CHAPTER IV

. BROWN, JONES, AND ROBINSON

"Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs and such-like folk, have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be somewhat astonished-if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken-to find how small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns." (Tom Brown's Schooldays, ch. i.)

Brown, Jones, and Robinson have usurped in popular speech positions properly belonging to Smith, Jones and Williams. But the high position of Jones and Williams is due to the Welsh, who, replacing a string of Aps by a simple genitive at a comparatively recent date, have given undue prominence to a few very common names; cf. Davies, Evans, etc. If we consider only purely English names, the triumvirate would be Smith, Taylor, and Brown. Thus, of our three commonest names, the first two are occupative and the third is a nickname. French has no regular equivalent, though Dupont and Durand are sometimes used in this way--

"Si Chateaubriand avait eu nom Durand ou Dupont, qui sait si son Génie du Christianisme n'eût point passé pour une capucinade?"

(F. Brunetiére.)

The Germans speak of Müller, Meyer and Schulze, all rural names, and it is perhaps characteristic that two of them are official. Meyer is an early loan from Lat. major, and appears to have originally meant something like overseer. Later on it acquired the meaning of farmer, in its proper sense of one who farms, i.e. manages on a profit-sharing system, the property of another. It is etymologically the same as our Mayor, Mair, etc. Schulze, a village magistrate, is cognate with Ger. Schuld, debt, and our verb shall.

OCCUPATIVE NAMES

Taking the different classes of surnames separately, the six commonest occupative names are Smith, Taylor, Clark, Wright, Walker, Turner. If we exclude Clark, as being more often a nickname for the man who could read and write, the sixth will be Cooper, sometimes spelt Cowper.

The commanding position of Smith is due to the fact that it was applied to all workers in every kind of metal. The modern Smiths no doubt include descendants of medieval blacksmiths, whitesmiths, bladesmiths, locksmiths, and many others, but the compounds are not common as surnames. We find, however, Shoosmith, Shearsmith, and Nasmyth, the last being more probably for earlier Knysmith, i.e. knife-smith, than for nail-smith, which was supplanted by Naylor. Grossmith I guess to be an accommodated form of the Ger. Grobschmied, blacksmith, lit. rough smith, and Goldsmith is very often a Jewish name for Ger. Goldschmid.

Wright, obsolete perhaps as a trade name, has given many compounds, including Arkwright, a maker of bins, or arks as they were once called, Tellwright, a tile maker, and many others which need no interpretation. The high position of Taylor is curious, for there were other names for the trade, such as Seamen, Shapster, Parmenter (