CURIOSITIES
OF
PURITAN NOMENCLATURE

CURIOSITIES
OF
PURITAN NOMENCLATURE

BY
CHARLES W. BARDSLEY
AUTHOR OF “ENGLISH SURNAMES, THEIR SOURCES AND SIGNIFICATIONS”

London
CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1880

[The right of translation is reserved]

Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles.

DEDICATED TO
HIS FELLOW MEMBERS
OF THE
HARLEIAN SOCIETY.

[Pg vii]

I will not be so ill-natured as to quote the names of all the writers who have denied the existence of Puritan eccentricities at the font. One, at least, ought to have known better, for he has edited more books of the Puritan epoch than any other man in England. The mistake of all is that, misled perhaps by Walter Scott and Macaulay, they have looked solely to the Commonwealth period. The custom was then in its decay.

I have to thank several clergymen for giving me extracts from the registers and records under their care. A stranger to them, I felt some diffidence in making my requests. In every case the assistance I asked for was readily extended. These gentlemen are the Rev. W. Sparrow Simpson, St. Matthew, Friday Street, London; the Rev. W. Wodehouse, Elham, Canterbury; the Rev. J. B. Waytes, Markington, Yorks.; the Rev. William Tebbs, Caterham Valley; the Rev. Canon Howell, Drayton, Norwich; the Rev. J. O. Lord, Northiam, Staplehurst; and the Rev. G. E. Haviland, Warbleton, Sussex. The last-named gentleman copied no less than 120[Pg viii] names, all of Puritan origin, from the Warbleton records. I beg to thank him most warmly, and to congratulate him on possessing the most remarkable register of its kind in England. Certain circumstances led me to suspect that Warbleton was a kind of head-quarters of these eccentricities; I wrote to the rector, and we soon found that we had “struck ile.” That Mr. Heley, the Puritan incumbent, should have baptized his own children by such names as Fear-not and Much-mercy, was not strange, but that he should have persuaded the majority of his parishioners to follow his example proves wonderful personal influence.

Amongst the laity, I owe gratitude to Mr. Chaloner Smith, Richmond, Surrey; Mr. R. R. Lloyd, St. Albans; Mr. J. E. Bailey, F.S.A., Manchester; Mr. J. L. Beardsley, Cleveland, U.S.A.; Mr. Tarbutts, Cranbrook, Kent; and Mr. Speed, Ulverston.

Of publications, I must needs mention Notes and Queries, a treasure-house to all antiquaries; the Sussex Archæological Society’s works, and the Yorkshire Archæological and Topographical Journal. The “Wappentagium de Strafford” of the latter is the best document yet published for students of nomenclature. Out of it alone a complete history of English surnames and baptismal names might be written. Though inscribed with clerkly formality, it contained more pet forms than[Pg ix] any other record I have yet seen; and this alone must stamp it as a most important document. The Harleian Society, by publishing church registers, have set a good example, and I have made much use of those that have been issued. They contain few instances of Puritan extravagance, but that is owing to the fact that no leading Puritan was minister of any of the three churches whose records they have so far printed. I sincerely hope the list of subscribers to this society may become enlarged.

For the rest—the result of twelve years’ research—I am alone responsible. Heavy clerical responsibilities have often been lightened by a holiday spent among the yellow parchments of churches in town and country, from north to south of England. As it is possible I have seen as many registers as any other man in the country, I will add one statement—a very serious one: there are thousands of entries, at this moment faintly legible, which in another generation will be wholly illegible. What is to be done?

Should this little work meet the eye of any of the clergy in Sussex, Kent, and, I may add, Surrey, I would like to state that if they will search the baptismal records of the churches under their charge, say from 1580 to 1620, and furnish me with the result, I shall be very much obliged.

Vicarage, Ulverston,
March, 1880.

[Pg x]

W. D. S. in the Prologue = “Wappentagium de Strafford.”

C. S. P. = “Calendar of State Papers.”

[Pg xi]

CONTENTS.

[Pg 1]

CURIOSITIES OF PURITAN NOMENCLATURE.

THE PET-NAME EPOCH IN ENGLAND.

I. The Paucity of Names after the Conquest.

There were no Scripture names in England when the Conqueror took possession; even in Normandy they had appeared but a generation or two before William came over. If any are found in the old[Pg 2] English period, we may feel assured they were ecclesiastic titles, adopted at ordination. Greek and Latin saints were equally unnoticed.

It is hard to believe the statement I have made. Before many generations had passed, Bartholomew, Simon, Peter, Philip, Thomas, Nicholas, John, and Elias, had engrossed a third of the male population; yet Domesday Book has no Philip, no Thomas, only one Nicholas, and but a sprinkling of Johns. It was not long before Jack and Jill took the place of Godric and Godgivu as representative of the English sexes, yet Jack was from the Bible, and Jill from the saintly Calendar.

Without entering into a deep discussion, we may say that the great mass of the old English names had gone down before the year 1200 had been reached. Those that survived only held on for bare existence. From the moment of William’s advent, the names of the Norman began to prevail. He brought in Bible names, Saint names, and his own Teutonic names. The old English names bowed to them, and disappeared.

A curious result followed. From the year 1150 to 1550, four hundred years in round numbers, there was a very much smaller dictionary of English personal names than there had been for four hundred years before, and than there has been[Pg 3] in the four hundred years since. The Norman list was really a small one, and yet it took possession of the whole of England.

A consequence of this was the Pet-name Epoch. In every community of one hundred Englishmen about the year 1300, there would be an average of twenty Johns and fifteen Williams; then would follow Thomas, Bartholomew, Nicholas, Philip, Simon, Peter, and Isaac from the Scriptures, and Richard, Robert, Walter, Henry, Guy, Roger, and Baldwin from the Teutonic list. Of female names, Matilda, Isabella, and Emma were first favourites, and Cecilia, Catharine, Margaret, and Gillian came closely upon their heels. Behind these, again, followed a fairly familiar number of names of either sex, some from the Teuton, some from the Hebrew, some from the Greek and Latin Church, but, when all told, not a large category.

It was, of course, impossible for Englishmen and Englishwomen to maintain their individuality on these terms. Various methods to secure a personality arose. The surname was adopted, and there were John Atte-wood, John the Wheelwright, John the Bigg, and John Richard’s son, in every community. Among the middle and lower classes these did not become hereditary till so late as 1450[Pg 4] or 1500.[1] This was not enough, for in common parlance it was not likely the full name would be used. Besides, there might be two, or even three, Johns in the same family. So late as March, 1545, the will of John Parnell de Gyrton runs:

The register of Raby, Leicestershire, has this entry:

Mr. Burns, who quotes these instances in his “History of Parish Registers,” adds that at this[Pg 5] same time “one John Barker had three sons named John Barker, and two daughters named Margaret Barker.”[2]

If the same family had but one name for the household, we may imagine the difficulty when this one name was also popular throughout the village. The difficulty was naturally solved by, firstly, the adoption of nick forms; secondly, the addition of pet desinences. Thus Emma became by the one practice simple Emm, by the other Emmott; and any number of boys in a small community might be entered in a register as Bartholomew, and yet preserve their individuality in work-a-day life by bearing such names as Bat, Bate, Batty, Bartle, Bartelot, Batcock, Batkin, and Tolly, or Tholy. In a word, these several forms of Bartholomew were treated as so many separate proper names.

No one would think of describing Wat Tyler’s—we[Pg 6] should now say Walter Tyler’s—insurrection as Gowen does:

“Watte vocat, cui Thoma venit, neque Symme retardat,
Bat—que Gibbe simul, Hykke venire subent:
Colle furit, quem Bobbe juvat, nocumenta parantes,
Cum quibus, ad damnum Wille coire volat—
Crigge rapit, dum Davie strepit, comes est quibus Hobbe,
Larkin et in medio non minor esse putat:
Hudde ferit, quem Judde terit, dum Tibbe juvatur
Jacke domosque viros vellit, en ense necat.”

These names, taken in order, are Walter, Thomas, Simon, Bartholomew, Gilbert, Isaac, Nicholas, Robert, William, Gregory, David, Robert (2), Lawrence, Hugh, Jordan (or George), Theobald, and John.

Another instance will be evidence enough. The author of “Piers Plowman” says—

“Then goeth Glutton in, and grete other after,
Cesse, the sonteresse, sat on the bench:
Watte, the warner, and his wife bothe:
Tymme, the tynkere, and twayne of his prentices:
Hikke, the hackney man, and Hugh, the pedlere,
Clarice, of Cokkeslane, and the clerke of the churche:
Dawe, the dykere, and a dozen othere.”

Taken in their order, these nick forms represent Cecilia, Walter, Timothy, Isaac, Clarice, and David. It will be seen at a glance that such appellatives are rare, by comparison, in the present day. Tricks of this kind were not to be played with Bible names at the Reformation, and the new names[Pg 7] from that time were pronounced, with such exceptions as will be detailed hereafter, in their fulness.

To speak of William and John is to speak of a race and rivalry 800 years old. In Domesday there were 68 Williams, 48 Roberts, 28 Walters, to 10 Johns. Robert Montensis asserts that in 1173, at a court feast of Henry II., Sir William St. John and Sir William Fitz-Hamon bade none but those who bore the name of William to appear. There were present 120 Williams, all knights. In Edward I.’s reign John came forward. In a Wiltshire document containing 588 names, 92 are William, 88 John, 55 Richard, 48 Robert, 23 Roger, Geoffrey, Ralph, and Peter 16. A century later John was first. In 1347, out of 133 common councilmen for London, first convened, 35 were John, 17 William, 15 Thomas, (St. Thomas of Canterbury was now an institution), 10 Richard, 8 Henry, 8 Robert. In 1385 the Guild of St. George at Norwich contained 377 names. Of these, John engrossed no less than 128, William 47, Thomas 41. The Reformation and the Puritan Commonwealth for a time darkened the fortunes of John and William, but the Protestant accession befriended the latter, and now, as 800 years ago, William is first and John second.

[Pg 8]But when we come to realize that nearly one-third of Englishmen were known either by the name of William or John about the year 1300, it will be seen that the pet name and nick form were no freak, but a necessity. We dare not attempt a category, but the surnames of to-day tell us much. Will was quite a distinct youth from Willot, Willot from Wilmot, Wilmot from Wilkin, and Wilkin from Wilcock. There might be half a dozen Johns about the farmstead, but it mattered little so long as one was called Jack, another Jenning, a third Jenkin, a fourth Jackcock (now Jacox as a surname), a fifth Brownjohn, and a sixth Micklejohn, or Littlejohn, or Properjohn (i.e. well built or handsome).

The nick forms are still familiar in many instances, though almost entirely confined to such names as have descended from that day to the present. We still talk of Bob, and Tom, and Dick, and Jack. The introduction of Bible names at the Reformation did them much harm. But the Reformation, and the English Bible combined, utterly overwhelmed the pet desinences, and they succumbed. Emmot and Hamlet lived till the close of the seventeenth century, but only because they had ceased to be looked upon as altered forms of old favourite names, and were[Pg 9] entered in vestry books on their own account as orthodox proper names.

II. Pet Forms.

These pet desinences were of four kinds.

(a) Kin.

The primary sense of kin seems to have been relationship: from thence family, or offspring. The phrases “from generation to generation,” or “from father to son,” in “Cursor Mundi” find a briefer expression:

“This writte was gett fra kin to kin,
That best it cuth to haf in min.”

The next meaning acquired by kin was child, or “young one.” We still speak in a diminutive sense of a manikin, kilderkin, pipkin, lambkin, jerkin, minikin (little minion), or doitkin. Appended to baptismal names it became very familiar. “A litul soth Sermun” says—

“Nor those prude yongemen
That loveth Malekyn,
And those prude maydenes
That loveth Janekyn:
····
Masses and matins
Ne kepeth they nouht,
For Wilekyn and Watekyn
Be in their thouht.”

Unquestionably the incomers from Brabant and[Pg 10] Flanders, whether as troopers or artisans, gave a great impulse to the desinence. They tacked it on to everything:

“Rutterkin can speke no Englyssh,
His tongue runneth all on buttyred fyssh,
Besmeared with grece abowte his dysshe
Like a rutter hoyda.”

They brought in Hankin, and Han-cock, from Johannes; not to say Baudkin, or Bodkin, from Baldwin. Baudechon le Bocher in the Hundred Rolls, and Simmerquin Waller, lieutenant of the Castle of Harcourt in “Wars of the English in France,” look delightfully Flemish.

Hankin is found late:

“Thus for her love and loss poor Hankin dies,
His amorous soul down flies.”
“Musarum Deliciæ,” 1655.

To furnish a list of English names ending in kin would be impossible. The great favourites were Hopkin (Robert),[3] Lampkin and Lambkin (Lambert), Larkin (Lawrence), Tonkin (Antony), Dickin, Stepkin (Stephen),[4] Dawkin (David), Adkin,[5] now Atkin (Adam, not Arthur), Jeffkin [Pg 11](Jeffrey), Pipkin and Potkin (Philip), Simkin, Tipkin (Theobald), Tomkin, Wilkin, Watkin (Walter), Jenkin, Silkin (Sybil),[6] Malkin (Mary), Perkin (Peter), Hankin (Hans), and Halkin or Hawkin (Henry). Pashkin or Paskin reminds us of Pask or Pash, the old baptismal name for children born at Easter. Judkin (now as a surname also Juckin) was the representative of Judd, that is, Jordan. George afterwards usurped the place. All these names would be entered in their orthodox baptismal style in all formal records. But here and there we get free and easy entries, as for instance:

Malkin was one of the few English female names with this appendage. Some relics of this form of Mary still remain. Malkin in Shakespeare is the coarse scullery wench:

[Pg 12] “The kitchen malkin pins
Her richest lockram ’bout her reechy neck,
Clambering the walls to eye him.”
“Coriolanus,” Act ii. sc. 1.

While the author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy” is still more unkind, for he says—

From a drab Malkin became a scarecrow. Hence Chaucer talks of “malkin-trash.” As if this were not enough, malkin became the baker’s clout to clean ovens with. Thus, as Jack took the name of the implements Jack used, as in boot-jack, so by easy transitions Malkin. The last hit was when Grimalkin (that is, grey-malkin) came to be the cant term for an old worn-out quean cat. Hence the witch’s name in “Macbeth.”

It will be seen at a glance why Malkin is the only name of this class that has no place among our surnames.[7] She had lost character. I have suggested, in “English Surnames,” that Makin, Meakin, and Makinson owe their origin to either Mary or Maud. I would retract that supposition. There can be little doubt these are patronymics of[Pg 13] Matthew, just as is Maycock or Meacock. Maykinus Lappyng occurs in “Materials for a History of Henry VII.,” and the Maykina Parmunter of the Hundred Rolls is probably but a feminine form. The masculine name was often turned into a feminine, but I have never seen an instance of the reverse order.

Terminations in kin were slightly going down in popular estimation, when the Hebrew invasion made a clean sweep of them. They found shelter in Wales, however, and our directories preserve in their list of surnames their memorial for ever.[8]

(b) Cock.

The term “cock” implied pertness: especially the pertness of lusty and swaggering youth. To cock up the eye, or the hat, or the tail, a haycock in a field, a cock-robin in the wood, and a cock-horse in the nursery, all had the same relationship of meaning—brisk action, pert demonstrativeness. The barn-door cockerel was not more cockapert[Pg 14] than the boy in the scullery that opened upon the yard where both strutted. Hence any lusty lad was “Cock,” while such fuller titles as Jeff-cock, or Sim-cock, or Bat-cock gave him a preciser individuality. The story of “Cocke Lorelle” is a relic of this; while the prentice lad in “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” acted at Christ College, Cambridge, in 1566, goes by the only name of “Cock.” Tib the servant wench says to Hodge, after the needle is gone—

“My Gammer is so out of course, and frantic all at once,
That Cock our boy, and I, poor wench, have felt it on our bones.”

By-and-by Gammer calls the lad to search:

“Come hither, Cock: what, Cock, I say.
Cock.How, Gammer?
Gammer. Go, hie thee soon: and grope behind the old brass pan.”

