The settlement of Fridaythorpe is recorded in William I’s Domesday survey of 1086, entered under the hundred of Acklam in Yorkshire. The survey assessed Fridaythorpe at 1 carucate of taxable land.

At the time of the survey, Fridaythorpe supported a recorded population of 3 villagers, 6 smallholders, working 4 ploughs between them.

The survey records Fridaythorpe’s value at 1 shilling in 1086. No pre-Conquest figure survives – not unusual in the North, where records were disrupted by the Harrying and by the patchy coverage of the survey.

Resources Recorded at Fridaythorpe (1086)

Cattle: 2
Sheep: 42
Meadow: 40 acres

Other Settlements in Acklam

The Meaning of the Name

The name Fridaythorpe is of Scandinavian origin. Its final element derives from the Old Norse word þorp, an outlying or secondary farmstead. The first element is most likely a personal name or an early descriptive term, now difficult to recover with certainty. Taken together the name probably meant something close to ‘a outlying farm’.

Names of this type are a fingerprint of Scandinavian settlement: they cluster across the old Danelaw, where Norse-speaking settlers renamed or founded villages from the late 9th century onward.

Remarkably, the name has changed little since 1086, when the Domesday scribes wrote it as Fridaythorpe.

Listed Buildings Near Fridaythorpe

Historic England records 1 listed building within about a mile of Fridaythorpe. Listing protects structures of special architectural or historic interest, graded I (exceptional), II* (particularly important) and II.

Grade I

Church of St Mary - 0.25 km

Fridaythorpe Today

Today Fridaythorpe lies within the administrative area of East Riding of Yorkshire, and the settlement recorded a population of 330 at the 2021 census. Nine and a half centuries separate that figure from the small rural community the Domesday survey recorded here in 1086.

Read more about modern Fridaythorpe on Wikipedia .