barton

Latin bertune.

In origin, the term bertune meant a 'barley farm', a grange where grain was produced and stored. Later, it came to mean the home farm of a manorial lord, often a monastic institution or other major landowner. The word has the same sense as berewick; and like berewicks, bartons were normally outlying dependencies of manors.

The place-name Barton is widely distributed, examples occurring in all circuits.

For more detail, see Rosamond Faith, The English peasantry and the growth of lordship (1997); and for the place-name form, see Concise Oxford dictionary of English place-names, edited by Eilert Ekwall (fourth edition, 1960).