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Burghfield is a village and large civil parish in West Berkshire, England, with a boundary with Reading. Burghfield can trace its history back to before the Domesday book, and was once home to three manors: Burghfield Regis, Burghfield Abbas and Sheffield (or Soefeld). Since the 1980s the population of Burghfield has nearly doubled with the construction of many new housing estates, dependent for its employment (that of commuters) on, for instance, Reading, Newbury and Basingstoke and M4 corridor which bisects the edge of the area. Most of the formerly sparsely inhabited fields of the hamlet or locality of Pingewood, in the north of the parish, are divided by the M4 motorway and have been converted after gravel extraction in the mid to late 20th century into lakes and their shores mostly used for water sports, fishing, and other leisure activities. They are also a habitat for migrating geese, water fowl and other wildlife. A few higher pits/quarries in this area have been drained, clay-lined and used as landfill. Burghfield has many amenities — the majority are sports clubs and facilities, including a leisure centre, educational or religious. ==Etymology== A ''Burh'' is an Old English name for a fortified town or other defended site, (e.g., at Burgh Castle), sometimes centred upon a hill fort though always intended as a place of permanent settlement, its origin was in military defence; "it represented only a stage, though a vitally important one, in the evolution of the medieval English borough and of the medieval town", H. R. Loyn asserted.〔H.R.Loyn, ''Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest'', 2nd ed. 1991, pages 137–8.〕 The boundaries of ancient burhs can often still be traced to modern urban borough limits. Most of these were founded by Alfred the Great in a consciously planned policy that was continued under his son Edward the Elder and his daughter, Æthelflaed, "Lady of the Mercians" and her husband Æthelred, Ealdorman of Mercia; the Mercian Register tells of the building of ten ''burhs'' by Aethelflaed, some as important as Tamworth and Stafford, others now unidentifiable.〔 Some were based on pre-existing Roman structures, some newly built, though some may have been built later. Athelstan granted these burhs the right to mint coinage, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries the firm rule was that no coin was to be struck outside a burh.〔 A 10th-century document called the Burghal Hidage cites 30 burhs in Wessex and three in Mercia (then under the domination of the West Saxon kings), built to defend the region against Viking raids. The Old English word was related to the verb ''beorgan'' (cf. Dutch and German ''bergen''), meaning "to keep, save, make secure". In German ''Burg'' means castle or fortress, though so many towns grew up around castles that it almost came to mean ''city'', and is incorporated into many placenames, such as Hamburg, Flensburg and Strasbourg.〔Hall, Alaric, ('Old MacDonald had a Fyrm, eo, eo, y: Two Marginal Developments of < eo > in Old and Middle English' ), Quaestio: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, 2 (2001), 60–90.〕 A place, probably in Berkshire, appearing as ''Yerburghfeld'' is seen in 1381. It may refer to Burghfield, or perhaps, Arborfield 〔National Archives; Plea Rolls of the Court of Common Pleas; CP40/483 ; Term 4, 1381; http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT6/R2/CP40no483/483_0207.htm;7th entry: the plaintiff is Eliis Smyth of Yerburghfeld 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Burghfield」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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