Surname Origins, Their Source and Significations (1875)

now, yet they did then occupy a place in the vocabulary of every-day converse. For it is wonderful how numberless are the local words, now obsolete saving for our registers, which were used in ordinary talk not more than five hundred years ago. That many of them have been thus rescued from oblivion by our hereditary nomenclature is due no doubt to the fact that the period of the formation of the latter is that also during which our tongue was settling down into that composite form of Saxon and Norman in which we now have it, and which in spite of losses in con-sequence, in spite of here and there a noble word crushed out, has given our English language its pliancy and suppleness, its strengths and shades.

We have mentioned ' de la Woode' and 'Attewoode.' 'De la Hirst' is exactly similar — its compounds equally numerous. The pasture beside it is Hursley' — if filberts abound it is 'Hazlehurst;' if ashes, ' Ashurst; ' if lindens or linds, 'Lyndhurst;' if elms, 'Elmhurst.' If hawks frequented it we find it styled ' Hawkhurst; ' if goats, 'Goathirst; ' if badgersor brocks, 'Brocklehurst; ' if deer, 'Dewhurst'(spelt Duerhurst, 1375). The 'holt' was less in size, being merely a coppice or small thicket. Chaucer speaks of ' holtes and hayes.' 'De la Holt ' is of frequent occurrence in our early rolls. Our 'Cockshots' are but the ' cocksholt,' the liquid letter being elided as in'Aldershot,' 'Oakshot,' 'and 'Bagshot,' or badgers' holt. A 'sham' or 'schaw' was a small woody shade or covert. An old manuscript says:

1 William de Okholt is found in the 'Inquis. post mortem.'This would be the original form.

LOCAL SURNAMES.

In somer when the shawes be sheyne,

And leves be large and long,

It is fulle mery in feyre foreste

To here the foulys song.

As a shelter for game and the wilder animals, it is found in such compounds as 'Bagshaw,' the badger being evidently common; 'Hindshaw,' 'Ramshaw,' 'Hogshaw,' ''Cockshaw,' 'Henshaw,' and 'Earnshaw.' The occurrence of such names as 'Shallcross' and 'Shawcross,' 'Henshall ' and 'Henshaw,' and 'Kersall 'and ' Kershaw,' would lead us to imagine that this word too has been somewhat corrupted. Other descriptive compounds are found in 'Birkenshaw,' or 'Denshaw,' or 'Bradshaw,' or 'Langshaw,' or 'Openshaw.' As for ' Shaw' simple, every county in England has it locally, and every directory surnominally. Such a name as 'Richard de la Frith' or 'George ate Frith ' carries us at once to the woodland copses that underlay our steeper mountain-sides -- they represented the wider and more wooded valleys in fact. We find the term lingering locally in such a name as 'Chapel-en-le-frith ' in the Peak of Derby-shire. The usual alliterative expression of early days was ' by frith and fell.' We have it varied in an old poem of the fourteenth century:

The Duke of Braband first of all

Swore, for thing that might befall,

That he should both day and night

Help Sir Edward in his right,

In town, in field, in frith and fen.

Our 'Friths ' are by no means in danger of obsoletism,

1 'Emelina de Hogshawe' (Inquis. post mortem). The name is now extinct, I believe.