Where Do Surnames Come From? Trades, Fathers, Places and Nicknames
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For most of history most people had one name, and when a village had three men called John they were told apart by a second word: John the smith, John from the hill, John son of William, John the short. The second word became hereditary in England between about 1100 and 1400, as the population grew and the state and the landlord needed to tell people apart on paper, and the result is that a surname is a fossil of a medieval description that no longer applies. Smith is still the commonest name in the English-speaking world, and the number of smiths is not the reason.
Four sources
Nearly every English surname, and most European ones, falls into one of four groups:
- •Occupations: Smith, Wright, Taylor, Baker, Miller, Cooper, Turner, Fletcher, who made arrows, Chandler, who made candles, and Webster, a female weaver; Smith leads because every village needed one and the name was given to the man rather than the trade
- •Patronymics, the father's name: Johnson, Williams, Robertson, Davies, the Welsh ap Rhys that became Price and ap Hywel that became Powell, and the Scandinavian -sen and -son; the Welsh fixed their surnames last, in the eighteenth century, which is why so many are the same few first names
- •Places: a village, Lincoln, Preston, Washington, or a feature, Hill, Wood, Brook, Ford, Atwood, and the Norman de and French style that gave names such as Sinclair and Beaumont
- •Nicknames: Brown, White, Long, Short, Armstrong, Young, Wise, Goodfellow, and the less kind ones that died out or were changed
Why they were fixed
A by-name became a surname when it passed to the children whether or not it fitted them, and that happened where and when records needed it. The Norman aristocracy brought hereditary names from France after 1066; the poll taxes of the fourteenth century, the manorial rolls and the parish registers ordered from 1538 required every person to be listed under a name that stayed the same, and a clerk who wrote John Smith once wrote it for the son. In Europe the fixing ran from Italy in the tenth century to Scandinavia in the nineteenth and Turkey in 1934, when a law required every citizen to adopt one, and Ataturk, father of the Turks, took his from the state. Jews in the Habsburg lands and Germany were compelled to take fixed surnames around 1800 and were sometimes charged for good ones, which is where the Goldbergs and the Rosenthals come from.
Elsewhere
The four sources are general, but the order of names and the way they are inherited are not. Chinese surnames, about a hundred of which cover most of the population, come first, are among the oldest fixed surnames in the world at over two thousand years, and are the reason there are ninety million Wangs. Icelanders use a true patronymic, Gudrun Jonsdottir being the daughter of Jon, and the telephone directory lists people by first name. Spanish and Portuguese names carry both parents' surnames, father's then mother's in Spain and the reverse in Portugal; Russian names carry a patronymic between the given name and the surname; and in much of the Islamic world a chain of the father's and grandfather's names served until colonial and modern states required a fixed one. Married women in England took their husband's name by a custom that the law never quite required and that is now optional; in Spain and Korea they never did.
What the names record
A map of surnames is a map of the past. Names that come from a single place, Featherstonehaugh or Kirkbride, are still clustered near it seven centuries later, and genetic studies find that men with a rare surname often share a Y chromosome, which is inherited along the same line. Occupational names record an economy of smiths, wrights and millers with no engineers or programmers; the distribution of Smith, Schmidt, Ferrari, Herrera, Kowalski and Kovacs across Europe is the blacksmith in a dozen languages. The names also record migration and its pressures: the Americanisation of Mueller into Miller and Schneider into Taylor at the docks and in the schools, the Jewish and Italian names shortened for the telephone, and the enslaved people of the Americas given or taking their owners' names, which is why Washington is one of the commonest surnames among Black Americans and rare among white ones.
Now
About 45,000 surnames are in use in Britain and most are held by a handful of families; the top hundred cover a third of the population and Smith, Jones, Williams, Brown and Taylor lead as they have since the fourteenth century. New names are still made, by immigration, by hyphenation, by choice, and the naming systems are converging as bureaucracies demand a first name and a last name in two boxes, which does not fit an Icelander, a Javanese with one name or a Spaniard with two. The description that became a name is still being read: a person called Fletcher is asked, once in a life, whether their ancestors made arrows, and the answer is yes, one of them, seven hundred years ago.
The takeaway
European surnames were by-names that became hereditary between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries as tax rolls and parish registers needed a fixed label, drawn from four sources: a trade, a father's name, a place or a nickname, which is why Smith, Johnson, Hill and Brown lead the lists. Other cultures fixed theirs earlier, as in China, or later, as in Turkey, or never, as in Iceland's patronymics, and the names still map where families came from, what their ancestors did and how they moved.