Such terms as nescock, meacock, dawcock, pillicock, or lobcock may be compounds—unless they owe their origin to “cockeney,” a spoiled, home-cherished lad. In “Wit without Money” Valentine says—

“For then you are meacocks, fools, and miserable.”

In “Appius and Virginia” (1563) Mausipula says (Act i. sc. 1)—

“My lady’s great business belike is at end,
When you, goodman dawcock, lust for to wend.”

[Pg 15]In “King Lear”

“Pillicock sat on pillicock-hill”

seems an earlier rendering of the nursery rhyme—

“Pillicock, Pillicock sate on a hill,
If he’s not gone, he sits there still.”

In “Wily Beguiled” Will Cricket says to Churms—

These words have their value in proving how familiarly the term cock was employed in forming nicknames. That it should similarly be appended to baptismal names, especially the nick form of Sim, Will, or Jeff, can therefore present no difficulty.

Cock was almost as common as “kin” as a desinence. Sim-cock was Simcock to the end of his days, of course, if his individuality had come to be known by the name.

Adecock is Adam, and Mocock or Mokock is Matthew. In the same way Sander-cock is a diminutive of Sander, Lay-cock of Lawrence, Luccock of Luke, Pidcock and Peacock of Peter,[Pg 16] Maycock and Mycock of Matthew, Jeff-cock of Jeffrey, Johncock of John, Hitch-cock or Hiscock or Heacock of Higg or Hick (Isaac), Elcock of Ellis, Hancock or Handcock of Han or Hand (Dutch John), Drocock or Drewcock of Drew, Wilcock of William, Badcock or Batcock of Bartholomew, and Bawcock of Baldwin, Adcock or Atcock of Adam, Silcock of Silas, and Palcock of Paul:

The difficulty of identification was manifestly lessened in a village or town where Bate could be distinguished from Batkin, and Batkin from Batcock. Hence, again, the common occurrence of such a component as cock. This diminutive is never seen in the seventeenth century; and yet we have many evidences of its use in the beginning of the sixteenth. The English Bible, with its tendency to require the full name as a matter of reverence, while it supplied new names in the place of the old ones that were accustomed to the desinence, caused this. It may be, too, that the new regulation of Cromwell in 1538, requiring the careful registration of all baptized children, caused parents to lay greater stress on the name as it was entered in the vestry-book.

[Pg 17]Any way, the sixteenth century saw the end of names terminating in “cock.”

(c.) On or In.

A dictionary instance is “violin,” that is, a little viol, a fiddle of four strings, instead of six. This diminutive, to judge from the Paris Directory, must have been enormously popular with our neighbours. Our connection with Normandy and France generally brought the fashion to the English Court, and in habits of this kind the English folk quickly copied their superiors. Terminations in kin and cock were confined to the lower orders first and last. Terminations in on or in, and ot or et, were the introduction of fashion, and being under patronage of the highest families in the land, naturally obtained a much wider popularity.

Our formal registers, again, are of little assistance. Beton is coldly and orthodoxly Beatrice or Beatrix in the Hundred Rolls. Only here and there can we gather that Beatrice was never so called in work-a-day life. In “Piers Plowman” it is said—

“Beton the Brewestere
Bade him good morrow.”

And again, later on:

“And bade Bette cut a bough,
And beat Betoun therewith.”

[Pg 18]If Alice is Alice in the registrar’s hands, not so in homely Chaucer:

“This Alison answered: Who is there
That knocketh so? I warrant him a thefe.”

Or take an old Yorkshire will:

Hugh, too, gets his name familiarly entered occasionally:

Huggins in our directories is the memorial of this. But in the north of England Hutchin was a more popular form. In the “Wappentagium de Strafford” occurs—

Also—

that is, Ellen the servant of Houchon. Our Hutchinsons are all north of Trent folk. Thus, too, Peter (Pier) became Perrin:

Marion, from Mary, is the only familiar instance that has descended to us, and no doubt we owe this fact to Maid Marion, the May-lady. Many a Mary Ann, in these days of double baptismal[Pg 19] names, perpetuates the impression that Marion or Marian was compounded of Mary and Ann.

Of familiar occurrence were such names as Perrin, from Pierre, Peter; Robin and Dobbin, from Rob and Dob, Robert; Colin, from Col, Nicholas; Diccon, from Dick, Richard; Huggin, from Hugh; Higgin, from Hick or Higg, Isaac; Figgin, from Figg, Fulke;[9] Phippin, from Phip and Philip; and Gibbin, or Gibbon, or Gilpin, from Gilbert. Every instance proves the debt our surnames have incurred by this practice.

Several cases are obscured by time and bad pronunciation. Our Tippings should more rightly be Tippins, originally Tibbins, from Tibbe (Theobald); our Collinges and Collings, Collins; and our Gibbings, Gibbins. Our Jennings should be Jennins; Jennin Caervil was barber to the Earl of Suffolk in the French wars (“Wars of England in France,” Henry VI.). Robing had early taken the place of Robin:

[Pg 20]Such entries as Raoulin Meriel and Raoul Partrer (this Raoul was private secretary to Henry VI.) remind us of the former popularity of Ralph and of the origin of our surnames Rawlins and Rawlinson:

Here again, however, the “in” has become “ing,” for Rawlings is even more common than Rawlins. Deccon and Dickin have got mixed, and both are now Dickens, although Dicconson exists as distinct from Dickinson. Spenser knew the name well:

The London Directory contains Lamming and Laming. Alongside are Lampin, Lamin, and Lammin. These again are more correct, all being surnames formed from Lambin, a pet form of Lambert:

Lambyn Clay played before Edward at Westminster at the great festival in 1306 (Chappell’s “Popular Music of ye Olden Time,” i. 29). The French forms are Lambin, Lamblin, and Lamberton, all to be met with in the Paris Directory.

All these names are relics of a custom that is obsolete in England, though not with our neighbours.

 [Pg 21]

(d.) Ot and Et.

These are the terminations that ran first in favour for many generations.

This diminutive ot or et is found in our language in such words as poppet, jacket, lancet, ballot, gibbet, target, gigot, chariot, latchet, pocket, ballet. In the same way a little page became a paget, and hence among our surnames Smallpage, Littlepage, and Paget.

Coming to baptism, we find scarcely a single name of any pretensions to popularity that did not take to itself this desinence. The two favourite girl-names in Yorkshire previous to the Reformation were Matilda and Emma. Two of the commonest surnames there to-day are Emmott and Tillot, with such variations as Emmett and Tillett, Emmotson and Tillotson. The archbishop came from Yorkshire. Tyllot Thompson occurs under date 1414 in the “Fabric Rolls of York Minster” (Surtees Society).

[Pg 22]Isabella was also popular in Yorkshire: hence our Ibbots and Ibbotsons, our Ibbetts and Ibbetsons. Registrations such as “Ibbota filia Adam,” or “Robert filius Ibote,” are of frequent occurrence in the county archives. The “Wappentagium de Strafford” has:

Cecilia became Sissot or Cissot:

In the “Manor of Ashton-under-Lyne” (Chetham Society), penned fortunately for our purpose in every-day style, we have such entries as—

Four wives named Cecilia in a community of some twenty-five families will be evidence enough of the popularity of that name. All, however, were known in every-day converse as Sissot.

Of other girl-names we may mention Mabel, which from Mab became Mabbott; Douce became Dowcett and Dowsett; Gillian or Julian, from Gill or Jill (whence Jack and Jill), became Gillot, Juliet, and Jowett; Margaret became Margett[Pg 23] and Margott, and in the north Magot. Hence such entries from the Yorkshire parchments, already quoted, as—

Custance became Cussot, from Cuss or Cust, the nick form. The Hundred Rolls contain a “Cussot Colling”—a rare place to find one of these diminutives, for they are set down with great clerkly formality.

From Lettice, Lesot was obtained:

And Dionisia was very popular as Diot:

Of course, it became a surname:

It is curious to observe that Annot, which now as Annette represents Anne, in Richard II.’s day was extremely familiar as the diminutive of Annora or Alianora. So common was Annot in North England that the common sea-gull came to be so known. It is a mistake to suppose that Annot had any connection with Anna. One out of every eight or ten girls was Annot in [Pg 24]Yorkshire at a time when Anna is never found to be in use at all:

As Alianora and Eleanora are the same, so were Enot and Anot:

Again, Eleanor became Elena, and this Lina and Linot. Hence in the Hundred Rolls we find “Linota atte Field.” In fact, the early forms of Eleanor are innumerable. The favourite Sibilla became Sibot:

Mary not merely became Marion, but Mariot, and from our surnames it would appear the latter was the favourite:

Eve became Evot, Adam and Eve being popular names. In the will of William de Kirkby, dated 1391, are bequests to “Evæ uxori Johannes Parvying” and “Willielmo de Rowlay,” and later on he refers to them again as the aforementioned “Evotam et dictum Willielmum Rowlay” (“Test. Ebor.,” i. 145. Surtees Society).

[Pg 25]But the girl-name that made most mark was originally a boy’s name, Theobald. Tibbe was the nick form, and Tibbot the pet name. Very speedily it became the property of the female sex, such entries as Tibot Fitz-piers ending in favour of Tibota Foliot. After the year 1300 Tib, or Tibet, is invariably feminine. In “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” Gammer says to her maid—

In “Ralph Roister Doister,” the pet name is used in the song, evidently older than the play:

“Pipe, merry Annot, etc.,
Trilla, Trilla, Trillary.
Work, Tibet; work, Annot; work, Margery;
Sew, Tibet; knit, Annot; spin, Margery;
Let us see who will win the victory.”

Gib, from Gilbert, and Tib became the common name for a male and female cat. Scarcely any other terms were employed from 1350 to 1550:

“For right no more than Gibbe, our cat,
That awaiteth mice and rattes to killen,
Ne entend I but to beguilen.”

Hence both Tibet and Gibbet were also used for the same; as in the old phrase “flitter-gibbett,” for one of wanton character. Tom in tom-cat came into ordinary parlance later. All our modern Tibbots, Tibbetts, Tibbitts, Tippitts,[Pg 26] Tebbutts, and their endless other forms, are descended from Tibbe.

Coming to boys’ names, all our Wyatts in the Directory hail from Guiot,[10] the diminutive of Guy, just as Wilmot from William:

Payn is met in the form of Paynot and Paynet, Warin as Warinot, Drew as Drewet, Philip as Philpot, though this is feminine sometimes:

Thomas is found as Thomaset, Higg (Isaac) as Higgot, Jack as Jackett, Hal (Henry) as Hallet (Harriot or Harriet is now feminine), and Hugh or Hew as Hewet:

The most interesting, perhaps, of these examples is Hamnet, or Hamlet. Hamon, or Hamond, was introduced from Normandy:

It became a favourite among high and low,[Pg 27] and took to itself the forms of Hamonet and Hamelot:

These were quickly abbreviated into Hamnet and Hamlet. They ran side by side for several centuries, and at last, like Emmot, defied the English Bible, the Reformation, and even the Puritan period, and lived unto the eighteenth century. Hamlet Winstanley, the painter, was born in 1700, at Warrington, and died in 1756. In Kent’s London Directory for 1736 several Hamnets occur as baptismal names. Shakespeare’s little son was Hamnet, or Hamlet, after his godfather Hamnet Sadler. I find several instances where both forms are entered as the name of the same boy:

Compare this with—

Speaking of Hamelot, we must not forget that ot and et sometimes became elot or elet. As a[Pg 28] diminutive it is found in such dictionary words as bracelet, tartlet, gimblet, poplet (for poppet). The old ruff or high collar worn alike by men and women was styled a partlet:

Hence partlet, a hen, on account of the ruffled feathers, a term used alike by Chaucer and Shakespeare.

In our nomenclature we have but few traces of it. In France it was very commonly used. But Hughelot or Huelot, from Hugh, was popular, as our Hewletts can testify. Richelot for Richard, Hobelot and Robelot for Robert, Crestolot for Christopher, Cesselot for Cecilia, and Barbelot for Barbara, are found also, and prove that the desinence had made its mark.

Returning, however, to ot and et: Eliot or Elliot, from Ellis (Elias), had a great run. In the north it is sometimes found as Aliot:

The feminine form was Elisot or Elicot, although this was used also for boys. The will of William de Aldeburgh, written in 1319, runs—

[Pg 29]The will of Patrick de Barton, administered in the same year, says—

As Ellis became Ellisot, so Ellice became Ellicot, whence the present surname. Bartholomew became Bartelot, now Bartlett, and from the pet form Toll, or Tolly, came Tollett and Tollitt.

It is curious to notice why Emmot and Hamlet, or Hamnet, survived the crises that overwhelmed the others. Both became baptismal names in their own right. People forgot in course of time that they were diminutives of Emma and Hamond, and separated them from their parents. This did not come about till the close of Elizabeth’s reign, so they have still the credit of having won a victory against terrible odds, the Hebrew army. Hamnet Shakespeare was so baptized. Hamon or Hamond would have been the regular form.

Looking back, it is hard to realize that a custom equally affected by prince and peasant, as popular in country as town, as familiar in Yorkshire and Lancashire as in London and Winchester, should have been so completely uprooted, that ninety-nine out of the hundred are now unaware that it ever existed. This was unmistakably the result of[Pg 30] some disturbing element of English social life. At the commencement of the sixteenth century there was no appearance of this confusion. In France the practice went on without let or hindrance. We can again but attribute it to the Reformation, and the English Bible, which swept away a large batch of the old names, and pronounced the new without addition or diminution. When some of the old names were restored, it was too late to fall back upon the familiarities that had been taken with them in the earlier period.

(e.) Double Terminatives.

In spite of the enormous popularity in England of ot and et, they bear no proportion to the number in France. In England our local surnames are two-fifths of the whole. In France patronymic surnames are almost two-fifths of the whole. Terminatives in on or in, and ot and et, have done this. We in England only adopted double diminutives in two cases, those of Colinet and Robinet, or Dobinet, and both were rarely used. Robinet has come down to us as a surname; and Dobinet so existed till the middle of the fifteenth century, for one John Dobynette is mentioned in an inventory of goods, 1463 (Mun. Acad. Oxon.). This Dobinet seems to have been somewhat familiarly used,[Pg 31] for Dobinet Doughty is Ralph’s servant in “Ralph Roister Doister.” Matthew Merrygreek says—

“I know where she is: Dobinet hath wrought some wile.
Tibet Talkapace. He brought a ring and token, which he said was sent
From our dame’s husband.”—Act. iii. sc. 2.

Colin is turned into Colinet in Spenser’s “Shepherd’s Calendar,” where Colin beseeches Pan:

“Hearken awhile from thy green cabinet,
The laurel song of careful Colinet?”

Jannet is found as Janniting (Jannetin) once on English soil, for in the “London Chanticleers,” a comedy written about 1636, Janniting is the apple-wench. Welcome says—

But the use of double diminutives was of every-day practice in Normandy and France, and increased their total greatly. I take at random the following surnames (originally, of course, christian names) from the Paris Directory:—Margotin, Marioton, Lambinet (Lambert), Perrinot, Perrotin, Philiponet, Jannotin, Hugonet, Huguenin, Jacquinot, and Fauconnet (English Fulke). Huguenin (little wee Hugh) repeats the same diminutive; Perrinot and Perrotin (little wee Peter) simply reverse the order of the two diminutives. The[Pg 32] “marionettes” in the puppet-show take the same liberty with Mariotin (little wee Mary) above mentioned. Hugonet, of course, is the same as Huguenot; and had English, not to say French, writers remembered this old custom, they would have found no difficulty in reducing the origin of the religious sect of that name to an individual as a starting-point. Guillotin (little wee William) belongs to the same class, and descended from a baptismal name to become the surname of the famous doctor who invented the deadly machine that bears his title. I have discovered one instance of this as a baptismal name, viz. Gillotyne Hansake (“Wars of English in France: Henry VI.,” vol. ii. p. 531).

