Talk:Tamworth, Staffordshire

message: I've removed the pronunciation note; I'm from Rugeley, and I've always heard it as "tamw'th", not "tammoth". It's not an exaggerated pronunciation, for sure (not "tam worth"), but the "w" is definitely audible. sjorford (?!) 12:56, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [Untitled]

message: I usually heard it called Tammuth or Tamuf. Me, being a tammie meself call it Tamuf. It would be interestin to know what you call it! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Emos rule (talk • contribs) 18:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  More on talking in Tamworth 

message: Riverside is more of a houseing estate, would it not be better to includ Mercia instead as that would include the whole area from between the railways line and the river.   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.121.241.209 (talk) 16:52, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suburbs/Areas 

message: One of the photos shows people quite close to the camera. It would probably be best not to show peoples faces. Can the photo be replaced? Snowman (talk) 10:46, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've blurred them. G-Man ? 02:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image 

message: Yeh i'm from Belgrave and loads of older people still say Win'cut and 'Tammuth'. As well as things like 'Shant' (for shall not) and pronouncing 'going', 'Gooin'.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fwoar! (talk • contribs) 19:55, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: Why no mention of Colin Grazier GC on this page? And what about Sir William Peel VC?  Samuel Parkes VC is there.91.110.205.188 (talk) 16:36, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Colin Grazier 

message: The image :Image:Mile Oak.gif is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here.  In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page.  Please check
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thread_title: Image copyright problem with Image:Mile Oak.gif

message: Why are so many roads in Tamworth not called 'road' or anything like that? They tend to be called just things like 'Willowbank' and the like. Of course there are roads like that in every town, but seemingly a much higher percentage in Tamworth than anywhere else Martyn Smith (talk) 11:35, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Road names

message: As a result of the recently completed page moves (see above section) links to the Tamworth disambiguation have rocketed up to #2 on the Disambiguation pages with links Top 500.  Please help lower this page's ranking by working on the Disambig fix list for Tamworth using Dab solver.  Thanks, Wbm1058 (talk) 17:29, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This DAB currently has five hits on the front page of my watchlist.  None are by anyone who proposed, supported, or executed the move.  Mr Stephen (talk) 21:37, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: All fixed (except Talk:Saint George#Patron Saint of Tamworth). SchreiberBike (talk) 06:08, 5 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help needed to fix links to Tamworth 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The Borough of Tamworth seems to be more or less coterminous with the town of Tamworth.  All the places in the borough which have separate articles are described in those articles as areas or suburbs of Tamworth.  The article on the borough is all about governance of the town and does not seem to justify its own article, so would anyone object to it being merged into this article? --Mhockey (talk) 17:54, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Per WP:UKDISTRICTS I think that Tamworth satisfies all 6 of the criteria for having just one article unlike Chesterfield and Corby for example. Crouch, Swale (talk)  20:05, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

message: I propose merging the Tamworth Built-up area article into this one. There isnt much in the built-up area that isnt already in the borough and covered here except for the Fazeley Eopsid (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Urban Area Merge proposal 

