The multiplicity and individualism of English surnames form a strange contrast to the tautology of Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and some parts of Southern Scotland, where, with rare exceptions, a name alone means nothing. Great numbers of English names carry of themselves distinction, though the possession of them may sometimes be accidental; or again, when among the early American colonists you find such names as Baskerville, Fettiplace, or Champernowne, if you know your England at all, you know for a certainty who they are and whence they came. But the bulk of English surnames have no particular social significance one way or the other, though many at once proclaim their county, particularly in the lower ranks of life, which have shifted less. Upon the whole our names are perhaps not very sonorous or inspiring. Some are hideously ugly, while many seem of themselves to preclude the possibility of gentle blood, though this is never a safe assumption. Constantly in remote country churches one finds the place of honour among the dead occupied for two or three centuries by a name that seems curiously ill-assorted with broad acres and coat armour. Sometimes it may be a long extinct one whose place knows it no more; or again, one of those still surviving families that have flourished in respectable obscurity, but in local regard, for centuries without ever catching the public ear, or perhaps even the ear of the next county but one!
Now Prodgers was once upon a time the supreme conception of a comical vulgarian with Mr. Punch. But the only Prodgers I ever heard of in real life was that ancient family of Wernddu and Gwernvale in Monmouthshire, now extinct or territorially so. Their traditional quarrel with their cousins the Powells of Perther on the score of family precedence led to a well-known humorous incident, which illustrates in entertaining fashion the passion of Welshmen for these things as opposed to the comparative apathy of their Saxon neighbours. The once contemned cockney pseudonym of Punch is of course a corrupted Welsh name (Ap-Rodger), and curiously rare: one of the very few, in fact, that of itself would suggest gentle blood. Rodgers were evidently scarce when the Welsh in the sixteenth century found the inconvenience of pedigree nomenclature and adopted the Christian name of their father (usually) as a permanent surname, rejecting the picturesque suggestion, as it is said, of Henry VIII. that the names of their estates or farms should be adopted; the consequence being that both have to be used to-day in most Welsh counties, on every occasion, from sheer necessity.
Trade could never have entered very seriously into the life of the armiger in most Welsh counties before the eighteenth century, for the sufficient reason that there was none. What the Welsh younger son did must remain a mystery, for Welsh social life between the Reformation, which darkened rather than illuminated the Principality, and the Hanoverian period, is itself rather obscure. There is no reason to suppose that the predilection for pedigrees which distinguishes the Welsh would have included any prejudice against trade had the opportunity arisen. But the genealogical instinct of the Cambrian is not altogether due, I think, to pride of race. A venial vanity, no doubt, has a fair share in it, but genealogy of itself has a strong detached interest for Welshmen. You will find men among all classes with an entirely impersonal interest in the ancestry of their neighbours. ‘I should like to show you a little collection of pedigrees I have at home’ is an offer I have had frequently made to me in Wales, and I can assure the reader that a Welsh MS. pedigree is a tolerably formidable document. I myself knew well a working man in Cardiganshire who spent his leisure hours in walking about collecting such material purely for his own amusement. Imagine a Wiltshire ploughman thus occupied!
Welsh social history is a thing apart. You do not expect to run up against a mercer or a goldsmith in a Welsh family tree which soars away through generations of virtual fixtures on the soil, and through a dim and pastoral past, till it finds its inevitable source in one or other of the five royal or fifteen noble tribes of Wales. And there you are! Rather disconcerting, however, is the small scale on which the dignity of a Welsh armiger must often have supported itself, not so very long ago. In the small grey stone houses still surviving in fair numbers, one seems to have arrived at a life so primitive as to require some readjustment of social values; men farming their own land, and not too much of it nor yet too fertile, beyond a doubt. I fear that, despite the pedigree, our London haberdasher’s well-dowered daughter would have turned up her nose at an average Welsh squire in Elizabeth’s golden days. The Welsh were never great sea-goers, though a few, like Morgan, rose to fame as buccaneers. The superfluous sons must have taken to farming in some fashion, and though never much given to colonising there was an agricultural movement into Pennsylvania early in the eighteenth century. This probably included a good many of the Welsh gentry, for a contemporary English traveller, describing the characteristics of the various groups of settlers, alludes to the Welsh as ‘greatly devoted to hunting and dogs.’[6]
Again, under the healthy, happy-go-lucky English social system, which must always, as now, have bewildered the foreigner, the intrusion of a genealogically unqualified female and her strain of blood into a family is quite overlooked. Marriage with respectable and often no doubt quite presentable women of neither birth nor fortune occurs constantly in pedigrees, as one would expect. But when only a female remains to continue the line and her husband takes her name this attitude is conveniently reversed and the paternal blood ignored. When that wonderful lady, Miss Kynnersley, of Loxley, in Staffordshire, married the most excellent Baron de Bode, her family strongly objected for the good old English reason that the baron was a foreigner. But when the bride arrived in Germany the tables were turned, the baron’s relations withholding any recognition of her till a satisfactory account of the lady’s pedigree was furnished by the Heralds’ College. The Kynnersleys were fortunately of the élite of our gentry, and all was satisfactory. But when a further demand for eight successive generations of armigers on the female side was made, any country squire’s daughter in England may well have felt some anxiety. However, the many who have read her delightful letters will remember that this clever, capable, and pushful English baroness secured the friendship and intimacy of much bigger people all over Europe than the mother and sisters of a German baron, though she had this too. But her brother the squire never forgave her.
A. G. Bradley.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Lawyers acquired land very freely in Scotland at all times. Whatever may have been the methods by which some legal founders of families in England acquired wealth, Scottish writers, including Sir Walter Scott, give a dark picture of the lawyer laird. The comparative poverty of land-owners, and land being the sole security for money in the country, gave the sharp man of business peculiar opportunities. In addition to this the cryptic phraseology of Scottish law, so inimitably set forth by Sir Walter himself, helped to bewilder and confound the unfortunate laird caught in its meshes.
[2] Pynnar’s Survey of Ulster, 1617.
[3] Ulster Presbyterians formed the chief influx after this period. They went to the Back country and did not assimilate with the English colonists.