The Name
Fazakerley is the name of a town and family. It is a very old English name, originating from the county of Lancaster (now Lancashire), just North of the modern city of Liverpool.
Originally, Fazakerley was the name of a piece of land. As was typical of the time, the name was later adopted by the family that settled on the land as their surname.
The name is constructed from three Anglo-Saxon words, faes, acer and leah. Faes means "border", acer means "cultivated land" and the earliest meaning of leah is "clearing in a forest". Faes-acer would be a piece of cultivated land against or defining some border, so faes-acer-leah would be when the same land was extended by woodland clearance.
Similar English names are Fazeley, a village in Staffordshire, constructed from the words faes and leah, and Akeley, a village in Buckinghamshire, constructed from the words aker and leah,
The Anglo-Saxons invaded in the fifth century. Fazakerley was named by
the Anglo-Saxons, so it must have been named after that date, but since we
don't know
what the border is
between, then it is not possible to be more precise about just exactly when
it was named. Perhaps it was a border between the Anglo-Saxon held town of
Walton and the settlements of the invading Vikings of the eleventh century?
We will probably never know.
Fazakerley was not mentioned in the Doomsday Book, so we can assume that no one of importance was living there in the eleventh century. The first mention of the family is in the Assize Rolls of the County of Lancaster concerning a Henry de