message: My edit correcting the statement has been reverted on the ground that it was unexplained and badly execcuted. I agree that it should have been explained but if badly executed then how? The statement that Tamworth was the capital is incorrect. Historians of Anglo-Saxon England say that the courts were mobile and there were no fixed capitals. I have the book cited for the statement that Tamworth was the capital but the reference was vague and had no page number. I found a statement that Tamworth was the principal administrative centre in the pre-Viking period - not afterwards when Mercia lost its independence - and amended and cited with the page number accordingly. Dudley Miles (talk) 20:14, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: There are countless references to it being capital of Mercia, these for example. . Also (according to my history book) It was the centre of royal government from the time of Offa and his successors, and the principal royal residence. There are 15 surviving Royal charters issued from Tamworth, and was the location of the principal royal mint. That would appear to justify claims of it being a capital. Also, your edit wiped out blue links to King Offa, meaning the sentence no longer made any sense. G-13114 (talk) 07:28, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: None of these are specialist historians of Anglo-Saxon England. This issue has been discussed on numerous occasions. See for example Talk:Winchester#Winchester the Anglo-Saxon capital?. Dudley Miles (talk) 07:41, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: You asked for sources, I've given you multiple sources which describe it as the capital of Mercia, quite what the difference between 'capital' and 'principal administrative centre' is I don't know. Also you have re added your linkless version which makes no sense to the reader. G-13114 (talk) 07:49, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia requires reliable sources, that is specialist sources on the period. None of your sources comply with that. I have just checked Mercia. an Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, Leicester University Press, 2001, a collection of essays by specialists. It nowhere refers to Tamworth as the capital. Thomas Charles-Edwards says that Mercia had three zones: "In the centre was Mercia proper, including such places as Repton, Lichfield and Tamworth". (p. 94). Janet Nelson describes Tamworth as "favourite residence of the eighth-century kings". (p.131)  Martin Welch describes it as "one of the most important Mercian vills". If Tamworth was the capital, it would certainly have been mentioned in this book. (p. 157) Dudley Miles (talk) 08:15, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: There weren't any formal capitals in Anglo-Saxon times, so technically this is correct. However, it meets a modern definition of a capital, as a centre of government. Multiple modern sources refer to it as such.  G-13114 (talk) 09:12, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

text: G-13114, your sources are all of low quality and some are simply not seondary. The use of such references causes many problems through wikipesia. Ten of them would not trump a peer reviewed article by a reputable academic from a reputable publisher. In addition, and on a personal note, I have always been uncomfortable when the phrase 'capital city' is used to describbe a main settlement in antiquity. I might be wrong but to me 'capital city' is a more modern term, meaning its use is often anachronistic. But as I said, I might be wrong on that point. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 10:03, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: It's open to varying interpretations I guess. Anglo-Saxon kingship was certainly itinerant, so the point about anachronism is a fair one, but that doesn't mean that there was no hierarchy of settlement, and it's pretty clear that for Mercia at least until the 9th century Tamworth was pretty much at the top of it. Hart unashamedly talks about "Tamworth, the Mercian capital" in Dorniers book of essays on Mercia  while Stenton talk of it as "Tamworth, the chief residence of [Mercia's] kings".  Is that a "capital"? It's certainly pretty arguable. "Capital" certainly feels less problematic than "principal administrative centre" further down, which makes it sound like there was some sort of civil service going on! And "Tamworth was by far the largest town in the English Midlands when today's much larger city of Birmingham was still in its infancy", errrm, really? When? There is pretty much no evidence of urbanity anywhere in early medieval England until the rise of the emporia. And what's the relevance of Birmingham at a time where there's no evidence it even existed? And don't get me started all the mentions of the heptarchy, a thoroughly discredited concept that seems to be all over Wikipedia. On balance I think the use of the word "capital" here is the least of its problems. JimmyGuano (talk) 19:09, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: We can all have our own opinions whether it is arguable to say that Tamworth was the capital, but we have to go by the sources, not our own interpretation. Modern expert sources are clear that there were no capitals in Anglo-Saxon states. I agree on Birmingham and have deleted the comment. Dudley Miles (talk) 19:38, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: We do indeed go by sources, which is why I added a couple of pretty authoritative ones, one of which directly attests the word! Stenton is probably the classic work on the subject and Cyril Hart is not exactly negligible in his reputation. And in fact another essay in the exact work you have cited does use the word "capital" of Tamworth.(p145) Don't get me wrong, I am not denying the pitfalls of "capital" in this context and would like to find something better, but "principle administrative centre" feels if anything worse - I don't think many scholars would argue there was a Mercian "state" - and it's also a poor paraphrase of the text in the cited source, which actually describes Tamworth's status as "the principle centre of the old Mercian regime". How about using John Blair's interpretation: "Pre-eminent is Tamworth, which emerges from 799 as a major Mercian royal centre, more like a ‘capital’ than any other English place before the tenth century.", which I guess is half capital and half not-capital and feels a nuanced interpretation by a highly respected scholar. Being a centre of royal power feels a more appropriate idea here than suggestions of bureaucracy. We do need to specify a time period too - there were large parts of the early medieval period when Tamworth was pretty marginal. JimmyGuano (talk) 20:54, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Apologies, link would be helpful wouldn't it -  JimmyGuano (talk) 21:13, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The source cited Edward the Elder with no page number and I changed it to what I thought was the correct wording of the source, adding 'administrative' because that word is used in the line above, but I agree that it is clumsy. I do not like Blair's wording as it seems to imply that there was a capital by the tenth century, which no reliable source says so far as I know. How about quoting "the principal centre of the old Mercian regime", with time qualification as you suggest? Dudley Miles (talk) 22:15, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: A phrase like "Principal royal centre of Mercia" might work as an intro, maybe cited to Blair and Stenton? It needs the qualification: it wasn't, for example, the principal ecclesiastic centre or the principle economic one. However even if we don't use the word "capital" (though I've now provided four attestations of the word, all from academics distinguished in this field), there is an important sense in which it was a capital that we need to capture in the wider text. Here's John Blair again, in a more recent book specifically about the development of the Anglo-Saxon landscape: "Six miles southeast of Lichfield was Tamworth, which from King Offa’s later years in the 780s and ’90s—but probably not before that—was a stable royal centre of an apparently new kind. It seems likely that Offa’s quasi- imperial ambitions and expanding territorial interests led him to establish a new ‘capital’, near Lichfield and the southward routes, on a site that had hitherto been peripheral." JimmyGuano (talk) 05:59, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The difference between a 'principal administrative centre' and a 'capital' is really splitting hairs. Of course technically it was never formally a 'capital' of anything, since the modern concept of a capital city didn't exist in the 8th century. However, it is probably was the closest thing to a modern concept of a capital, it is a modern term and concept applied retrospectively.. Modern non-specialist sources almost universally refer to Tamworth as the capital of Mercia, including the BBC, the Staffordshire County Council website and the Historical Association among others (including the sites I linked earlier). I don't think we can simply ignore the modern description. I would suggest that the best solution would be to restore the capital description, but qualify it by putting it in quotemarks to denote that the description is a modern and unnoficial one. G-13114 (talk) 09:08, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I prefer "principal centre" but 'capital' in single quotes obviously can be supported if other editors prefer it. Dudley Miles (talk) 09:24, 19 October 2021 (UTC)