Returning to England, we find these pet forms in use well up to the Reformation:

[Pg 33]“Ralph Roister Doister,” written not earlier than 1545, and not later than 1550, by Nicholas Udall, contains three characters styled Annot Alyface, Tibet Talkapace, and Dobinet Doughty. Christian Custance, Sim Suresby, Madge Mumblecheek, and Gawyn Goodluck are other characters, all well-known contemporary names.

In “Thersites,” an interlude written in 1537, there is mention of

“Simkin Sydnam, Sumnor,
That killed a cat at Cumnor.”

Jenkin Jacon is introduced, also Robin Rover. In a book entitled “Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic” (Henry VIII.), we find a document (numbered 1939, and dated 1526) containing a list of the household attendants and retinue of the king. Even here, although so formal a record, there occurs the name of “Hamynet Harrington, gentleman usher.”

We may assert with the utmost certainty that, on the eve of the Hebrew invasion, there was not a baptismal name in England of average popularity that had not attached to it in daily converse one or other of these diminutives—kin, cock, in, on, ot, and et; not a name, too, that, before it had thus attached them, had not been shorn of all its fulness, and curtailed to a monosyllabic nick form.[Pg 34] Bartholomew must first become Bat before it becomes Batcock, Peter must become Pierre before Perrot can be formed, Nicholas must be abbreviated to Col or Cole before Col or Cole can be styled Colin, and Thomas must be reduced to Tom before Tomkin can make his appearance.

Several names had attached to themselves all these enclytics. For instance, Peter is met with, up to the crisis we are about to consider, in the several shapes of Perkin or Parkin, Peacock, Perrot, and Perrin; and William as Willin (now Willing and Willan in our directories), Wilcock, Wilkin, and Wilmot, was familiar to every district in the country.

III. Scripture Names already in use at the Reformation.

It now remains simply to consider the state of nomenclature in England at the eve of the Reformation in relation to the Bible. Four classes may be mentioned.

(a.) Mystery Names.

The leading incidents of Bible narrative were familiarized to the English lower orders by the performance of sacred plays, or mysteries, rendered[Pg 35] under the supervision of the Church. To these plays we owe the early popularity of Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Sara, Daniel, Sampson, Susanna, Judith, Hanna or Anna, and Hester. But the Apocryphal names were not frequently used till about 1500. Scarcely any diminutives are found of them. On the other hand, Adam became Adcock and Adkin; Eve, Evott and Evett; Isaac, Hickin, and Higgin, and Higgot, and Higget; Joseph, Joskin; and Daniel, Dankin and Dannet.

(b.) Crusade Names.

The Crusaders gave us several prominent names. To them we are indebted for Baptist, Ellis, and Jordan: and John received a great stimulus. The sacred water brought in the leathern bottle was used for baptismal purposes. The Jordan commemorated John the Baptist, the second Elias, the forerunner and baptizer of Jesus Christ. Children were styled by these incidents. Jordan became popular through Western Europe. In England he gave us, as already observed, Judd, Judkin, Judson, Jordan, and Jordanson. Elias, as Ellis, took about the eighth place of frequency, and John, for a while, the first.

 [Pg 36]

(c.) The Saints’ Calendar.

The legends of the saints were carefully taught by the priesthood, and the day as religiously observed. All children born on these holy days received the name of the saint commemorated: St. James’s Day, or St. Nicholas’s Day, or St. Thomas’s Day, saw a small batch of Jameses, Nicholases, and Thomases received into the fold of the Church. In other cases the gossip had some favourite saint, and placed the child under his or her protection. Of course, it bore the patron’s name. A large number of these hagiological names were extra-Biblical—such as Cecilia, Catharine, or Theobald. Of these I make no mention here. All the Apostles, save Judas, became household names, John, Simon, Peter, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, Thomas, and Philip being the favourites. Paul and Timothy were also utilized, the former being always found as Pol.

(d.) Festival Names.

If a child was born at Whitsuntide or Easter, Christmas or Epiphany, like Robinson Crusoe’s man Friday, or Thursday October Christian of the Pitcairn islanders, he received the name of the day. Hence our once familiar names of Noel or Nowell, Pask or Pascal, Easter, Pentecost, and Epiphany or Tiffany.

[Pg 37]It will be observed that all these imply no direct or personal acquaintance with the Scriptures. All came through the Church. All, too, were in the full tide of prosperity—with the single exception of Jordan, which was nearly obsolete—when the Bible, printed into English and set up in our churches, became an institution. The immediate result was that the old Scripture names of Bartholomew, Peter, Philip, and Nicholas received a blow much deadlier than that received by such Teutonic names as Robert, Richard, Roger, and Ralph. But that will be brought out as we progress.

The subject of the influence of an English Bible upon English nomenclature is not uninteresting. It may be said of the “Vulgar Tongue” Bible that it revolutionized our nomenclature within the space of forty years, or little over a generation. No such crisis, surely, ever visited a nation’s register before, nor can such possibly happen again. Every home felt the effect. It was like the massacre of the innocents in Egyptian days: “There was not one house where there was not one dead.” But in Pharoah’s day they did not replace the dead with the living. At the Reformation such a locust army of new names burst upon the land that we may well style it the Hebrew Invasion.

[Pg 38]

THE HEBREW INVASION.

I. The March of the Army.

The strongest impress of the English Reformation to-day is to be seen in our font-names. The majority date from 1560, the year when the Genevan Bible was published. This version ran through unnumbered editions, and for sixty, if not seventy, years was the household Bible of the nation. The Genevan Bible was not only written in the vulgar tongue, but was printed for vulgar hands. A moderate quarto was its size; all preceding versions, such as Coverdale’s, Matthew’s,[Pg 39] and of course the Great Bible, being the ponderous folio, specimens of which the reader will at some time or other have seen. The Genevan Bible, too, was the Puritan’s Bible, and was none the less admired by him on account of its Calvinistic annotations.

But although the rage for Bible names dates from the decade 1560-1570, which decade marks the rise of Puritanism, there had been symptoms of the coming revolution as early as 1543. Richard Hilles, one of the Reformers, despatching a letter from Strasburg, November 15, 1543, writes:

We take up our Bibles, and find that of Zipporah it is said—

The margin says, “a desolate stranger.” At this time Moses was fled from Pharaoh, who would kill him. The parallel to Richard Hilles’s mind was complete. This was in 1643.[12]

[Pg 40]In Mr. Tennyson’s drama “Mary,” we have the following scene between Gardiner and a yokel:

“Gardiner.I distrust thee,
There is a half voice, and a lean assent:
What is thy name?
Man.Sanders!
Gardiner.What else?
Man.Zerrubabel.”

The Laureate was right to select for this rebellious Protestant a name that was to be popular throughout Elizabeth’s reign; but poetic license runs rather far in giving this title to a full-grown man in any year of Mary’s rule. Sanders might have had a young child at home so styled, but for himself it was practically impossible. So[Pg 41] clearly defined is the epoch that saw, if not one batch of names go out, at least a new batch come in. Equally marked are the names from the Bible which at this date were in use, and those which were not. Of this latter category Zerrubabel was one.

In the single quotation from Hilles’s letter of 1543 we see the origin of the great Hebrew invasion explained. The English Bible had become a fact, and the knowledge of its personages and narratives was becoming directly acquired. In every community up and down the country it was as if a fresh spring of clear water had been found, and every neighbour could come with jug or pail, and fill it when and how they would. One of the first impressions made seems to have been this: children in the olden time received as a name a term that was immediately significant of the circumstances of their birth. Often God personally, through His prophets or angelic messenger, acted as godparent indeed, and gave the name, as in Isaiah viii. 1, 3, 4:

Here was a name palpably significant. Even before they knew its exact meaning the name was enrolled in English church registers, and by-and-by zealot Puritans employed it as applicable to English Church politics.

All the patriarchs, down to the twelve sons of Jacob, had names of direct significance given them. Above all, a peculiar emphasis was laid upon all the titles of Jesus Christ, as in Isaiah vii. 14:

At the same time that this new revelation came, a crisis was going on of religion. The old Romish Church was being uprooted, or, rather, a new system was being grafted upon its stock, for the links have never been broken. The saints were shortly to be tabooed by the large mass of English folk; the festivals were already at a discount. Simultaneously with the prejudice against the very names of their saints and saintly festivals, arose the discovery of a mine of new names as novel as it was unexhaustible. They not merely met the new religious instinct, but supplied what would have been a very serious vacuum.

But we must at once draw a line between the[Pg 43] Reformation and Puritanism. Previous to the Reformation, so far as the Church was concerned, there had been to a certain extent a system of nomenclature. The Reformation abrogated that system, but did not intentionally adopt a new one. Puritanism deliberately supplied a well-weighed and revised scheme, beyond which no adopted child of God must dare to trespass. Previous to the Reformation, the priest, with the assent of the gossip, gave the babe the name of the saint who was to be its patron, or on whose day the birth or baptism occurred. If the saint was a male, and the infant a female, the difficulty was overcome by giving the name a feminine form. Thus Theobald become Theobalda; and hence Tib and Tibot became so common among girls, that finally they ceased to represent boys at all. If it were one of the great holy days, the day or season itself furnished the name. Thus it was Simon, or Nicholas, or Cecilia, or Austen, or Pentecost, or Ursula, or Dorothy, became so familiar. From the reign of Elizabeth the clergy, and Englishmen generally, gave up this practice. Saints who could not boast apostolic honours were rejected, and holy men of lesser prestige, together with a large batch of virgins and martyrs of the Agnes, Catharine, and Ursula type,[Pg 44] who belonged to Church history, received but scant attention. As a matter of course their names lapsed. But the nation stood by the old English names not thus popishly tainted. Against Geoffrey, Richard, Robert, and William, they had no prejudice: nay, they clung to them. The Puritan rejected both classes. He was ever trotting out his two big “P’s,”—Pagan and Popish. Under the first he placed every name that could not be found in the Scriptures, and under the latter every title in the same Scriptures, and the Church system founded on them, that had been employed previous, say, to the coronation day of Edward VI. Of this there is the clearest proof. In a “Directory of Church Government,” found among the papers of Cartwright, and written as early as 1565, there is the following order regarding and regulating baptism:—

Nothing can be more precise than this. To the strict Puritan to reject the Richards, Mileses, and Henrys of the Teutonic, and the Bartholomews,[Pg 45] Simons, Peters, and Nicholases of the ecclesiastic class, was to remove the Canaanite out of the land.

How early this “article of religion” was obeyed, one or two quotations will show. Take the first four baptismal entries in the Canterbury Cathedral register:

Another son seems to have been Philemon:

A daughter “Repentance” must be added:

Take another instance, a little later, from the baptisms of St. Peter’s, Cornhill:

Rebecca, therefore, would be baptized in 1586. Sara and Aholiab died of the plague in 1603. Both old Robert Pownoll and the cobler must have been Puritans of a pronounced type.

[Pg 46]The Presbyterian clergy were careful to set an example of right name-giving:

A still more interesting proof comes from Northampton. As an example of bigotry it is truly marvellous. On July 16, 1590, Archbishop Whitgift furnished the Lord Treasurer with the following, amongst many articles against Edmond Snape, curate of St. Peter’s, in that town:

At the time of service Snape proceeded till they came to the place of naming: they said “Richard;”

This may be an extreme case, but I doubt not the majority of the Presbyterian clergy did their best to uproot the old English names, so far as their power of persuasion could go.

[Pg 47]Even the pulpit was used in behalf of the new doctrine. William Jenkin, the afterwards ejected minister, in his “Expositions of Jude,” delivered in Christ Church, London, said, while commenting on the first verse, “Our baptismal names ought to be such as may prove remembrances of duty.” He then instances Leah, Alpheus, and Hannah as aware of parental obligations in this respect, and adds—

As a general rule, the New Testament names spread the most rapidly, especially girl-names of the Priscilla, Dorcas, Tabitha, and Martha type. They were the property of the Reformation. Damaris bothered the clerks much, and is found indifferently as Tamaris, Damris, Dammeris, Dampris, and Dameris. By James I.’s day it had become a fashionable name:

Martha, which sprang into instant popularity, is registered at the outset:

[Pg 48]Phebe had a great run. The first I have seen is—

Dorcas was, perhaps, the prime favourite, often styled and entered Darcas. Every register has it, and every page. A political ballad says—

“Come, Dorcas and Cloe,
With Lois and Zoe,
Young Lettice, and Beterice, and Jane;
Phill, Dorothy, Maud,
Come troop it abroad,
For now is our time to reign.”

Persis, Tryphena, and Tryphosa were also largely used. The earliest Persis I know is—

Some of these names—as, for instance, Priscilla, Damaris, Dorcas, and Phebe—stood in James’s reign almost at the head of girls’ names in England. Indeed, alike in London and the provinces, the list of girl-names at Elizabeth’s death was a perfect contrast to that when she ascended the throne. Then the great national names of Isabella, Matilda, Emma, and Cecilia ruled supreme. Then the four heroines Anna, Judith, Susan, and Hester, one or two of whom were in the Apocryphal narrative, had stamped themselves on our registers in what appeared indelible lines, although they were[Pg 49] of much more recent popularity than the others. They lost prestige, but did not die out. Many Puritans had a sneaking fondness for them, finding in their histories a parallel to their own troubles, and perchance they had a private and more godly rendering of the popular ballad of their day:

“In Ninivie old Toby dwelt,
An aged man, and blind was he:
And much affliction he had felt,
Which brought him unto poverty:
He had by Anna, his true wife,
One only sonne, and eke no more.”

Esther[13] is still popular in our villages, so is Susan. Hannah has her admirers, and only Judith may be said to be forgotten. But their glory was from 1450 to 1550. After that they became secondary personages. Throughout the south of England, especially in the counties that surrounded London, the Bible had been ransacked from nook to corner. The zealots early dived into the innermost recesses of Scripture. They made themselves as familiar with chapters devoted solely to genealogical tables, as to those which they quoted to[Pg 50] defend their doctrinal creed. The eighth chapter of Romans was not more studied by them than the thirty-sixth of Genesis, and the dukes of Edom classified in the one were laid under frequent contribution to witness to the adoption treated of in the other. Thus names unheard of in 1558 were “household words” in 1603.

The slowest to take up the new custom were the northern counties. They were out of the current; and Lancashire, besides being inaccessible, had stuck to the old faith. Names lingered on in the Palatinate that had been dead nearly a hundred years in the south. Gawin figures in all northern registers till a century ago, and Thurston[14] was yet popular in the Fylde district, when it had become forgotten in the Fens. Scotland was never touched at all. The General Assembly of 1645 makes no hint on the subject, although it dwelt on nearly every other topic. Nothing demonstrates the clannish feeling of North Britain as this does. At this moment Scotland has scarcely any Bible names.

In Yorkshire, however, Puritanism made early stand, though its effects on nomenclature were[Pg 51] not immediately visible. It was like the fire that smoulders among the underwood before it catches flame; it spreads the more rapidly afterwards. The Genevan Bible crept into the dales and farmsteads, and their own primitive life seemed to be but reflected in its pages. The patriarchs lived as graziers, and so did they. There was a good deal about sheep and kine in its chapters, and their own lives were spent among the milk-pails and wool shears. The women of the Old Testament baked cakes, and knew what good butter was. So did the dales’ folk. By slow degrees Cecilia, Isabella, and Emma lapsed from their pedestal, and the little babes were turned into Sarahs, Rebeccas, and Deborahs. As the seventeenth century progressed the state of things became still more changed. There had been villages in Sussex and Kent previous to Elizabeth’s death, where the Presbyterian rector, by his personal influence at the time of baptism, had turned the new generation into a Hebrew colony. The same thing occurred in Yorkshire only half a century later. As nonconformity gained ground, Guy, and Miles, and Peter, and Philip became forgotten. The lads were no sooner ushered into existence than they were transformed into duplicates of Joel, and Amos, and Obediah.[Pg 52] The measles still ran through the family, but it was Phineas and Caleb, not Robert and Roger, that underwent the infliction. Chosen leaders of Israel passed through the critical stages of teething. As for the twelve sons of Jacob, they could all have answered to their names in the dames’ schools, through their little apple-cheeked representatives, who lined the rude benches. On the village green, every prophet from Isaiah to Malachi might be seen of an evening playing leap-frog: unless, indeed, Zephaniah was stealing apples in the garth.

