The region around Oswestry in north-west Shropshire is a remarkable corner of England in which, for much of the last thousand years, Welsh has been spoken at least as widely as English. This study offers a detailed analysis of some rich medieval sources which record the names of fields, farms and enclosures, hillocks, streams and copses in the local landscape. These, together with the names of the people who bought, sold and worked the land, offer an extraordinary insight into the linguistic communities of a bilingual area between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The surviving material is presented in full and constitutes a valuable ‘new’ source for both medieval Welsh and English languages. Discursive chapters consider what the evidence suggests about linguistic boundaries and identities at the time of the documents, and about how the later medieval situation may have developed in a borderland traversed by the great Anglo-Saxon earthworks of Offa’s Dyke and Wat’s Dyke.
