Surname Origins, Their Source and Significations (1875)

Some of my readers will remember that in the 'Squyr of low degree ' the king, amongst other pleasures by which to soothe away his daughter's melancholy, promises her,

Ye shall have Rumney.

Our 'Chailens' are but lingering memorials of the now decayed woollen manufactures of Chalons, of which we shall have more to say anon; and not to mention others, our 'Roans' (always so spelt and pronounced in olden times), our 'Anvers,' once 'de Anvers,' our 'Cullings,' 'Cullens,' ''Collinges,' and 'Lyons,' are but relics of former trades for which the several towns of Rouen, and Antwerp, and Cologne, and Lyons, were notorious. The rights of citizenship and all other advantages seem early to have been accorded them. In the thirteenth century we find Robert of Catalonia and Walter Turk acting as sheriffs, and much about the same time a 'Pycard ' was Mayor of London.

I must stop here. We have surveyed, comparatively speaking, but a few of our local surnames. From the little I have been able to advance, however, it will be clear, I think, that with regard to the general subject of nomenclature these additional sobriquets had become a necessity. The population of England, less than two millions at the period of the Conquest, was rapidly increasing, and, which is of far more importance so far as surnames are concerned, increasing corporately. Population was be-coming every day less evenly diffused. Communities

1 Foxe, in his Martyrology, speaks of the 'Bishop of Mentz, of Cullen, and of Wormes.' (Vol. i. p. 269, ed. 1844.)

LOCAL SURNAMES.

were fast being formed, and as circumstances but more and more induced men to herd themselves together, so did the necessity spring up for each to have a more fixed and determinate title than his merely personal or baptismal one, by which he might be more currently known among his fellows.