Re: Getting our arms around this
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In reply to:
Re: Getting our arms around this
7/14/01
A good, but not the whole, point.However, this is not the time or place to nit-pick.What you have brought into focus is something that bedevils genealogists when moving back in time in Europe beyond about 1400.It is this.
In the medieval period, people thought more in terms of LINEAGE than in terms of FAMILY NAME.For instance: Rick de Stapleford, Don de Malpas and Joe de Eaton could well be three brothers, the sons of Don de Pulford; and Barbara de Eaton could well be sister and daughter to none, nor even related.
The concept of SURNAME is comparatively recent.
Surnames as an INHERITED and a MALE attribute of a family are not even remotely reliable, in themselves, before about 1400.They did not exist as such.The mind-set of that time did not work in the way that ours does; and so we should not expect it to fall in with our demands.
That is why FEMALE lineage is as important as MALE lineage in the genealogy of the period.
Perhaps a discursive note on surnames may be of use.
The acquisition of surnames during the past six or seven hundred years has been affected by many factors, including social class and social structure.
On the whole, the richer and more powerful classes tended to develop surnames earlier than the working classes and the poor; but that is a relative, not an absolute, measure.
Surnames are the product of urban areas rather than of rural areas. This suggests that surnames are connected to the emergence of bureaucracies.As long as land tenure, military service, fealty and the feudal system of control were a part of the direct relationship between a lord and his vassals, the need did not arise for FIXED DISTINGUISHING EPITHETS to mark out one churl from another, one dynastic branch of a seignorial marriage network from another.
Only with the growth of more complex societies in the fifteenth cenury did such matters as land tenure, and in particular the collecting of taxes by STRANGERS, begin to have a bearing on the need for a SURNAME, in that it became imperative to have A MORE DETAILED STRUCTURE of nomenclature TO DISTINGUISH ONE INDIVIDUAL FROM ANOTHER.Until then, SOCIETY was so LOCALISED in its thought and its experience that it was enough for AN INDIVIDUAL to have ONE NAME and ONE IDENTIFYING PLACE OR OCCUPATION.
These NAMES WERE NOT INHERITED FROM FATHER TO SON, and therefore the MODERNidentification of a family by NAME did not exist.
Beyond the rough boundary of 1400, MODERN genealogical thought and procedures cannot be rigorously applied, since neither structure nor documentation exist in the quality and the quantity that is necessary if we are to say anything intelligent BY THIS MEANS ALONE.Therefore, no genealogist can attempt to be efficient inthe Middle Ages without a knowledge of heraldry.Heraldry was the iconographic marker of what WE think of as "blood" and "family"; and it was made to be accurate.At the point where documents begin to fail us, heraldry becomes strong.It is a language that does not depend upon a literate mind in order for it to be "read".We have to remember that literacy, which for us is a requirement of education, was not held to be important among the societies of the Middle Ages, even at the highest levels.The ability to read and write was more a manual skill, the work ofclerks, who were paid to do the job that an aristocrat could see no need to learn.
In England, it is not likely that ANY family name that is not in some way noble (i.e at least land owning, and so requiringdocumentation) can be traced back beyond the introduction of Parish Registers in the 1590s.Apart from legal records of civil and eccesiatical courts, no one will have survived as a written name.Even when there is a name mentioned, it will be in isolation, with no links forwards or backwards of any use to genealogy.As an example: the Accounts of Vale Royal Abbey in Cheshire for the year 1278 record the names of Robert de Eton and William de Eton as carters, who made accurately itemized journeys with their one-horse carts over measured distances backwards and forwards with specified loads on particular days.But who Robert and William were as individuals is lost, if it was ever known. We can say nothing about them as human beings.
The last thing I want to do is to throw cold water on enthusiasm.But enthusiasm must be informed by strict rules of engagement, otherwise all activity becomes a futile pooling and puddling of names and dates, which may be a pleasant enough pursuit, but adds nothing to a real awareness of who we are.
More often than not we have to come to terms with the reality that we can say little, if anything.Such disappointment does not give us the right to fantasize and try to build on running sand.Medieval Europe is not Anywhere over the Rainbow,There is no Yellow Brick Road. Indeed, the roads of Medieval Europe are notoriously few, and treacherous; deeply mired,and seldom straight.
That said, the American Eatons who can document their way back to New England in the seventeenth cenury are unusually fortunate.Once documents can bridge the Atlantic, then the way back may be traced,provided it is done logically and a step at a time.To aim for a predetermined and prejudiced destination without any continuously linked factual evidence as a map courts disaster.A great deal of time and energy can be spent to no purpose.The only proper, and ultimately satisfying, method is to set off, one step at a time, retracing the footprints, in order to find where they originate -- whether it may be with some Welsh lordling or with Robert Carter retracing his own footprints every day along a Cheshire lane in March 1278.Either eventuality is equally remarkable.
Alan Garner.
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Re: Getting our arms around this
Rick Eaton 7/15/01