Athelington – Name Origin

I was quite intrigued by this village’s name and this is what The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Placenames has to say about it….

Athelington, Suffolk. Alinggeton in 1219, Athelinton in 1234 and Athelington in 1254.

That’s a surprising consistent village name given the centuries which have passed. The dictionary then notes that the word origin is the same as the village of Allington in Derbyshire, which is “the tun of the Aelle’s people”. The ‘tun’ is an enclosure or farmstead and Aelle was an Anglo-Saxon leader from the fifth century, noted to be the first English king of lands south of the Humber.

And, St. Peter’s Church at Athelington.