How the English got hereditary family names

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If that title makes it sound like I’m about to tell you how the alligator got its tail, I sort of am but it’s not alligators and it’s not tails. It’s about a tradition–hereditary family names–that those of us who grew up with it tend to forget isn’t inevitable. 

 

Let’s start with the Anglo-Saxons 

The Anglo-Saxons had a pressing need to tell one Aelfgifu or Aelfstan from all the other Aelfgifus and Aelfstans. Because as far as I can tell the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy all had the same damn names. 

Okay, I admit, I haven’t done a deep dive into the Anglo-Saxons, and the names are one of the things that put me off. But I can still explain the system. Or systems, really. 

Irrelevant photo: evening light, north Cornwall

 

Some people got nicknames: the king Aethelred Unraed translates to Aethelred the poorly advised. Since Aethelred means wise counsel, the pun must’ve been irresistible. He’s gone down in history as Ethelred the Unready, and having gotten named with a pun in one language, it was probably inevitable that he’d get saddled with a parallel pun in the language that picked up from it.

He was neither ready nor well advised in the face of Viking invasions, so the name’s not a bad fit. 

But the nicknames weren’t necessarily insults. The woman who married Harold II, the last of the  Anglo-Saxon kings, was Edith (Aelfgifu in Anglo-Saxon) Swanneck. 

Well, she sort of married him. It was a handfast marriage, not one recognized by the church, which apparently left him free to also marry Edith of Mercia, and that brings us neatly to the second way they could keep track of their Aelfgifus and Aelfstans: by adding a place name to a given name. 

The third way was to use a patronymic–forming a second name from the father’s name, so one of the six Cuthberts in a village might be Cuthbert Edmund’s son. But Cuthbert’s son would be Aelfric Cuthbert’s son. It was a family link but only for one generation. 

What about the Celts, though? They seem to have started out using patronymics–that one-generation use of the father’s name, although the Welsh sometimes listed more than one generation. Cornwall, at least, was slower than England to stabilize last names. One article I found gives examples from the fifteenth and sixteenth century of families changing their names when they moved, sometimes using the place they lived as a last name.

 

Enter the Normans

Hereditary family names were still fairly new in France when the Normans invaded England. (That’s 1066–one of the few dates I don’t have to look up.) Or more to the point, they were new in Normandy, which was where the Normans came from. It was part of France except for the ways in which it wasn’t part of France. It was a duchy within France and didn’t become a French province until the fifteenth century, so– 

Yeah. It’s complicated. It’s also pretty much irrelevant, but I’ll stop here long enough to say that it doesn’t help to see history through modern glasses. Let’s think of it as vaguely French. All we’re talking about is naming practices, and Lord Google assures me that in the eleventh century a hereditary family name was the must-have item for any aristocratic French family. So of course the Normans brought theirs when they crossed the channel.

Your average French family, though? Didn’t have one, didn’t need one. Last names were strictly a prestige item, emphasizing pedigree and unbroken tradition and all that stuff you have to believe matters if you’re going to convince yourself that aristocracy makes sense.

So when the Normans set foot on English soil, they brought those invisible prestige items with them, although just to contradict everything I’ve said, William the Conqueror–the big, bad chief of the Normans–never did have a hereditary last name. Before the invasion, he was William of Normandy or William the Bastard. Then he became William the Conqueror. 

Following that tradition, England’s (and later Britain’s) royal families ran around without surnames until 1917, when the current lot took the name Windsor. Before that, they were known by their dynasties: the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts–

How’s that different from having an inherited last name? Let’s admit that we’re splitting hairs, but it’s what the experts say, so we’ll just nod wisely and play along. 

We have a handy way to check in on how this last name business all played out after the Norman conquest. William–he’s now the Conqueror, not the Bastard or the of-Normandy–demanded an inch-by-inch and tenant-by-landlord survey of his new toy, England, and it took the form of the 1068 Domesday Book, where you find a mix of surnames and no-surnames: Gilbert Tison, Ralph Paynel, and Robert Malet, but also Walter the deacon and Walter the crossbowman. 

 

Commoners 

Over the course of a few centuries, inherited surnames slid downward until every Tom, Dick, and Edith had one. By 1400, most English families were using hereditary last names.

