Many pubs owe their names to popular sports (the Cricketers, the Fox and
Hounds, the Cockpit), or to the workaday pursuits of the people who once drank
in them. Pubs like the Plough, the Fleece, the Woolpack, and the Shepherd's Rest
were clearly designed for farmers and farm workers. The Boot was for cobblers,
the Anchor for sailors, and the Shoulder of Mutton for butchers. Not all
references are so immediately evident. The Beetle and Wedge in Berkshire
sounds hopelessly obscure until you realize that a beetle and wedge were basic
tools of carpenters 200 years ago.
Many of the very oldest pub names represent religious themes—the Crossed
Keys, the Seven Stars, the Hope and Anchor. The Lamb and Flag, a fairly
common name in Britain still, was the symbol of the Knights Templar, who rode
to the Crusades, and the Saracen's Head and Turk's Head commemorate their
enemies' fate. Still other pub names are built around catchphrases, homilies,
puns, and bits of philosophy, or are simply of unknown provenance. Names such
as the Tumbledown Dick, First and Last, Mortal Man, Romping Donkey, Ram
Jam Inn, Live and Let Live, and Man with a Load of Mischief (the sign outside
depicts a man with a woman slung over his shoulder) all fall resoundingly into
this category.
The picture is further clouded by the consideration that many pub names have
been corrupted over the centuries. The Pig and Whistle is said to have its roots in
peg (a drinking vessel) and wassail (a festive drink). The Goat and Compasses is
sometimes said to come from "God Encompasseth Us." The Elephant and
Castle, originally a pub and now a district of London, may have been the Infanta
de Castille. The Old Bull and Bush, a famous pub on Hampstead Heath, is said
to come from Boulogne Bouche and to commemorate a battle in France. Some
of these derivations may be fanciful, but there is solid evidence to show that the
Dog and Bacon was once the Dorking Beacon, that the Cat and Fiddle was once
Caterine la Fidele (at least it is recorded as such in the Domesday Book), and
that the Ostrich Inn in Buckinghamshire began life as the Hospice Inn.
All this is by way of introducing, in a decidedly roundabout manner, how we
came to acquire our own names. The study of names is onomastics. For much of
history, surnames, or last names, were not considered necessary. Two people named, say, Peter living in the same hamlet might adopt or be given second
names to help distinguish them from each other—so that one might be called
Peter White-Head and the other Peter Son of John (or Johnson)—but these
additional names were seldom passed on. The business of acquiring surnames
was a long one that evolved over centuries rather than years. As might be
expected it began at the top of the social scale and worked its way down. In
England last names did not become usual until after the Norman conquest, and in
many other European countries, such as Holland, they evolved much later still.
Most surnames come ultimately, if not always obviously, from one of four
sources: place-names (e.g., Lincoln, Worthington), nicknames (Whitehead,
Armstrong), trade names (Smith, Carpenter), and patronymics, that is names
indicating a familial relationship (Johnson, Robertson). In his lifetime a person
might be known by a variety of names—for instance, as Peter the Butcher Who
Lives by the Well at Putney Green or some such. This would eventually
transmute into Peter Butcher or Peter Green or Peter Wells. Often in such cases
the person would take his name from the figure on a nearby inn sign. In the
Middle Ages, when the ability to read could scarcely be assumed, it was
common for certain types of businesses to have symbols outside their doors. The
striped barber pole is a holdover from those days. A wine merchant would
always have a bush by his front door. Hence his neighbor might end up being
called George Bush.
Two events gave a boost to the adoption of surnames in England.
The first was the introduction of a poll tax in 1379, which led the government to
collect the name of every person in the country aged sixteen or over, and the
second was the enactment of the Statute of Additions in 1413, which required
that all legal documents contain not just the person's given name, but also his or
her occupation and place of abode. These two pieces of medieval bureaucracy
meant that virtually everyone had to settle on a definite and fixed surname.
It's surprising how many medieval occupations are embedded in modern family
names. Some are obvious: Bowman, Archer, Carpenter, Shepherd, Forrester. But
many others are not, either because the craft has died or become rare, as with
Fuller (a cleanser of cloths) and Fletcher (a maker of bows and arrows) or
because the spelling has been corrupted in some way, as with Bateman (a
corrupted form of boatman) or because the name uses a regionalism, as with
Akerman (a provincial word for a plowman). It mustn't be forgotten that this wasa time of great flux in the English language, when many regional spellings and
words were competing for dominance. Thus such names as Hill, Hall, and Hull
could all originally have meant Hill but come from different parts of the country.
Smith is the most common name in America and Britain, but it is also one of the
most common in nearly every other European language. The German Schmidt,
the French Ferrier, Italian Ferraro, Spanish Herrero, Hungarian Kovacs, and
Russian Kusnetzov are all Smiths.
English names based on places almost always had prepositions to begin with but
these gradually disappeared, so that John of Preston became just John Preston,
though occasionally they survive in names like Atwater and Underwood or as
remnants in names like Noakes (a contraction of atten Oakes, or "by the oak
trees") or Nash (for atten Ash, "by the ash tree"). A curious fact about names
based on places is that they are so often obscure—mostly from places that few
people have heard of. Why should there be so many more Middletons than
Londons, so many more Worthingtons than Bris-tols? The main cities of
medieval Britain—London, York, Norwich, Glasgow—are relatively uncommon
as surnames even though many thousands of people lived there. To understand
this seeming paradox you must remember that the purpose of surnames is to
distinguish one person or family from the great mass of people. If a person
called himself Peter of London, he would be just one of hundreds of such Peters
and anyone searching for him would be at a loss. So as a rule a person would
become known as Peter of London only if he moved to a rural location, where
London would be a clear identifying feature, but that did not happen often. In the
same way, those people named Farmer , probably owe their name to the fact that
an ancestor left the farm, while names like French, Fleming, Welch, or Walsh
(both from Welsh) indicate that the originator was not a resident of those places
but rather an emigrant.