Langley – Name Origin

And, since I’ve written about the origins of the place name of Hardley, here’s Langley since they share a village sign. Back to The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Placenames.

Langley, Norfolk. Langale in Domesday Book, Langeleg in 1201. 

This one is easy for the dictionary to define as there are Langleys up and down the country, all nearly certainly derived from the old English ‘long leah’, or long wood, both of these words having Germanic roots. Confusingly, later on ‘lea’ came to mean an open area of land, just to make things complex.