Littlemore - Name

This is an English locational surname. It originates from a place called Littlemore in the county of Oxfordshire, known to its inhabitants as Oxon. Littlemore is first recorded in the famous Domesday Book of 1086 as Litemora, and the meaning is literally "small moor". On this basis there should have been many other such places in the British Isles, and perhaps there were but if so they seem to have disappeared. Littlemore is a locational surname, meaning a name given to people usually after they left their original homes to settle somewhere else, and it is also one which has been widely recorded in the surviving church registers of the city of London since at least Elizabethan times. This suggests that the village was probably "diminished" in the Middle Ages perhaps to facilitate sheep farming, a fate which befell many areas of the south midlands. Sheep required far fewer "hands" than the previous arable farming, and resulted in people having no choice but to leave for other places. The city of London, with according to legend, its streets paved with gold was an obvious target. How many Littlemore's found gold, we do not know, but they left their mark in the church registers. Examples include Ann Littlemore who married John Sanders at St Dunstans Stepney, on March 27th 1600, and two hundred years later on July 27th 1800, Eliza Littlemore was christened at St Sepulchre Church, in the city of London.