In search of the the Old North - Yr Hen Ogledd

My map of ‘Keith Johnsons’ in the USA in my previous posting, nudged me into reporting on some of the interesting work on surname distributions that has been undertaken for England by Kevin Schürer.

The whole paper ‘Surnames and the search for regions’, Local Population Studies, 72 (2004) by K. Schürer can be found at:

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/surnames/papers/schurer.pdf

Kevin is the Director of both the UK Data Archive and Economic and Social Data Service and also Professor of History at the University of Essex.

His paper analyses the geographical distribution of surnames in England in 1881 in an attempt to identify ‘cultural provinces’ or local ‘countries’ (i.e. ‘pays’ in French), following the 19th Century search for districts ‘to which people felt that they belonged’.

That is distinct areas ‘which could evoke sentimental feelings amongst those who had moved away – and which people felt were inhabited by their relations, friends and fellow workers, having a character all of their own’ (see my post on the French human geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache).

While 396,776 unique surnames were recorded in the 1881 Census of England and Wales, there were only 41,203 surnames with a frequency of 25 individuals or more. Schürer uses these surnames as the basis of his study. This equates to an average of one additional surname for every 630 persons across the whole population.

The distribution of surnames was, as is still typical, very skewed. One fifth of the population shared just under 60 surnames; a half of the population were accounted for by some 600 surnames; while the top 10,000 surnames covered 90 per cent of the population.

Conversely, ten per cent of the population, those with the rarest surnames, jointly accounted for some 30,000 surnames, more if those with frequencies of less than 25 are also considered.

So what does the data covering some 26 million people with some 41,000 different surnames reveal about regional diversity?

I have taken the Northern England as my area of interest – drawing on the comments made in Schürer’s paper.

Looking first at the density (i.e. the average number of persons per surname), not surprisingly Wales stands out as having a low surname density (or a high number of people per surname) - but one which is matched in an area consisting of south Lancashire and the south-western parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The low density of surnames in south Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire seems to be associated with a greater propensity towards toponymic (place descriptive) originating surnames (e.g. Grimshaw, Greenhalgh, Ramsbottom, Sykes, Scargill) at the expense of the ‘son’ ending patronymics which are elsewhere typically northern. The latter dilute the toponymics to a greater degree in the areas of Norse (Cumbria) and Danish (east Yorkshire and Lincolnshire) settlement.

Across England, the patronymic and metronymic surnames (those ending in –son, for example, Johnson, Richardson, Jackson, Mallinson) are relatively frequent in proportional terms north and east of the line drawn from Chester to London (i.e. the old Danelaw), excluding Rutland and East Anglia.

It is interesting to note that this nineteenth-century distribution of patronymic and metronymic surnames is very similar to that depicted by the Lay Subsidy Rolls some 500 to 600 years earlier. The processes of industrialisation and migration, even over half a millennium apparently did had fundamentally change the pattern.

An alternative line of analysis is to consider the degree of clustering of surnames (or the extent to which the surnames in a particular place do or do not overlap or correspond with those of another place).

Centring the analysis on Lancaster, there is a high degree of correspondence with adjoining areas. But correspondence is also high with parishes extending through the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and also parts of north Wales.

Conversely, the degree of correspondence is relatively weak with much of the southern part of the county and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

It would appear that there are echoes here of the regional pattern displayed in toponymic surnames.

Refocusing the central point on the city of York, the parishes with the highest degree of surname correspondence are located in the North and East Ridings of the county, but relatively high levels of correspondence are also displayed by parishes in Cumberland, and to a lesser degree Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire.

Equally, most parishes in the west of the country (except Cumbria) record relatively low levels of surname correspondence with York. It may not suit Yorkshire loyalists to learn that the North and East Ridings of ‘God’s own county’ have more in common, using this measure, with north Lancashire and Cumberland than they do with the West Riding - which, in turn, seems bound at the hip with south Lancashire.

Looking more specifically at the degree to which individuals with the same surname were scattered by distance, amongst those regions with the lowest separation distances (with the darkest shading in the map) were south Lancashire and the southern parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire – which again stand out as a common area.

A second belt of low separation distances takes in Cheshire, north Staffordshire and north-east Derbyshire, while a ‘middling belt’ encompasses Shropshire, south Staffordshire, south Derbyshire, stretching over to east Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, with Lincolnshire being joined by Cambridgeshire.

So what does this tell us about the North, as a region, and its distinct cultural districts or 'pays'?

Well, nothing for certain that's for sure - but it is fascinating that the surname evidence supports the common observation that the South Lancashire and West Yorkshire dialects are very close, in spite of their separation by the bleak Pennine hills.

So, could there be a faint outline still sketched on the palimpsest of the ancient Celtic / Brigantian kingdoms of Yr Hen Ogledd (the old 'Welsh North')?

This would certainly fit with the historical references to the relatively longstanding survival of a Celtic kingdom in West Yorkshire (Elmet - and its likely capital 'Leeds') and the presence of a cluster of 'Welsh' placenames in South Lancashire (including 'Wigan').