I got drawn into this topic by last week’s post, about Johanna Ferrour, a leader of the Peasants Revolt, who had at least three different last names and three spellings of her first. The system was shifting but the pieces weren’t locked into place yet. 

One source links the spread of family names to those poll taxes that set off the Peasants Revolt Johanna Ferrour helped lead. How else are you going to track who’s paid and who hasn’t? 

When Henry VIII introduced parish registers that recorded each parish church’s births, marriages, and burials, the country lurched further in the direction of hereditary surnames, but even then in some parts of the country a person could still be baptised under one name, married under another, and buried under a third.

The village I live in is small enough that a lot of people know a lot of people but don’t necessarily know their last names. We end up identifying people by their jobs if they’re visible ones, or by their partners, or occasionally by their dogs. We’re not stuck in the medieval era, but the early medieval system is handy.

To be fair, back when I drove cab–this was in the seventies and in the US–we did the same thing. We had an Al and a Big Al. We had a driver known by not just his last name but also by his favorite phrase, Shitya.

 

Women’s last names

Everything I’ve said so far about hereditary names has a built-in problem: it applies to men, not to women. Sorry. I don’t usually write as if men represented humanity at large. What with being a woman and all, I’m constantly getting reminders that it’s inherently problematic to say “people” when you mean men. But men’s last names defined the system and we needed to slot the system into place.

So now let’s talk about women’s names.

In the fourteenth century–around the time of the Peasants Revolt and the poll tax, England was developing the legal theory of coverture, which meant that when a woman married anything she owned was transferred to her husband. (There were a few exceptions, but not many.) The rest of Europe followed Roman law, which gave the husband management of the wife’s property but not ownership. 

She herself also became his property.

Yeah, history’s a bitch and the present has a few problems of its own.

Women took their husbands’ last names when they married. (That wasn’t necessarily true in other countries.) The woman disappeared behind the man. Taking his name wasn’t mandatory and there were exceptions, but it was the default setting–common enough that the exceptions were sometimes written into marriage contracts. This mostly happened among people of property when the woman’s fortune was bigger than the man’s and the woman’s family had no other way for its name to continue. Which by then would’ve been a central concern to any aristocratic family.

 

Inevitability

I started out by saying that those of us who grew up with hereditary family names tend to think the tradition’s inevitable and pretty much universal. But the world’s more imaginative than that. In many places, women who marry keep their own names and no one expects a family to have the same last name. Some cultures continue the tradition of forming a last name from the father’s name–and sometimes if less commonly from the mother’s. In places, people use their given name and that’s pretty much it. The idea of a family name isn’t universal.

 

A bit of personal history

This is pretty much irrelevant, but since we’re talking about how those solid-seeming family names turn out to be fluid, I thought I’d toss it in: names on both sides of my family have been changeable. On my mother’s side, Baruch seems to have become Benedict and Weill became into Wiley.

My father’s family name was Gurievich when my grandfather left Russia for the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, but he wrote it in the Cyrillic alphabet. And/or in the Hebrew alphabet–your guess is as good as mine and possibly better. I’m not sure how many languages he knew–Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, surely–but English doesn’t seem to have been one of them when he landed at Ellis Island. That came later. So some immigration clerk wrote down Hurwitz. What the hell, it had a few of the same sounds. That happened to a lot of immigrants.

When he’d saved up enough money to bring his family over, they became Hurwitzes.

My father was born in the U.S. with the name Hurwitz, but as a young man he played bit parts in the theater, and it was a time when Jewish actors took non-Jewish stage names. He took that a step farther and he changed his last name legally, and a generation and many extra years later here I am with this absurd ultra-English name. When I was younger I thought of changing it back, then asked myself how far back I wanted to go and on which side of the family, although on either side I’d be tracing men’s names, which put me off the idea a bit. I talked about it with one of my aunts and she, who’d changed her own name when she married but had also taken the professional name of Delza (she was a dancer), told me I should stay with the name I had.

“It’s who you are,” she said.

She was right, but it left me wondering who she was.

So I kept the name I was born with, and I’d always assumed it was Anglo-Saxon, but Lord Google assures me of several contradictory origins, including Norman, Anglo-Saxon tinged with northern English and Scottish, and (if AI is to be believed, which it isn’t necessarily), Viking. It seems fitting that I get to choose my own origin for the name I have such tenuous title to. But in case that’s not murky enough and I need a coat of arms–and who doesn’t in these difficult days?–Lord G. led me to nine variations I could claim, and I just can’t decide which suits me best.

