GLEAN EVERY LAST CLUE FROM YOUR NAME

Why, how and when did surnames come into use? Wayne Shepheard answers all these important questions in his foray into researching the origin of family names

Wayne Shepheard

The use of surnames is a relatively recent circumstance in human history. Many past societies have used second names to distinguish people and families, but the modern world’s adoption of formal last names only dates back about 700 years.

I first wrote about this subject in an article published in the Journal of One-Name Studies (Shepheard, 2018). In that piece I described information obtained from a medieval church document, Liber Vitae Ecclesiae Dunelmensis (the Durham Book of Life), and posed the following questions:

• Was there an underlying reason why people began to use, or at least be recorded with a surname?

• Why did it not commonly occur until the 14th century?

• Was it in response to political or societal shifts, coincidentally across almost all of Europe?

• Or was it because of something else?

Since publication of that paper, I have found additional documents that demonstrate similar timing of when surname usage achieved dominance in identifying people.

What has been most helpful in reviewing this subject are:

• summaries that are continuous over long periods of time,

• have hundreds of names,

• and can be compared with other lists to see what changes may have occurred.

Types of names

To get qualitative and quantitative assessments of the style of names in old records, I categorized them under a few broad types, based on the descriptions used by the Guild of One-Name Studies, and analyzed various types of documents to determine how these name types were distributed:

Locative – meaning there was a designation as to where an individual lived or what lands he represented (such names have prefixes – ‘de’ or ‘atte’)

Descriptive – meaning there was a description of a person’s rank, position, occupation or relationship to another person (have prefix – ‘le’)

Single – meaning that only a “forename” was recorded with no indication of a second or last name or location of residence

Surname – meaning there was a full name including forename and last or surname.

Domesday Book – 11th century

The Domesday Book was the survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085 to provide details on the valuation of land holdings and resources in his domain. The book lists the owners and tenants-in-chief, principally barons and churchmen who held the lands directly from King William – almost 5,000 of them from over 13,000 settlements listed in 40 old counties – none recorded with a surname.

The modern world’s adoption of formal last names only dates back about 700 years

The men listed on Figure 1, for Devon, for example, were recorded primarily with single and locative style names, although some had just a title or description of where they originated or with specific descriptors of what expertise they had.

The Domesday Book does not help us unravel when true surnames were adopted. It may, however, give us a starting point as to when and where certain surnames may have originated. What we can confidently say, at least with reference to this document [see Figure 1], is that surnames were not in use during the 11th century.

The Hundred Rolls – 13th century

What has come to be known as the Second Domesday are the Rotuli Hundredorum, or Hundred Rolls, which was a survey of landholdings in England commissioned by King Edward I in 1279. The rolls do not survive for all regions, but there is good coverage for parts of Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.