Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 223

With this volume, the eighth in the series that began in 1973, the English Surnames Survey, funded by the Marc Fitch Fund and housed in what is now the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, comes to an end. Previous volumes in the series have been county surveys; this one is devoted to the use of onomastic evidence in tackling the elusive concept of the North as a separate region. It is based on an impressive range of printed sources – lay subsidies, poll taxes, manor court rolls, cartularies, etc. – from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with some evidence from the twelfth century and more from parish registers in the early modern period. A series of maps shows the geographical distributions of various names to demonstrate their northern provenance or their confinement to local societies within the wider North (but it is not always clear whether blank counties signify the lack of examples or the absence of evidence).

Dr Postles is not concerned with those numerous northern names that are derived from farms, hamlets and villages, including such splendid examples as Ackroyd, Entwistle, Ramsbottom and Sowerbutts, for such names were obviously formed locally. It should be noted, however, that in the North they account for about 50 per cent of surnames. His concern is with other categories of bynames and hereditary surnames at the period of their formation. His scholarly work adds a great deal to our understanding of these processes. But how far do they help in defining a distinctive northern region?

He begins, with suitable caution, by considering whether names such as North (or Norris), South, East and West relate to migrants. The answer to his question can be provided by much later evidence, that of the 1881 census returns, which have been shown to point to the ‘homes of family names’ in much earlier times. At that time, the 9,929 Norths were living mainly in the North (with 2,095 in the West Riding) and in Lincolnshire and Leicestershire. The 12,865 people named Norris were also found predominantly in the North (with 2,245 in Lancashire). Those named South lived mainly in the South, and (if we exclude London) the highest number of those named East were living in Lincolnshire, with very few in western England. Only the widespread name West does not conform to this pattern. It is clear that such names mostly referred to people who were living not far north, south, east or west of a locality, just as place-names such as Norton, Sutton, Aston and Weston were coined in a local context.

Dr Postles acknowledges that the naming patterns which he observes are not confined to the North, though they are far more evident there. The problem, of course, is where is the southern boundary of the northern region? The distributions on his maps often extend down to Lincolnshire and Leicestershire and occasionally into Norfolk. He concludes his discussion of occupational names, for example, by referring to ‘the spilling out of the North into lower reaches’, but notes that their density ‘was more intense in the northernmost reaches, so that they can be construed as characterizing the North if not exclusively northern’. He also recognizes the importance of pays or ‘country’ within the northern region. Indeed, he is rightly concerned to emphasize this point in each of his discussions of particular forms of name. But when we look at the map on p.95, which shows that in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries elliptical topographical bynames such as Northiby were largely confined to north Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire, with some spillage into the North Riding, we wonder how this can be reconciled with the notion of a northern region beyond the Humber and the Mersey.

In a book that is packed with detailed evidence it is, of course, only to be expected that some interpretations might be questioned. Thus, in an interesting discussion of occupational bynames, it might be noted that Badger is not especially northern, as it has a strong presence in the West Midlands, and that Collier is widespread nationally, as it was more commonly applied to a charcoal burner than to a coal miner. It is also interesting to note that Neathird, which features so strongly in Leicestershire on his map based on the poll tax returns of 1377–81, should be included in his examples of the instability of bynames, for it does not survive as a surname.

The strength of this book is in the thorough assembling of evidence for many different types of byname. Although it is already well known that some forms, such as names ending in -son or -man or occupational names such as Walker, Lister or Thacker, are predominantly northern, Dr Postles has provided firm evidence placed in a wider context. He is particularly informative on the formation of bynames from surviving pre-Conquest personal names, pet forms of names that are often concealed by Latin forms in taxation records but are revealed in manor court rolls, ‘inventive and sometimes salacious forms of nicknames’, and a distinctive topographical vocabulary that includes Scandinavian terms such bek, kar, lund, and scale, etc. Throughout, he is concerned with the various bynames that were acquired by peasant farmers, many of which (at least in Yorkshire) developed into hereditary surnames during the first half of the fourteenth century. His book is therefore of interest to medieval agrarian historians and not just to specialists in the field of onomastics.