The surname Marsden is locative, that is to say it is derived from the name of a place. Most reference books on surname origins are agreed on this and associate the name either with the township of Marsden near Huddersfield in Yorkshire or the townships of Great and Little Marsden to the south and east of what is now the town of Nelson, Lancashire. The place name is said to derive from the Old English words mercel meaning a boundary and denu meaning a valley, thus, a valley which marked a boundary. The earliest record of this becoming part of a personal name is to be found in the Exchequer Rolls (commonly known as the "Pipe Rolls") for Lancashire for the year 1194-5 which contain references to Peter, Richard and Osbert de Merclesden. The de Merclesden name recurs in these records from time to time during the next two centuries but by the early 15th century it begins to appear as Merseden or Mersden and as early as 1413 the modern spelling of Marsden appears in a deed of gift of land in the village of Great Marsden from Christopher Marsden to his brother Henry.
I was always aware that the surname Marsden was more common in the north of England than elsewhere but could not be precise about this until I carried out a study of present day distribution using the British Telecom telephone directories. It came as little surprise that the vast majority of the 5000 or so directory entries were to be found in the northern counties but to my great surprise two concentrations stand out from the rest. These are to be found in the areas covered by the Blackburn/Huddersfield and Sheffield/Chesterfield directory volumes. Remarkable as it may seem, after eight centuries Marsdens are still to be found in their greatest concentration around the townships where the name is first believed to have appeared. The second highest concentration around Sheffield/Chesterfield, however, remains to be explained.
Equally interesting is the way in which many of the variants have all but disappeared and the -den spelling has predominated. In the 18th and 19th century, the -din variant was not uncommon. Today, the entire England and Wales telephone directory contains only eight entries with this spelling, seven of which are in London or southern England and one in Wales. There is no trace of this variant in the vicinity of Hatfield, Yorkshire where it was well represented less than a century ago. The -tin variant has fared little better. There are eleven entries with the spelling Marstin, also concentrated in London and the southeast. This may suggest a connection with the Marsdins above. A study of these families would be very interesting. Marsdon has survived a little better but still only gives rise to 28 entries, with again a tendency to the south of England and a lesser concentration in a line from Lincolnshire to mid Wales.
Another question which was partly answered by the distribution study concerned whether Marston is a variant of Marsden or a surname in its own right. Works on surname origins by Reaney and others offer both explanations. The telephone directories contain some 1600 Marston entries. There is no area in which the name reaches anything like the peak of 175 per 100,000 of Marsden in the Blackburn area. The peak density for Marston is 41 per 100,000 around Coventry and Leicester. Indeed, the majority of occurrences are distributed in a band through the centre of the country from mid-Wales to The Wash. There is, however, a concentration in northern England with its highest density around Harrogate.
From these distributions, I feel quite satisfied that the name Marston has arisen from separate origins. It is significant that the greatest concentrations of the name occur in the Midlands in an area which contains three settlements by this name with three more nearby. The concentration of the Marston name in the north of the country may derive from the village of Long Marston which is some 10 miles east of Harrogate. I would not, however, rule out the possibility that some Marsdens might have become Marstons and vice versa as a result of the vicissitudes of phonetic spelling by church ministers and other public officials.
The telephone directory exercise is a useful tool to establish the broad distribution of surnames but the area which each directory covers is frequently large and the precision with which concentrations can be located is therefore limited. A more precise method would be to use postcodes which cover far smaller areas. A rigorous analysis on this basis is beyond the scope of a manual exercise (not in establishing the distribution of surnames which would be merely tedious but in establishing the total number of directory entries in each postcode area). There is the possibility of a low cost directory appearing on CD ROM. If this becomes available and is open to the appropriate manipulation, I propose to repeat the exercise on this more precise basis and will publish the results in a future issue of Marsden Family History News.
If you are interested in learning more about Marsden (near Huddersfield) in Yorkshire, mentioned in the above article, take a look at
Marsden - Heart of the South Pennines, a site dealing with the history of Marsden and providing information about local places of interest.Revised: 1 April 2002