LAURA PRESTWOOD

Feminine form of the Late Latin male name Laurus ‘laurel’. St Laura was a 9th-century Spanish nun who met her death in a cauldron of molten lead. Laura is also the name of the woman addressed in the love poetry of the Italian poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74), and it owes much of its subsequent popularity to this. There have been various speculations about her identity, but it has not been established with any certainty. He first met her in 1327 while living in Avignon, and she died of the plague in 1348. The popularity of the given name in the English-speaking world has endured since the 19th century, when it was probably imported from Italy.

English: topographic name from Middle English prest ‘priest’ + wode ‘wood’, denoting someone who lived by a wood owned by the Church, or a habitational name from places so named in Buckinghamshire, Staffordshire, and Sussex.