27,988 Global SALISBURY Family Members

SALISBURY Family History

This name emerged in England and is locational, relating as it does to the city of Salisbury in Wiltshire or from the village of Salesbury in Lancashire.

The Wiltshire town was first recorded in 900 as Searoburg which is believed to have derived from the original Roman Celtic name Sorbiodinum, although other definitions state it derives from the Old English 'Searo' (meaning arms, device, skill), and 'burh' (stronghold or fortress). The Lancashire village was first recorded as Salebyry and later as Salewelle in the 13th century, meaning 'fortress by Sale Wheel' (Sale Wheel being a pool in a local river).

The earliest recorded example of the use of the name relates to a Robert de Salisbyre of Wiltshire who appears on the 1273 Hundred Rolls. Examples from the 16th and 17th centuries were particularly numerous in Lancashire, and the origins of those families' surnames would derive from the Lancashire village of Salesbury. Those references include a Henry Salisbury who was recorded as living in Chepin, Lancashire in the 1620s, and a Ralph and Ann Salisbury who lived in Hindley in the 1670s.

Historically there was also a notable and long established Salisbury surname cluster in Wales. It is not certain where the Welsh branch of this family hailed from originally (some theories state Herefordshire although other historians believe the family was from Salesbury in Lancashire), but the Welsh Salisburys had certainly settled in Lleweni, an estate located near to the town of Denbigh in north Wales, by the 1330s. The family became very prominent and wealthy during the subsequent centuries, in particular when the family earned the favour of the Tudor kings, and Thomas Salusbury was knighted by Henry VII.

The Denbighshire Salisbury family spawned numerous junior branches, and the surname has remained relatively prominent on the records throughout north Wales – chiefly in Denbigshire, but also in the neighbouring counties of Caernarvonshire, Flintshire and Montgomeryshire – for centuries.

Notable people

• William Salesbury (c.1520–1584), scholar and chief translator of the first Welsh New Testament. A descendant of the Lleweni family, and a proficient linguist, he published many works, including translations as well as a collection of Welsh proverbs.
• Sir Edward James Salisbury (1886–1978), an English botanist and ecologist, born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. A lecturer in plant ecology and botany, in 1943 he was appointed the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.

 

SOURCES:

1851 census

A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames (1896) by Charles Wareing Endell Bardsley

Dictionary of Walesh Biography, National Library of Wales, https://biography.wales/

Surnames of the United Kingdom (1912) by Henry Harrison