ONOMASTICS and ITS USES Joel T

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvi:1 (Summer, 2005), 57–62. ONOMASTICS AND ITS USES Joel T. Rosenthal Onomastics and Its Uses Naming, Society and Regional Identity: Papers Presented at a Sympo- sium Jointly Arranged by the Marc Fitch Fund and the Department of Lo- cal History. Edited by David Postles (Oxford, Leopard’s Head Press, 2002) 294 pp. $29.95 Names, Time and Place: Essays in Memory of Richard McKinley. Edited by Della Hooke and David Postles (Oxford, Leopard’s Head Press, 2003) 264 pp. $55.00 Historians have been slow to embrace the ªeld of onomastics, ªnding it too technical, too specialized, and not readily applicable to typical questions and avenues of inquiry. The twenty-two papers in these two volumes (ten in the Postles volume and twelve in Hooke/Postles) give some substance to these whining views of historians’ agenda. Some of the essays are indeed technical; many are specialized in focus and in their use of data; and a few are ad- denda to research projects or to reference volumes rather than free-standing studies. The wide range of topics, subjects, and methodologies embraces family names or surnames; given, baptismal, or Christian names; bynames or nicknames; and place names (though not as a main focus). The essays can be organized by cate- gory, permitting observations along methodological lines and on the light that they shed on societies and social settings. As a collec- tion, the two volumes span the ages from prehistoric times to An- glo-Saxon and early modern England, seventeenth-century New England, and nineteenth-century Sweden. Essays in both volumes explore such themes as mobility and migration, as well as other behavioral or biological aspects of a given population or universe, rather than onomastics per se. Though people are traced and their movements analyzed by way Joel T. Rosenthal is Distinguished Professor of History, State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (Uni- versity Park, 2003); Late Medieval England, 1377–1485: A Bibliography of Historical Scholarship, 1990–1999 (Kalamazoo, 2003). © 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0022195054025906 by guest on 02 October 2021 58 | JOEL T. ROSENTHAL of their names, because of how they are labeled in sources, there is little technical or internal analysis of their names and naming patterns. Had these men, women, and even children been traceable by way of a numbered id card or some comparable signiªer of in- dividual, family, and collective identity (such as a physical or ge- netic mark of distinction like ear size and shape), the ªndings would have been much the same. Roger Thompson looks at 2,141 people who made “the great migration” from the eastern counties of England to New England between 1629 and 1640. Most of them came from stable English stock with local roots known to go back for ªve or more generations. Such long-term geographical or regional stability was the dominant mode; most pre-migration movement had been local, within a small radius; the same, or a comparable, pattern proved to be the prevailing one in the New World as well. Furthermore, this pattern holds pretty much across the socio-economic spectrum—rich or poor, Old World or New. Daniel Scott Smith, in an essay that is almost a se- quel to Thompson’s, looks at how isonymic clusters in eigh- teenth-century Massachusetts (especially in records from 1771) help to decode patterns of family inheritance, social stratiªcation, and subsequent relocation within or across the colony. In this case, other social forces—that is, other than merely sharing a surname— seem to offer better prospects for following the distribution of wealth, the strength of family bonding, and the various paths of inheritance and transmission. The essays by Thompson and Smith, as well as others, em- phasize the idea that many who change their place of residence in traditional society often go only a short distance, at least as mea- sured in miles, greater though it often seemed in terms of culture and economic opportunity and horizons. This ªnding is revision- ism of a mild sort, since many early studies tended to overestimate distance traveled and duration of peregrination. Kevin Schürer’s study of three Essex parishes in the second half of the nineteenth century illustrates the force of “place-oriented” loyalty when ex- amined in the context of small-scale or local-regional analysis. Al- though the river Stour may not look very imposing on the map, it served as an “artiªcial perception barrier,” a signiªcant factor in understanding the low incidence of exogamous marriage between young women and men of nearby parishes of adjacent English counties. John Langton and Göram Hoppe present a comparable Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0022195054025906 by guest on 02 October 2021 ONOMASTICS AND ITS USES | 59 study of migration/non-migration in their examination of regional identity and economic opportunity