It is to Norman influence we owe the firm establishment of several names, which had already got securely settled on the Continent on account of the odour of sanctity that had gathered about them. The Reformation threw into the shade of oblivion the memories of many holy men and women who in their day and generation exercised a powerful influence on our general nomenclature. Many of my readers will be unaware that there were three St. Geralds and three St. Gerards held in high repute previous to the eleventh century. The higher Norman families seem to have been attached to both, though ‘Gerard’ has made the deepest impression. ‘Gerald’ and ‘Fitz-Gerald’ are the commonest descendants of the first. As respects ‘Gerard,’ such names as ‘Garret Widdrington,’ or ‘Jarrarde Hall,’ or ‘Jarat Nycholson,’ found among our Yorkshire entries, serve to show how far the spirit of verbal corruption can advance; and our many ‘Garrets,’ ‘Jarrets,’ ‘Jarratts,’ and ‘Jerards,’ as surnames, will probably testify the same to all ages.[[37]] As there were twenty-eight ‘Walters’ in Domesday Survey, we cannot attribute the popularity of that name to St. Walter, abbot of Fontenelle in the middle of the twelfth century. But, as Miss Yonge shows, it had been spread over Aquitaine in the earlier part of the tenth century, through the celebrity of a saintly Walter who resided in that dukedom about the year 990. Few sobriquets enjoyed such a share of attention as this. In one of its nicknames, that of ‘Water,’[[38]] we are reminded of Suffolk’s death in Shakespeare’s Henry VI., where the murderer says—
My name is Walter Whitmore.
How now! why start’st thou? What, doth death affright!
Suffolk. Thy name affrights me, in whose sound is death.
A cunning man did calculate my birth,
And told me that by water I should die.
University men will remember a play of another kind upon its other form of ‘Wat,’ in the poems of C. S. C., whose power of rhyming, at least, I have never seen surpassed, even by Ingoldsby himself. He thus begins one of his happiest efforts—
Ere the morn the east has crimsoned,
When the stars are twinkling there,
(As they did in Watts’s Hymns, and