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Laura, there's a marvelous book, "The Miracle of Language," by Charlton Laird, published in 1953 and undoubtedly long since out of print, that I found among my father's possessions after his death. It provides a fascinating review of English spelling.
When the Anglo-Saxons learned to read and write, they learned Latin. When they began writing their own language, which of course varied immensely in pronunciation from place to place, the Anglo-Saxon scribes used late Latin phonetic values, tried to use letters as phonetic equivalents, endeavored to be consistent, and had some spelling conventions.
"Remarkably, this sense for spelling shrank until it almost disappeared. When the Normans became Anglo-Normans they brought their spelling with them...(F)or a time the two systems existed side by side...Perhaps in all this welter scribes gave up in despair, but whatever the reason, the situation is clear: Middle English spelling is little more than confusion...
"We constantly see the same word spelled in two ways in adjacent lines, and I recall once having noticed one word spelled four different ways in four consecutive lines of a Middle English manuscript...
"Consider the follwing bit of evidence, which I blundered upon in a manuscript in the Huntington Library...(T)he scribe...copied the same seven lines twice...But now the curious fact. No two of these lines agree. Here was the same scribe, with the same copy, who copied the same passage twice within a quarter hour, and he does not produce one single line which is consistent in both copies. Nor is he consistent in his own spelling of common words.
"Was this a bungler or someone who scarcely knew how to write? No, for we know something about him...The obvious fact about the copying is this: the copyist felt no obligation to copy what was before him. He looked at a line and wrote it as he pleased, changing the order of the words if he felt like it, even substituting a synonym now and then, and spelling and punctuating as the spirit moved him. People in the middle ages were not much concerned about spelling...
"Just how a zeal for spelling revived we do not know. Certainly, it grew with the Renaissance...Gradually the notion returned and became popular that there were right and wrong ways to spell words. The conception grew especially in the authoritarian eighteenth century, and by the time Noah Webster in this country was trying to encourage a simplified spelling, rectitude in orthography had become almost as rigid and demanding as rectitude in sexual morality. Men fought about spelling...Today there is more rigidity in spelling than in anything else associated with language."
Not only was our name Churchill originally a Norman name, but its pronunciation evolved in England. Thus, there was both spelling variation and pronunciation/spelling evolution over the period up to Churchill emigration to the colonies. That emigration occurred, of course, before the eighteenth century rigidification described above, but even in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, when the first U.S. censuses were taken, the Churchill spelling was not yet standardized. It apparently was during the course of the nineteenth century that a consensus formed around the present spelling, but as Dennis observes, in the Manhattan line the consensus apparently emerged around the Churchell spelling, which the Manhattan Churchills continued to use until late in the nineteenth century, perhaps even into the twentieth century. A line of Connecticut Churchills in Pennsylvania also consciously held to the Churchell spelling in the nineteenth century. While I have never seen Churell or Churcell in American Churchills, the latter as a throwback to the old Anglo-Norman spellings would not surprise me for the seventeenth century.
Malcolm
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