What Name Shall I Say?
By STRIX N China if a man wishes to find out what you I are called he asks: 'What is your honourable surname?' and you reply 'My humble surname is Fu' (or Chang, or whatever it may be). At least that is what used to happen; possibly the Communists have ironed out the old-fashioned courtesies.
Although in this country we employ no such deprecating formula when revealing our identities, our manner does tend to vary through a wide range of nuances on these occasions. When registering a complaint or a protest we say 'My name is Smith' in a sort of Agincourt voice, totally different from the insinuating tones in which we impart exactly the same information to a head-waiter who thinks he may be able to find room for us if we come back in a quarter of an hour. As the policeman, standing beside our parked car, gets out his notebook the weary dis- dain and the unnatural precision with which we articulate 'Smith—John Henry Smith' are preg- nant with every sort of implication, from 'I realise you are only doing your duty, my good man, but must you take such a long time about it?' to 'Small wonder that bullion-robberies are of almost daily occurrence, if this is how the con- stabulary sees fit to waste its time!'
'What name shall I say?' Consider the wide differences between the manner in which Smith replies 'Smith' when he is calling on (a) an actress with a bunch of flowers, (b) the Editor of The Times with a horsewhip and (c) the head- mistress of a girls' school. It will be seen that our usage in this matter has certain affinities with the Chinese, the main difference being that ours is more flexible but less polished.
* * This is hardly surprising, for we have only had surnames for what is by Chinese standards a very short time. According to Mr. P. H. Reaney, whose Dictionary of British Surnames (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 70s.) is published to- morrow, they only came into general use after the Norman Conquest and have since changed their spelling with bewildering frequency. At first they were never, or practically never, hereditary, being merely tacked on to one's personal name for convenience during one's lifetime; since their purpose was to differentiate, the idea of a man and his sons all having the same surname would —had it occurred to anyone—have seemed silly.
For a time there was a mild craze for having two alternative surnames, like 'John Bulichromp called le Binder' (1300) and 'Ralph de Eyr called Proudfoot of Havering' (1393). This strikes me as a foolish practice, and much more confusing than having no surname at all. When due allow- ance has been made for schizophrenia and whimsicality, a man really ought to be able to make up his mind after a certain age whether he is called Ralph de Eyr or Proudfoot of Havering. Inability to do so makes a mockery of the whole system; and it is difficult not to feel impatient with Nichol Wigh (1418) 'otherwise callyd Nicholas Ketringham otherwise callyd John Segrave otherwise callyd Nicholl Pecche.'
In Scotland surnames developed even later than in England and were slower in becoming here- ditary; 'they changed with each succeeding generation, and in the Highlands it was not until the eighteenth century that this practice was abandoned.'
Mr. Reaney's scholarship, which appears to be impeccable, throws upon the origins of the Scottish clans sidelights of a sublunary and un- romantic kind. 'The clan system' (he writes) 're- sulted in large numbers of people with the same name, but no specific surname of their own. The desire for protection in unsettled times caused men to attach themselves to a powerful clan and to assume its name. Chiefs of clans and heads of landed families increased the number of their followers by conciliation or coercion, and all took the name of the clan. In the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries the rapid increase in the Clan Mackenzie was due to the inclusion of the old native tenants on land acquired from time to time by the chiefs. "Frasers of the boll of meal" were poor Bissets who had changed their name to Fraser for a bribe. Oppressed people from the neighbouring districts sought the protection of Gilbert Cumin who adopted them as clansmen by baptising them in the stone hen-trough at his castle door. Henceforth they were "Cumins of the hen-trough" to distinguish. them from Cumins of the true blood.'
It was only two hundred years ago, after the Battle of Culloden, that Gaelic surnames, seeping southward, 'were often anglicised to overcome Lowland hostility.' Maclain became Johnson, MacLevy Livingstone, Maceachrain Cochrane and so on. A roughly similar process was set in motion by the influx of Irish immigrants into southwest Scotland after 1820. The O'Tooles became Doyles, the McSweeneys Swans and the McGrimes Grahams.
Although neither Brian Boru (1002-1014) nor his sons had hereditary surnames (his grandsons were the first O'Briens), Ireland started going in for surnames in the tenth century, thus establish- ing a comfortable lead over the rest of the British Isles. But the Anglo-Norman invasion confused the issue. Some English settlers took Irish names, and by the fourteenth century, when English power was on the decline, this tendency had become so pronounced that an Act of 1366 ordered the expatriates to 'leave off entirely the manner of naming by the Irish.' A century later this was followed up by a spirited attempt to compel the natives themselves—in the counties of Dublin, Meath, Louth and Kildare—to assume 'an English surname of a town, as Sutton, Chester, Trim, Skreen, Cork, Kinsale; or a colour, as Black, White, Brown; or an art, as Smith or Carpenter; or an office, as Cook, Butler.'
* * *
The Scandinavians and the Celts: the Bretons (who fought at Hastings as a sort of Foreign Legion) and the natives of the English provinces of France: the Gaels and the Welsh, who eschewed surnames until the seventeenth cen- tury—these are only some of the ethnological sources of our surnames. Place-names, pet names, nicknames, forgotten crafts and obsolete ap- pointments, fauna and flora, garments and tools —all have made their contributions to the ex- panding telephone directories.
Mr. Reaney's dictionary is not concerned with genealogy or family history; 'the fact that Robert le Turnur lived in Staffordshire in 1199 and that there was a William de Kouintre in London in 1230 does not mean that they are the ancestors of all or any of the modern Turners or Coven- trys.' The entries under individual names are, even to their bearers, of only academic interest, but Mr. Reaney's scrupulous work is a useful 're- minder of what a mongrel race we are and always have been. It is to be hoped. that one day an appendix will be added, analysing the tendency in recent times for Nussbaum to become Fro- bisher, and Dzjhorskic Drake, by deed-poll.
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