Romanby appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, entered under the hundred of Allerton in Yorkshire.

Other Settlements in Allerton

The Meaning of the Name

The name Romanby is of Scandinavian origin. Its final element derives from the Old Norse word bý, a farmstead or village. 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 farmstead’.

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 Romanby.

Listed Buildings Near Romanby

Historic England records 9 listed buildings within about a mile of Romanby. Listing protects structures of special architectural or historic interest, graded I (exceptional), II* (particularly important) and II.

Grade II*

County Hall - 1.02 km

Grade II

Packhorse Bridge - 0.2 km
52, the Green - 0.28 km
Church of St James the Great - 0.51 km
Romanby War Memorial Clock Tower - 0.55 km
Railway Hotel - 0.91 km
Zion Sunday School - 1.25 km
Old Theatre - 1.26 km
Zion United Reformed Church - 1.28 km

Scheduled Monuments Near Romanby

Scheduled monuments are nationally important archaeological sites given legal protection. 2 lie within roughly a mile of Romanby:

Motte and Bailey castle and site of a bishops’ palace - 1.03 km
Howden Bridge - 1.53 km

Romanby Today

Today Romanby lies within the administrative area of Hambleton, and the settlement recorded a population of 5,883 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 Romanby on Wikipedia .