An English surname taken from a Derbyshire Dales village that appears in Domesday Book in 1086.
BRASS-ing-tun (locally BRASS-un)
Sources last checked 21 September 2026. 18 sources.
Brassington is a place-name surname.1,2,3 It comes from the village of Brassington in Derbyshire, whose Old English name can be read in two ways: as “Brandsige’s farm”, from a man’s name, or as “the farm by the steep path”. The name began in Derbyshire, spread to Staffordshire, and outside England is now found mainly in the United States and Australia.
Brassington is a village and civil parish in the Derbyshire Dales, about 13 miles north-west of Derby and 3 miles west of Wirksworth, measured in straight lines.4,5 The village stands on a steep, south-facing hillside, with valley sides to the north and east.4 Its church, St James, is Norman in origin, from the late 12th century.6 Lead mining shaped the village for centuries. It reached its peak in the 17th century, when about a third of the people of Brassington and Carsington were miners.4,7
Scholars have proposed two readings of the name, both from Old English.
Kenneth Cameron, in The Place-Names of Derbyshire (1959), read the name as a man’s name, Brandsige (brand, fire or a sword, and sige, victory), followed by -ing-, which can mean people associated with a person, and tūn, a farmstead or enclosed settlement.1,8,9 The name is not recorded on its own, but he thought it a regular formation from well-established elements.9
Eilert Ekwall, in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (1947), suggested cautiously that the name may be Old English brant, steep, stig, path, and tūn: a farmstead by the steep path. He added that the place is on a steep slope.10 He later changed the last element to dūn, hill, giving a hill at a steep path.11
Scholars still differ, and the argument is set out below.
Cameron thought his reading much preferable to Ekwall’s, and noted that O. Ritter had made the same suggestion.9 The Dictionary of American Family Names (2nd edition, 2022) gives the same reading, calling the name unattested but plausible.2
Writing in the Journal of the English Place-Name Society in 2017, John Insley called Cameron’s personal name implausible, since Brand- is mainly a Langobardic (Lombard) element and is not found in Old English. He judged Ekwall’s later reading, the hill at a steep path, preferable.11 The Key to English Place-Names, a database from the University of Nottingham’s Institute for Name-Studies that draws on the English Place-Name Society’s surveys, still lists both readings.8
The village appears in Domesday Book in 1086, and its name turns up in people’s names from the early 1300s. It has been spelled in many ways since.
Locally the name was said with the middle syllable dropped. Cameron gives the local pronunciation as [bræsən].9
The Oxford dictionary lists Brasington, Brazington and Bressington as variants.3
The name did not stay in the valley. In 1890 Henry Brougham Guppy found that although Derbyshire “was originally the home of the Brassingtons”, who took the name from a township near Wirksworth, it had become more numerous across the Staffordshire border around Stoke-upon-Trent.15 Forebears, a commercial genealogy site, estimates that 23% of English bearers now live in Staffordshire, 13% in Derbyshire and 8% in Greater Manchester.16
Each bar is that country’s share of the worldwide estimate. These are estimates, and surnam.es itself says they are not an exact count. The lighter end of England’s bar marks the difference from the Oxford figure.
Where they were born or settled shows how far the name has travelled.
As listed on Wikipedia’s page for the surname, with details from each person’s own article.18