Families of Dorset & Wiltshire
Stonehenge to the Jurassic Coast, Salisbury, Dorchester, Sherborne, and the great chalk downlands of southern England.
Tap a region of the map to see who held it.
Families seated in Dorset & Wiltshire
- HillOn the hill, and the Penny Post and the National Trust.
- WhiteThe fair one.
- AdamsSon of Adam.
- BaileyThe steward of the bailey, castle administration in one syllable.
- CoxThe cock, youth and pride.
- PayneThe villager's joke, worn with honour now.
- LongThe long one.
- DavisSon of David, one spelling among England's commonest.
- MartinThe saint's name, English and Norman registers alike.
- HarrisHarry's son, the West Country spelling, and the Welsh chapel surname of Howell Harris.
- StevensStephen's line, southwestern -ens spelling.
- JenkinsLittle John, Welsh thumbprint on English registers.
- PerryPear-orchard or Peter's kin.
- FordThe crossing, stamped on Shakespearian country.
- StoneThe stone, boundary-mark name.
- FoxThe fox, nickname that stuck.
- SaundersAlexander's son, Cornish and Wessex thick.
- HopkinsLittle Hodge, border favourite.
- HarveyBreton battle-name, English orchard now.
- MatthewsMatthew's son, March and Welsh edge.
- LaneThe lane, hedge-bottom dweller.
- HuntThe hunter, chase and warren.
- ColeCoal-black or Saint Nicholas' pet form.
- WestonThe western farm, toponym epidemic.
- LawrenceLaurence of Rome, England's Registers repeat him.
- HardyThe bold one, a Norman nickname.
- WheelerThe wheelwright at his bench.
Historic ties to Dorset & Wiltshire
Families with historic but not core ground here.
Champions made here
Famous bearers whose lives or work root in Dorset & Wiltshire.
- William CoxThe Dorset farmer's son who built the first wheeled road across the Blue Mountains in six months in 1814 and opened the Australian interior to settlement.
- George HerbertThe Montgomery-born metaphysical poet of the seventeenth-century English religious tradition whose collection The Temple, prepared on his death-bed at Bemerton in 1633 and posthumously published the same year, ran through thirteen editions in fifty years and stands at the centre of the English-language devotional lyric tradition.
- Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of ShaftesburyThe Dorsetshire-born Tory peer whose parliamentary career across sixty years secured the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act ending child and female employment underground, the 1847 Ten Hours Act regulating the textile mills, and a chain of further humanitarian statutes that constitute the foundational corpus of Victorian factory and social legislation.