Cornelius part IV

Just one more blog inspired by Cornelius and then I’ll move on. I promise.

As a modern forename Cornelius is not common. Offhand I can think only of Cornelius Ryan, who wrote The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, amongst other works on the Second World War.

Roddy MacDowell’s chimp in The Planet of the Apes was called Cornelius and Shakespeare used the name a couple of times, in Cymbeline and Hamlet. I’ve found that there is a basketball player called Cornelius Hawkins, nicknamed Connie.

But its origin is much grander. The Cornelii – let’s call them the Cornelians and my spellcheck will stop bothering me – were one of the great aristocratic clans (gentes) of Rome. Over hundreds of years they provided a high proportion of Consuls, Rome’s chief executives, as well as many other leaders.

One of her greatest generals was Scipio (pictured), the man who finally defeated Hannibal at the battle of Zama in North Africa and ended the Second Punic War (202 BC). In full his name was Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Major, where Publius is a personal name, used by intimates, Cornelius his clan name and Scipio is family name. The ‘Africanus’ was an honour given to him after his victory over Hannibal, similar to the British award of a peerage to a successful general, for example Montgomery of Alamein. ‘Major’ distinguishes him from a later Scipio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Africanus

I read that Scipio turned down huge powers in Rome, such as ‘dictator for life’ at the end of his campaign, but later Cornelians were less modest.

Cornelius Sulla, who lived from 138-78 BC, was another general who twice marched his armies on Rome at one time was granted an indeterminate term as dictator. He was part of the process whereby the Republic, with its checks and balances and fears of absolute power, was breaking apart and moving towards the time of the Emperors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Cornelius_Sulla

Cornelius Cinna (d 84BC) was another strong man who served as Consul for four years in succession – strictly illegal – and continued the dangerous precedents, using his army to cow the Senate, murdering his opponents and subverting the constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Cornelius_Cinna

Later in the century other Cornelians tried the same thing with less success. Cornelius Lentulus Sura and Cornelius Cethegus were involved in the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome. They were exposed by Cicero, found guilty and judicially strangled in 63 BC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Cornelius_Lentulus_%28Sura%29

So, to bring these meanderings back to the Hundlebys, was there once an ancient history buff called Bradley who fancied the name? Highly unlikely, I would have thought, because most of these men were rather unsavoury characters and were known in any case by their surname – Scipio, Sulla, etc.

It’s more likely that the name was used for religious reasons. Here there are two main candidates, two ‘saints’ in fact.

The first is the Roman centurion Cornelius, whom we meet in The Acts of the Apostles, chapter 10. Already a devout man, Cornelius was told about the gospel in a dream and approached the apostle Peter with a view to baptism. Peter needed a dream himself to be convinced that gentiles as well as Jews were welcome in the Christian fold but eventually Cornelius was baptized. Later he was canonised by the Catholic Church, as was just about anybody whose name appears in the New Testament.

The whole story is drenched in myth, but it represents a vital moment in the history of Christianity, when it ceased to be a Jewish heresy and began its rise to domination of the western world.

The Bradleys seem to have had a taste for Biblical names and I would guess that Centurion Cornelius was the reason for its adoption.

There are other saints named Cornelius, one of whom was a pope and a martyr.

He was a member of the old Cornelian clan and ‘reigned’ as Bishop Rome from 253-251 AD.

Finally, my researches have turned up one interesting fact. Did you know that the rooster mascot of Kellogg’s is called Cornelius?

Corn – Cornelius, get it?

Thoughts on Christian names

My last post was about the name Cornelius, which is a name passed down over several generations of at least one branch of the Hundleby family.

In trawling through the charts, two things struck me. First, the tendency of generations to be linked in this way, children being named after one or other of their parents or grandparents and uncles, etc being honoured. Second, that the pool of names was quite small. This seems to have been the practice about 100-200 years ago, but I think that the tendency has declined.

I rather hope that my elder son, if and when he settles down and raises a family, has an eye to tradition and carries on the names Henry and, maybe Sarah for a girl. It doesn’t have to be the name used, but it provides a link, however sentimental, with the past.

We may never know how a name like Cornelius came to be given to a Bradley child in the prehistory of our records. In my own case, my wives and I agreed that she would have the final choice of names for our daughters and I for the boys.

My first wife named our first daughter after an Orkadian aunt, Jessie being a diminutive of Janet, rather than Jessica. Janet is itself a diminutive of Jane, the feminine equivalent of John. Corinne came from who knows where. I believe I’d never come across it before, but I’ve learned since that it comes from the Greek and means ‘maiden’. Ovid wrote poems to a woman named Corinna.

James received the second name, Henry, for reasons of family continuity and the third, Barrett, was his mother’s maiden name. His first, James, is one of the few boys’ names that I actually like. Names like William, George, Joseph and Henry I find old-fashioned. On the other hand I’m not fond of trendy, modern ones. I’d better not give any examples, for fear of offending people. And I wanted to avoid ‘fancy’ names like Winston or Sylvester. And I’m not fond of those beginning with vowels. This fastidiousness left me a pretty small pool, James, David, Robert, Richard, John and Michael and little else.

