English Surnames: Their Sources and SignificationsBardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
History
English Surnames: Their Sources and Significations
Bardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
Names, English; Names, Personal -- English
Its old rival upon the Adriatic still vies with it in ‘Veness,’ once
enrolled as ‘de Venise.’ Rome has given us our early ‘Reginald le
Romayns’ and ‘John le Romayns,’ whose descendants now write their names
in the all but unaltered form of ‘Romaine,’[141] and to Lombardy and the
Jews we owe Lombard street, and our ‘Lombards,’ ‘Lumbards,’ ‘Lubbards,’
and perhaps ‘Lubbers’—not to mention our ‘Luckes,’ and ‘Luckies,’ a
progenitor of whom I find inscribed in the Hundred Rolls as ‘Luke of
Lucca.’ Advancing eastwards, a ‘Martin le Hunne’ looks strangely as if
sprung from a Hungarian source. Whatever doubt, however, there may be on
this point, there can be none on ‘William le Turc,’[142] whose name is
no solitary one in the records of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and whose descendants are by no means extinct in the
nineteenth. ‘Peter le Russe’ would seem at first sight to be of Russian
origin, especially with such a Christian name to the fore as the one
above, but it is far more probably one more form of the endless
corruptions of ‘le Rous,’ a sobriquet of complexion so extremely
familiar to all who have spent any time over mediæval registers. I have
already mentioned ‘le Norrys’ as connected with our ‘Norris.’ ‘Dennis,’
I doubt not, in some cases, is equally representative of the former ‘le
Daneys.’ Entries like ‘William le Norris,’ or ‘Walter le Norreis,’ or
‘Roger le Daneis,’ or ‘Joel le Deneys,’ are of constant occurrence.
These, added to the others, may be mentioned as bringing before our eyes
the broadest limits of European immigration, and with scarcely an
exception they are found among the English surnames of to-day.
But we must not forget the Dutch—a term that once embraced all the
German race.[143] ‘Dutchman,’ though I have found no instance in early
rolls, is, I see, a denizen of our present directories, while
‘Dutchwomen,’ found in the fourteenth century, is extinct. Our ‘Pruces’
are but the old ‘le Pruce,’ or Prussian, as we should now term them. The
word is met with in an old political song, and, as it contains a list of
articles, the introduction of which into England from Flanders made the
two countries so closely connected, I will quote it fully:—
Now beer and bacon bene fro Pruse i-brought
Into fflaunders, as loved and fere i-soughte;
Osmonde, coppre, bowstaffes, stile and wex,
Peltre-ware, and grey, pych, tar, borde, and flex,
And Coleyne threde, fustiane, and canvase,
Corde, bokeram, of old tyme thus it wase.
But the fflemmynges among these things dere,
Incomen loven beste bacon and beer.
‘Fleming,’ as our registers prove, was seemingly the popular term for
all the Low Countrymen, bands of whom were specially invited over by two
of our kings to spread their industry in our own land. Numbers of them
came in, however, as simple wool-merchants, to transmit the raw material
into Holland. As the old ‘Libel on English Policy’ says—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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