In the summer of 1460, her husband a prisoner and her cause coming apart, Margaret of Anjou crossed into Scotland to ask the regent Mary of Guelders for soldiers. She got little for the trip; the standard account says she negotiated "unsuccessfully it seems". That December her supporters destroyed the Duke of York outside a Yorkshire town called Wakefield.
That embassy is about as close as Wakefield gets to Scottish history, and it is a town doing the work rather than a family. The surname is English, taken from the West Riding city, and what it has left in Scottish records is very thin.
What Does Wakefield Mean?
The second half is settled: Old English feld meant open country, cleared ground rather than a hedged field in the modern sense. The first half has two candidates and the standard references decline to rank them. The Oxford dictionary of family names derives the place from either the personal name Waca or the common noun wacu, "wake festival", plus feld. The place-name literature offers the same pair: "Waca's field", or open land "in which a wake or festival was held".
Either reading gives you a gathering ground, and neither has won. The confident version on name-meaning pages, that Wakefield certainly means the festival field, goes further than the dictionaries will.
What Does the Domesday Entry Say?
The survey of 1086 writes the place Wachefeld, and also Wachefelt. The digitized Domesday record puts it in the wapentake of Agbrigg, held by King Edward before the Conquest and King William after it, with nine villagers, eleven freemen, twenty-two smallholders and three priests across fifty-one ploughlands.
The money is the part worth reading twice. Wakefield had been worth sixty pounds in 1066. By 1086 it was worth fifteen, and partially waste: the harrying of the north in an accountant's column. Our account of the Thorlby name, from another West Riding township in the same survey, shows the identical collapse in blunter language.
There is a second source for the surname too: Wakefield Lawn in Potterspury, Northamptonshire, a far smaller place worth testing when a line refuses to connect to Yorkshire.
Why Is the Date of the Battle Disputed?
Richard, Duke of York, died at Wakefield, along with his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, and Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury. Tradition gives the date as 30 December 1460 and pictures York sheltering in Sandal Castle. Contemporary evidence points instead to an ambush on 29 December, and the manorial accounts have him still at Conisbrough Castle at Christmas.
What matters to a family historian is duller: after 1460 "Wakefield" was a word every English clerk could spell, and a surname whose spelling stabilizes early behaves better in the registers.
How Many Wakefields Were in Scotland?
Twenty-one, in the 1901 census, ranking the name 8,126th. That is a scatter across a whole nation rather than a community anywhere in it, which puts Wakefield among the surnames in our piece on Scotland's scarcest names, with the difference that Wakefield is not rare at all in England.
So a Scottish Wakefield should be read as an arrival and dated accordingly, the job our articles on the Green name and Stamfield do for other English names in Scottish registers. Scots had a word for the situation, and it became a surname too: our history of the Inglis name shows how "the Englishman" became a Midlothian family.
How Do You Trace a Wakefield Line?
- Work the West Riding first: Wakefield parish, then the townships of the great manor around it, before anything north of the Tweed.
- Search Wakefield alongside Wakefeild and the occasional Wakefild, which are clerks' slips rather than separate names.
- If a Scottish record appears, read the birthplace column before anything else. Scottish census returns usually name the English county the family came from.
- Then follow the statutory registers back from 1855 with our walkthrough of the ScotlandsPeople website, and English parish registers at the far end.
Own a Piece of Wakefield Heritage
A West Riding town with two possible meanings, three priests in Domesday and a battle it never asked for is a decent inheritance to carry. Three pieces are made for the name here: a garden flag, a heritage mug and a framed keepsake ornament, all carrying the family crest over a woven tartan. Wakefield is an English habitational name with no historic claim to any Scottish pattern, so the tartan is a choice made for the look of the object; our explainer on what tartan convention covers shows where the real limits sit.
Wakefield Family Crest Garden Flag on a Woven Tartan Ground
Frequently Asked Questions About the Wakefield Name
Is Wakefield a Scottish surname?
No. It is English, from Wakefield in Yorkshire or Wakefield Lawn in Northamptonshire, and only twenty-one bearers appeared in Scotland in 1901.
Does Wakefield really mean "field of the wake"?
That is one of two readings the dictionaries allow. The other takes the first element as the personal name Waca. Neither has been established over the other.
Is there a Wakefield clan, chief or tartan?
None of the three. Wakefield is an English place-name surname, with no kindred structure, no recognized chief and no pattern recorded to it.
Sources and Further Reading
- Open Domesday: Wakefield gives the 1086 entry, including the fall from sixty pounds to fifteen.
- Wakefield carries the toponymy and the Wachefeld spellings.
- Oxford Dictionary of Family Names: Wakefield for both Old English readings and Wakefield Lawn.
- Battle of Wakefield covers the disputed date and the approach to Mary of Guelders.
- Wakefield in the 1901 Scottish census returns twenty-one bearers, ranked 8,126th.
- ScotlandsPeople is where you test whether a Wakefield settled in Scotland, and when.
A Yorkshire clearing named either for a festival or for a man called Waca has come a long way to end up on a Scottish porch flag. Wakefield pieces are here, from a catalog of over 2,000 names.