Fare-well seems a shade more worldly than Live-well, but was common enough:
“1589, July 16, Baptized Fare-well, son of Thomas Hamlen, gent.”—St. Dunstan-in-the-West, London.
“1723, Sep. 5. Buried Mr. Fare-well Perry, rector of St. Peter’s.”—Marlborough.
A writer in Notes and Queries, September 9, 1865 (Mr. Lloyd of Thurstonville), says—
“A man named Sykes, resident in this locality, had four sons whom he named respectively Love-well, Do-well, Die-well, and Fare-well. Sad to say, Fare-well Sykes met an untimely end by drowning, and was buried this week (eleventh Sunday after Trinity) in Lockwood churchyard. The brothers Live-well, Do-well, and Die-well were the chief mourners on the occasion.”
It seems almost impossible that the father should have restored three of the Puritan names accidentally. Probably he had seen or heard of these names in some Yorkshire church register. One of these names, Farewell, is still used in the county, as the directories show. I see Fare-well Wardley, in Sheffield, in the West Riding Directory for 1867.
This closes the exhortatory class. It is both numerous and interesting, and some of its instances grew very familiar, and looked as if they might find a permanent place in our registers. The eighteenth century saw them all succumb, however.
(d.) Accidents of Birth.
Evidently it was a Puritan notion that a quiverful of children was a matter for thanksgiving. There is a pleasant ring in some of the names selected by religious gossips at this time, or witnesses, as I should rather term them. Free-gift was one such, and was on the point of becoming an accepted English name, when the Restoration stepped in, and it had to follow the way of the others. It began with the Presbyterian clergy, judging by the date of its rise:[50]
“1616, ——. Buried Mary, wiffe of Free-gift Mabbe.”—Chiddingly, Sussex.