I did ponder on Old Testament names – Jacob, Joel, Micah, all of which can be shortened to sound normal – but was, shall we say, dissuaded.

I have a fondness for girls’ names beginning with J and my second wife’s decision on Juliet for our daughter was never a cause for disagreement. A Roman name, of course, the diminutive of Julia, but mainly a tribute to Shakespeare’s heroine.

I’ve often teased my son David that, had he been born three days later on February 14, with a Juliet in the family, he might have been called Romeo. As it was he received another from my limited supply. Nearby cousins named Richard ruled that name out. David grew up happy to bear a king’s name, but less happy to be told it meant ‘Beloved’ or even ‘Darling’.

My youngest daughter was given a queen’s name and her second name, Grace, seemed to fit naturally with it.

So there we are. Forgive me for a somewhat self-indulgent blog. Next time I’ll share my findings about the origins of the name Cornelius. It’s the least I can do, since I fear that at my age I’m unlikely to be able to revive it as a family name.

The Cornelii

In 1967 I went up to university in Bristol. For the first two years I lived in a hall of residence on the Somerset side of the Avon Gorge. The hall was a collection of large, rather grand houses which had been bought up by the university for use as student accommodation. Each house had a ‘sub-warden’, usually a lecturer, whose role was to supervise and support us.

My sub-warden was a lecturer in English called Basil Cottle, whom I discovered to be the author of The Penguin Book of Surnames. In the first few weeks after or arrival he would invite small groups in for sherry and conversation before one of the formal evening meals for which we were obliged to wear academic gowns. It seems like another world, doesn’t it?

At these gatherings, designed to make us feel at home and get to know each other, he would tell us the meaning and origin of our surname. I expected that he would find mine fascinating and unusual. But no. ‘A simple locative,’ he said, ‘place name.’

Nevertheless, I’ve always been fascinated by names and words in general, and wrote about it earlier in the year.

Posting Evelyn’s pen-portrait of Cornelius Bradley Hundleby – sounds like an American general, doesn’t he? – reminded me of when I first came across the name Cornelius. I was doing some desultory browsing through some census records for Hundleby when the name jumped out at me. Such an unusual name amongst all the Henrys, Williams, Samuels and Thomases.

When eventually Susan sent me some of her charts I found more Corneliuses (Cornelii?) and wondered where it had come from and why it had been chosen in the first place. I learned it had been used originally by the Bradley family and imported along with names like Nathaniel and Susanna.

The first instance I find is Cornelius Bradley (born ca 1837), son of Susanna Bradley. He was therefore the nephew of the Ruth and Ann, the sisters who married Thomas and John respectively. Susanna, at some stage, married Daniel Pocklington. Was he the father? If so, why didn’t Cornelius bear his name?

Let me digress to ask the same question about John Hundleby Bradley, born ca 1811 and the first child of the aforementioned John and Ann. Was he John’s child? Why did the parents wait 6 years to marry? Again, why didn’t he take his father’s name?

The fact of being born ‘out of wedlock’ is irrelevant to most people today but I find it a little odd that it happened so often at this period. Other examples are my own great-grandfather, Henry, and Samuel Fox Hundleby (born 1799). It was contrary to the prevailing morality, and many of the family seem to have been keen Christians. But since when have things like that hindered the course of true love?

I was wrong to say that Susanna’s Cornelius was the earliest we know about, for his Aunt Ruth had provided Thomas with a son of that name in 1830, Cornelius (Bradley).

Thomas and Ruth went on to have three grandsons with the name

Their sons William and Joseph (the latter incidentally an example of the name of a deceased child being given to a later baby) used the name for their own sons, Thomas ‘Cornelius’ (b 1848) and Cornelius (b 1859). The third (b 1864) was the namesake of his father.

Cornelius Bradley Hundleby’s wife, Rebecca, was probably glad of the two servants they had acquired by 1871, because theirs was another large family, seven boys and one girl (Ruth of course), who was the eldest. One of the boys was another Cornelius (b 1864) and his brother George continued the tradition by naming his younger son Cornelius Frank (b ?, d 1974). So did Ruth, whose marriage to George Griffin produced Cornelius Griffin.

Going back to Thomas and Ruth, another of their sons was John (b 1833), whose grandson Cornelius was born in 1901 and died 1971 in Louth. Is he the last?

I have been reading up on the original Cornelii of Rome and may write about that soon.

In the meantime I’ll provide this link as I’m wondering which Cornelius is referred to. And who might be the ‘Miss Hundleby’ mentioned? The name Elmhirst also recurs, reminding me of Evelyn’s reference to Moses Elmhirst JP in her essay on Cornelius Bradley Hundleby.

http://www.granthamjournal.co.uk/custompages/CustomPage.aspx?PageID=63664

If the link doesn't work - and it didn't when I checked - try googling "cornelius hundleby", using the quotation marks.

Some Lincolnshire Place-names

I thought I would muse a little on places in Lincolnshire and their names.

