This name is of southern English locational origin from any of the several places called Buckland including nine in Devonshire alone, four in Somerset, two in Kent and Dorset, and one each in Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire and Surrey. The one Buckland in Lincolnshire is an exception to the locational trend. Recorded variously as Bocland and Bocheland in the Domesday Book of 1086 for the above group of counties, the name represents the Olde English pre 7th Century "boc", a book, plus "land", land i.e. "Bookland", or land held by right of a written charter as opposed to "folcland", land held by right of custom from which the king drew food-rents and customary services. Land could be exempted from these public burdens only by the grant of a royal charter or "boc". In the modern idiom the surname can be found spelt as Bucklan or Buckland. The surname has a very early first recording, (see below). On September 17th 1564 William Bucklan and Elizabeth More were married in Feniton, Devonshire, and on May 2nd 1635 Christopher Buckland, aged 20, was an early emigrant to the New World, settling in the Barbados. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Aelfgyth of Boclande, which was dated circa 970 - "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles of Devonshire", during the reign of King Edgar the Saxon, 959 - 975. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.

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