"Cicer, a small pulse, lesse than pease" (Cooper).
Such are Barleycorn and Peppercorn, the former found in French as Graindorge. The rather romantic names Avenel and Peverel seem to be of similar formation, from Lat. avena, oats, and piper, pepper. In fact Peverel is found in Domesday as Piperellus, and Pepperell still exists. With these may be mentioned Carbonel, corresponding to the French surname Charbonneau, a little coal.
CHAPTER XXII ADJECTIVAL NICKNAMES
"The man replied that he did not know the object of the building; and to make it quite manifest that he really did not know, he put an adjective before the word 'object,' and another—that is, the same—before the word 'building.' With that he passed on his way, and Lord Jocelyn was left marvelling at the slender resources of our language, which makes one adjective do duty for so many qualifications."
(BESANT, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, ch. xxxviii.)
The rejection by the British workman of all adjectives but one is due to the same imaginative poverty which makes the adjective "nice" supreme in refined circles, and which limits the schoolgirl to "ripping" and her more self-conscious brother to the tempered "decent." But dozens of useful adjectives, now either obsolete or banished to rustic dialect, are found among our surnames. The tendency to accompany every noun by an adjective seems to belong to some deep-rooted human instinct. To this is partly due the Protean character of this part of speech, for the word, like the coin, becomes dulled and worn in circulation and needs periodically to be withdrawn and replaced. An epithet which is complimentary in one generation is ironical in the next and eventually offensive. Moody, with its northern form Mudie, which now means morose, was once valiant (Chapter I); and pert, surviving in the name Peart, meant active, brisk, etc.—
"Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth."
(Midsummer Night's Dream, i. 1.)