Americans Still Carry These 750 Year Old English Insults As Surnames

Your English surname may be a medieval insult. Ballard, Whitehead, Stout and Peacock all began as jokes a village made about one man, and we trace seventeen of them through the Domesday Book, the royal pipe rolls and the Hundred Rolls to decode English ancestry, surname meaning and name etymology for every English American, Canadian and Australian family. Number 17: Got... Number 16: Sca... Number 15: Pau... Number 14: Gul... Number 13: Dri... Number 12: Wag... Number 11: Bal... Number 10: Bel... Number 9: Bra... Number 8: Lig... Number 7: Goo... Number 6: Doo... Number 5: Hal... Number 4: Sto... Number 3: Whi... Number 2: Pea... Number 1: ??? One honest note: this is about names and records, not DNA. A nickname surname records what one village thought of one man on one day. What his children were like, and what you are like, is a separate question the record never touches. One entry is on this list because almost everybody gets it wrong. Belcher sounds like the crudest name in the countdown, and the dictionaries agree without argument that it is Norman French for a fair face. The English verb arrived separately, out of Old English, and the two collided in a single spelling four centuries later. The countdown also carries a name the dictionaries cannot settle at all, where one reading is an insult and the other is a compliment, and the record gives no way to choose between them. Sources: the Domesday Book of 1086, the pipe rolls and Curia Regis rolls, the Hundred Rolls of 1273, and the register of Oseney Abbey; P. H. Reaney and R. M. Wilson, A Dictionary of English Surnames; Hanks, Coates and McClure, The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland; Richard McKinley, A History of British Surnames. Narration is a synthetic voice created for this channel. It imitates no real person. #EnglishSurnames #Ancestry #FamilyHistoy Click here to subscribe:    / @thesurnameregister