text: That would be fine so long as there are specialist sources to support the explanation without OR or SYNTH. Dudley Miles (talk) 09:46, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Not an unreasonable request! Do those changes seem like a reasonable reflection of some decent sources? JimmyGuano (talk) 14:42, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: They look OK to me. I have made changes to dubious edits by other editors. Blair says that Tamworth seems to have been Æthelflæd's capital. I have not quoted this as other historians regard Gloucester as more important at this time, but his opinion may be worth citing if he gets support for his view. Dudley Miles (talk) 22:30, 23 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capital of Mercia 

message: you may be interested in . I am doubtful about the statement that it was a ruin until Æthelflæd fortified it. I wonder whether the comment is based on archaeology or just lack of information. The Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia just says that it was a frontier town in the period. I can send you a scan of the page if you wish. Dudley Miles (talk) 20:04, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: You may be correct, that's just how I read my source, it says it was in no mans land on a lawless frontier for 40 years with its former royal buildings in ruin. However it doesn't say it was depopulated. I would logically imagine that not many people would have wanted to live under those circumstances though. But yes it isn't stated that it was abandoned. G-13114 (talk) 20:52, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sources 

message: Since no article exists at Borough of Tamworth per #Merger proposal as the boundaries are long-standing (see User:Crouch, Swale/District split) and similar an article should probably exist on the council per WP:UKDISTRICTS like Eastbourne Borough Council unless the article on the district is restored. Crouch, Swale (talk)  21:23, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Tamworth Borough Council]]