round them. [Footnote: See Guppy,
Homes of Family Names.] The names Daft and Turney, well known in
Nottingham, appear in the county in the Hundred Rolls. Cheetham, the
name of a place now absorbed in Manchester, is as a surname ten times
more numerous there than in London, and the same is true of many
characteristic north-country names, such as the Barraclough,
Murgatroyd, and Sugden of Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. The
transference of Murgatroyd (Chapter XII) to Cornwall, in Gilbert and
Sullivan's Ruddigore, must have been part of the intentional
topsy-turvydom in which those two bright spirits delighted.

Diminutives in -kin, from the Old Dutch suffix -ken, are still found
in greatest number on the east coast that faces Holland, or in Wales,
where they were introduced by the Flemish weavers who settled in
Pembrokeshire in the reign of Henry I. It is in the border counties,
Cheshire, Shropshire, Hereford, and Monmouth, that we find the old
Welsh names such as Gough, Lloyd, Onion (Enion), Vaughan (Chapter
XXII). The local Gape, an opening in the cliffs, is pretty well
confined to Norfolk, and Puddifoot belongs to Bucks and the adjacent
counties as it did in 1273. The hall changes hands as one conquering
race succeeds another--

"Where is Bohun? Where is de Vere? The lawyer, the farmer, the silk
mercer, lies perdu under the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to
say nothing" (Emerson, English Traits),

but the hut keeps its ancient inhabitants. The descendant of the
Anglo-Saxon serf who cringed to Front de Boeuf now makes way
respectfully for Isaac of York's motor, perhaps on the very spot where
his own fierce ancestor first exchanged the sword for the ploughshare
long before Alfred's day.

CHAPTER V. THE ABSORPTION OF FOREIGN NAMES

"I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family,
though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who
settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandize, and
leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he
married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good
family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson
Kreutznaer; but by the usual corruption of words in English, we are
now called--nay, we call ourselves and write our name--Crusoe" (Robinson
Crusoe, ch. i.).

Any student of our family nomenclature must be struck by the fact that
the number of foreign names now recognizable in Engl