100 ARCHIVES
Domesday Book Derbyshire

Rauenesholm in the Domesday Book (1086)

YEAR: 1086 HUNDRED: Scarsdale COUNTY: Derbyshire

Rauenesholm appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, entered under the hundred of Scarsdale in Derbyshire.

Other Settlements in Scarsdale

The Meaning of the Name

The name Rauenesholm is of Scandinavian origin. Its final element derives from the Old Norse word holmr, an island or dry ground in marsh. 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 island’.

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 Rauenesholm.

Data derived from the Open Domesday project (opendomesday.org), based on the Domesday Book dataset compiled by Professor J.J.N. Palmer and team. The Domesday Book (1086) is in the public domain.

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