From Yorkshire, about the close of the seventeenth century, the rage for Scripture names passed into Lancashire. Nonconformity was making progress; the new industries were already turning villages into small centres of population, and the Church of England not providing for the increase, chapels were built. If we look over the pages of the directories of West Yorkshire and East Lancashire, and strike out the surnames, we could imagine we were consulting anciently inscribed registers of Joppa or Jericho. It would seem as if Canaan and the West Riding had got inextricably mixed.

What a spectacle meets our eye! Within the limits of ten leaves we have three Pharoahs, while[Pg 53] as many Hephzibahs are to be found on one single page. Adah and Zillah Pickles, sisters, are milliners. Jehoiada Rhodes makes saws—not Solomon’s sort—and Hariph Crawshaw keeps a farm. Vashni, from somewhere in the Chronicles, is rescued from oblivion by Vashni Wilkinson, coal merchant, who very likely goes to Barzillai Williamson, on the same page, for his joints, Barzillai being a butcher. Jachin, known to but a few as situated in the Book of Kings, is in the person of Jachin Firth, a beer retailer, familiar to all his neighbours. Heber Holdsworth on one page is faced by Er Illingworth on the other. Asa and Joab are extremely popular, while Abner, Adna, Ashael, Erastus, Eunice, Benaiah, Aquila, Elihu, and Philemon enjoy a fair amount of patronage. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, having been rescued from Chaldæan fire, have been deluged with baptismal water. How curious it is to contemplate such entries as Lemuel Wilson, Kelita Wilkinson, Shelah Haggas, Shadrach Newbold, Neriah Pearce, Jeduthan Jempson, Azariah Griffiths, Naphtali Matson, Philemon Jakes, Hameth Fell, Eleph Bisat, Malachi Ford, or Shallum Richardson. As to other parts of the Scriptures, I have lighted upon name after name that I did not know existed in the Bible at all[Pg 54] till I looked into the Lancashire and Yorkshire directories.

The Bible has decided the nomenclature of the north of England. In towns like Oldham, Bolton, Ashton, and Blackburn, the clergyman’s baptismal register is but a record of Bible names. A clerical friend of mine christened twins Cain and Abel, only the other day, much against his own wishes. Another parson on the Derbyshire border was gravely informed, at the proper moment, that the name of baptism was Ramoth-Gilead. “Boy or girl, eh?” he asked in a somewhat agitated voice. The parents had opened the Bible hap-hazard, according to the village tradition, and selected the first name the eye fell on. It was but a year ago a little child was christened Tellno in a town within six miles of Manchester, at the suggestion of a cotton-spinner, the father, a workman of the name of Lees, having asked his advice. “I suppose it must be a Scripture name,” said his master. “Oh yes! that’s of course.” “Suppose you choose Tellno,” said his employer. “That’ll do,” replied the other, who had never heard it before, and liked it the better on that account. The child is now Tell-no Lees, the father, too late, finding that he had been hoaxed.[15] “Sirs,” was the[Pg 55] answer given to a bewildered curate, after the usual demand to name the child. He objected, but was informed that it was a Scripture name, and the verse “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” was triumphantly appealed to. This reminds one of the Puritan who styled his dog “Moreover” after the dog in the Gospel: “Moreover the dog came and licked his sores.”

There is, again, a story of a clergyman making the customary demand as to name from a knot of women round the font. “Ax her,” said one. Turning to the woman who appeared to be indicated, he again asked, “What name?” “Ax her,” she replied. The third woman, being questioned, gave the same reply. At last he discovered the name to be the Scriptural Achsah, Caleb’s daughter—a name, by the way, which was somewhat popular with our forefathers. No wonder this mistake arose, when Achsah used to be entered in some such manner as this:

Axar’s father was Caleb Starrs. The scriptural relationship was thus preserved. Achsah crossed the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers, and has[Pg 56] prospered there ever since. It is still popular in Devonshire and the south-west of England. All these stories serve to show the quarry whence modern names are hewn.

I have mentioned the north because I have studied its Post-Office Directories carefully. But if any one will visit the shires of Dorset, and Devon, and Hampshire, he will find the same result. The Hebrew has won the day. Just as in England, north of Trent, we can still measure off the ravages of the Dane by striking a line through all local names lying westward ending in “by,” so we have but to count up the baptismal names of the peasantry of these southern counties to see that they have become the bondsmen of an Eastern despot. In fact, go where and when we will from the reign of Elizabeth, we find the same influence at work. Take a few places and people at random.

Looking at our testamentary records, we find the will of Kerenhappuch Benett proved in 1762, while Kerenhappuch Horrocks figures in the Manchester Directory for 1877. Onesiphorus Luffe appears on a halfpenny token of 1666; Habakkuk Leyman, 1650; Euodias Inman, 1650; Melchisedek Fritter, 1650; Elnathan Brock, 1654; and Abdiah Martin, 1664 (“Tokens of Seventeenth Century”). Shallum Stent was married in 1681[Pg 57] (Racton, Sussex); Gershom Baylie was constable of Lewes in 1619, Araunah Verrall fulfilling the same office in 1784. Captain Epenetus Crosse presented a petition to Privy Council in 1660 (C. S. P. Colonial); Erastus Johnson was defendant in 1724, and Cressens Boote twenty years earlier. Barjonah Dove was Vicar of Croxton in 1694. Tryphena Monger was buried in Putney Churchyard in 1702, and Tryphosa Saunders at St. Peter’s, Worcester, in 1770. Mahaliel Payne, Azarias Phesant, and Pelatiah Barnard are recorded in State Papers, 1650-1663 (C. S. P.), and Aminadab Henley was dwelling in Kent in 1640 (“Proceedings in Kent.” Camden Society). Shadrack Pride is a collector of hearth-money in 1699, and Gamaliel Chase is communicated with in 1635 (C. S. P.). Onesiphorus Albin proposes a better plan of collecting the alien duty in 1692 (C. S. P.), while Mordecai Abbott is appointed deputy-paymaster of the forces in 1697 (C. S. P.). Eliakim Palmer is married at Somerset House Chapel in 1740; Dalilah White is buried at Cowley in 1791, and Keziah Simmons is christened there in 1850. Selah Collins is baptized at Dyrham, Gloucestershire, in 1752, and Keturah Jones is interred at Clifton in 1778. Eli-lama-Sabachthani Pressnail was existing in 1862 (Notes and Queries), and the Times recorded a Talitha-Cumi[Pg 58] People about the same time. The will of Mahershalalhashbaz Christmas was proved not very long ago. Mrs. Mahershalalhashbaz Bradford was dwelling in Ringwood, Hampshire, in 1863; and on January 31, 1802, the register of Beccles Church received the entry, “Mahershalalhashbaz, son of Henry and Sarah Clarke, baptized,” the same being followed, October 14, 1804, by the baptismal entry of “Zaphnaphpaaneah,” another son of the same couple. A grant of administration in the estate of Acts-Apostles Pegden was made in 1865. His four brothers, older than himself, were of course the four Evangelists, and had there been a sixth I dare say his name would have been “Romans.” An older member of this family, many years one of the kennel-keepers of Tickham fox-hounds, was Pontius Pilate Pegden. At a confirmation at Faversham in 1847, the incumbent of Dunkirk presented to the amazed archbishop a boy named “Acts-Apostles.” These are, of course, mere eccentricities, but eccentricities follow a beaten path, and have their use in calculations of the nature we are considering. Eccentricities in dress are proverbially but exaggerations of the prevailing fashion.

 [Pg 59]

II. POPULARITY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

The affection felt by the Puritans for the Old Testament has been observed by all writers upon the period, and of the period. Cleveland’s remark, quoted by Hume, is, of course, an exaggeration.

Lord Macaulay puts it much more faithfully in his first chapter, speaking, too, of an earlier period than the Commonwealth:

The Presbyterian clergy had another objection to the New Testament names. The possessors were all saints, and in the saints’ calendar. The apostolic title was as a red rag to his blood-shot eye.

“Upon Saint Peter, Paul, John, Jude, and James,
They will not put the ‘saint’ unto their names,”

says the Water-poet in execrable verse. Its local[Pg 60] use was still more trying, as no man could pass through a single quarter of London without seeing half a dozen churches, or lanes, or taverns dedicated to Saint somebody or other.

“Others to make all things recant
The christian and surname of saint,
Would force all churches, streets, and towns
The holy title to renounce.”

To avoid any saintly taint, the Puritan avoided the saints themselves.

But the discontented party in the Church had, as Macaulay says, a decided hankering after the Old Testament on other grounds than this. They paid the Hebrew language an almost superstitious reverence.[16] Ananias, the deacon, in the “Alchemist,” published in 1610, says—

“Heathen Greek, I take it.
Subtle.How! heathen Greek?
Ananias. All’s heathen but the Hebrew.”[17]

[Pg 61]Bishop Corbet, in his “Distracted Puritan,” has a lance to point at the same weakness:

“In the holy tongue of Canaan
I placed my chiefest pleasure,
Till I pricked my foot
With an Hebrew root,
That I bled beyond all measure.”

In the “City Match,” written by Mayne in 1639, Bannsright says—

“Mistress Dorcas,
If you’ll be usher to that holy, learned woman,
That can heal broken shins, scald heads, and th’ itch,
Your schoolmistress: that can expound, and teaches
To knit in Chaldee, and work Hebrew samplers,
I’ll help you back again.”

The Puritan was ever nicknamed after some Old Testament worthy. I could quote many instances, but let two from the author of the “London Diurnall” suffice. Addressing Prince Rupert, he says—

“Let the zeal-twanging nose, that wants a ridge,
Snuffling devoutly, drop his silver bridge:
Yes, and the gossip’s spoon augment the summe,
Altho’ poor Caleb lose his christendome.”

More racy is his attack on Pembroke, as a member of the Mixed Assembly:

“Forbeare, good Pembroke, be not over-daring:
Such company may chance to spoil thy swearing;
And these drum-major oaths of bulk unruly
May dwindle to a feeble ‘by my truly.’
He that the noble Percy’s blood inherits,
[Pg 62]Will he strike up a Hotspur of the spirits?
He’ll fright the Obediahs out of tune,
With his uncircumcis-ed Algernoon:
A name so stubborne, ’tis not to be scanned
By him in Gath with the six fingered hand.”

If a Bible quotation was put into the zealot’s mouth, his cynical foe took care that it should come from the older Scriptures. In George Chapman’s “An Humorous Day’s Work,” after Lemot has suggested a “full test of experiment” to prove her virtue, Florilla the Puritan cries—

To which the gruff Labervele replies—

In the same facetious strain, Taylor, the Water-poet, addresses a child thus:

“To learne thy duty reade no more than this:
Paul’s nineteenth chapter unto Genesis.”

This certainly tallies with the charge in “Hudibras,” that they

“Corrupted the Old Testament
To serve the New as precedent.”

This affection for the older Scriptures had its effect upon our nomenclature. No book, no story, especially if gloomy in its outline and melancholy in its issues, escaped the more morbid Puritan’s[Pg 63] notice. Every minister of the Lord’s vengeance, every stern witness against natural abomination, the prophet that prophesied ill—these were the names that were in favour. And he that was least bitter in his maledictions was most at a discount. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were in every-day request, Shadrach and Abednego being the favourites. Mordecai, too, was daily commemorated; while Jeremiah attained a popularity, as Jeremy, he can never altogether lose. “Lamentations” was so melancholy, that it must needs be personified, don a Puritanical habit, and stand at the font as godfather—I mean witness—to some wretched infant who had done nothing to merit such a fate. “Lamentations Chapman” appeared as defendant in a suit in Chancery about 1590. The exact date is not to be found, but the case was tried towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign (“Chancery Suits, Elizabeth”).

It is really hard to say why names of melancholy import became so common. Perhaps it was a spirit morbidly brooding on the religious oppressions of the times; perhaps it was bile. Any way, Camden says “Dust” and “Ashes” were names in use in the days of Elizabeth and James. These, no doubt, were translations of the Hebrew “Aphrah” into the “vulgar tongue,” the name having become[Pg 64] exceedingly common. Micah, in one of the most mournful prophecies of the Old Testament, says—

Literally: “in the house of dust roll thyself in the dust.” The name was quickly seized upon:

This last entry proves how early the name had arisen. In Kent it had become very common. The registers of Canterbury Cathedral teem with it:

In these instances we see at a glance the origin of the licentious Aphra Behn’s name, which looks so like a nom-de-plume, and has puzzled many. She was born at Canterbury, with the surname of Johnson, baptized Aphra, and married a Dutch merchant named Behn. When acting as a Government spy at Antwerp in 1666, she signs a letter “Aphara Behn” (C. S. P.), which is nearer the Biblical form than many others. It is just possible her father might have rolled himself several times in the dust had he lived to read some of his[Pg 65] daughter’s writings. Their tone is not Puritanic. The name has become obsolete; indeed, it scarcely survived the seventeenth century, dying out within a hundred years of its rise. But it was very popular in its day.

Rachel, in her dying pains, had styled, under deep depression, her babe Benoni (“son of my sorrow”); but his father turned it into the more cheerful Benjamin (“son of the right hand”). Of course, Puritanism sided with the mother, and the Benonis flourished at a ratio of six to one over the Benjamins:

I don’t think, however, all these mothers died in childbed. It would speak badly for the chirurgic skill of the seventeenth century if they did. It was the Church of Christ that was in travail.

Ichabod was equally common. There was something hard and unrelenting in Jael (already mentioned) that naturally suited the temper of every fanatic:

[Pg 66]Mehetabell had something in it, probably its length, that made it popular among the Puritan faction. It lasted well, too:

But while Deborah, an especial pet of the fanatics, Sara, Rebecca, Rachel, Zipporah, and Leah were in high favour as Old Testament heroines, none had such a run as Abigail:

Few Scripture names made themselves so popular as this. At the conclusion of the sixteenth century it was beginning its career, and by Queen Anne’s day had reached its zenith. When the Cavalier was drinking at the alehouse, he would waggishly chant through his nose, with eye upturned—

“Come, sisters, and sing
An hymne to our king,
Who sitteth on high degree.
The men at Whitehall,
And the wicked, shall fall,
And hey, then, up go we!
[Pg 67]‘A match,’ quoth my sister Joice,
‘Contented,’ quoth Rachel, too;
Quoth Abigaile, ‘Yea,’ and Faith, ‘Verily,’
And Charity, ‘Let it be so.’”

A curious error has been propagated by writers who ought to have known better. It is customarily asserted that abigail, as a cant term for a waiting-maid, only arose after Abigail Hill, the Duchess of Marlborough’s cousin, became waiting-woman to the queen, and supplanted her kinswoman. Certainly we find both Swift and Fielding using the term after this event. But there is good reason for believing that the sobriquet is as old as Charles I.’s reign. Indeed, there can be no reasonable doubt but that we owe the term to the enormous popularity of Beaumont’s comedy, “The Scornful Ladie,” written about 1613, and played in 1616. The chief part falls to the lot of “Abigal, a waiting-gentlewoman,” as the dramatis personæ styles her, the playwright associating the name and employment after the scriptural narrative. But Beaumont knew his Bible well.

That Abigail at once became a cant term is proved by “The Parson’s Wedding,” written by Killigrew some time between 1645 and 1650. Wanton addresses the Parson:

“Was she deaf to your report?
Parson. Yes, yes.
Wanton. And Ugly, her abigail, she had her say, too?
Parson. Yes, yes.”

[Pg 68]That this sentence would never have been written but for Beaumont’s play, there can be no reasonable doubt. It was performed so late as 1783. In 1673, after yearly performances, it was published as a droll, and entitled “The False Heir.” In 1742 it appears again under the title of “The Feigned Shipwreck.” Samuel Pepys, in his Diary, records his visits to the playhouse to see “The Scornful Lady” at least four times, viz. 1661, 1662, 1665, and 1667. Writing December 27, 1665, he says—

Abigail passed out of favour about the middle of the last century, but Mrs. Masham’s artifices had little to do with it. The comedy had done its work, and Abigail coming into use, like Malkin two centuries before, as the cant term for a kitchen drab, or common serving wench, as is sufficiently proved by the literature of the day, the name lost caste with all classes, and was compelled to bid adieu to public favour.

