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Heald is also a Medieval/Old English word (hielde) that means dweller on the slope of a hill which fits with the generally accepted view that the family originated in Lancashire which is a very hilly part of England. It also suggests that the first people to adopt the surname were probably not farmers.
If you look at the LDS records and ferret out the earliest birth and marriage records you will find that almost all of them cluster within 20-40 miles of Manchester England with a cluster in the North (Chorley, Preston, Bury, and Brindle), the South (Mobberley and Alderlay, Cheshire) and the East (Southern Yorkshire and Derbyshire).
Unfortunately, surnames were in use for 200 years or more before the earliest Heald Records (we can guess at about 1525 for the earliest birth that I've seen). So, unless someone spends a lot of time researching old legal documents (hopefully, some of our ancestors were land owners or criminals -- otherwise they would never have been mentioned) we'll probably never know exactly where the name originated...
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