To actually work as a miller or a Farmer, you must have a mill or a farm. As these would have gone to the eldest son of a family, the remainder would have moved into some other means of living. So while it’s safe to say there would be more people working as farmhands, or who were the children of a farmer, I’m not sure that there would be more farmers than smiths as the generations went on.
You can, however, train all your sons to be smiths of whatever sort, and they can then take their professions out into the world, go forth, and multiply. In fact, there is so much hard physical labor to be done in a smithy, that it was one fo the most commonly apprenticed jobs, and many people came to the US giving x number of years to a smith in return for their price of passage. They would then walk away from the deal with the training they needed to set up shop in another town.
Then there’s the industrial revolution to consider. A smith could easily get work forging factory equipment, or making metal parts in a factory. As time wore on , there were fewer and fewer farmers, and the young people moving into the cities would have liekly changed the name.
I also think (this paragraph is just guessing) that in the US there may be some of the realities of emmigration at work. Coming over, folks are liable to be trying to start a new life. Smith would be the highest social ranking one could claim without also being highly educated. If one claimed to be a professor, the immigration offical might speak in Latin, and you’d be outed. I’m betting a lot of people claimed the surname Smith for this reason.
All of which makes me wonder why there aren’t a lot of families called Merchant, or more families called Clark.
But by the time of widespread immigration to the US English surnames were family names, not descriptive names. You weren’t John Smith in 1776 because you were a blacksmith, you were John Smith because your father’s last name was Smith.
I believe the real reason there aren’t many people surnamed “Farmer” is that Farmer wasn’t descriptive enough. In a village there might be a couple smiths, a couple millers, a couple weavers, a couple coopers, but most people were farmers. So describing someone as “John the farmer” didn’t distinguish between the dozens of Johns who were farmers. So instead of 20 John Farmers you had John Green, John Brown, John Hill, John Johnson, John Williamson, John Thomson, John King, and so on.
Don’t forget John Norton, John Sutton, John Weston, John Houghton, John Layton - all descriptions of farms or settlements by geography or other features.
I researched surnames in England in the thirteen hundreds for a couple of days. My favorites were “ate children” (pronounced, according to the book, as “at chilthern”) and “in the ditch”. The first was said to be a reference to a type of soil very good for farming and the second was said to refer to living on land that was in a low area. Both would be locative names rather than occupational names, which is what you’d get if your occupation was too common, as has been mentioned.
The big four for early English surname types were: Patronymic, Occupational, Locative, and Personal. And you could have different surnames depending on which group was referring to you. As in, called John London because you used to live there before moving into the local village, John Jameson to your colleagues back in London, and John Loafbite to relatives and friends of relatives who are never going to forget your appetite when you were a teen. In good sized cities, your Locative could refer to which pub you lived nearest to.
According to several sources (including this one), the surname “Farmer” was generally adopted by tax collectors. I’ve heard that this was a reference to “harvesting” payments from the locals.
There was a lot of 'Americanation" of names as people came to the new country.
In an earlier day Arnold Schwarts might have gone on to be the Governor of Calif.
As mentioned above, “Farmer” came to mean something like “renter”, someone who worked on lands that didn’t belong to him. Farmers were like sharecroppers.
Tax farmers were people who collected tax payments, from the same root. They weren’t “farmers” because they harvested taxes like crops, tax farming derives from the original senses of the word, where the tax farmer paid the state a lump sum for the right to collect taxes.
From here, it appears that in the Netherlands, Smit (Smith) ranks tenth on the list of most common last names. The Dutch equivalent of Johnson is in the top ten twice (Jansen and Janssen). What’s intriguing is that ‘Van den Berg’ (Of the Mountain) is also in the top ten, in a country where the highest point is 321 meters above sea level…
A name that you’d sooner expect is ‘Van Dijk’, ‘Of the Dyke’, which is in the list as well, but only two places above Van den Berg. Finally, while only about 5 per cent (at the very most) of the current Dutch population is Frisian, ‘De Vries’ (The Frisian) is the second name on the list! There’s names such as ‘Den Hollander’ or Den Brabander’ or ‘De Zeeuw’, but there not at all very common.