This affection for the Old Testament has never died out among the Nonconformists. The large batch of names I have already quoted from modern directories is almost wholly from the earlier Testament. Wherever Dissent is strong,[Pg 69] there will be found a large proportion of these names. Amongst the passengers who went out to New England in James and Charles’s reigns will be found such names as Ebed-meleck Gastrell, Oziell Lane, Ephraim Howe, Ezechell Clement, Jeremy Clement, Zachary Cripps, Noah Fletcher, Enoch Gould, Zebulon Cunninghame, Seth Smith, Peleg Bucke, Gercyon Bucke (Gershom), Rachell Saunders, Lea Saunders, Calebb Carr, Jonathan Franklin, Boaz Sharpe, Esau del a Ware, Pharaoh Flinton, Othniell Haggat, Mordecay Knight, Obediah Hawes, Gamaliell Ellis, Esaias Raughton, Azarias Pinney, Elisha Mallowes, Malachi Mallock, Jonadab Illett, Joshua Long, Enecha Fitch (seemingly a feminine of Enoch), and Job Perridge. Occasionally an Epenetus Olney, or Nathaniell Patient, or Epaphroditus Haughton, or Cornelius Conway, or Feleaman Dickerson (Philemon), or Theophilus Lucas, or Annanias Mann is met with; but these are few, and were evidently selected for their size, the temptation to poach on apostolic preserves being too great when such big game was to be obtained. Besides, they were not in the calendar! These names went to Virginia, and they are not forgotten.

 [Pg 70]

III. Objectionable Scripture Names.

Camden says—

The most cursory survey of our registers proves this. Captain Hercules Huncks and Ensign Neptune Howard fought under the Earl of Northumberland in 1640 (Peacock’s “Army List of Roundheads and Cavaliers”). Both were Royalists.

Cartwright, the great Puritan, attacked these names in 1575, as “savouring of paganism” (Neal, v. p. xv. Appendix). It was a pity he did not include some names in the list of his [Pg 71]co-religionists, for surely Tamar and Dinah were just as objectionable as Venus or Lais. The doctrine of a fallen nature could be upheld, and the blessed state of self-abasement maintained, without a daily reminder in the shape of a Bible name of evil repute. Bishop Corbett brought it as a distinct charge against the Puritans, that they loved to select the most unsavoury stories of Old Testament history for their converse. In the “Maypole” he makes a zealot minister say—

“To challenge liberty and recreation,
Let it be done in holy contemplation.
Brothers and sisters in the fields may walk,
Beginning of the Holy Word to talk:
Of David and Uria’s lovely wife,
Of Tamar and her lustful brother’s strife.”

One thing is certain, these names became popular:

The alternate form of Bath-shua (1 Chron. iii. 5) was used, although the clerks did not always know how to spell it:

As for Dinah, she became a great favourite from her first introduction; every register contains her name before Elizabeth’s death:

Crossing the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers, she settled down at length as the typical negress; yet Puritan writers admitted that when she “went out to see the daughters of the land,” she meant to be seen of the sons also!

Taylor, the Water-poet, seems to imply that Goliath was registered at baptism by the Puritan:

“Quoth he, ‘what might the child baptized be?
Was it a male She, or a female He?’—
‘I know not what, but ’tis a Son,’ she said.—
‘Nay then,’ quoth he, ‘a wager may be laid
It had some Scripture name.’—‘Yes, so it had,’
Said she: ‘but my weak memory’s so bad,
I have forgot it: ’twas a godly name,
Tho’ out of my remembrance be the same:
’Twas one of the small prophets verily:
’Twas not Esaias, nor yet Jeremy,
Ezekiel, Daniel, nor good Obadiah,
Ah, now I do remember, ’twas Goliah!’”

Pharaoh occurs, and went out to Virginia, where it has ever since remained. It is, as already shown, familiar enough in Yorkshire.

Of New Testament names, whose associations are[Pg 73] of evil repute, we may mention Ananias, Sapphira, and Antipas. Ananias had become so closely connected with Puritanism, that not only did Dryden poke fun at the relationship in the “Alchemist,” but Ananias Dulman became the cant term for a long-winded zealot preacher. So says Neal.

Sapphira occurs in Bunhill Fields:

She was therefore born in 1633. Her brother (they were brought up Presbyterians) was Robert Leighton, who died Archbishop of Glasgow.

Drusilla, again, was objectionable, but perchance her character was less historically known then:

Antipas, curiously enough, was almost popular, although a murderer and an adulterer:

[Pg 74]Dr. Increase Mather, the eminent Puritan, in his work entitled “Remarkable Providences,” published at Boston, U.S.A., in 1684, has a story of an interposition in behalf of his friend Antipas Newman.

Of other instances, somewhat later, Sehon Stace, who lived in Warding in 1707 (“Suss. Arch. Coll.,” xii. 254), commemorates the King of the Amorites, Milcom Groat (“Cal. St. P.,” 1660) representing on English soil “the abomination of the children of Ammon.” Dr. Pusey and Mr. Spurgeon might be excused a little astonishment at such a conversion by baptism.

Barrabas cannot be considered a happy choice:

Mr. Maskell draws attention to the name in his history of that church. There is something so emphatic about “now Barrabas was a robber,” that thoughts of theft seem proper to the very name. We should have locked up the spoons, we feel sure, had father or son called upon us. The father who called his son “Judas-not-Iscariot” scarcely cleared the name of its evil associations, nor would it quite meet the difficulty suggested by the remark in “Tristram Shandy:”

We have all heard the story of Beelzebub. If the child had been inadvertently so baptized, a remedy might have been found in former days by changing the name at confirmation. Until 1552, the bishop confirmed by name. Archbishop Peccham laid down a rule:

That this law had been carelessly followed after the Reformation is clear, else Venus Levat, already quoted, would not have been married in 1631 under that name. Certainly Dinah and Tamar come under the ban of this injunction.

Curiously enough, the change of name was sanctioned in the case of orthodox names, for Lord Coke says—

He then quotes the case of Sir Francis Gawdie, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, whose name by baptism was Thomas, Thomas being changed to Francis at confirmation. He[Pg 76] holds that Francis shall stand (“Institutes,” 1. iii.). This practice manifestly arose out of Peccham’s rule, but it is strange that wanton instances should be left unchanged, and the orthodox allowed to be altered.

Arising out of the Puritan error of permitting names like Tamar and Dinah to stand, modern eccentricity has gone very far, and it would be satisfactory to see many names in use at present forbidden. I need not quote the Venuses of our directories. Emanuel is of an opposite character, and should be considered blasphemy. We have not adopted Christ yet, as Dr. Doran reminded us they have done in Germany, but my copy of the London Directory shows at least one German, bearing the baptismal name of Christ, at present dwelling in the metropolis. Puritan eccentricity is a trifle to this.

IV. Losses.

(a.) The Destruction of Pet Forms.

But let us now notice some of the more disastrous effects of the great Hebrew invasion. The most important were the partial destruction of the nick forms, and the suppression of diminutives. The English pet names disappeared, never more to[Pg 77] return. Desinences in “cock,” “kin,” “elot,” “ot,” “et,” “in,” and “on,” are no more found in current literature, nor in the clerk’s register. Why should this be so? An important reason strikes us at once. The ecclesiastic names on which the enclytics had grown had become unpopular well-nigh throughout England. It was an English, not a Puritan prejudice. With the suppression of the names proper went the desinences attached to them. The tree being felled, the parasite decayed. Another reason was this: the names introduced from the Scriptures did not seem to compound comfortably with these terminatives. The Hebrew name would first have to be turned into a nick form before the diminutive was appended. The English peasantry had added “in,” “ot,” “kin,” and “cock” only to the nickname, never to the baptismal form. It was Wat-kin, not Walterkin; Bat-kin, not Bartholomewkin; Wilcock, not Williamcock; Colin, not Nicholas-in; Philpot, not Philipot. But the popular feeling for a century was against turning the new Scripture names into curt nick forms. As it would have been an absurdity to have appended diminutives to sesquipedalian names, national wit, rather than deliberate plan, prevented it. If it was irreverent, too, to curtail Scripture names, it was equally irreverent to give[Pg 78] them the diminutive dress. To prove the absolute truth of my statement, I have only to remind the reader that, saving “Nat-kin,” not one single Bible name introduced by the Reformation and the English Bible has become conjoined with a diminutive.[19]

The immediate consequence was this; the diminutive forms became obsolete. Emmott lingered on till the end of the seventeenth century; nay, got into the eighteenth:

But it was only where it was not known as a form of Emma, and possibly both might exist in the same household. I have already furnished instances of Hamlet. Here is another:

It lasted till the eighteenth century. But nobody knew by that time that it was a pet name of Hamon, or Hamond; nay, few knew that the[Pg 79] surname of Hammond had ever been a baptismal name at all:

It is curious to notice that Mr. Hovenden, in his “Canterbury Register,” published 1878, for the Harleian Society, has the following entries:—

Turning to the index, the editor has styled them Hamilton Struggle and Hamilton Leucknor. Ham’on, of course, is Hammon, or Hammond. I may add that some ecclesiastic, a critic of my book on “English Surnames,” in the Guardian, rebuked me for supposing that Emmot could be from Emma, and calmly put it down as a form of Aymot! What can prove the effect of the Reformation on old English names as do such incidents as these?

An English monarch styled his favourite Peter Gaveston as “Piers,” a form that was sufficiently familiar to readers of history; but when an antiquary, some few years ago, found this same Gaveston described as “Perot,” it became a difficulty to not a few. The Perrots or Parratts of[Pg 80] our London Directory might have told them of the old-fashioned diminutive that had been knocked on the head with a Hebrew Bible.

Collet, from Nicholas, used as a feminine name, died out also. The last instance I know of is—

Colin, the other pet form, having got into our pastoral poetry, lingered longer, and may be said to be still alive:

The last Wilmot I have discovered is a certain Wilmote Adams, a defendant in a Chancery suit at the end of Elizabeth’s reign (“Chancery Suits: Elizabeth”), and the last Philpot is dated 1575:

All the others perished by the time James I. was king. Guy, or Wyatt, succumbed entirely, and the same may be said of the rest. Did we require further confirmation of this, I need only inquire: Would any Yorkshireman now, as he reads over shop-fronts in towns like Leeds or Bradford, or in the secluded villages of Wensleydale or Swaledale, the surnames of Tillot and Tillotson, Emmett and Emmotson, Ibbott, Ibbet, Ibbs, and[Pg 81] Ibbotson, know that, twenty years before the introduction of our English Bible, these were not merely the familiar pet names of Matilda, Emma, and Isabella, but that as a trio they stood absolutely first in the scale of frequency? Nay, they comprised more than forty-five per cent. of the female population.

The last registered Ibbot or Issot I have seen is in the Chancery suits at the close of Queen Bess’s reign, wherein Ibote Babyngton and Izott Barne figure in some legal squabbles (“Chancery Suits: Elizabeth,” vol. ii.). As for Sissot, or Drewet, or Doucet, or Fawcett, or Hewet, or Philcock, or Jeffcock, or Batkin, or Phippin, or Lambin, or Perrin, they have passed away—their place knoweth them no more. What a remarkable revolution is this, and so speedy!

Failing our registers, the question may arise whether or not in familiar converse the old pet forms were still used. Our ballads and plays preserve many of the nick forms, but scarcely a pet form is to be seen later than 1590. In 1550 Nicholas Udall wrote “Ralph Roister Doister,” in the very commencement of which Matthew Merrygreek “says or sings”—

“Sometime Lewis Loiterer biddeth me come near:
Somewhiles Watkin Waster maketh us good cheer.”

[Pg 82]Amongst the dramatis personæ are Dobinet Doughty, Sim Suresby, Madge Mumblecrust, Tibet Talkapace, and Annot Aliface. A few years later came “Gammer Gurton’s Needle.” Both Diccon and Hodge figure in it: two rustics of the most bucolic type. Hodge, after relating how Gib the cat had licked the milk-pan clean, adds—

Immediately after this, again, in 1568 was printed “Like will to Like.” The chief characters are Tom Tosspot, Hankin Hangman, Pierce Pickpurse, and Nichol Newfangle. Wat Waghalter is also introduced. But here may be said to end this homely and contemporary class of play-names. ’Tis true, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beggar’s Bush,” Higgen (Higgin) is one of the “three knavish beggars,” but the scene is laid in Flanders.

Judging by our songs and comedies, the diminutive forms went down with terrible rapidity, and were practically obsolete before Elizabeth’s death. But this result was more the work of the Reformation at large than Puritanism.

(b.) The Decrease of Nick Forms.

This was not all. The nick forms saw themselves reduced to straits. The new godly names,[Pg 83] I have said, were not to be turned into irreverent cant terms. From the earliest day of the Reformation every man who gave his child a Bible name stuck to it unaltered. Ebenezer at baptism was Ebenezer among the turnips, Ebenezer with the milk-pail, and Ebenezer in courtship; while Deborah, who did not become Deb till Charles I.’s reign, would Ebenezer him till the last day she had done scolding him, and put “Ebenezer” carefully on his grave, to prove how happily they had lived together!

As for the zealot who gradually forged his way to the front, he gave his brother and sister in the Lord the full benefit of his or her title, whether it was five syllables or seven. There can be no doubt that these Hebrew names did not readily adapt themselves to ordinary converse with the world. Melchisedek and Ebedmelech were all right elbowing their way into the conventicle, but Melchisedek dispensing half-pounds of butter over the counter, or Ebedmelech carrying milk-pails from door to door, gave people a kind of shock. These grand assumptions suggested knavery. One feels certain that our great-grandmothers had a suspicion of tallow in the butter, and Jupiter Pluvius in the pail.

Nor did these excavated names harmonize with[Pg 84] the surnames to which they were yoked. Adoniram was quaint enough without Byfield, but both (as Butler, in “Hudibras,” knew) suggested something slightly ludicrous. Byron took a mean advantage of this when he attacked poor Cottle, the bookseller and would-be writer:

“O Amos Cottle! Phœbus! what a name
To fill the speaking trump of future fame!
O Amos Cottle! for a moment think
What meagre profits spring from pen and ink.”

Amos is odd, but Amos united to Cottle makes a smile irresistible.

Who does not agree with Wilkes, who, when speaking to Johnson of Dryden’s would-be rival, the city poet, says—

And Sterne, as the elder Disraeli reminds us, in one of his multitudinous digressions from the life of “Tristram Shandy,” makes the progenitor of that young gentleman turn absolutely melancholy, as he conjures up a vision of all the men who

Even Oliver Goldsmith cannot resist styling the knavish seller of green spectacles by a conjunction[Pg 85] of Hebrew and English titles as Ephraim Jenkinson; and his servant, who acts the part of a Job Trotter (another Old Testament worthy, again) to his master, is, of course, Abraham!

But, oddly as such combinations strike upon the modern tympanum, what must not the effect have been in a day when a nickname was popular according as it was curt? How would men rub their eyes in sheer amazement, when such conjunctions as Ebedmelech Gastrell, or Epaphroditus Haughton, or Onesiphorus Dixey, were introduced to their notice, pronounced with all sesquipedalian fulness, following upon the very heels of a long epoch of traditional one-syllabled Ralphs, Hodges, Hicks, Wats, Phips, Bates, and Balls (Baldwin). Conceive the amazement at such registrations as these:

The “Chancery Suits” of Elizabeth contain a large batch of such names; and I have already enumerated a list of “Pilgrim Fathers” of James’s reign, whose baptisms would be recorded in the previous century.