I have no idea if any of them is real, and that seems fitting too.

28 thoughts on “How the English got hereditary family names”

  2. I’ve had 4 surnames, none of which came from my birth father, 2 of which came from chaps Mum married, and 2 from Mr.Fraggles 1 &2, none that connect me to my paternal heritage so to speak, so had to rely on Mum for family history, and that’s good enough for me. Thanks for this train of thought I’m having now!

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    • If you decide to write a post on it–and it strikes me as well worth one–drop a link here, will you? I can never tell how much traffic an old post will get, but some of them get quite a bit. Others fade into obscurity. Whatever happens to this one, it’s a post I’d like to read.

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    • I love it. When I drove cab, one driver was known as Shitya Birosh. His last name was Birosh and he was known for saying “shit ya.” (It was Minnesota. Ya was the local version of yeah. For some reason, though, his last name absolutely had to be part of it. He was never just called Shitya.

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    • There’s so much history bound up in last names–not just English ones–that I’ve often wished I could eavesdrop on the moment(s) when they were given. Although having said that, for many I expect there wasn’t any one moment–they grew organically. Which doesn’t stop my imagination from wanting to be there.

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      • My surname, Ellis, is believed to be of Welsh, English, Hebrew and/or Greek origin. It’s unlikely I have any connections to the Mr. Ellis of Ellis Island but I am always intrigued by stories of immigrants who arrived there – and how their surnames became anglicised at the whim of a clerk who didn’t understand their native language.

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        • Welsh, English, Hebrew, and/or Greek? That’s one hell of a mix there. I’m tempted to say they can’t all be possible, but I wasn’t there and life’s much stranger than our imaginations. Or at least than mine.

          The Ellis Island stories are fascinating, but to be fair to the clerks I’m inclined to think a lot of the name changes grew out of desperation and frustration rather than whim.

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            • Many did, with unpredictable results. A family I know of tried to Americanize their German name and made it Chinese, and another tried for a less Jewish name and made it more so. The moral of this story, I’d say, is wait a few years until you’re more sure of the language–

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  5. There are all kinds of surname origins! There are the patronymics, such as Johnson. But some families used the French fils, which became fitz in England and Ireland, so you get names like Fitzwilliam (think Pride and Prejudice). Then there are job names, such as Butcher and Baker. Or nicknames/descriptive names, such as Young (for some reason, hardly anyone is called Old, but Young is very common!). Or place names, which can be either a town/village name such as Stafford, or a “thing” name such as Bridge or Hill. And so on and so forth …

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    • Very true. And as someone here pointed out, every wave of immigration brought a new collection of names–and new approaches to naming, which don’t always mesh well with the English approach. The Chinese family-name-first comes to mind, and the Spanish tradition of putting the mother’s last name first and then father’s.

      The more complicated it gets, the more fascinating I find it.

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      • “Fitz” used to signify a bastard son. Not all were hindered by that slur! On my mother’s side there were Bennetts, Quartermains (I believe from Cornish background) and then variations of Scandinavian spellings of Anderson… I have no recollection of my paternal grandsires…

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        • It would be an interesting study to trace the acceptance and lack of acceptance of bastards through English/British history. I haven’t, but it seems to vary over time–and depending on how far up the food chain you were. And whether your father acknowledged you. I expect that’s why some of the Fitzes weren’t hindered by it–they would’ve been an acknowledged.

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  6. A deep dive into a fascinating subject. It is amazing where names came from and connections one would not have dreamed of. The way names got changed by the notations made when immigrants came through Ellis Island are a whole other variation, and of course the descriptive names of First Peoples.
    The comments add a good deal to the main column.

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  7. Worth mentioning in this context is that a large set of names sometimes, and a small set almost always, identified a person’s employer or landlord rather than the person’s father. The King, Baron, Abbot, etc., used the names of their territories. People who used the titles or names of those higher up the feudal hierarchy were commoners. You can’t tell whether a name like “Henry” was taken by the son of someone called Henry or by someone who worked for King Henry. About a name like “King” you know for sure…sometimes the commoner who took that name didn’t even work for the royal family, but shortened the name from some place name. Which was what I did when choosing a screen name while in a town called Kingsport.

