From an Old English place name meaning 'settlement in open country or on a field.'
Felton is an English topographic surname that became an occasional given name, following the well-worn path of the British landed-gentry naming convention where a family's ancestral village could become a son's first name. It derives from the Old English *feld* (open land, field) combined with *tun* (a settlement, estate, or enclosure), meaning roughly 'settlement in open country' or 'farm by the field.' Several villages in England carry the name — Felton in Northumberland, Felton in Herefordshire, Felton in Somerset — each of them the probable origin of a separate branch of the surname.
As a given name Felton appeared most consistently in American usage during the nineteenth century, a period when English topographic surnames were fashionable as first names among families seeking to project stability and Anglo-Saxon rootedness. It carried mild associations with the name Felix (Latin: 'lucky, happy'), even though the etymologies are unrelated — the sonic overlap was enough to lend Felton a faintly auspicious feeling. Rebecca Latimer Felton, the Georgia politician who in 1922 became the first woman to serve in the United States Senate (appointed, briefly, at age eighty-seven), put the name into American political history.
In the twenty-first century Felton is perhaps best known through Tom Felton, the British actor who played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series, introducing the surname — and by extension the given name — to a global generation of film fans. For parents drawn to English place-name surnames repurposed as first names — names like Dalton, Colton, Weston, or Preston — Felton offers a genuine historical pedigree and a satisfying, solid sound.
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