Maggie's Farm

I was curious about when English surnames became fixed in time by inheritance rather than being individual descriptors of convenience which were only used for one's lifetime.

First, we have to go back to the pre-surname era. In pre-medieval England, the population was so small, and most villages so tiny, that, if your name was Merthin, everybody around knew who you were. Then the Norman Conquest Frenchified England. Many or most of the colorful old Anglo-Saxon given names (like Aldwyn and Odelia and Theomund)  disappeared and were replaced with names of French origin like these four:

It has been estimated that almost 50% of the male babies born by 1200 A.D. were using just four common first names: William (15%), Robert (12%), Richard (11%) and Henry (10%). Such percentages show the need, even by the Middle Ages, for a second name of identification. As a result, patronymic naming conventions came into play whereby sons were named after their fathers, and sometimes even after their mothers.

As with traditional Scandinavian names, patronymic surnames are not fixed but are labels of convenience: they change with each generation. "Which John do you mean?" "Oh, John Robert's son.") Robert Richardson's son John becomes John Robertson. (Shifting surnames, of course, persists with women still generally taking on their husband's surname.)

The Medieval Warm Period saw a rapid growth in the English population, with the growth of market towns and cathedral towns, often with thousands in population. Descriptors became necessary: John (who lives on the) Hill, William (the) Carpenter, Jack (who came here from) Aisnley, Roger (the) Knight. By late Medieval times, descriptive (but not fixed) surnames were fairly universal except in small farming villages. These were, generally speaking,

Place names
Occupation names
Patronyms
Descriptive or nicknames

Thus we had Christian (given) names, and descriptive, non-hereditary surnames. As best I can tell, literacy and record-keeping led the way towards fixed surnames around or slightly before 1500 (although they were probably implied before that among the land-owning aristocracy: eg William, Lord of Westmoreland's sons were probably forever Westmoreland in some way unless the King punished you by taking your land away, or cutting your head off.) As Wiki says:

In Britain, hereditary surnames were adopted in the 13th and 14th centuries, initially by the aristocracy but eventually by everyone. By 1400, most English and Scottish people had acquired surnames, but many Scottish and Welsh people did not adopt surnames until the 17th century, or even later. Henry VIII (1509 - 1547) ordered that marital births be recorded under the surname of the father.

Ah yes, there's the answer: government edict, no doubt for control and taxation purposes.

Because of this, it is difficult or impossible to trace non-aristocratic English geneologies much further back than 1500, when John Miller's son Jack the carpenter was named Jack Miller instead of Jack the Carpenter. Before that, there were minimal church records and either no surnames, or no consistency in them if there were any. Furthermore, it did not take long for every town to be filled with unrelated Smiths, Carpenters, Millers, Weavers, Masons, Brewers, Bakers, Hills, Fields, and Rivers. And Bankers (lived near a riverbank - there were no "banks") and Farmers (farm tax-collectors, not tillers of the soil). It's funny, but although they made up the bulk of the population at one time, Serf never became popular as a surname while Freeman did...

Perhaps serfdom isn't all it's cracked up to be, despite its European and maybe North American comeback these days.

More tomorrow, including why, if you are of English or French ancestry, you are almost certainly related to Charlemagne -