Read an interesting piece earlier about surnames, or rather surnames that derive from nicknames! In the days before it was mandatory to have a legal surname (round about the 1300s), people were recognised as much by the nickname's people gave them as for their family names and these often related to their job, their appearance, their demeanour, their temperament or simply by the way they strutted their stuff! The names, which weren't always complimentary, often stuck, particularly in the North of England oddly enough, and in time became formal surnames - as these were increasingly required by bureaucrats to legally identify people the more societies enlarged and developed. Many of those original nicknames live on as surnames today and here are a few:
Belcher comes courtesy of a real person who had a 'lovely face'; Biss, on the other hand, was the opposite. Kay related to a left hander or a citeog as we say here. Read was ginger; Early was noble; Frost was aloof. Dolittle was lazy ... as was Idle. Pratt was clever (the one that got away!). Lamb was meek; Lawless, licentious; Mutton was a dunce. Chubb was fat; Begg was small and Sly and Smellie need no explanation .. at all! Nor does Fox, Stag or Quarrell. On the ruder side, Wagstaff was a medieval ‘flasher’ as was Waghorn and I'll leave it to you to figure out the meaning of both Longstaff and Hardstaff! All the detail comes from A Dictionary of Surnames which lists the origins of over 100,000 names in all the European languages including our own Gaelic. The work is edited by Patrick Hanks and Flavina Hodges. By the way, the nick in nickname comes from the Anglo Saxon word eke meaning "also" or "other".
More tomorrow...
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