those which the Norman nobles who
came over at the Conquest handed on from father to son. These people
generally took the name of the place from which they had come in
Normandy. In this way names like _Robert de Courcy_ ("Robert of
Courcy") came in; and many of these names, which are considered very
aristocratic, still remain. We have _de Corbet_, _de Beauchamp_, _de
Colevilles_, and so on. Sometimes the _de_ has been dropped.
Sometimes, again, people took their names in the same way from places
in England. We find in old writings names like _Adam de Kent_, _Robert
de Wiltshire_, etc. Here, again, the prefix has been dropped, and the
place-name has been kept as a surname. _Kent_ is quite a well-known
surname, as also are _Derby_, _Buxton_, and many other names of
English places.

The Normans introduced another kind of name, which became very common
too. They were a lively people, like the modern French, and were very
fond of giving nicknames, especially names referring to people's
personal appearance. We get the best examples of this in the
nicknames applied to the Norman kings. We have William _Rufus_, or
"the Red;" Richard _Coeur-de-Lion_, or "Lion-Hearted;" Henry
_Beauclerc_, or "the Scholar."

These names of kings were not handed down in their families. But in
ordinary families it was quite natural that a nickname applied to the
father should become a surname. It is from such nicknames that we get
surnames like _White_, _Black_, _Long_, _Young_, _Short_, and so on.
All these are, of course, well-known surnames to-day, and though many
men named _Long_ may be small, and many named _Short_ may be tall, we
may guess that this was not the case with some far-off ancestor.
Sometimes _man_ was added to these adjectives, and we get names like
_Longman_, _Oldman_, etc.

Sometimes these names were used in the French of the Normans, and we
get two quite different surnames, though they really in the first
place had the same meaning. Thus we have _Curt_ for _Short_, and the
quite well-known surname _Petit_, which would be _Short_ or _Little_
in English. The name _Goodheart_ was _Bun-Couer_ in Norman-French, and
from this came _Bunker_, which, if we knew nothing of its history,
would not seem to mean _Goodheart_ at all. So the name _Tait_ came
from _Tete_, or _Head_; and we may guess that the first ancestor of
the numerous people with this name had something remarkable about
their heads. The name _Goodfellow_ is really just th