Morley is a village in

County Durham County Durham, officially simply Durham, is a ceremonial county in North East England.UK General Acts 1997 c. 23Lieutenancies Act 1997 Schedule 1(3). From legislation.gov.uk, retrieved 6 April 2022. The county borders Northumberland and Tyne an ...

, England. It is situated five miles to the west of

Bishop Auckland Bishop Auckland ( ) is a market town and civil parishes in England, civil parish at the confluence of the River Wear and the River Gaunless in County Durham, England. It is northwest of Darlington and southwest of Durham, England, Durham. M ...

(OS grid reference NZ 1127). Morley is first mentioned in 1295, already with its present spelling; its coal mine was mentioned, as ''Morleypitte'' already in c. 1440. The name probably means "open ground by a moor", from

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

''mōr'' " moor, clearing, pasture" + lẽah "open ground, clearing".Victor Watts (ed.), ''The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), s.v. ''MORLEY Durham''.

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Villages in County Durham {{Durham-geo-stub