Towards a Cornish Parliament?

Or to retain the status quo where the decisions that affect the people of Cornwall are made from a centralised government that's currently proposing Cornwall be governed by an administrative body in Devon? ‘The decision to recognise the unique identity of the Cornish, now affords them the same status under the European Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities as the UK’s other Celtic people, the Scots, the Welsh and…

http://rysrudh.uk/2025/01/07/towards-a-cornish-parliament/

We’ve seen a list of the 20 or so commonest surnames in the nineteenth century. But what about the others? Over the next few months when I have time I’ll post the top 200 names (combining spelling variants as far as possible) in batches of ten, with their supposed type and the number of households with that name in 1861.

To recap, here’s the amended top 20.

And here’s the next ten.

Finally, we meet some names that didn’t arise from a first name. Cock for example was originally a nickname with various suggested meanings. It was widespread in Cornwall by the 1500s and the broad similarity of its distribution in the 1520s and the 1640s implies that it was already a fixed surname in most places in 1500.

Maps of all these surnames in the 1500s and 1641 can be found here.

Further details of most will be found in my The Surnames of Cornwall.

https://bernarddeacon.com/2024/09/11/cornwalls-top-surnames-the-list-continues/

#familyHistory #surnames

This month I shall be publishing a new revised and extended edition of The Surnames of Cornwall which, as of today, will be temporarily unavailable online. For the first time, this book will also be available in hardback. The updated edition includes a further 100 surnames distinctive to Cornwall, bringing the total to around 850 separate surnames with notes on their origin, meaning and geography. Several entries have been amended, revised or updated in the light of recent scholarship and the invaluable help provided by family historians since the original was published in 2019.

To mark this, over the next few weeks I will be posting a series of expanded accounts of the 20 most commonly occurring surnames in Cornwall in 1861. These may not (almost invariably are not) unique to Cornwall or even in some cases more likely to be encountered in Cornwall than in some other parts over the Tamar. Nonetheless, anyone with a Cornish heritage who possesses one of these surnames can regard themselves as having a Cornish lineage as impeccable as those with surnames beginning Tre, Pol or Pen.

https://bernarddeacon.com/2024/08/05/coming-soon-a-new-edition-of-the-surnames-of-cornwall/

#Cornwall #familyHistory

What were the most common surnames in Cornwall in 1861? But first, why 1861? At this time – and indeed until the 1890s – in-migration into Cornwall from England was minimal, Cornwall having a higher proportion of locally born residents than any English county. Mass migration had set in during the late 1840s but the largest exodus was still to come, after the later 1860s. That took with it many distinctively Cornish surnames. But the 1850s was the decade when Cornwall’s mining economy peaked. For all these reasons 1861 seemed the best choice to capture the traditional, native stock of surnames.

The 20th most numerous Cornish surname in 1861 was Phillips and its direct spelling variants. In the medieval period Philip was a common first name, in part owing to Philip being one of Christ’s disciples, usually a short route to popularity (excepting Judas). Interestingly, it was also a favourite in south-west Wales. It had been adopted as a surname across Cornwall by the early 1500s, although by the 1600s confined mainly to mid and west Cornwall. This was because a vernacular version Philp emerged in east Cornwall in the late 1500s and became a separate and common name there.

Unlike Philp, Philip began to receive a suffixed -s in the 1630s. By the mid-1700s this process was complete. Philip was now Philips or Phillips. By 1861, when there were 424 households in Cornwall headed by a Phillips, the distribution of the surname reflected Cornwall’s population geography, with most living in the Central Mining District of Camborne-Redruth and a secondary concentration at St Austell.

https://bernarddeacon.com/2024/08/06/cornwalls-top-20-surnames-the-countdown-begins/

#familyHistory #Phillips #Philp

The medieval first names introduced to the British Isles from France by the Normans spawned a bewildering number of variants. In the late medieval period, when the number of first names was shrinking, this had the advantage of helping to differentiate folk with the same second name.

The name Richard was particularly prolific when it came to coining offshoots. Richard and Rickard were interchangeable in medieval times, reflecting two pronunciations. Rickard produced the short forms Rick and Dick, which sometimes became vernacular Hick.

The first map below indicates that Hick in Cornwall must have had many different origins. But it also suggests its heartland lay in mid-Cornwall from the north coast at Padstow through Bodmin to Fowey in the south and Liskeard to the south east. This pattern had become even more obvious by the mid-seventeenth century.

In the early 1500s, only five per cent of Hicks listed in the tax returns had gained an <-s>. By 1641 90 per cent had. How and why had this additional <s> appeared? Surnames ending with <s> originated in the English south-west Midlands – Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Herefordshire in particular – when the poorer classes began to adopt hereditary surnames after the late 1200s. From about 1550 onwards some surnames from first names, like Hick, that did not originally have an <s> began to adopt them too. This was possibly by analogy with the earlier surnames that ended with <s> or possibly it just became the fashionable thing to do when a herd instinct set in.

In Wales when hereditary surnames were adopted after the 1500s an added <s> became particularly common in names like Williams and Jones. It’s no coincidence that this was also the case in Cornwall, where many second names in the Cornish-speaking community only became hereditary surnames after 1500.

In 1861, when there were 440 households in Cornwall headed by someone named Hicks, there had been some drift westwards to the mining districts of Redruth and St Just. However, the original heartland is still visible in the map of Hickses at that point.

https://bernarddeacon.com/2024/08/07/cornwalls-top-20-surnames-19-hicks/

#familyHistory #Hicks