The relative paucity of people named Farmer is much easier to explain than the large number of Smiths, really.
Look at it this way: surnames developed as identifiers, so that if you had two Johns in your village, you could differentiate John the blacksmith from John the cartwright.
However, for every baker, blacksmith, shoemaker, miller, and so on, you’d have dozens of farmers. What would be the point of identifying somebody as John the farmer? Much easier to refer to him as John, son of William, or whatever.
Not quite: Patel is a name taken by a group of Gujarati Kshatriya sub-castes that were landowners (and often thus farmers). It doesn’t literally mean “farmer” though; the actual meaning is “village headman”, which in turn comes from the pat-likh, the book in which village headmen recorded land ownership and tax payments.
UNtil someone better comes along - originally Welsh names were not only patrymonic but also dynastic so “Llywellyn* the Last” was actually Llywellyn ap Gryffudd ap Llywellyn ap Iorweth etc. “ap” is “son of”.
Now the English didn’t really like this and tried to simplify matters by encouraging the Welsh to limit it to a single “ap somebody”. (I don’t have a date handy I’m afraid - possibly the act of union in the 16th Century officially but I think I recall that in “Wild Wales”, published 1862, George Burrows was still meeting people who introduced themselves in the traditional way)
Using “ap + name” is the “Welshest” type of surname, I knew a welsh-speaker who actually changed his surname by deed pole from Richards to “ap Rhisiart” for this very reason.
Over time the “ap” became attached to the actual name and in some cases mutated to a “b” sound. ap Rhys gave birth to Price, ap Eynon to Beynon, ap Evan to Bevan, ap Robert to Probert etc. We could possibly say these are the next “most Welsh” names. (Just now it occurs to me that “Upjohn” may come from this practice.)
This is nothing but a guess but the name+s type surnames - Evans, Davies etc seem to be one step further towards the English system - you find the Anglicized Hughes but not Huws for example. I guess “Bevans” type names are a hybrid.
Now “Jones” is a whole other headache - there is no “j” in Welsh. The letter doesn’t exsist … why not use “Sions” ? My father (a Jones) had a theory that the names came from a Norman lord in whose service a lot of Welsh folk found themselves but I’ve never seen this theory anywhere else.
*spellings vary
Cat, thanks for the info. But I actually knew how the forms developed. I was wondering about the modern context. What is the frequency of each form? Is there any correlation to geography or socioeconomic class regarding their distribution? Is there any social perception regarding certain forms? Are there any trends? You mention that you know people who have reverted to a more “authentic” Welsh form. Is this part of a larger trend?
Works for me. They could be ironically given, too, as in Little John or John Sparrow for someone who moves slowly.
Back to the OP - surnames went through an evolution from applying only to an individual (Joan the Fair Maid of Kent) to being inherited (John Kent (not implying any relation)). In the middle there was some wiggle room, when a person could perhaps choose between several surnames that had been used by his near forebears. If a smith had more status than the other names, it would be natural to choose to be Smith.
I’ve only got anecdotal evidence for you I’m afraid. I’ve spent more time in South Wales and would say the names with an initial “p” or “b” are more common down there but then … population density is higher.
A quick search on this site suggests Roberts is actually more common in the North and Probert in the South - similar results for Hughes versus Pugh. If you have time you could play around there for a while - there’s data for 1881 & 1998 so you can see some sort of evolution.
Incidentally I’ve always associated Jenkins with Wales (specifically rugby players Neil & Gethinand singer Catherine) the National Trust site bears this out.
The friend who changed his name was pretty rabidly anti-English - my Italian’s not up to much but if he had to speak to me in a “foreign language” he preferred it to be one he liked (ie not English). In my experience the trend is for “Welsher” first names, especially for boys, and leave the surnames to look after themselves.
