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We have one field called Coffin Tyning, and “ Deadman’s Fields” 
and other similar names are not uncommon in other parts of the 
country. I believe such names always point to some old (probably 
forgotten) struggle which ended in death. Slaughter and 
Slaughterford would have the same meaning. There are even 
Death’s Fields, but these are almost certainly derived from 
the old family name of De Aith, now corrupted into Death. At 
Sarsden, in Oxfordshire,* there are fields called Qualmstones ; 
they are marked by a large stone to which a legend is attached of 
a sheep-stealer being strangled by the stone catching in the rope 
on which the sheep was slung and so strangling him. I have 
little doubt that the legend was a late invention when the old 
meaning was forgotten. Qualm is the old English word for death 
or pestilence, and there are throughout England many such large 
stones, to which in times of pestilence provisions were brought to 
the infected districts, and the money placed on the stone, and so 
all contact was avoided. The case of Eyam, in Derbyshire, is 
well-known, and there is one at Stoke Bishop, near Bristol, still 
called Pitch and Pay, and I have no doubt the Sarsden Qualm- 
stones are the same. 
To return to Bitton—Baglands and Little Baglands, Heards, 
Soper’s Pool, and Chedwin House are probably proper names and 
may be passed by. The Lons is.a good old word, apparently a 
local form of Launde, of which Lawn is the modern variant. We 
now always connect lawns with a well-kept garden, but the Lons, 
or Laund, were very different. They were always open grassy 
spaces in a forest, what we should now call grassy glades. And 
so I suppose that any field called the Lons (we have three or four 
in Bitton) would mark the neighbourhood of old woods or forests ; 
just as Lansdown, formerly Launtesdon, was the western 
boundary of the old Royal Forest of Furches ; and with its wide 
* For this information and for the account of the fields at Wickwar 
I have to thank J. Harell, Esq., of Falfield. 
