[76]. Butler; Pott; Dugdale; Mabinogion; Lady C. Guest; Dunlop, Fiction.
Section II.—Names from Beo.
The old verb beo (to make happy or bless) formed the participle beatus (happy or blessed), which was applied by the Church to her departed members, and in time was bestowed on the living. Indeed, in France, béate was so often applied to persons who lived in the profession of great sanctity, that une vieille béate has now come to be used in the sense of a hypocritical pretender.
St. Beatus, or Béat, was an anchorite near Vendôme, in the fifth century; but we do not find instances of his patronage having been sought for men, though in England Beata is a prevailing female name in old registers and on tombstones up to the seventeenth century, when it dies away, having, I strongly suspect, been basely confounded with Betty. Beata and Bettrys are however still used in Wales. This last stands for Beatrice (a blesser), which seems to have been first brought into this island as a substitute for the Gaelic Bethoc (life), of which more in its place.
The original Beatrix, the feminine of Beator (a blesser), is said to have been first borne by a Christian maiden, who, in Diocletian’s persecution, drew the bodies of her martyred brothers from the Tiber, and buried them: afterwards she shared their fate, and her relics were enshrined in a church at Rome, whence her fame spread to all adjacent countries; and her name was already frequent when Dante made the love of his youth, Beatrice Portinari, the theme of his Vita Nuova, and his guide through Paradise. Thus it was a truly national name at Florence; and Shakespeare used the Italian spelling for his high-spirited heroine, thus leading us to discard the old Latin x. It has been a queenly name in Spain, but less common here than it deserves.
| English. | Welsh. | French. | Italian. | Spanish. |
| Beatrix | Bettrys | Béatrix | Beatrice | Beatriz |
| Trix | Bice | |||
| Beatrice | ||||
| Portuguese. | German. | Russian. | Slavonic. | |
| Beatrix | Beatrix | Beatriks | Beatrica |
This same beo is said to be the source of benus, the old form of bonus, which survives in the adverb benè. Both adjective and adverb are familiar in their many derivatives in the southern tongues, as well as in the bonnie and bien that testify to the close connection of France and Scotland when both alike were the foes of England.
The feminine Bona, or Bonne, was probably first invented as a translation of the old German Gutha; for we find a lady, in 1315, designated as Bona, or Gutha, of Göttingen. Bona was used by the daughters of the Counts of Savoy, and in the House of Luxemburg, and came to the crown of France with the daughter of the chivalrous Johann of Luxemburg, the blind King of Bohemia.
St. Benignus, whose name is from the same source, was a disciple of St. Polycarp, and is reckoned as the apostle of Burgundy, where he was martyred, and has been since commemorated by the splendid abbey of St. Benigne, at Dijon, whence it happens that Benin has been common among the peasantry in that part of France, and Benigne is to be found among the string of Christian names borne by the French gentry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Servia has the feminine form, Benyma, shortening it into Bine.
Benedico (to speak well) came to have the technical sense of to bless; and the patriarch of the Western monks rendered Benedictus (blessed) so universally known that different forms of it prevail in all countries, lesser luminaries adding to its saintly lustre.