A couple of local items were discovered while searching for new items for the new edition of my local Folklore bibliography…

1)

Mow Cop is in an unusual position. As evidenced by an interesting observation by D. Sylvester in the article “The hill villages of England and Wales”, The Geographical Journal, 1947…

“Mow Cop is probably unique as a hill village in that it lies across a fourfold boundary line dividing two parishes, two counties, two dioceses, and the two provinces of Canterbury and [missing word, probably “York”]”

Reminds me a bit of Tolkien’s Bree, also a liminal hill-place at the meeting of many ways. Apparently there’s now also a “Mow Cop relay” for the giant Jodrell Bank radio-telescope up there, which perhaps adds another and rather more cosmic “line”.

2)

Mid Staffordshire can claim the honour of saving the Venerable Bede for the nation. J. Baker, “Old English saete and the historical significance of ‘folk’ names”, Early Medieval Europe, 2017, has…

“The Old English Bede may well have been produced in the region around Staffordshire (T. Miller (trans.), The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 2 vols (London, 1890), I, pp. xiii–lix)”

Yes, ok… “Staffordshire”. It’s a big long place. Where exactly? Baker’s cited source (Miller) is on Archive.org and offers an exhaustive analysis of the dialect and words. He plumps with equal vagueness for “North Mercia” as the place that made the Old English Version of Bede, but usefully states that it must have been very near the area of the production of the Rushworth Gospels and the Vespasian Psalter. On the current thinking about the Gospels and Psalter that means somewhere around Lichfield. Which chimes with Miller who notes that… “Lichfield also early possessed a notable monastery”, and he further suggests Wenlock Abbey (15 miles SW of Stafford, over in Shropshire) as the site of the initial preservation of that copy of the Old English Bede. But where was the “notable monastery”? Probably very near Lichfield Cathedral, or else the monastery at Burton-upon-Trent (if that lines up with the dialect). But the precise answer will likely be found in the new scholarly book Lichfield and the Lands of St Chad (2020), which it’s said has done a huge amount of new work on this neglected topic in Mercian history.

Lichfield may also have had a role in preserving Beowulf, since the first known owner of the Beowulf original was the Bishop of Lichfield.