Sheffield Surnames: Hallam, Staniforth, Lomas and the Rest
Read the names over the shop doors and on the war memorials around Sheffield and the Peak and a pattern shows. A lot of them are places: a farm, a ford, a cliff, a valley, sometimes only a few miles away. Many local families carry the name of the spot where an ancestor lived seven or eight hundred years ago. This is a guide to some of the surnames of Sheffield and the Peak, where they came from, and a couple that sound local but aren’t.
How surnames work here
Most English surnames fall into a few kinds. Locational names come from a place: a village, a farm, a manor. Topographic names describe where someone lived: by the ford, at the cliff, in the long valley. Others come from a father or mother (relationship names, like Atkinson, from Atkin, a pet form of Adam), from a job, or from a nickname. In Yorkshire, with its Anglo-Saxon and Viking layers, a great many are place names, so a surname often points to one particular village or even one farm.
The historian who did most to map this for Sheffield was David Hey (1938–2016) of the University of Sheffield, an authority on surnames and on the local history of Yorkshire, whose books include Family Names and Family History and Surnames, DNA, and Family History.
Hallam
The obvious one. Hallam is the old name for the country around Sheffield, first written in Domesday Book as “Hallun”, and Hallamshire is still used as a name for the district (see the place-names guide for what the word might mean). The surname is first recorded in 1297, when an Adam de Hallum turns up in the Yorkshire Pipe Rolls. Not every Hallam family comes from Sheffield, though. There are two Derbyshire villages called Kirk Hallam and West Hallam, recorded as “Kirkehalum” in 1242 and “Westhalum” in 1230, and some Hallams take their name from those. Today the name is commonest in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire, which is exactly where those places are.
Staniforth
About as South Yorkshire as a surname gets: around a quarter of the Staniforths in England live in South Yorkshire, with more in Derbyshire and West Yorkshire. It means the stony ford, from Old English stán and ford, with “forth” an old northern way of saying ford. A Matild de Staniforthe is recorded in a Yorkshire tax return of 1297, and a Robert Staniforth was christened at St Peter’s, Sheffield, in 1572. Which stony ford is still argued about. Older writers pointed at Stainforth near the Don, but David Hey suggested a farm called Stonyford, in Ecclesfield.
Lomas
A Peak and Pennine name. Lomas comes from a lost village called Lomax, once near Bury in Lancashire, whose name puts together Old English lumm, a pool, and halh, a nook. The earliest dated record of the name is the christening of an Elizabeth Lomas in 1549. The two spellings came to divide by county: in 1912 a writer on surnames noted that “Lomas is extremely common in Derbyshire and Cheshire”, while “the form Lomax seems to be confined to Lancashire”. It is still commonest in Greater Manchester, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire.
Hinchcliffe
Also spelled Hinchliffe. It comes from a place called Hinchcliff near Holmfirth, in West Yorkshire, and means the settlement at the steep cliff, from Old English henge, steep, and clif. The first recorded bearer is John de Hengeclif, in the court rolls of the Manor of Wakefield in 1324, and the spellings wander after that: Hyncheclyffe in 1441, Hynseclif in 1485, Henseclyf in 1552, Hinchliffe by 1633.
Wragg, Ibbotson and Revill
Wragg is Scandinavian. It comes from the Old Danish personal name Wraghi, and a William Wraggi is in the Worcestershire Pipe Rolls in 1192. Ibbotson can be a family name built from a woman’s name: Ibb, a pet form of Isabel, and a Henry Ibbotson appears in the Yorkshire poll tax returns of 1379. Revill is the odd one: it is French in origin, probably a nickname for someone “fun-loving” and “boisterous”, from revel, and it was particularly well recorded in Yorkshire from the late 14th century.
Halliday: not from round here
Halliday sounds as if it belongs on a Sheffield allotment, but its roots are elsewhere. It is a seasonal name, given to someone born on a holy day, a religious festival, from Old English hálig, holy, and dæg, day. The first recorded spelling is Reginald Halidei, in Bedfordshire, in 1179. In Scotland the family is linked with Hoddom in Dumfriesshire. Nothing ties its origin to South Yorkshire.
From Sheffield names to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, is full of local surnames. Its hero is Van Hallam, the impossibly old hunter at the heart of The Hellsborough Chronicles, who carries the name of the land itself. The Dark Peak District Council is run by Sophie Hinchcliffe, and Boggy Lomas, the nascenti scientists’ first experiment, is one of the Jellyhead elite: both of them Made. And Hellsborough’s ordinary jellyheads carry surnames that are place names, Loxley, Wadsley, Damflask and the rest, named after the ground they were settled on. The words they speak are in the guide to Sheffield dialect, and Foked is the free solo RPG set in the same world. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: kinds of surname and Atkinson from Who Do You Think You Are? magazine, which also gives Hey’s Stonyford suggestion; David Hey from Wikipedia; the origins and early records of Hallam, Staniforth, Lomas, Hinchcliffe, Wragg, Ibbotson, Revill and Halliday from the Internet Surname Database (Hallam, Staniforth, Lomas, Hinchcliffe, Wragg, Ibbotson, Revill, Halliday); present-day distribution and the older surname writers from Forebears (Hallam, Staniforth, Lomas).
Books
