SoulKid |
Posted on 10/30/01 @ 12:00 AM
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The Conquerors 1.0c |
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Build and Destroy |
The Normans are thought to have been the first to introduce the practice of fixed surnames among us; and certainly, a little while before the Conquest, some of those adventurers had taken family names from their chateaux in Normandy. "Neither is there any village in Normandy," says Camden, "that gave not denomination to some family in England." But that these Norman surnames had not been of long standing is very certain, for at the Conquest it was only 160 years since the first bands of Northmen rowed up the Seine, under their leader Hrolf, whom our history books honour with the theatrical name of Rollo, but who was known among his people as "Hrolf the Ganger."
But whether in imitation of the Norman lords, or from the great convenience of the distinction, the use of fixed surnames arose in France about the year 1000, came into England sixty years later, or with the Norman Conquest, and reached us in Scotland, speaking roundly, about the year 1100.
The first examples of fixed surnames in any number in England are to be found in the Conqueror's Valuation Book called Domesday. "Yet in England," again to quote the judicious Master Camden, "certain it is, that as the better sort, even from the Conquest, by little and little took surnames, so they were not settled among the common people fully until about the time of Edward the Second."
We had our share of those dashing Norman adventurers who introduced among us the customs of chivalry and the surnames they had adopted from their paternal castles across the Channel. They made a rage for knighthood in both ends of our island, and turned the ladies' heads. An English princess declined to marry a suitor who "had not two names"; and here in Scotland they became the favourites and companions of our sovereigns; witness the courtiers who surrounded David I, and his grandsons, whose names ~ Brus, Balliol, De Morevil, De Umphravil, De Berkelai, De Quinci, De Vipont, De Vaux, and a hundred others ~ still thrill on our tongues, and bring up stories of knightly feats of arms, of the battlefield and the tilting-ground.
On the Continent, especially in France, this style of surname, showing its territorial origin ~ especially where marked with the De, so much valued by our neighbours ~ is considered as almost the absolute test of gentry; and many a pretty Frenchwoman has given herself and her fortune in exchange for little more than the empty sound of the aristocratic prefix. With us it has never been so; and our difference is not merely of language. We have never recognised the principle of raising these territorial names into an aristocracy of gentry ~ a top cream of society. We have no higher names in England ~ not even De Vere, Clifford, or Nevil -- than our Spensers, Fitzgeralds, Stuarts, Butlers, names which cannot have a territorial origin.
The era of fixed surnames does not rest only on the authority of Camden. It can be proved by a thousand records, English and Scotch. It seems to me it is almost sufficiently proved, when we can show the race of Stuart ~ already first of Scotch families in opulence and power ~ distinguished by no fixed surnames for several generations after the Norman Conquest. Much later, the ancestors of the princely line of Hamilton were known as Walter Fitz-Gilbert, and Gilbert Fitz-Walter, before it occurred to them to assume the name their kinsmen had borne in England. But you must allow me here, and for the present, to rest it on my mere assertion, that surnames were first used among us in the twelfth century, and came into general use in the following one. |