The Romance of Names
1914
Every surname is a fossil of medieval England, waiting to be decoded. Ernest Weekley's 1914 study remains a captivating excavation of how ordinary names came to carry extraordinary histories. He traces the surnames we pass down daily back to their surprising origins: the Smiths and Coopers who bore their trades, the Hilltons who became Hill, the Norman knights who took their castles' names and the Anglo-Saxon peasants who simply passed down their father's name until it became something fixed and inheritable. Weekley examines how personal names became family names, how geography left its mark upon thousands of designations, and how the chaos of medieval spelling gradually settled into the inconsistent system we now take for granted. The book reveals that what we call ourselves is never arbitrary. It is for anyone who has ever looked at a name and wondered: what did this mean five hundred years ago, and who were the people who first carried it?
About The Romance of Names
Chapter Summaries
- Preface to Third Edition
- Weekley acknowledges corrections from readers and emphasizes that surname study has been left mostly to amateur philologists. He presents the book as a general survey rather than comprehensive treatise.
- I
- Introduces the four basic categories of English surnames: personal (from ancestors), local (from places), occupative (from trades), and nicknames (from characteristics). Uses a rugby team as examples.
- II
- Analyzes actual medieval records from 1273, showing London jurymen, Middlesex jurymen, and Steeple Claydon cottagers' names with their modern equivalents and etymologies.
Key Themes
- Linguistic Evolution
- Weekley demonstrates how surnames reflect the natural evolution of language, showing how words change meaning, pronunciation, and spelling over centuries.
- Social History Through Names
- Surnames serve as windows into medieval society, revealing occupations, social structures, migration patterns, and cultural values of past eras.
- The Danger of Folk Etymology
- The book repeatedly warns against accepting obvious or romantic explanations for name origins, emphasizing the need for rigorous philological evidence.
Characters
- Ernest Weekley(protagonist)
- Professor of French and Head of the Modern Language Department at University College, Nottingham. The author presents himself as a scholarly guide through the complex world of English surname etymology.
