Recorded as Hollick and occasionally Hallick, this is an English surname. It is locational from a now "lost" place called "Holwick", thought to have been in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The placename is derived from the Old English pre 7th Century "hol", a hollow, or "holegn", holly, and "wic", a dairy-farm, thus, "the dairy-farm in the hollow", or "the dairy-farm amongst the holly trees". An estimated three thousand villages and hamlets are known to have disappeared in Britain since circa 1100, due to such natural disasters as the Black Death of 1348, in which an eighth of the population perished, or to the widespread practice of "clearing" large areas of land to make sheep pastures during the height of the wool-trade in the 14th and 15th Centuries. The surname is now predominant in the Midlands of England. Amongst the sample recordings are the christenings of Richard Hollick on January 23rd 1760 at Lutterworth, and of John Hallick on August 18th 1765 at Barwell in Leicestershire. The first recorded spelling of the family name may be that of Susanna Hollicke which was dated May 3rd 1629, when she was christened at Tamworth, in Warwickshire. This was during the reign of King Charles 1st , known as "The Martyr", 1625 - 1649. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was sometimes 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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