Woodage

This is a very unusual and rare English surname. Recorded as Woodage and occassionally as Wooddage, it is apparently locational from some place of the same or near spelling. However nothing quite like it is recorded in any of the known maps and gazetters of the past three centuries suggesting that either this is the name of a now 'lost' medieval village of which the only reminder is the surname itself or it is a transposition of some other place name and/or surname. Lost medieval villages are an unseen feature of the British Isles. It is estimated that at least three thousand such hamlets and villages, and some researchers claim more, have gone missing since Elizabethan times and most if not all, have given rise to a surname. As to why they disappeared has been the subject of several books, but changes in agricultural practices, creaping urbanisation, coastal erosion, The Great Plagues, and even war, have all played their parts. The name probably means 'Wood henge' with henge being pre 7th century Olde English for a gibbet, of which there were many examples in England. However this is conjecture. Early examples of the surname recording include Margaret Woodage who married Mathew Cooke at St Giles Cripplegate, in the city of London, on January 29th 1659, and Frederick Louis Woodage, a christening witness at Greenwich, on March 28th 1889.