Charlton

This name derives from the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) pre-7th-century place name “ceorlatun,” composed of two elements: “ċeorl” (a churl, a freedman ranked below a servant, but above a thrall; man; peasant, a rustic, a countryman or laborer, a peasant, a rough, moody, ill-bred person) plus “tūn” (an enclosed piece of ground, settlement, a large inhabited place, a town). In turn, the name means “settlement of the peasants.” The surname is first recorded towards the end of the 12th-century. One Hugh de Charleton is recorded in Northumberland (1333). Charl was used as a nickname for a bondman, villain, or a person of low birth and rude manners in the middle Ages.