Re: Bewers - a Dutch surname?

<genlist@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mailman.163.1282568171.18641.genbrit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Just because spelling wasn't standardised, that doesn't mean it was
random, and
we know much more about the history of English sounds and spellings than
genealogists seem to realise. When people wrote names down, they *thought*
that
their spellings, however misguided to our eyes, made some sort of sense.
Individual scribes might make spelling mistakes, but genuine mistakes
would not
find their way into the common spelling of a name.

and, in the quoted document ...

"Nothing we discover about distribution post-1538 can change the fact that
the linguistic derivation of one name from another can only be established
or challenged
by examining the earliest available evidence in the light what we know about
the history of English and of English surnames."

I find this argument troublesome, because it seems to ascribe some sort of
permanence to surnames. I see surname changes in the 19th century that make
no sense to me. Examples from Bedfordshire are "Harbour" coexisting with
"Herbert" (in the village of Knotting) a few lines of "Currington"
transmuting into "Cunnington", "Onion" becoming "Inyon". And I've seen
several more.

My own experience in the 18th and 19th centuries seems to be that illiterate
labourers had no control over their names, they changed according to how
others perceived them. If someone moved to a village where a similar name
existed, there was a significant chance that their name would be changed to
that of the incumbents, whether etymologically sensible or not. And if all
this happened in fairly recent times, where we have significant
documentation of how the name of an individual changed according to
circumstances, goodness knows what was happening in mediaeval times.

Steven


.

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