and development in nineteenth-century Ostergotland (Sweden). Good jobs, particularly in the developing iron industry, tended to hold people and to break or terminate long cycles of mobility, regardless of former patterns of restless movement, whereas necessity kept others on the move for as long as they can be followed. In most studies, names are only a label; they rarely assume, or are assigned, causative power. However, in some instances, the choice or use of a name unpeels a hidden or subterranean layer of the social and cultural onion. Tracking names (and those so named) across space (as borne by those tied to each other by vary- ing degrees of social and familial linkage) can be matched with tracking them through time. Jeremy Boulton’s examination of the strategies that governed the choice of baptismal names for the children of early modern London picks up an issue of great interest to medievalists (such as this reviewer). Who chose the child’s name; who was thereby commemorated or honored? Grandparents, godparents, remote ancestors, and deceased siblings are the cus- tomary iconic ªgures. Working forward from the sixteenth century, the pattern is that godparents are losing the pride of place that they had once held. Though looking only at male children, and arguing outward from a micro-slice of London’s population, par- ents were apparently claiming (or reclaiming?) the power to choose—or to impose—in an area crucial to the establishment of identity and the assertion of patriarchal continuity. In a complex study, Evelyn Lord extends this approach to probe the correlations between family naming patterns and inheritance systems, thereby separating eldest sons (under primogeni- ture) from their siblings and landlords and “owners” from lesser holders, tenants, and the landless in the English countryside. Each social class had its own tradition. In some of these studies, names provide a way to detect patterns of social development and inter- action. Names and patterns of behavior also clearly have a recipro- cal or dialectical relationship. Nominal links can be read as a social shorthand that proclaimed—at least to those in the know—the ex- istence of bonds and networks not otherwise explicable. The links between local stability, migration, and class are fur- ther developed in essays that emanate from scholars of local history (particularly those working out of the University of Leicester). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0022195054025906 by guest on 02 October 2021 60 | JOEL T. ROSENTHAL Harold Fox examines the relationships between agricultural ter- rain, rural prosperity, and the alternative accommodations (and life styles) available to farmworkers in ªfteenth- and sixteenth-century Devon. The size of farms, their yields and fertility, and the land- lord’s reliance on either regular or casual labor are the key vari- ables (rather than names per se). Though Fox’s study is more in the realm of local, agricultural, or economic history, workers’ names provide the ºagstones from which the pathway is con- structed. David Hey offers another case study, based on material from the northern and northwestern English counties, that argues for stable families—to the extent that names tell the story—from the mid-Tudor era into the nineteenth century. Lord presents comparable ªndings for early modern Surrey, with due regard for large differences within a small region when contrasting the adjacent agriculture (and pastoral) worlds of the weald, the greensand, and the downs. Suella Postles and David Postles argue for the long- term presence and importance of regional “core families” who survived the contingencies of life and demographic fortune, as well as assaults from modern scholars who placed too much em- phasis on seasonal and occupational migration without paying sufªcient attention to the entire course of the life cycle. Unlike the essays above, which portray historical societies via the study of names and the social patterns that they illuminate, if not create, others examine issues of settlement, naming, and demographic assimilation in such long-established onomastic questions as the extent and vectors of Viking settlement in Britain. Gillian Fellows-Jensen’s carefully nuanced examination of Scandi- navian place names in Britain, by way of zones of settlement and language, explores complex paths and contours of migration that were once thought explicable simply by a name count and some etymological analysis. It is accepted that no single, one-swoop Scandinavian invasion of, and/or migration into, the British Isles took place, but rather multiple invasions alongside subsequent internal movements. Danes who ªrst settled north of Edinburgh and then moved into eastern England create a different scenario from those about to leave home for the ªrst time; naming patterns are a sort of ultraviolet light that illuminates what is not otherwise visi- ble.

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