But compare this with the fact that the leading men in England at this very time were recognized only by the curtest of abbreviated names. In that very quaint poem of Heywood’s, “The Hierarchie of Blessed Angels,” the author actually makes it the ground of an affected remonstrance:

“Marlowe, renowned for his rare art and wit,
Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit,
Although his Hero and Leander did
Merit addition rather. Famous Kid
Was called but Tom. Tom Watson, though he wrote
Able to make Apollo’s self to dote
Upon his muse, for all that he could strive,
Yet never could to his full name arrive.
Tom Nash, in his time of no small esteem,
Could not a second syllable redeem.
········
Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill
Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will:
And famous Jonson, though his learned pen
Be dipped in Castaly, is still but Ben.”

However, in the end, he attributes the familiarity to the right cause:

“I, for my part,
Think others what they please, accept that heart
[Pg 87]That courts my love in most familiar phrase;
And that it takes not from my pains or praise,
If any one to me so bluntly come:
I hold he loves me best that calls me Tom.”

It is Sir Christopher, the curate, who, in “The Ordinary,” rebels against “Kit:”

“Andrew. What may I call your name, most reverend sir?
Bagshot. His name’s Sir Kit.
Christopher. My name is not so short:
’Tis a trisyllable, an’t please your worship;
But vulgar tongues have made bold to profane it
With the short sound of that unhallowed idol
They call a kit. Boy, learn more reverence!
Bagshot. Yes, to my betters.”

We need not wonder, therefore, that the comedists took their fun out of the new custom, especially in relation to their length and pronunciation in full. In Cowley’s “Cutter of Colman Street,” Cutter turns Puritan, and thus addresses the colonel’s widow, Tabitha:

In his epilogue to this same comedy, Cutter is supposed to address the audience as a “congregation of the elect,” the playhouse is a conventicle, and he is a “pious cushion-thumper.” Gazing about the theatre, he says—through his nose, no doubt—

“But yet I wonder much not to espy a
Brother in all this court called Zephaniah.”

[Pg 88]This is a better rhyme even than Butler’s

“Their dispensations had been stifled
But for our Adoniram Byfield.”

In Brome’s “Covent Garden Weeded,” the arrival at the vintner’s door is thus described:

The contrast between Will or Harry, the nick forms, and Zachary,[20] the full name, is intentionally drawn, and Gabriel instantly rails at it.

In “Bartholomew Fair,” half the laughter that convulsed Charles II., his courtiers, and courtezans, was at the mention of Ezekiel, the cut-purse, or Zeal-of-the-land, the baker, who saw visions; while the veriest noodle in the pit saw the point of Squire Cokes’ perpetually addressing his body-man Humphrey in some such style as this:

How the audience would laugh and cheer at a sally that was simply manufactured of a repetition of the good old-fashioned name for Humphrey; and thus a passage that reads as very dull fun[Pg 89] indeed to the ears of the nineteenth century, would seem to be brimful of sarcastic allusion to the popular audience of the seventeenth, especially when spoken by such lips as Wintersels.

The same effect was attempted and attained in the “Alchemist.” Subtle addresses the deacon:

“What’s your name?
Ananias. My name is Ananias.
Subtle.Out, the varlet
That cozened the Apostles! Hence away!
Flee, mischief! had your holy consistory
No name to send me, of another sound,
Than wicked Ananias? Send your elders
Hither, to make atonement for you, quickly,
And give me satisfaction: or out goes
The fire ...
If they stay threescore minutes; the aqueity,
Terreity, and sulphureity
Shall run together again, and all be annulled,
Thou wicked Ananias!”

Exit Ananias, and no wonder. Of course, the pit would roar at the expense of Ananias. But Abel, the tobacco-man, who immediately appears in his place, is addressed familiarly as “Nab:”

“Face. Abel, thou art made.
Abel. Sir, I do thank his worship.
Face. Six o’ thy legs more will not do it, Nab.
He has brought you a pipe of tobacco, doctor.
Abel. Yes, sir; I have another thing I would impart——
Face. Out with it, Nab.
Abel.Sir, there is lodged hard by me
A rich young widow.”

To some readers there will be little point in[Pg 90] this. They will say “Abel,” as an Old Testament name, should neither have been given to an un-puritanic character, nor ought it to have been turned into a nickname. This would never have occurred to the audience. Abel, or Nab, had been one of the most popular of English names for at least three centuries before the Reformation. Hence it was never used by the Puritans, and was, as a matter of course, the undisturbed property of their enemies. Three centuries of bad company had ruined Nab’s morals. The zealot would none of it.[21]

But from all this it will be seen that a much better fight was made in behalf of the old nick forms than of the diminutives. By a timely rally, Tom, Jack, Dick, and Harry were carried, against all hindrances, into the Restoration period, and from that time they were safe. Wat, Phip, Hodge, Bat or Bate, and Cole lost their position, but so had the fuller Philip, Roger, Bartholomew, and Nicholas, But the opponents of Puritanism carried the war into the enemy’s camp in revenge for this, and Priscilla, Deborah, Jeremiah, and Nathaniel, although they were rather of the Reformation than Puritanic introductions, were turned by the time[Pg 91] of Charles I. into the familiar nick forms of Pris, Deb, Jerry, and Nat. The licentious Richard Brome, in “The New Academy,” even attempts a curtailment of Nehemiah:

“Lady Nestlecock. Negh, Negh!
Nehemiah. Hark! my mother comes.
Lady N. Where are you, childe? Negh!
Nehemiah. I hear her neighing after me.”
Act iv. sc. 1. (1658).

It was never tried out of doors, however, and the experiment was not repeated. Brome was still more scant in reverence to Damaris. In “Covent Garden Weeded” Madge begins “the dismal story:”

After this she is Dammy in the mouth of Nicholas throughout the play. This, too, was a failure. Indeed, it demonstrates a remarkable reverence for their Bible on the part of the English race, that every attempt to turn one of its names into a nick form (saving in some three or four instances) has ignominiously failed. We mean, of course, since the Reformation.

The Restoration was a great restoration of nick forms. Such names as had survived were again for a while in full favour, and the reader has only[Pg 92] to turn to the often coarse ballads and songs contained in such collections as Tom d’Urfey’s “Pills to Purge Melancholy” to see how Nan, Sis, Sib, Kate, and Doll had been brought back to popular favour. It was but a spurt, however, in the main. As the lascivious reaction from the Puritanic strait-lacedness in some degree spent itself, so did the newly restored fashion, and when the eighteenth century brought in a fresh innovation, viz. the classic forms, such as Beatrix, Maria, Lætitia, Carolina, Louisa, Amelia, Georgina, Dorothea, Prudentia, Honora—an innovation that for forty years ran like an epidemic through every class of society, and was sarcastically alluded to by Goldsmith in Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, and the sisters Olivia and Sophia—the old nick forms once more bade adieu to English society, and now enjoy but a partial favour. But Bill, Tom, Dick, and Harry still hold on like grim death. Long may they continue to do so!

(c.) The Decay of Saint and Festival Names.

There were some serious losses in hagiology. Names that had figured in the calendar for centuries fared badly; Simon, Peter, Nicholas, Bartholomew, Philip, and Matthew, from being first favourites, lapsed into comparative oblivion.[Pg 93] Some virgins and martyrs of extra-Biblical repute, like Agnes, Ursula, Catharine, Cecilia, or Blaze, crept into the registers of Charles’s reign, but they had then become but shadows of their former selves.

‘Sis’ is often found in D’Urfey’s ballads, but it only proves the songs themselves were old ones, or at any rate the choruses, for Cecilia was practically obsolete:

It was now that Awdry gave way:

St. Blaze,[22] the patron saint of wool-combers and the nom-de-plume of Gil Blas, has only a church or two to recall his memory to us now. But he lived into Charles’s reign:

This is the last instance I have seen. Hillary shared the same fate:

Bride is rarely found in England now:

Benedict, which for three hundred years had been known as Bennet, as several London churches can testify, became well-nigh extinct; but the feminine Benedicta, with Bennet for its shortened form, suddenly arose on its ashes, and flourished for a time:

These feminines are sometimes bothering. Look, for instance, at this:

The true spelling should have been Mathea, which, previous to the Reformation, had been given to girls born on St. Matthew’s Day.[23] The nick form Mat changed sexes. In “Englishmen for my Money” Walgrave says—

Appoline, all of whose teeth were extracted at her martyrdom with pincers, was a favourite saint for appeal against toothache. In the Homily “Against the Perils of Idolatry,” it is said—

Scarcely any name for girls was more common than this for a time; up to the Commonwealth period it contrived to exist. Take St. Peter, Cornhill, alone:

Names from the great Church festivals fared as badly as those from the hagiology. The high day of the ecclesiastical calendar is Easter. We have more relics of this festival than any other. Pasche Oland or Pascoe Kerne figure in the Chancery suits of Elizabeth. Long before this the Hundred Rolls had given us a Huge fil. Pasche, and a contemporary record contained an Antony Pascheson. The different forms lingered till the Commonwealth:

Pascha Turner, widow, was sister of Henry Parr, Bishop of Worcester.

The more English “Easter” had a longer survival, but this arose from its having become confounded with Esther. To this mistake it owes the fact that it lived till the commencement of the present century:

Epiphany, or Theophania (shortened to Tiffany), was popular with both sexes, but the ladies got the chief hold of it.

“Megge Merrywedyr, and Sabyn Sprynge,
Tiffany Twynkeler, fayle for no thynge,”

says one of our old mysteries. This form succumbed at the Reformation. Tyffanie Seamor appears as defendant about 1590, however (“Chancery Suits: Eliz.”), and in Cornwall the name reached the seventeenth century:

The following is from Banbury register:

Epiphany Howarth records his name also about 1590 (“Chancery Suits: Eliz.”), and a few years later he is once more met with in a State paper (C. S. P. 1623-25):

[Pg 98]This Epiphan is valuable as showing the transition state between Epiphania and Ephin, the latter being the form that ousted all others:

But Ephin was not a long liver, and by the time of the Restoration had wholly succumbed. The last entry I have seen is in the Westminster Abbey register:

Pentecost was more sparely used. In the “Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londonensi” occur both Pentecost de London (1221) and Pentecost Servicus, and a servitor of Henry III. bore the only name of “Pentecost” (“Inquis., 13 Edw. I.,” No. 13). This name was all but obsolete soon after the Reformation set in, but it lingered on till the end of the seventeenth century.

Noel shared the same fate. The Hundred Rolls furnish a Noel de Aubianis, while the “Materials[Pg 99] for a History of Henry VII.” (p. 503) mentions a Nowell Harper:

Noel still struggled gamely, and died hard, seeing the eighteenth century well in:

Again the Reformation, apart from Puritanism, had much to do with the decay of these names.

(d.) The Last of some Old Favourites.

There were some old English favourites that the Reformation and the English Bible did not immediately crush. Thousands of men were youths when the Hebrew invasion set in, and lived unto James’s reign. Their names crop up, of course, in the burial registers. Others were inclined to be tenacious over family favourites. We must be content, in the records of Elizabeth’s and even James’s reign, to find some old friends standing side by side with the new. The majority of them were extra-Biblical, and therefore did not meet[Pg 100] with the same opposition as those that savoured of the old ecclesiasticism. Nevertheless, this new fashion was telling on them, and of most we may say, “Their places know them no more.”

Looking from now back to then, we see this the more clearly. We turn to the “Calendar of State Papers,” and we find a grant, dated November 5, 1607, to Fulk Reade to travel four years. Shortly afterwards (July 15, 1609), we come across a warrant to John Carse, of the benefit of the recusancy of Drew Lovett, of the county of Middlesex. Casting our eye backwards we speedily reach a grant or warrant in 1603, wherein Gavin[26] Harvey is mentioned. In 1604 comes Ingram Fyser. One after another these names occur within the space of five years—names then, although it was well in James’s reign, known of all men, and borne reputably by many. But who will say that Drew, or Fulk, or Gavin, or Ingram are alive now? How they were to be elbowed out of existence these very same records tell us; for within the same half-decade we may see warrants or grants relating to Matathias Mason[Pg 101] (April 7, 1610) or Gersome Holmes (January 23, 1608). Jethro Forstall obtains licence, November 12, 1604, to dwell in one of the alms-rooms of Canterbury Cathedral; while Melchizedec Bradwood receives sole privilege, February 18, 1608, of printing Jewel’s “Defence of the Apology of the English Church.” The enemy was already within the bastion, and the call for surrender was about to be made.

Take another specimen a few years earlier. In the Chancery suits at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, we find a plaintiff named Goddard Freeman, another styled Anketill Brasbridge, a defendant bearing the good old title of Frideswide Heysham, while a fourth endeavours to secure his title to some property under the signature of Avery Howlatt. Hamlett Holcrofte and Hammett Hyde are to be met with (but we have spoken of them), and such other personages as Ellice Heye, Morrice Cowles, and Gervase Hatfield. Within a few pages’ limit we come across Dogory Garry, Digory Greenfield, Digory Harrit, and Degory Hollman. These names of Goddard, Anketill, Frideswide, Avery, Hamlet, Ellice, Morrice, Gervase, and Digory were on everybody’s lips when Henry VIII. was king. Who can say that they exist now? Only Maurice and Gervase enjoy a precarious[Pg 102] existence. A breath of popular disregard would blow them out. Avery held out, but in vain:

But what else do we see in these same registers? We are confronted with pages bearing such names as Esaye Freeman (Isaiah), or Elizar Audly (Eliezer), or Seth Awcocke, or Urias Babington, or Ezekias Brent,—and this not forty years after the Reformation. These men must have been baptized in the very throes of the great contest.

Another “Calendar of State Papers,” bearing dates between 1590 and 1605, contains the names of Colet Carey (1580) and Amice Carteret (1599), alongside of whom stands Aquila Wyke (1603). Here once more we are reminded of two pretty baptismal names that have gone the way of the others. It makes one quite sad to think of these national losses. Amice, previous to the Reformation, was a household favourite, and Colet a perfect pet. Won’t somebody come to the rescue? Why on earth should the fact that the Bible has been translated out of Latin into English strip us of these treasures?

Turn once more to our church registers. Few will recognize Thurstan as a baptismal name:

Drew and Fulk are again found:

Take the following, dropped upon hap-hazard as I turn the pages of St. Dionis Backchurch:

So they run. How quaint and pretty they sound to modern ears! Amongst the above I have mentioned some girl-names. The change is strongly marked here. It was Elizabeth’s reign saw the end of Joan. Jane Grey set the fashionable Jane going; Joan was relegated to the milkmaid, and very soon even the kitchen wench would none of it. Joan is obsolete; Jane is showing signs of dissolution.[27]

[Pg 104]It was Elizabeth’s reign saw the end of Jill, or Gill, which had been the pet name of Juliana for three centuries:

In one of our earlier mysteries Noah’s wife had refused to enter the ark. To Noah she had said—

“Sir, for Jak nor for Gille
Wille I turne my face,
Tille I have on this hille
Spun a space.”

It lingered on till the close of James’s reign. In 1619 we find in “Satyricall Epigrams”—

“Wille squabbled in a tavern very sore,
Because one brought a gill of wine—no more:
‘Fill me a quart,’ quoth he, ‘I’m called Will;
The proverb is, each Jacke shall have his Gill.’”

But Jill had become a term for a common street jade, like Parnel and Nan. All these disappeared at this period, and must have sunk into disuse, Bible or no Bible. A nanny-house, or simple “nanny,” was well known to the loose and dissolute of either sex at the close of the sixteenth century. Hence, in the ballad “The Two Angrie Women of Abington,” Nan Lawson is a wanton; while, in “Slippery Will,” the hero’s inclination for Nan is anything but complimentary:

[Pg 105] “Long have I lived a bachelor’s life,
And had no mind to marry;
But now I faine would have a wife,
Either Doll, Kate, Sis, or Mary.
These four did love me very well,
I had my choice of Mary;
But one did all the rest excell,
And that was pretty Nanny.

“Sweet Nan did love me deare indeed,” etc.

Respectable people, still liking the name, changed it to Nancy, and in that form it still lives.

Parnel, the once favourite Petronilla, fell under the same blight as Peter, and shared his fate; but her character also ruined her. In the registers of St. Peter, Cornhill, we find the following entries:—

Two other examples may be furnished:—

The Restoration did not restore Parnel, and the name is gone.

