Beal has two possible origins. The first is a locative surname for someone from a place called Beal in Northumberland. a more appealing option is from the Old French bele  meaning ‘beautiful’, which was also used as a woman’s name. Alexander Filius Bele-’son of Bele’- lived in Lincolnshire in 1203 and was literally the son of someone called Bele. Whether this Bele was male or female, though we don’t know!. The arms shown here are those of the Beales of maidstone. There ancestor William Beale was portreeve (an official who  collected the port’s dues) of Maidstone at the end of the 14th century. William’s descendant Sir John Beele lived at Farningham Court, was made a baronet in 1660 and became high sherriff of Kent in 1665, He died in 1684, without a son, so his baronetcy expired. Another branch of his family survived, however, at Hyde Place and was represented in the 1880s by reverend Beale Post, LLB, of Milsted near sittingbourne, author of a fascinating work on our ancient British past, Britannic researches.

Beal is the 1,896th most common surname in Britain, coincidentally very close in ranking to Lund. It has 4,239 bearers-but these statistics are just for spelling the surname ‘Beal’. If you throw in the other spellings the surname becomes far more common. It’s distribution is erratic, but mainly across the south and east coasts of England. with prominent pockets in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and on the Sussex coast.

Beale with an’e', is common in the south and mostprominent in the south west. the lesson to be learned for Beal researchers is always to search under all possible variants of the surname, for any given family line is bound to have been recorded, at various times, under these different spellings.