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(Withers 2000 535)

Rules were also laid down for choosing ‘authorities’ to authenticate the place-names collected.

For names generally the following are the best individual authorities and should be taken in the order given: Owners of property; estate agents; clergymen, postmasters and schoolmasters ... Small farmers and cottagers are not to be depended on, even for the names of the places they occupy …’

(ibid 535)

This exclusive approach, reliant on informants from the landowning and professional classes, meant that those who worked the land and were closest to it were marginalised in the formal recording of place-names. As a result, local variants in naming were ignored. Subtleties of the spoken language were mistakenly represented as fixed and constant. What was not standard became accepted as standard. Parts of the map also remained blank for no other reason than an understandable reluctance of the informants to give freely of information, which the Government might use to their disadvantage. In some cases, settlements of native Irish were omitted. Those who worked the landscape were either mapped off, or mis-mapped onto a paper landscape. Problems of representation were more complex still, since those collecting information had no influence over its final transcription in OS’s Southampton HQ, giving further scope for misrepresentation.