Sibyl had a tremendous run in her day, and narrowly escaped a second epoch of favour in the second Charles’s reign. Tib and Sib were always[Pg 106] placed side by side. Burton, speaking of “love melancholy,” says—

The “Psalm of Mercie,” too, has it:

“‘So, so,’ quoth my sister Bab,
And ‘Kill ’um,’ quoth Margerie;
‘Spare none,’ cry’s old Tib; ‘No quarter,’ says Sib,
‘And, hey, for our monachie.’”

In “Cocke Lorelle’s Bote,” one of the personages introduced is—

Three names practically disappeared in this same century—Olive, Jacomyn or Jacolin, and Grissel:

Olive was a great favourite in the west of England, and was restored by a caprice of fashion as Olivia in the eighteenth century. It was the [Pg 107]property of both sexes, and is often found in the dress of “Olliph,” “Olyffe,” and “Olif.” From being a household pet, Dorothy, as Doll, almost disappeared for a while. Doll and Dolly came back in the eighteenth century, under the patronage of the royal and stately Dorothea. What a run it again had! Dolly is one of the few instances of a really double existence. It was the rage from 1450 to 1570; it was overwhelmed with favour from 1750 to 1820. Dr. Syntax in his travels meets with three Dollys. Napoleon is besought in the rhymes of the day to

“quit his folly,
Settle in England, and marry Dolly.”

Once more Dolly, saving for Dora, has made her bow and exit. I suppose she may turn up again about 1990, and all the little girls will be wearing Dolly Vardens.

Barbara, with its pet Bab, is now of rarest use. Dowse, the pretty Douce of earlier days, is defunct, and with it the fuller Dowsabel:

Joyce fought hard, but it was useless:

Lettice disappeared, to come back as Lætitia in the eighteenth century:

Amery, or Emery, the property of either sex, lost place:

Avice shared the same fate:

Thomasine requires a brief notice. Coming into use as a fancy name about 1450, it seems to have met with no opposition, and for a century and a half was a decided success. It became familiar to every district in England, north or south, and is found in the registers of out-of-the-way villages in Derbyshire, as plentifully as in those of the metropolitan churches:

In other registers such forms as Thomasena, Thomesin, Thomazin, Tomasin, and Thomasin occur. In Cowley’s “Chronicle,” too, the name is found:

“Then Jone and Jane and Audria,
And then a pretty Thomasine,
And then another Katharine,
And then a long et cætera.”

V. The General Confusion.

But what a state of confusion does all this reveal! By the time of the Commonwealth, there was the choice of three methods of selection open to the English householder in this matter of names. He might copy the zealot faction, and select his names from the Scriptures or the category of Christian graces; he might rally by the old English gentleman, who at this time was generally a Cavalier, and Dick, Tom, Harry, or Dolly, his children; or he might be careless about the whole matter, and mix the two, according to his caprice[Pg 110] or fancy. That Royalist had no bad conception of the state of society in 1648, when he turned off verses such as these:

“And Greenwich shall be for tenements free
For saints to possess Pell-Mell,
And where all the sport is at Hampton Court
Shall be for ourselves to dwell.
Chorus. ‘’Tis blessed,’ quoth Bathsheba,
And Clemence, ‘We’re all agreed.’
‘’Tis right,’ quoth Gertrude, ‘And fit,’ says sweet Jude,
And Thomasine, ‘Yea, indeed.’

“What though the king proclaims
Our meetings no more shall be;
In private we may hold forth the right way,
And be, as we should be, free.
Chorus. ‘O very well said,’ quoth Con;
‘And so will I do,’ says Franck;
And Mercy cries, ‘Aye,’ and Mat, ‘Really,’
‘And I’m o’ that mind,’ quoth Thank.”

As we shall show in our next chapter, “Thank” was no imaginary name, coined to meet the exigencies of rhyme. Thanks, however, to the good sense of the nation, an effort was made in behalf of such old favourites as John, William, Richard, Robert, and Thomas. So early as 1643, Thomas Adams, Puritan as he was, had delivered himself in a London pulpit to the effect that “he knew ‘Williams’ and ‘Richards’ who, though they bore names not found in sacred story, but familiar to the country, were as gracious saints” as any who[Pg 111] bore names found in it (“Meditations upon the Creed”). The Cavalier, we know, had deliberately stuck by the old names. A political skit, already referred to, after running through a list of all the new-fangled names introduced by the fanatics, concludes:

“They’re just like the Gadaren’s swine,
Which the devils did drive and bewitch:
An herd set on evill
Will run to the de-vill
And his dam when their tailes do itch.
‘Then let ’em run on!’
Says Ned, Tom, and John.
‘Ay, let ’um be hanged!’ quoth Mun:
‘They’re mine,’ quoth old Nick,
‘And take ’um,’ says Dick,
‘And welcome!’ quoth worshipful Dun.
‘And God blesse King Charles!’ quoth George,
‘And save him,’ says Simon and Sill;
‘Aye, aye,’ quoth old Cole and each loyall soul,
‘And Amen, and Amen!’ cries Will.”

Another ballad, lively and free as the other, published in 1648, and styled “The Anarchie, or the Blest Reformation,” after railing at the confusion of things in general, and names in particular, concludes with the customary jolly old English flourish:

“‘A health to King Charles!’ says Tom;
‘Up with it,’ says Ralph like a man;
‘God bless him,’ says Moll, ‘And raise him,’ says Doll,
‘And send him his owne,’ says Nan.”

The Restoration practically ended the conflict,[Pg 112] but it was a truce; for both sides, so far as nomenclature is concerned, retained trophies of victory, and, on the whole, the Hebrew was the gainer. At the start he had little to lose, and he has filled the land with titles that had lain in abeyance for four thousand years. The old English yeoman has lost many of his most honoured cognomens, but he can still, at least, boast one thing. The two names that were foremost before the middle of the twelfth century stand at this moment in the same position. Out of every hundred children baptized in England, thirteen are entered in the register as John or William. The Cavalier, too, can boast that “Charles,”[28] although there were not more of that name throughout the length and breadth of England at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, now[Pg 113] occupies the sixth place among male baptismal names.

Several names, now predominant, were for various reasons lifted above the contest. George holds the fourth position among boys; Mary and Elizabeth, the first and second among girls. George dates all his popularity from the last century, and Mary was in danger of becoming obsolete at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, so hateful had it become to Englishmen, whether Churchmen or Presbyterians. It was at this time Philip, too, lost a place it can never recover. But the fates came to the rescue of Mary, when the Prince of Orange landed at Torbay, and sate with James’s daughter on England’s throne. It has been first favourite ever since. As for Elizabeth, a chapter might be written upon it. Just known, and no more, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was speedily popularized in the “daughter of the Reformation.” The Puritans, in spite of persecution and other provocations, were ever true to “Good Queen Bess.” The name, too, was scriptural, and had not been mixed up with centuries of Romish superstition. Elizabeth ruled supreme, and was contorted and twisted into every conceivable shape that ingenuity could devise. It narrowly escaped the diminutive desinence, for Ezot and Ezota occur[Pg 114] to my knowledge four times in records between 1500 and 1530. But Bess and Bessie took up the running, and, a century later, Bett and Betty. It will surprise almost all my readers, I suspect, to know that the “Lady Bettys” of the early part of last century were never, or rarely ever, christened Elizabeth. Queen Anne’s reign, even William and Mary’s reign, saw the fashionable rage for Latinized forms, already referred to, setting in. Elizabeth was turned into Bethia and Betha:

The familiar form of this was Betty:

[Pg 115]Bess was forgotten, and it was not till the present century that, Betty having become the property of the lower orders, who had soon learnt to copy their betters, the higher classes fell back once more on the Bessie of Reformation days.

Meanwhile other freaks of fancy had a turn. Bessie and Betty were dropped into a mill, and ground out as Betsy. This, after a while, was relegated to the peasantry and artisans north of Trent. Then Tetty and Tetsy had an innings. Dr. Johnson always called his wife Tetty. Writing March 28, 1753, he says—

Eliza arose before Elizabeth died; was popular in the seventeenth, much resorted to in the eighteenth, and is still familiar in the nineteenth century. Thomas Nash, in “Summer’s Last Will and Testament,” has the audacity to speak of the queen as—

“that Eliza, England’s beauteous queen,
On whom all seasons prosperously attend.”

Dr. Johnson, in an epigram anent Colley Cibber and George II., says—

“Augustus still survives in Maro’s strain,
And Spenser’s verse prolongs Eliza’s reign.”

But by the lexicographer’s day, the poorer[Pg 116] classes had ceased to recognize that Eliza and Betty were parts of one single name. They took up each on her own account, as a separate name, and thus Betty and Eliza were commonly met with in the same household. This is still frequently seen. The Spectator, the other day, furnished a list of our commonest font names, wherein Elizabeth is placed fourth, with 4610 representatives in every 100,000 of the population. Looking lower down, we find “Eliza” ranked in the twenty-first place with 1507. This is scarcely fair. The two ought to be added together; at least, it perpetuates a misconception.

[Pg 117]

PURITAN ECCENTRICITIES.

I. Introductory.

There are still many people who are sceptical about the stories told against the Puritans in the matter of name-giving. Of these some are Nonconformists, who do not like the slights thus cast upon their spiritual ancestry; unaware that while this curious phase was at its climax, Puritanism was yet within the pale of the Church of England. Others, having searched through the lists of the Protector’s Parliaments, Commissioners, and army officers, and having found but a handful of odd[Pg 118] baptismal names, declare, without hesitation, that these stories are wicked calumnies. Mr. Peacock, whose book on the “Army Lists of Roundheads and Cavaliers” is well worth study, says, in one of the numbers of Notes and Queries—

This is an old mistake. If Mr. Peacock had looked at our registers from 1580 to 1640, instead of from 1640 to 1680, he would never have written the above. There is the most distinct evidence that during the latter portion of Elizabeth’s reign, the whole of James’s reign, and great part of Charles’s reign, in a district roughly comprising England south of the Trent, and having, say, Banbury for its centre, there prevailed, amongst a certain class of English religionists, a practice of baptizing children by scriptural phrases, pious ejaculations, or godly admonitions. It was a practice instituted of deliberate purpose, as conducive to vital religion, and as intending to separate the truly godly and renewed portion of the community from the world at large. The Reformation epoch had seen the English middle and[Pg 119] lower classes generally adopting the proper names of Scripture. Thus, the sterner Puritan had found a list of Bible names that he would gladly have monopolized, shared in by half the English population. That a father should style his child Nehemiah, or Abacuck, or Tabitha, or Dorcas, he discovered with dismay, did not prove that that particular parent was under any deep conviction of sin. This began to trouble the minds and consciences of the elect. Fresh limits must be created. As Richard and Roger had given way to Nathaniel and Zerrubabel, so Nathaniel and Zerrubabel must now give way to Learn-wisdom and Hate-evil. Who inaugurated the movement, with what success, and how it slowly waned, this chapter will show.

There can be no doubt that it is entirely owing to Praise-God Barebone, and the Parliament that went by his name,[30] the impression got abroad in after days that the Commonwealth period was the heyday of these eccentricities, and that these remarkable names were merely adopted after conversion, and were not entered in the vestry-books as baptismal names at all.

The existence of these names could not escape[Pg 120] the attention of Lord Macaulay and Sir Walter Scott. The Whig historian has referred to Tribulation Wholesome and Zeal-of-the-land Busy almost as frequently as to that fourth-form boy for whose average (!) abilities to the very end of his literary life he entertained such a profound respect. Two quotations will suffice. In his “Comic Dramatists of the Restoration” he says, speaking of the Commonwealth—

Again, in his Essay on Croker’s “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” he declares—

In “Woodstock,” Scott has such characters as Zerrubabel Robins and Merciful Strickalthrow, both soldiers of Oliver Cromwell; while the zealot ranter is one Nehemiah Holdenough. Mr. Peacock most certainly has grounds for complaint here, but not as to facts, only dates.

 [Pg 121]

II. Originated by the Presbyterian Clergy.

In Strype’s “Life of Whitgift” (i. 255) we find the following statement:—

I follow up the history of but two of these ministers, Hopkinson of Salehurst, and Heley of Warbleton. Suspended by the commissary, they were summoned to Canterbury, December 6, 1583, and subscribed. Both being married men, with young families, we may note their action in regard to name-giving. The following are to be found in the register at Salehurst:

These entries are of the utmost importance; they begin at the very date when the new custom arose, and are patronized by three ministers in succession—possibly four, if Thomas Lorde was also a clergyman.

Heley’s case is yet more curious. He had been prescribing grace-names for his flock shortly before the birth of his first child. He thus practises upon his own offspring:

Under rectorial pressure the villagers followed suit; and for half a century Warbleton was, in the names of its parishioners, a complete exegesis of justification by faith without the deeds of the law. Sorry-for-sin Coupard was a peripatetic exhortation to repentance, and No-merit Vynall was a standing denunciation of works. No register in England is better worth a pilgrimage to-day than Warbleton.[32]

[Pg 123]Still confining our attention to Sussex and Kent, we come to Berwick:

I think the father ought to be whipped most incontinently in the open market who would inflict such a name on an infant daughter. They did not think so then. The point, however, is that the father was incumbent of the parish.

A more historic instance may be given. John Frewen, Puritan rector of Northiam, Sussex, from 1583 to 1628, and author of “Grounds and Principles of the Christian Religion,” had two sons, at least, baptized in his church. The dates tally exactly with the new custom:

Accepted[33] died Archbishop of York, being prebend designate of Canterbury so early as 1620:

One more instance before we pass on. In two[Pg 124] separate wills, dated 1602 and 1604 (folio 25, Montagu, “Prerog. Ct. of Cant.,” and folio 25, Harte, ditto), will be found references to “More-fruite and Faint-not, children of Dudley Fenner, minister of the Word of God” at Marden, in Kent.

Now, this Dudley Fenner was a thoroughly worthy man, but a fanatic of most intolerant type. In 1583 we find him at Cranbrook, in Kent. An account of his sayings and doings was forwarded, says Strype, to Lord Burghley, who himself marked the following passage:—

But a curious note occurs alongside this passage in Lord Burghley’s hand:

Two of these names were given to his own children, as Cranbrook register shows to this day:

Soon after this Dudley Fenner again got into trouble through his sturdy spirit of nonconformity. After an imprisonment of twelve months, he fled to Middleborough, in Holland, and died there about 1589.

[Pg 125]The above incident from Strype is interesting, for here manifestly is the source whence Camden derived his information upon the subject. In his quaint “Remaines,” published thirty years later (1614), after alluding to the Latin names then in vogue, he adds:

Very likely Lord Burghley gave Fenner’s selection to the great antiquary.

Coming into London, the following case occurs. John Press was incumbent of St. Matthew, Friday Street, from 1573 to 1612:

John Bunyan’s great character name of Hopeful is to be seen in Banbury Church register. But such an eccentricity is to be expected in the parish over which Wheatley presided, the head-quarters, too, of extravagant Puritanism. We all remember drunken Barnaby:

“To Banbury came I, O prophane one!
Where I saw a Puritane one,
Hanging of his cat on Monday
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.”

But the point I want to emphasize is that this Hopeful was Wheatley’s own daughter:

[Pg 126]Take a run from Banbury into Leicestershire. A stern Puritan was Antony Grey, “parson and patron” of Burbach; and he continued “a constant and faithfull preacher of the Gospell of Jesus Christ, even to his extreame old age, and for some yeares after he was Earle of Kent,” as his tombstone tells us. He had twelve children, and their baptismal entries are worth recording:

Why old Antony was persuaded of the devil to christen his second child by the ungodly agnomen of Henry, we are not informed. It must have given him many a twinge of conscience afterwards.

Had the Puritan clergy confined these vagaries to their own nurseries, it would not have mattered[Pg 127] much. But there can be no doubt they used their influence to bias the minds of godparents and witnesses in the same direction. We have only to pitch upon a minister who came under the archbishop’s or Lord Treasurer’s notice as disaffected, seek out the church over which he presided, scan the register of baptisms during the years of his incumbency, and a batch of extravagant names will at once be unearthed. In the villages of Sussex and Kent, where the personal influence of the recalcitrant clergy seems to have been greatest, the parochial records teem with them.

