Roseblade

Recorded in several spellings including Roseblade, Roseblead, and Rosblade, this is an English surname probably of Elizabethan origins. Today there would seem to be many more nameholders in the USA, and recent research suggests that there are only about twenty families in the British Isles. The make up of the name implies that it was locational from a place called Roseblade. English compound surnames commencing with "Rose" usually refer to a person originally from a place or places such as Roseberry in the county of Yorkshire, Rosegrove in Lancashire, Rosehill in Cheshire, and many more. However no place called Roseblade or similar has been found in any of the known gazetters of England for the past three centuries. This is not unusual, since the 15th century an estimated five thousand villages have completely disappeared, usually leaving the surname as the only surviving public memory. To add to the confusion the prefix Rose on a place name generally referred not too rose trees or bushes as they were everywhere, but a derivative of the Viking word "hross" meaning a horse, and hence described a stud farm. Rose Hill as an example, being a horse farm on the hill. Interestingly our research has shown that the village of Bladen in Oxfordshire is recorded as Blade in the famous Domesday Book of England in 1086. This may have been because it stood on a bend of the river shaped like a shoulder blade, or perhaps was shiny like a blade. If so the meaning of Roseblade may have been a horse farm by a river. Sample church recordings include Lanselot Roseblade, christened at Staines in Middlesex, on January 6th 1670, and Elizabeth Roseblead, who married one Edward Meads at the church of St Clement Danes, Westminster, on January 1st 1784.