How they found me

Thanks to Statcounter, I can tell which words people entered into a search engine to find Liberal England. So it's a big hello to two of today's visitors.

First, there was someone in Kuwait who went to Yahoo! and typed in "what was the original function for market harborough".

I am glad that is what they are talking about in the Gulf. In case he or she drops by again, here is an extract from The Making of the English Landscape: Leicestershire by the great W. G. Hoskins - the man who invented local history as an academic discipline:

Market Harborough is a good example of a town created at a comparatively late date. Until the middle of the twelfth century it was merely an outlying part of the fields of the rural manor of Great Bowden. Harborough means "the hill where the oats grow well", now the hill immediately north of the town.

A few traders began to gather at the point where the important main road (from Northampton to Leicester) crossed the Welland, roughly a day's journey from each town, and in 1177 we have the first mention in the records of a new community. In the year 1203 they felt sufficiently confident to purchase from the Crown the right to hold a weekly market.

So now you know.

And then there was someone at NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe who went to went to Google (Belgian version) and entered: "'Paddy Ashdown' spy".

I could tell you more about that, but I would have to kill you.