Survey of English Place-Names

Historical Forms

• Martensley … a passel off my manor off Martynsthorpe 1536 Denb

• Martinsley 1536 ib

Etymology

'Martin's woodland glade or clearing in woodland', v. lēah .This was no doubt the moot-site of the Martinsley Hundred which took its name.

There are obvious problems to be faced with this group of place-names. First, there is the uncertainty of whether Martinstok , the name of which survived until at least 1286, refers to the same settlement as Martinsthorpe, whose earliest recording is eighty years earlier than this. Martinstok is, of course, first recorded thirty years earlier than Martinsthorpe. Then there is the question of what precisely the stoc of Martinstok represents. If it were simply 'a secondary settlement', the replacement of OE  stoc by Scand  þorp , with the same meaning, is easily understandable. But its compounding with the saint's name Martin suggests that stoc here could originally have meant 'a religious place', conforming to a pattern of religious associations of stoc in English place-names (v. Elementss. v. stoc (2)). The dedications of the churches at Martinsthorpe and Lyndon (both in Martinsley Hundred) were to St Martin, but we do not know from what period these dedications date. However, Martin is compounded also in the topographical names Martines hó 'Martin's headland', some three miles to the south-west of Martinsthorpe, and Martinsley 'Martin's woodland glade or clearing', evidently somewhere within Martinsthorpe's bounds. It is difficult to see in what circumstances such topographical names containing a saint's name could have been created and how a saint could have been associated with as large a tract of land as their locations indicate: but a secular Martin as landowner would present no such problems. It should be noted that Martin was used as an everyday OE personal name. For example, one Martin, a mill owner in Esctun in the East Midlands, sold his mill in the years between 972 and 992 (BCS 1130).The weight of the evidence as we have it at present favours a secular, landowning Martin whose secondary settlement of Martinstok had its name reshaped during the thirteenth century by the Scandinavian word for farmstead in the ME dialect of the East Midlands and whose woodland glade or clearing was the meeting- place for the men of the Martinsley Hundred.