Thus was the final stage of fanaticism reached, the year 1580 being as nearly as possible the exact date of its development. Thus were English people being prepared for the influx of a large batch of names which had never been seen before, nor will be again. The purely Biblical names, those that commemorated Bible worthies, swept over the whole country, and left ineffaceable impressions. The second stage of Puritan excess, names that savour of eccentricity and fanaticism combined, scarcely reached England north of Trent, and, for lack of volume, have left but the faintest traces. They lasted long enough to cover what may be fairly called an epoch, and extended just far enough to embrace a province. The epoch[Pg 128] was a hundred years, and the province was from Kent to Hereford, making a small arc northwards, so as to take in Bedfordshire, Leicestershire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. The practice, so far as the bolder examples is concerned, was a deliberate scheme on the part of the Presbyterian clergy. On this point the evidence is in all respects conclusive.

III. Curious Names not Puritan.

Several names found in the registers at this time, though commonly ascribed to the zealots, must be placed under a different category. For instance, original sin and the Ninth Article would seem to be commemorated in such a name as Original. We may reject Camden’s theory:

inasmuch as he does not appear to have believed in it himself. The name, as a matter of fact, was given in the early part of the sixteenth century, in certain families of position, to the eldest son and heir, denoting that in him was carried on the original stock. The Bellamys of Lambcote Grange, Stainton, are a case in point. The eldest son for three generations bore the name; viz. Original Bellamy, buried at Stainton, September 12, 1619,[Pg 129] aged 80; Original, his son and heir, the record of whose death I cannot find; and Original, his son and heir, who was baptized December 29, 1606. The first of these must have been born in 1539, far too early a date for the name to be fathered upon the Puritans. Original was in use in the family of Babington, of Rampton. Original Babington, son and heir of John Babington, was a contemporary of the first Original Bellamy (Nicholl’s “Gen. et Top.,” viii.).

Another instance occurs later on:

Sense, a common name in Elizabeth and James’s reigns, looks closely connected with some of the abstract virtues, such as Prudence and Temperance. The learned compiler of the “Calendar of State Papers” (1637-38) seems to have been much bothered with the name:

The suggestion from the editorial pen is that this Seuce (as he prints it) is a bewildered spelling of Susey, from Susan! The fact is, Seuce is a bewildered misreading on the compiler’s part of Sense, and Sense is an English dress of the foreign[Pg 130] Senchia, or Sancho, still familiar to us in Sancho Panza. Several of the following entries will prove that Sense was too early an inmate of our registers to be a Puritan agnomen:

That it was familiar to Camden in 1614 is clear:

The name became obsolete by the close of the seventeenth century, and, being a saintly title, was sufficiently odious to the Presbyterians to be carefully rejected by them in the sixteenth century. Men who refused the Apostles their saintly title were not likely to stamp the same for life on weak flesh.[35]

Nor can Emanuel, or Angel, be brought as charges against the Puritans. Both flatly contradicted Cartwright’s canon; yet both, and especially the former, have been attributed to the zealots. No[Pg 131] names could have been more offensive to them than these. Even Adams, in his “Meditations upon the Creed,” while attacking his friends on their eccentricity in preferring “Safe-deliverance” to “Richard,” takes care to rebuke those on the other side, who would introduce Emanuel, or even Gabriel or Michael, into their nurseries:

Emanuel was imported from the Continent about 1500:

The same conclusion must be drawn regarding Angel. Adams continues:

If the Puritans objected, as they did to a man, to the use of Gabriel and Michael as angelic names, the generic term itself would be still more objectionable:

In this case we may presume the son, and not the father, had turned Puritan.

[Pg 132]A curious custom, which terminated soon after Protestantism was established in England, gave rise to several names which read oddly enough to modern eyes. These were titles like Vitalis or Creature—names applicable to either sex. Mr. Maskell, without furnishing instances, says Creature occurs in the registers of All-Hallows, Barking (“Hist. All-Hallows,” p. 62). In the vestry-books of Staplehurst, Kent, are registered:

One instance of Vitalis may be given:

These are not Puritan names. The dates are against the theory. They belong to a pre-Reformation practice, being names given to quick children before birth, in cases when it was feared, from the condition of the mother, they might not be delivered alive. Being christened before the sex could be known, it was necessary to affix a neutral name, and Vitalis or Creature answered the purpose. The old Romish rubric ran thus:

Vitalis Engaine and Creature Cheeseman, in the above instances, both lived, but, by the law just quoted, retained the names given to them, and underwent no second baptism. If the sex of the yet breathing child was discovered, but death certain, the name of baptism ran thus:

An English form occurs earlier:

Without entering into controversy, I will only say that if the clergy, up to the time of the alteration in our Article on Baptism, truly believed that “insomuch as infants, and children dying in their infancy, shall undoubtedly be saved thereby (i.e. baptism), and else not,” it was natural that such a delicate ceremonial as I have hinted at should have suggested itself to their minds. After the Reformation, the practice as to unborn children fell into desuetude, and the names with it.

 [Pg 134]

IV. Instances.

(a.) Latin Names.

The elder Disraeli reminded us, in his “Curiosities of Literature,” that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was common for our more learned pundits to re-style themselves in their own studies by Greek and Latin names. Some of these—as, for instance, Erasmus[36] and Melancthon—are only known to the world at large by their adopted titles.

The Reformation had not become an accomplished fact before this custom began to prevail in England, only it was transferred from the study to the font, and from scholars to babies. Renovata, Renatus, Donatus, and Beata began to grow common. Camden, writing in 1614, speaks of still stranger names—

While, however, the Presbyterian clergy did not[Pg 135] object to some of these Latin sobriquets, as being identical with the names of early believers of the Primitive Church, stamped in not a few instances with the honours of martyrdom, they preferred to translate them into English. Many of my examples of eccentricity will be found to be nothing more than literal translations of names that had been in common vogue among Christians twelve and thirteen hundred years before. To the majority of the Puritan clergy, to change the Latin dress for an English equivalent would be as natural and imperative as the adoption of Tyndale’s or the Genevan Bible in the place of the Latin Vulgate.

A curious, though somewhat later, proof of this statement is met with in a will from the Probate Court of Peterborough. The testator was one Theodore Closland, senior fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. The date is June 24, 1665:

This is a manifest translation of the early Christian “Quod-vult-deus.” Grainger, in his “History of England” (iii. 360, fifth edition), says—

[Pg 136]Closland, or Crosland, the grandfather, was evidently a Puritan, with a horror of the Latin Vulgate, Latin Pope, and Latin everything. Hence the translation.

Nevertheless, the Puritans seem to have favoured Latin names at first. It was a break between the familiar sound of the old and the oddity of the new. Redemptus was less grotesque than Redeemed, and Renata than Renewed. The English equivalents soon ruled supreme, but for a generation or two, and in some cases for a century, the Latin names went side by side with them.

Take Renatus, for instance:

It was Renatus Harris who built the organ in All-Hallows, Barking, in 1675 (“Hist. All-Hallows, Barking,” Maskell). Renatus and Rediviva occur in St. Matthew, Friday Street, circa 1590. Rediviva lingered into the eighteenth century:

Desiderata and Desiderius were being used at the[Pg 137] close of Elizabeth’s reign, and survived the restoration of Charles II.:

Donatus and Deodatus, also, were Latin names on English soil before the seventeenth century came in:

Desire and Given,[37] the equivalents, both crossed the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers.

Love was popular. Side by side with it went Amor. George Fox, in his “Journal,” writing in 1670, says—

In Ripon Cathedral may be seen:

The name still exists in Yorkshire, but no other county, I imagine.

Other instances could be mentioned.[38] I place a few in order:

(b.) Grace Names.

In furnishing instances, we naturally begin with those grace names, in all cases culled from the registers of the period, which belong to what we may style the first stage. They were, one by one, but taken from the lists found in the New Testament, and were probably suggested at the outset by the moralities or interludes. The morality went between the old miracle-play, or mystery, and the regular drama. In “Every Man,” written in the reign of Henry VIII., it is made a vehicle for retaining the love of the people for the old ways, the old worship, and the old superstitions. From the time of Edward VI. to the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, there issued a cluster of interludes of this same moral type and cast; only all breathed[Pg 139] of the new religion, and more or less assaulted the dogmas of Rome.

These moralities were popular, and were frequently rendered in public, until the Elizabethan drama was well established. All were allegorical, and required personal representatives of the abstract graces, and doctrines of which they treated. The dramatis personæ in “Hickscorner” are Freewill, Perseverance, Pity, Contemplation, and Imagination, and in “The Interlude of Youth,” Humility, Pride, Charity, and Lechery.

It is just possible, therefore, that several of these grace names were originated under the shadow of the pre-Reformation Church. The following are early, considering they are found in Cornwall, the county most likely to be the last to take up a new custom:

However this may be, we only find the cardinal virtues at the beginning of the movement—those which are popular in some places to this day, and still maintain a firm hold in America, borne thither by the Puritan emigrants.

The three Graces, and Grace itself, took root almost immediately as favourites. Shakespeare seems to have been aware of it, for Hermione says—

The registers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century teem with these; sometimes boys received them. The Rev. Hope Sherhard was a minister in Providence Isle in 1632 (“Cal. S. P. Colonial,” 1632).

We may note that the still common custom of christening trine-born children by these names dates from the period of their rise:[40]

Mr. Lower says (“Essays on English Surnames,” ii. 159)—

Thomas Adams, in his sermon on the “Three Divine Sisters,” says—

“They shall not want prosperity,
That keep faith, hope, and charity.”

Perhaps some of these parents remembered this.

Faith and Charity are both mentioned as distinctly Puritan sobriquets in the “Psalm of Mercie,” a political poem:

“‘A match,’ quoth my sister Joyce,
‘Contented,’ quoth Rachel, too:
Quoth Abigaile, ‘Yea,’ and Faith, ‘Verily,’
And Charity, ‘Let it be so.’”

Love, as the synonym of Charity, was also a favourite. Love Atkinson went out to Virginia with the early refugees (Hotten, “Emigrants,” p. 68).

[Pg 142]Besides Love and Charity, other variations were Humanity and Clemency:

Clemency was pretty, and deserved to live; but Mercy seems to have monopolized the honours, and, by the aid of John Bunyan’s heroine in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” still has her admirers. Instances are needless, but I furnish one or two for form’s sake. They shall be late ones:

But there were plenty of virtues left. Prudence had such a run, that she became Pru in the sixteenth, and Prudentia in the seventeenth century:

Justice is hard to separate from the legal title; but here is an instance:

Truth, Constancy, Honour, and Temperance were frequently personified at the font. Temperance[Pg 143] had the shortest life; but, if short, it was merry. There is scarcely a register, from Gretna Green to St. Michael’s, without it:

Constance,[41] Constancy, and Constant were common, it will be seen, to both sexes:

Patience, too, was male as well as female. Sir Patience Warde was Lord Mayor of London in 1681. Thus the weaker vessels were not allowed to monopolize the graces. How familiar some of these abstract names had become, the Cavalier[Pg 144] shall tell us in his parody of the sanctimonious Roundheads’ style:

“‘Ay, marry,’ quoth Agatha,
And Temperance, eke, also:
Quoth Hannah, ‘It’s just,’ and Mary, ‘It must,’
‘And shall be,’ quoth Grace, ‘I trow.’”

Several “Truths” occur in the “Chancery Suits” of Elizabeth, and the Greek Alathea arose with it:

Alathea lasted till the eighteenth century was well-nigh out:

[Pg 145]Honour, of course, became Honora, in the eighteenth century, and has retained that form:

Sir Thomas Carew, Speaker of the Commons in James’s and Charles’s reign, had a wife Temperance, and four daughters, Patience, Temperance, Silence, and Prudence (Lodge’s “Illust.,” iii. 37). Possibly, as Speaker, he had had better opportunity to observe that these were the four cardinal parliamentary virtues, especially Silence. This last was somewhat popular, and seems to have got curtailed to “Sill,” as Prudence to “Pru,” and Constance to “Con.” In the Calendar of “State Papers” (June 21, 1666), a man named Taylor, writing to another named Williamson, wishes “his brother Sill would come and reap the sweets of Harwich.” Writing again, five days later, he asks “after his brother, Silence Taylor.”

This was one of the names that crossed the Atlantic and became a fixture in America (Bowditch). It is not, however, to be confounded with Sill, that is, Sybil, in the old Cavalier chorus:

[Pg 146] “‘And God blesse King Charles,’ quoth George,
‘And save him,’ says Simon and Sill.”

Silence is one of the few Puritan names that found its way into the north of England:

The mother of Silence Leigh, who was a widow when she married, was Silence Beswicke (“Memorials of St. Ann, Manchester,” p. 55).[43] The name is found again in the register of Youlgreave Church, Derbyshire (Notes and Queries, Feb. 17, 1877). Curiously enough, we find Camden omitting Silence as a female name of his day, but inserting Tace. In his list of feminine baptismal names, compiled in 1614 (“Remaines,” p. 89), he has

Here, then, is another instance of a Latin name translated into English. I have lighted on a case proving the antiquary’s veracity:

[Pg 147]Tace must have lasted a century, therefore. Silence may be set down to some old Puritan stickler for the admonition of Saint Paul: “Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection” (1 Tim. ii. 11).

The Epistle to the Romans was a never-failing well-spring to the earnest Puritan, and one passage was much applied to his present condition:

There is scarcely a word in this passage that is not inscribed on our registers between 1575 and 1595. Faith, Grace, and Hope have already been mentioned;[44] Camden testified to the existence of Tribulation in 1614; Rejoice was very familiar; Patience, of course, was common:

Even Experience is found—a strange title for an infant.

So ran the epitaph of a missionary (vide Pulpit, Dec. 6, 1827) to the Vineyard Island. It had been handed on to him, no doubt, from some grandfather or grandmother of Elizabeth’s closing days.

A late instance of Diligence occurs in St. Peter, Cornhill:

Obedience had a good run, and began very early:

Obedience Robins is the name of a testator in 1709 (Wills: Archdeaconry of London), while the following epitaph speaks for itself:

“Add to your faith, virtue,” says the Apostle. As a name this grace was late in the field:

[Pg 149]Confidence and Victory were evidently favourites:

Perseverance went out with the emigrants to New England, but I do not find any instance in the home registers. Felicity appeared in one of our law courts last year, so it cannot be said to be extinct; but there is a touch of irony in the first of the following examples:—

Comfort has a pleasant atmosphere about it, and many a parent was tempted to the use of it. It lingered longer than many of its rivals. Comfort Farren’s epitaph may be seen on the floor of Tewkesbury Abbey:

Again, in Dymock Church we find:

Nearly 150 years before this, however, Comfort[Pg 150] Starr was a name not unknown to the more heated zealots of the Puritan party. He was a native of Ashford, in Kent, and after various restless shiftings as a minister, Carlisle being his head-quarters for a time, went to New Plymouth in the Mayflower, in 1620. There he became fellow of Harvard College, but returned to England eventually, and died at Lewes in his eighty-seventh year.

Perhaps the most interesting and popular of the grace names was “Repentance.” In a “new interlude” of the Reformation, entitled the “Life and Repentance of Marie Magdalene,” and published in 1567, one of the chief characters was “Repentance.” At the same time Repentance came into font use, and, odd as it may sound, bade fair to become a permanently recognized name in England:

In the “Sussex Archæological Collections” (xvii.[Pg 151] 148) is found recorded the case of Repentance Hastings, deputy portreeve of Seaford, who in 1643 was convicted of hiding some wreckage:

Evidently his repentance began too early in life to be lasting; but infant piety could not be expected to resist the hardening influence of such a name as this.[45]

Humiliation was a big word, and that alone must have been in its favour:

Humiliation, being proud of his name, determined to retain it in the family—for he had one—but as he had began to worship at St. Dionis Backchurch, the entries of baptism lie there, the spelling of his surname being slightly altered: