Before Surnames: When Names Were Brutally Honest

SPEAKER_00 0:02 If you open up the pages of England's Doomsday Book from 1086, you'll see a whole host of unique characters.

SPEAKER_01 0:11 Ivo Tall Boys.

SPEAKER_00 0:12 Reginald the Sheriff.

SPEAKER_01 0:14 Tursten, son of Rolf. Priest 1. Hugh the Ass.

SPEAKER_00 0:19 And William the Goat.

SPEAKER_01 0:21 These are genuine names from the book, a time before surnames were an established part of life. In fact, some of the names that feature don't have any descriptive last names at all. They're just Ansfred or Godfrey. And that's it.

SPEAKER_00 0:34 Now, as far as I'm aware, there are only two Oliver Giyus that exist in the world. At least as far as I can tell, and that's thanks to Facebook. But if there are any other Oliver Giius out there, please do get in touch. In that circumstance, if we happen to be in the same room together, the addition of a surname probably wouldn't help to save much confusion. But generally speaking, surnames have been an incredible tool for helping us to tell one Ollie from another in a world full of many Ollies.

SPEAKER_01 1:04 I just want to add here there is actually only one Philippa Giu in the world, at least from my search on Facebook, so that's me. And one Philippa Warehun, which was my maiden name.

SPEAKER_00 1:14 Ah, so you're very unique.

SPEAKER_01 1:16 I certainly am. But surnames, having two names, is a relatively new idea. So what did we do before surnames and when did they become a thing? I'm Philippe Giu.

SPEAKER_00 1:26 And I'm Oli Giu, and this is what we did before, the podcast where we explore the history of modern inventions.

SPEAKER_01 1:35 Now there are more than 8 billion people on this planet right now, soon to become 10 billion by 2060. But a thousand years ago, historians and demographers estimate the total global population was roughly 250 to 310 million people.

SPEAKER_00 1:52 Yeah, so the entire planet back then, actually, if you can imagine this, they had fewer people than just the United States has now. And in in Europe, that equates to there being around 35 to 45 million people. And spread out like they were, with most, you know, living in small rural communities, it was quite easy to keep track of people without official surnames. So basically they just didn't have them. Back then it was it was possible just to be John or Mary, or perhaps slightly more descriptive, you could have been Karen, daughter of Paul. But that was that was it really.

SPEAKER_01 2:27 Yeah, and if you go back even further in time, I don't know, like 5,000 years ago, the global population is estimated to have been around 20 to 30 million people total. So if you think about it, that's the same as modern day Australia or Texas, and you can see how it's getting easier to just have one name.

SPEAKER_00 2:44 I think we should go a little bit further back in time, even still, Philly, back into the Stone Age, because if you go to the middle Paleolithic, there may have been only around one to five million people globally. So names, names, just like first names, were still obviously very important, uh, even if you were living just in a tribe of 20 to 50 people, because obviously they serve as a way to call someone over or warn them or talk about them when they're not there. We still needed to gossip back then, obviously. Um, but that name could have been super simple, like one name would have been more than sufficient. I've recently also been finding out about this sort of ancient branch of Homo sapiens who tried moving into Europe out of Africa. Um, there's actually been a few times that Homo sapiens have tried to do that. And there was one group of people called the LRJ people. Uh there was probably only a few hundred of them, and they failed to establish themselves in Europe. I imagine a tiny amount of humans like that really wouldn't have needed surnames at all.

SPEAKER_01 3:48 And also you've got to remember they didn't have Facebook to search who had the same name as you.

SPEAKER_00 3:53 Yeah, that's true. I wonder if, because you wouldn't have uh had books either telling you like these are some top ten baby names. I wonder if everyone was just more likely to have a unique first name because they were basing it on whatever was in their environment. Or maybe first names were sort of more like grunts than um than what we sort of know today.

SPEAKER_01 4:14 Oi.

SPEAKER_00 4:15 Oi, yeah, like oh yes, it's coming over. Um but you know, populations did start to grow, communities started to expand, and then you had more than one Ollie moving into the same village. So things began to get a bit more complicated. So before the surnames that we have today, people used what historians call by names. So these are names that told people who you were, uh, perhaps what you did or where you came from as well. So you might have had uh John the Tool, Mary with the red hair, uh, or or maybe William from the Hill. And they, you know, they were not surnames necessarily as we understand them, and they weren't family names, definitely. They were echonames, meaning extra names, um, that sort of described you in some way. I wonder what your echoname would be, Philly.

SPEAKER_01 5:08 Uh Good Time Phil. That's what my friends call me.

SPEAKER_00 5:10 Good time Philly, the good time, yeah, Good Time Phil. Okay, great. Um, do you know echanames, actually? Just a quick fun fact on echanames, it's the etymological root of the word nickname. So um over time people would say the phrase a nechoname, and the N blurred into the E and became a nickname. So that's where we get that from.

SPEAKER_01 5:33 Yeah, and I guess eventually we kind of moved away from these echanames. And although surnames in Europe weren't common until actually only around a thousand years ago, China was way ahead of the curve. So the earliest systematic surnames appeared in China like over 3,000 years ago. So aristocratic families in the Zhou dynasty, they began using these family names to kind of show their lineage, really. So they would have been derived from the names of ancestral states or clans. For example, the surname Zhou, that comes from the state of Zhou, while Zhiang, that traced back to one of China's ancient clan groups. And some of those ancient Chinese surnames like Li and Wang and Zhou, they're still in use today. They're like 3,000 years old, some of the oldest really continuous family names in the world.

SPEAKER_00 6:20 Yeah, and when surnames began spreading in Europe in the Middle Ages, it was the nobility that got there first as well. So in the English Doomsday Book of 1086, which we mentioned at the start, this was sort of a national audit ordered by William the Conqueror, and it recorded some of the earliest English surnames. And as we mentioned, there are a lot of single names listed in there, which gets a bit confusing if you're going through it and seeing multiple of the same name.

SPEAKER_01 6:48 Yeah, but there are also some surnames in there, aren't there? You've got William of Warren, Hugh, son of Baldric, Baldwin the Sheriff, or Godric the Steward. Most of these names weren't hereditary yet, but they still describe the person rather than their sort of family line. But there was one surname that popped up before all of this in Europe. It's the name O'Cleary. This is such a big name in Ireland still today, but it first appeared in County Galway in the year 916, so it's one of the oldest ever recorded in Europe, actually.

SPEAKER_00 7:19 Then, you know, villages, they became towns, towns became cities, so we really needed a better way of differentiating people. And governments needed to know who exactly they were taxing, of course. Um it all comes down to tax. So, you know, surnames became more established. And in the in the 13th and 14th centuries, when people started staying in the same place for a lot longer, things like land and titles and trades, they started to be passed from parent to child. So sir surnames as a result got passed down as well.

SPEAKER_01 7:52 Interestingly, this means many European surnames only became fixed 500 to 700 years ago. So so recently, and some are even younger than the printing press. So if you think about it, that's insane, really. In Scotland and Ireland, many didn't even appear until after 1500. So that's when clan naming systems kind of started to fade away. So most surnames today fall into one of four categories, and they tell us something about how our ancestors saw themselves or how others saw them. So the most common one that people think of is occupation, of course. You've got Smith, which I think many people know means blacksmith or metal worker, and it's actually one of the most common surnames in the English-speaking world because many communities had one. Other similar names include Baker, Carpenter, Taylor, Miller, Fisher, all pretty straightforward.

SPEAKER_00 8:44 Then there's location names like hill, wood, rivers, at water, underhill, ford. These came from landmarks, and you know, you might have been Alice from the Hill or Thomas by the river. And over time those prepositions dropped away, so the the got dropped, and the from got dropped, and the descriptor stuck, so you just got left with the wood or the river.

SPEAKER_01 9:06 There are patronymic names, so basically meaning it comes from a parent's name. Johnson came from Johnson, O'Brien is a descendant of Brian, McDonald is the son of Donald, and Ivanov is the son of Ivan. And these developed in almost every culture, and it was kind of a simple way of saying, I belong to this family line.

SPEAKER_00 9:27 Then there were descriptive names or nicknames, as we sort of mentioned earlier. So you might have someone called short, brown, white, young, strange, or good. And sometimes these were these were flattering, sometimes they weren't. So uh I was looking into this 9th century king uh called King Charles the Bald, for example. Um, and it's actually thought the name was used ironically because he was actually really, really hairy.

SPEAKER_01 9:54 There's also that 10th century King Sancho the First of Leon, nicknamed Sancho the Fat, because he was about 240 kilograms, I think.

SPEAKER_00 10:03 Yeah, so people um have been mean for uh all of history. Um there were actually some great medieval records of of people as well, literally named Black in the Mouth or Weaselhead. Um actually some some with the last name the drunkard or bad neighbour. I like that one. You can kind of tell what those were getting at.

SPEAKER_01 10:23 And then there were other names that kind of came from aspiration. So in medieval England, some families tried to associate themselves with more aristocratic French-sounding names, like if you think about Beaumont, which means beautiful hill, or Fitzroy, literally son of the king. And then later on in Victorian times, plenty of people quietly upgraded their surnames for elegance, really. So Smith became Smith with a Y, Clark became Clark with an E, just a little bit of spelling flourish, really, to sound a bit more refined, which I really like.

SPEAKER_00 10:56 Yeah, I might actually, I'm not sure. I really want to make Giu uh even more flourishy, because people can already not spell that. Um and then by the late medieval times, uh, a new type of name began to emerge too. So this was the middle name. I find middle names absolutely fascinating because like to me they seem totally pointless, and and I feel like we just choose them arbitrarily. But in England, um, there was actually a law at the time that stopped commoners from having them. So, you know, as it seems to be the case with pretty much everything, the rich got to have them first. So they got surnames first, they got middle names first. But by the 19th century, a huge population growth uh across Europe and America saw the widespread adoption of middle names because people they just wanted to stand out. Even though only about 5% of Americans born during the Revolutionary War era had middle names, by the 1900s, almost all Americans had one.

SPEAKER_01 11:52 Yeah, and it makes sense. It turns out having a middle name could actually make it up to a hundred times less likely for someone to share your name than if you just have a surname. So I guess it does help the confusion.

SPEAKER_00 12:04 Yeah, and so uh some people though have taken it a bit too far. Um, you know, you always get somebody who's got sort of like five or six middle names, and you think, what is that for? But Lawrence Watkins has really gone beyond. So he's a guy from New Zealand and he changed his his name at the age of 24. So this is not a given name. He just decided he wanted tons and tons of middle names. He actually holds the Guinness World Record for the longest personal name, and it contains 2,253 unique words. And according to the Guinness World Record website, he worked in the city library at the time and he picked names out of books and through recommendations from co-workers. And I just think that is the most eccentric thing ever. And we could probably do a whole podcast on middle names, to be honest, but I think we should move on and continue on the spread of surnames around the world.

SPEAKER_01 12:57 Yeah, while Europe was figuring out its naming system, other parts of the world were doing the same, but in totally different ways. So in Japan, surnames developed around 1400 years ago, often tied to landownership with names like tanaka, meaning middle of the rice field. But for centuries it was only nobles and samurai that used them. So commoners weren't actually legally required to have surnames until around the 19th century, during the Meiji Restoration. This was a political and cultural revolution, basically, that abolished the samurai class system beginning in 1868.

SPEAKER_00 13:32 And when surnames were finally made compulsory in Japan in 1875, millions of people suddenly had to just invent one. Um and they often drawed inspiration from local geography. That's why names like Yamada, which means mountain rice field, and Kobayashi, which means small forest, are still really common everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 13:52 In Iceland, they never really adopted fixed family surnames at all. And even today, so if your name's Eric Johnson, that literally means Eric, son of John. And then Eric's child might have maybe Kara Eric's daughter, and that means daughter of Eric. So each generation kind of starts fresh.

SPEAKER_00 14:12 Yeah, I quite like that. And actually, in some indigenous cultures, names were quite fluid, so they changed based on like life events or achievements or like spiritual experiences. So their identity would almost evolve rather than being fixed. And they may have, you know, been earned or bestowed through ceremonies or important events. And interestingly, despite them being super useful in helping us to distinguish one person from another, surnames can actually cause more confusion in some cases. For instance, um, many people think Martin Luther and Martin Luther King Jr. are the same person, or maybe one is the father of the other, but they're actually two completely different people from different points in history. And the surname there actually makes things worse.

SPEAKER_01 15:01 Yeah, it's the same with Louis Armstrong and Neil Armstrong. One played the trumpet, the other walked on the moon, but some people still mix them up. And I'm sure there's so many other examples from history, so do let us know if you can think of any.

SPEAKER_00 15:14 Yeah, and recently we met someone, didn't we, whose surname spelling meant that she only just discovered a whole missing branch of her family. So basically what happened was her dad's surname was changed ever so slightly with the addition of an extra S. And that was enough to basically cause this confusion that meant she didn't realize that this whole tranche of her family existed elsewhere. So surnames, they're fantastic, obviously, but they're not a perfect solution.

SPEAKER_01 16:43 Let's head now to around the 1700s, 1800s. This is where surnames were very much official and well established. This is when governments started keeping census records, issuing passports, as we've mentioned, collecting taxes. So if you didn't have a surname, the authorities would give you one. And sometimes that was absolutely harmless. It was fine, but other times it was quite traumatic.

SPEAKER_00 17:04 Yeah, that's right. So in colonial periods, for example, indigenous and enslaved people, they would have been assigned surnames by the colonizers. So often these would be names of the people who owned or converted them. And really it sort of erased ancestral naming traditions and replaced them with, I suppose, what you could call a system of control.

SPEAKER_01 17:27 But you'll be pleased to know that there is a kind of growing movement to kind of try and revive or reassert traditional naming systems in indigenous communities, either by restoring those ancestral names or by allowing a bit more flexibility again.

SPEAKER_00 17:42 And surnames, they also tell a story of migration. So when immigrants arrived in English-speaking countries, officials often simplified their their names. So Schmidt became Smith, uh, Müller, uh M-U-L-L-E-R with a little sort of umlaut, that became Miller, Giovanni may have become something like John's, and you know, it wasn't necessarily because they were prejudiced to these names, it was just, you know, you've got messy handwriting, you weren't typing back then, so you wanted to make things easier and and remove any language barriers. But others, they chose to change their names voluntarily. So especially if you look during wartime, a name like Kaiser or Deutsch, for instance, that could draw suspicion. So people actually said, Yeah, I will go ahead and change that to something more English sounding.

SPEAKER_01 18:32 Yeah, I can kind of see why people would feel like they were forced to do that. Um here's a surprising one the website Forbears says it knows of over 30 million different surnames on Earth. So if you were to average that out, that's about 238 people per name. And obviously, some names are super common, some are not so common, so that average doesn't necessarily work, but it gives us kind of a good idea. I actually looked up our names before. So I looked up Where Hun, which is my maiden name. There's only 328 people with that surname in the world, and most of them are in Poland. But if you compare that to the name Gyu, which we think is quite unusual, we we don't really need that many. Well, there's 21,275.

SPEAKER_00 19:19 Okay, so it is quite common.

SPEAKER_01 19:20 And mostly in France and Guernsey, which of course is not really a surprise. And actually, this is quite reflective of how a lot of names are really very common. We like to reuse them rather than reinvent them. In China, the top 100 names cover 85% of the population. In Vietnam, 40% of people are called Noyen. And in Korea, half the country shares just three: Kim, Lee, and Park. And globally, the most common surname is Wang. That's shared by more than 107 million people.

SPEAKER_00 19:52 And although we think surnames have taken over the globe, there are actually still some places that don't use them. So Myanmar never introduced the use of surnames and still doesn't have them in what we would consider like our modern way of using them.

SPEAKER_01 20:07 Yeah, I find that so interesting. Most Western Indonesians don't have surnames either. Tibetans traditionally use two given names and they generally just don't use a surname. And there are other examples too. In fact, somebody who only has a one-word name is actually known as a mononymous person.

SPEAKER_00 20:25 Very mononymous. Something I wondered, given that surnames weren't really a thing until what, 3,000 years ago, we've said, and in Europe, way later than that. How come Norse gods have surnames like Thor Odinson, for example? Well, you may have just noticed there, but this is just an example again of patronymics. So Thor, son of Odin, Odin being sort of the sort of principal god of Norse mythology. And for the Greek gods, uh Zeus with the last name Olympios, that just meant Zeus of Mount Olympus, which was his divine seat. Or Athena Parthenos literally means Athena the Virgin. So it's a bit like saying Alexander the Great, for instance, uh, or Good Time Phil. And these were epithets which existed long before surnames and were one of humanity's first ways of distinguishing people, or deities in this case, who shared a name.

SPEAKER_01 21:22 Yeah, and I think today surnames connect us to the past, don't they? But they're not as fixed as they once were, so they kind of change through marriage and divorce, personal reinvention.

