About The Canterbury Stockbridges and London Woodstocks and beyond.
Please sign in to see more. Recorded as Stackbridge, Stockbridge and Stockbredg, this is an English and sometimes Scottish locational surname. It originates from one or all the places called Stockbridge or Stocksbridge including Stockbridge in the county of Hampshire, Stockbridge and Stocksbridge in the county of Yorkshire, and over the border into Scotland, Stockbridge district in the city of Edinburgh, Stockbridge in Berwickshire, and Stockbriggs in Lanarkshire. There is also a "lost" medieval village and now just a hamlet called Stockbridge in the county of Sussex. All have the same meaning of the place (stoc) by the causeway (brigg), and presumably referred to a marshy area in pre Norman times which was crossed by a raised section of roadway. Stockbridge in Hampshire is first referred to in the pipe rolls of the county in 1227, during the long reign of King Henry 111rd of England, (1216 - 1272). Locational surnames tend to be either names given to the original lord of the manor and his descendants, or to people who at some stage left their homes to move somewhere else, and were thereafter forever identified by being called after their first village. In this case the surname is well recorded in the city of London. Early examples include Annes Stockbridge who married Symond Frenchborne at St Giles Cripplegate on February 5th 1575, and Antony Stockbredg, ghiven as being a christening witness.
Woodstock. This interesting name is Anglo-Saxon in origin, and is a locational surname deriving from the place called "Woodstock" in Oxfordshire. The placename is recorded as "Wudustoc" in the "Anglo-Saxon Laws" of circa 1000, and as "Wudestoke" in the 1123 "Anglo Saxon Chronicles", and means, simply, "the place in the woods". The derivation is from the Old English pre 7th Century "Wudu", wood, with "stoc", often used to mean just "place", but also used to denote an outlying hamlet or dependent settlement. Locational surnames were usually given to the Lord of the Manor, and to those former inhabitants of a place who moved to another area. One Robert Woodstock was an early emigrant to the New World, leaving London on the "Matthew", bound for St.Christopher's, in 1635. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Huddle de Wodestok, which was dated 1273, The Oxfordshire Hundred Rolls, during the reign of King Edward I, "The Hammer of the Scots", 1272 - 1307. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original name. |