Surname Origins, Their Source and Significations (1875)

vogue at this period, and what not, and of those which were, by their relative frequency, in a measure, what were the most popular. Certainly the change is most extraordinary when we compare the past with the present. Some, once so popular that they scarce gave identity to the bearer, are now all but obsolete, while numerous appellations at present generally current were then utterly unknown. There are surnames familiar to our ears whose root as a Christian name is now passed out of knowledge; while, on the other hand, many a Christian name now daily upon our lips has no surname formed from it to tell of any lengthened existence. The fact is, that while our surnames, putting immigration aside, have been long at a standstill, we have ever been and are still adding to our stock of baptismal names.' Each new national crisis, each fresh achievement of our arms, each new princely bride imported from abroad — these events are being commemorated daily at the font. This is but the continuance of a custom, and one very natural, which has ever existed. Turn where we will in English history during the last eight hundred years, and we shall find the popular sympathies seeking an outlet in baptism. Did a prince of he blood royal meet with a hapless and cruel fate, his memory was at once embalmed in the names of the children born immediately afterwards, saving when a mother's superstitious fears came in to prevent it. Did some national

'Thus we find in the Manchester Directory for 1861, 'Napoleon Bonaparte Sutton, tripe-seller,' and 'Napoleon Stott, skewer-maker.'Born, doubtless, during the earlier years of the present century, their parents have thus stamped upon their lives the impress of that fearful interest which the name of Napoleon then excited.

PATRONYMIC SURNAMES.

hero arise who upheld and asserted the people's rights against a grinding and hateful tyranny. His name is speedily to be found inscribed on every hearth. The reverse is of equal significance. It is by the fact of a name, which must have been of familiar import, finding few to represent it, we can trace a people's dislikes and a nation's prejudices. A name once in favour, as a rule, however, kept its place. The cause to which it owed its rise had long passed into the shade of forgotten things, but the name, if it had but attained a certain hold, seems easily to have kept it, till indeed such a convulsion occurred as revolutionised men and things and their names together.

There have been two such revolutionary crises in English nomenclature, the Conquest and the Reformation, the second culminating in the Puritan Common-wealth. Other crises have stamped themselves in indelible lines upon our registers, but the indenture, if as strongly impressed, was far less general, and in the main merely enlarged rather than changed our stock of national names. Thus was it with the Crusades. A few of the names it introduced have been popular ever since. Many, at first received favourably, died out, if not with, at least soon after, the subsidence of the spirit to which they owed their rise. Some of these came from the Eastern Church, of whose existence at all the Crusader seems to have suddenly reminded us. Some were Biblical, associated in Bible narrative with the very soil the Templars trod. Some, again, were borrowed from Continental comrades in arms, names which had caught the fancy of those who introduced them, or were connected