SPEAKER_00 21:31 Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that actually. So in the US, about 70% of women take their husband's surname when they get married, and in Britain it's as much as 90%. Even though there was a survey that suggested only 59% actually want to do it. So that's a big difference. That's you know, 31% who take their partner's last name but weren't really sure about whether or not they wanted to. Now you changed your name to match mine when we got married. And I I felt like it didn't seem as though it was a tough choice for you. You seem pretty happy to do it. Uh clearly everyone's not like you, but you know, what is it like to be expected to change your surname? And I did it change your sense of identity?

SPEAKER_01 22:17 Um yeah, it's really interesting. I was really excited to change my name. I felt like it symbolized that when we were getting married, we were becoming a family, and that if we were to have had children, which we have done now, that we would all have the same name. So for me, I didn't feel like I was losing my sense of identity. I was really excited to kind of adopt your name. But I can completely understand why for some people to just you know be expected to change their name, they're like, What? But this is me. But we are kind of seeing now more and more that men are also or like the other partner is also adopting the woman's name. So I know somebody who when they got married, Married, he took her name. So that is happening more and more. Um, it's really interesting because we're obviously in broadcasting, and I remember when I was going to change my name after we got married, somebody said to me, you know, in broadcasting, we don't change our names. So you keep your maiden name on air, and then you kind of have your married name for like your official documents. And I think lots of doctors do that as well, surgeons, because you know, if you've worked so hard for your doctor title, I'm not giving it to my husband. Um, and I think that's really interesting. But I I pushed back and I changed my name anyway, and it didn't really matter. I'm glad that I did.

SPEAKER_00 23:37 Yeah, well, I'm glad you did choose to change your name because it meant we didn't have to miss out on the opportunity when we were both in radio for me to say, I'm Ollie Giu, and here with the news is Philly Giu.

SPEAKER_01 23:47 That was iconic.

SPEAKER_00 23:48 Yeah, I I loved that. Um, and if it helps, I mean, in a world of usernames and online identities, it's clear that some people actually feel more attached to their handles than their surnames. You can call me Bob Squire. Um, you know, names, they sort of used to anchor us to family, to geography, but I feel like they're a bit more flexible these days, maybe even optional. And we've come sort of full circle in a way, back to single names and self-chosen identities. Uh, you know, kind of a world where who you are matters more than what you're called.

SPEAKER_01 24:22 One thing that I find so interesting is that names do still shape how we're perceived. And actually, it's something that played into thought processes when we named our daughters. I, you know, what how are they going to be perceived based on their names? And studies show that people with surnames earlier in the alphabet are often called on first or ranked higher on lists, and those with kind of noble or pleasant sounding names like King or Fairchild, they sometimes receive this kind of unconscious positive bias. And sadly, foreign or ethnic sounding names still do face hiring discrimination even today, and even ancient naming systems just really continue to shape modern identity.

SPEAKER_00 25:05 Yeah, and slightly randomly, just before you wrap up, I'd also like to mention one common phrase I've heard throughout my life and even jokingly trotted out um how you should never trust a person with two first names. Have you heard that?

SPEAKER_01 25:19 Only because you've said it, but I've never heard it before then.

SPEAKER_00 25:22 Yeah, so to explain it a bit more in detail, it's um the idea is that someone with a last name that could also be a first name should not be trusted. I realize that this is probably just some sort of joke that went wild, but I decided to go on a digging spree to find out where this came from or whether it was just something I heard like in the playground. And um no, it is a thing that people have have heard and and talk about.

SPEAKER_01 25:47 What? So like Peter Peterson. I think that's a good strong name.

SPEAKER_00 25:50 No, not Peter Peterson, maybe um Philly, Georgia, for instance, you know, that um where you've got a genuine a name which could genuinely be a first name as well. So like John Peter. Um apparently they're untrustworthy. So a lot of people say um they first heard about it on an episode of Mystery Science Theatre, and others think it's got something to do with serial killers. Others just say it's because these names sound made up, you know, making these people sound dubious. Like, who is John Peter? That doesn't sound real. But honestly, I have found nothing conclusive. So do let me know if you have any clues at all. I'm Ollie, and this is what we did before.

SPEAKER_01 26:30 And I'm Philly. Have you got any ideas for an episode? Let us know. And if we choose your idea, we'll even credit you in the outro.

SPEAKER_00 26:37 Do subscribe if you enjoyed listening. It helps us out massively, and we will see you next time.