    The set of names that almost never described the person’s father includes titles for people who were “married to the Church.” Abbot, Friar, Brothers, Priest, Parson, Vicar, Bishop, Pope…in theory they could have had sons before they took Holy Orders, but in most cases what they had were employees and renters.

    Priscilla King

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    • Interesting, and something I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere. I’ve always wondered about the name Pope, given that any children they had they couldn’t claim. What you’re saying could explain it.

      The tradition of aristocrats being identified by names, titles, lands, and who knows what else drove me crazy when I was trying to make sense of some of Shakespeare’s plots. It was like reading a Russian novel: you needed a wall chart matching the names to the characters.

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  8. Fascinating as ever, Ellen. Slightly off topic, is the Icelandic system, which must be a tricky one for genealogists. Girls take their father’s first name (rarely, their mother’s) plus dottir, so under their system I would be Jean Williamsdottir but my daughter would be Helen Gordonsdottir. My husband would be Gordon Gordonsson and we all would retain those names after marriage. Their system has even more complications and rules, to do with their alphabet etc.

    https://www.icelandtours.is/blog/icelandic-names-what-makes-them-unique/

    I wonder if the ‘Fitz” for an illegitimate son might have been more accepted in the eleventh century and for a while after, as William the Conqueror was a bastard? I note there isn’t much said about illegitimate daughters… Presumably the acknowledged illegitimate son of a Duke could marry respectably but an illegitimate daughter wouldn’t have the same clout, unless there was a big bribe in the way of a dowry. (I’m thinking about Dido Belle, here).

    Since the recent trend for everyone to be addressed by their first name, surnames seem to be less significant in an informal setting, hence the tendency to speak of Kevin the plumber, to distinguish him from Kevin Elizabeth’s husband, in our house. I don’t suppose it will change anyone’s surname as we’re all so tied in to the need to identify ourselves for official purposes but it’s easy to see how many names came about.
    Jeannie

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    • Okay (illegitimacy), this is worth a post if I can find enough information for one. My–admittedly vague–understanding is that if an illegitimate child had enough money, they were acceptable–in society and in the marriage market, although not as good a catch as a legitimate one. But that’s nothing more than my impression and even if it’s accurate it’s not tied to any particular set of centuries. Don’t give it much weight. No idea how much impact William the Bastard had on all of that in the early days of the Norman conquest. It’s an interesting question.

      My head was in danger of exploding when I got to your comment about the complications that have to do with their alphabet. If I get brave enough, I’ll follow the link. It sounds fascinating. And mildly insane. Thanks.

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  9. Viking Jews ?! Goodness … what implications …. ! !

    In the village I called home nobody knew someone by the official family name (the one in the passport), but everybody was known by the Hausname, like “der Bauersch Rudi”. I was “der ühlersch hanne ihr jung'” – it went after the women’s name here – or “der ühlersch marda ihr enkala (von der hanne)” (Martha being my grandmother, Hanne being my mother).
    The “official” name was something for the outside, like anything in connection with papers, well, the state in what ever form, anything beyond the village’s border. My grandfather, Martha’s husband, married into “the house” (as effing small as it was !), he came from outside, and hence was known as “ühlersch Alfred”.

    (“Ühlersch” – Northern Franconian dialect for “Öler”, those who do produce / do deal with, oil ; not from the ground, but from natural grown fruits / plants from the woods ; we always lived from the woods ; they produced remedies.)

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    • That’s fascinating about the village names. Any idea how widespread that tradition was? Only your village? Many villages? A whole part of the country?

      I’m lost as to where the Viking Jews comment came from, though.

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      • With “village names” you mean the “Hausnamen” I speak of, yes ?
        You find it all over the Reich. Nothing special.
        See this :
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_name#Hofname_(estate_name)

        The Jewish Vikings come from here :
        “So I kept the name I was born with, and I’d always assumed it was Anglo-Saxon, but Lord Google assures me of several contradictory origins, including Norman, Anglo-Saxon tinged with northern English and Scottish, and (if AI is to be believed, which it isn’t necessarily), Viking.”

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        • Okay, that alleged Viking origin for my name colliding with my actual heritage–that was too large a leap for me to follow. A lack of imagination on my part, no doubt. Or maybe a bit of sanity. Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart.

          And yes, by village names I did mean household names. I find that fascinating.

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