An Interdisciplinary Historical Semantic Study of the Old English Word Burh

This thesis explores the meaning and uses of Old English burh, which broadly denotes ‘a fortified place’. As well as being a very common and productive word in Old English, burh holds great significance for historical and archaeological studies, and features especially in discussions about the Alfredian defence system against the Vikings, the development of manorial sites and the rise of urbanism. Despite this, burh has never before received a thorough, dedicated semantic study, and this thesis aims to fill this gap in the scholarship by studying the word through a whole-corpus, context-based and interdisciplinary methodology. Alongside the exploration of burh’s meaning, this thesis has created a new historical semantic methodology, both to handle the 3730 instances of the word and also to create a productive bridge between linguistic study and, particularly, archaeology. One of the means of managing the data size was to split the corpus into six major text groupings, which form the basis of my main chapters of analysis. Within this framework, burh has been considered within the context of linguistic, textual, historical and physical evidence from various angles and perspectives, with this pluralistic methodology allowing for a multi-faceted understanding of the word. It is hoped that the methodology can offer a blueprint for future interdisciplinary historical semantic studies. This thesis shows that burh is a word broad in denotation, but rich in connotation, which changes both diachronically and, more strikingly, synchronically. Indeed, the conclusions about burh will show how text types and topics can impact our understanding of Old English vocabulary generally.