Fielding
A surname that usually began as a place-name for someone who lived or worked by a field, though one old tradition links it to a German noble family.
The #5,700 most common surname in the United States (2010 Census) — about 1 in every 50,772 Americans shares it.
Etymology
Fielding is generally understood as an English surname built from Old English field, meaning an open area of land, with the suffix -ing used in a family or place association. In that sense, it would originally have described someone who lived near, belonged to, or came from a field or fields. Some 19th-century writers also repeated a different story that connected the name with a noble German family of Hapsburg/Laufenburg origin, but that account is not the usual linguistic explanation for the surname.
History
The name appears in medieval English records and was later treated by some antiquarians as a local or topographic surname. The German noble-origin story circulated in older heraldic and genealogical books, but modern surname studies usually favor the simpler English place-name explanation. The surname is well known in Britain and America, in part through the novelist Henry Fielding.
Origin
Regions
Variant spellings
Fun fact
Henry Fielding helped make the surname especially familiar through novels like Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.
From the historical record
“of a common field. FIELDING. In a docmneut dated 9 Edw. IL, mentioned by Collins, Geoffrey de Fielding calls himself " Filius Galfridi filii Galfridi, comitisde Hapsburget domini iu Laufenburget RiuFiLDiNG iuGermania.'' It appears from the same authority that Geoffrey, earl of Hapsburg, by the oppres- sion of…”
— Patronymica Britannica: a dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom