What is the origin of the Brettle or Brettell name? I became interested in the origins of the surname when researching my family history: it soon became clear however that Brettell, although quite a rare surname, was more common than Brettle. As I searched for earlier generations of my paternal family I found that they sometimes appeared as Brettle and sometimes as Brettell; this was in official records such as census data or Births, Marriage or Death records. Education was not compulsory until the 1880s (3) and then only for children aged 5 to 10 with little provision before then for education for working class children so we do not have to go too far back to find that our ancestors probably could not write their name. How their name was recorded depended on an official such as a census enumerator, registrar, vicar etc. writing down what he had heard, or thought he had heard, thus a Brettle or Brettell may appear on a record. It was common on marriage records of the period that the couple to be married and also the witnesses would "leave their mark" which amounted to no more than them making a cross on the written record as the signatories were illiterate. My conclusion is that Brettle and Brettell are not necessarily different family lines but they may be part of the same ancestry with the recorded name varying along the way. My apologies to the rather more numerous Brettells but I use the name Brettle to mean either of the variants throughout this site. There are other variants on the name too, a non-exhaustive list is: Brittell, Brethel, Britnell, Brattell, Brattle, Bretell, Bretel, Breteuil, Bretull, Britell, Breteel, Breteal, Britill, Brittle, Bretale and Brettale. Whether these are simply variants the way the name is recorded in official documents or if they refer to different origins is difficult to say. It is quite possible that some of these names have become interwoven with one another through misspelling or the recording choice by an official over the generations making the whole business of tracking down their origins difficult.
There are varying views on the origin of the Brettle name, these may be classified into four main groups which I compare in these following pages:
After reading these ideas for the origin on the Brettle/Brettell name you might wonder what to make of it all: Celtic source, Norman French, Huguenot settlers, or geographic location? There certainly were early potential Brettles e.g. Godwin Brytael in 1035 and the name Brytael and Brithael developing into Bretel, Britel and perhaps later into Brettle, Brettell etc. These could be an early origin of the name but it does not seem to fit too well with the strong localisation of the name in the West Midlands (see the page on Brettle Name Distribution). Of course there are Brettles in other parts of the UK and possibly their name could have evolved from the Celtic source. So far as the de Breteuil source is concerned it is popular to make the claim that “my ancestors came over with William the Conqueror” but the name Breteuil seems to be sparse in the records after Roger de Breteuil rebelled against William and the earldom was lost with no clear evolution of the name from de Breteuil to Brettle etc. Turning to a Huguenot source: a closer examination of the history suggests that the Brettle Huguenot connection is via marriage to an pre-existing native Englishwoman, Joan Brettell, and not from a French Brettle source. Maybe I am influenced by the professional work of John Hemingway, past Archeological Officer of Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, but my favoured explanation is that Brettle originates from Bredhill. This also fits in well with the localisation of the name in the Kingswinford area. All these conclusions have to be tentative however because there are smaller concentrations of Brettles in the Nottingham area and even a substantial group in Germany. It is quite possible that the name evolved from different original sources in different places; putting this together with the way the spelling of the name has changed over the centuries explains why tracing the name origin can get quite complicated.
You may want to come to your own conclusion after looking at some of the references above but if you want to delve further into the topic I can also recommend the pages, "Origins of the Brettell Name" (4) and the references therein, which is part of Mary Brettell’s excellent Brettell One Name Study (5) as well as the more academic publications by Sidney Grazebrook, John Gough Nichols and John Hemingway referred to earlier.
(1) The quote by W.H. Auden comes from his poem "Letter to Lord Byron," which was part of a collaborative travel book called "Letters from Iceland" in 1937.
(2) What is the Black Country? Dr. John Fletcher. The Blackcountryman Magazine vol 1.1 (1967)
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_England History of education in England Wikipedia
(4) http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brettell/genealogy/BRETTELL/Brettell_Origins.htm Brettell Origins RootsWeb Freepages
(5) http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brettell/genealogy/BRETTELL/BRETTELL_One_Name_Study.html#Intro Brettell One Name Study RootsWeb Freepages