I learnt a little about the various suffixes of towns and villages at school, but just a little research shows that it was all rather over-simplified. For example, I was always told that ‘wick’ was Anglo-Saxon for ‘market, and therefore Butterwick was obviously derived from a dairy or a place where butter was sold. Apparently not true, because ‘wick’ can also be of Scandinavian origin, especially when the place is found near the sea, because it means ‘inlet’ or ‘creek’. The Butterwick where my people come is just a mile or two from the Wash and it seems pretty likely that Butruic, as it was called in the Domesday Book, was a Viking settlement.

It stands to reason that the earliest Viking invaders or settlers would create colonies near the coast. Skegness was one of them. Admittedly ‘ness’ can be Old English as well, but ‘Skeg’ has the giveaway K, characteristic of Scandinavia. The suffix ‘ney’ was old Norse for ‘island’ – eg Orkney – but came to mean an enclosure or, especially in Lincolnshire, land reclaimed from the marsh. Bardney, Friskney and Stickney, where I lived briefly as a child.

Butterwick is not far from Benington, an Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, ending, which shows how the two nations lived in close proximity to each other. I expect the local derby football matches had a bit of needle in them. I read that there are places where the Vikings took over an English settlement and renamed it, but only partially. Grimston (there’s one in Leicestershire, another in Yorkshire) has an Anglo-Saxon ending, but a Scandinavian prefix. It looks like Grim gave his name to the place but didn’t bother to remove the suffix, perhaps not wanting people to get his village confused with Grimsby.

The ‘by’ ending is well-known as the great Viking indicator – Hundleby, Spilsby, Hemingby, etc (incidentally, I read that Rugby in Warwickshire is the most southerly town with a 'by' suffix) – but less well-known that it can be a prefix occasionally. The village of Bicker is the only example I can bring to mind, being a combination of ‘settlement’ and ‘marsh’. The ‘car’ in Redcar, Yorkshire, is another variation of the Norse word for marshland.

So ‘Bicker’ does not mean ‘Wrangle’, where an uncle once lived. That name means ‘crooked’ in Old Norse and refers to a winding stream long since gone.

Back near Butterwick, there’s Frieston, an English ending with a suspiciously Nordic beginning, and down the road there’s Fishtoft, definitely Scandinavian, but I doubt it’s got anything to do with fish. I may well be wrong about that. In any case, the ‘fish’ came later; the village was simply ‘Toft’ in Domesday.

Boston, of course, is St Botolph’s town, but now incorporates the old Danish settlement of Skirbeck. ‘Beck’ means stream in both language traditions, but we know that Skirbeck was called a ‘wapentake’, a small administrative unit, similar to the Saxon ‘hundred’, which theoretically contained a hundred households. The concept of the wapentake wasn’t finally abolished until 1888. It’s possible that the ‘Skir’ means ‘church’, for it’s not just Scotland where ‘kirk’ has that meaning.

Back to ‘wick’ and a variation is ‘wig’, as in Wigford, the area that became part of Lincoln as I know it today. This time it does mean market, market by the river crossing to be precise and lies at the bottom of the hill on which ancient Lincoln proper stands. There’s still a bit of snobbery in the city about whether you live ‘uphill’ or ‘downhill’.

The various names in Lincoln are reminders of the different peoples who became strands in the fabric of the city. The ‘Lin’ in Lincoln comes from ‘llyn’, a Celtic word meaning lake; and the ‘coln’ is a reminder of the Roman colony established on the hill for retired soldiers, who would have been of all nationalities throughout the Empire, not just Italian. The Romans also left us the Fossdyke, as well as the Fosse Way and Ermine Street, which meet at the bottom of Cross o’Cliffe Hill. (By the way, that’s where one of the Eleanor Crosses was erected). The Angles founded Wigford and the Scandinavians left us several ‘gates’ or streets, such as Hungate and Saltergate. The Normans are remembered in Beaumont Fee, as well as the Castle and Cathedral.

I’d better stop before I get on to Swineshead, which probably has nothing to do with pigs. I strongly doubt that that Threekingham has any royal connection at all.

Names

I once worked for a year for the local office of the Department of Work and Pensions, the Records department. It was pretty routine and I spent my day filing large folders of personal information on long racks of shelving.

For someone interested in names, though, it was fascinating. There was the usual character who had changed his name to Elvis Presley – ever town has at least one – as well as problems deciding which part of a Muslim or Sikh name counts as the surname and the frequent mixing up of ‘Macs’ and ‘Mcs’.

I found somebody once whose surname was ‘De La Pole’. I informed my colleagues, who by now were used to my eccentricities, that if Richard III had not killed at Bosworth, murdered as I see it, the throne of England might have passed to the De La Pole who was the son of Richard’s sister.

I used to say that the records were a marvellous resource for students researching surname distribution throughout the country. And the section devoted to Retirement Pensioners would have been useful to anyone interested in the changing fashions in first names. I remember all the seventy year-old women called Rose, Pearl, Doris, Iris, Mavis – flowers, jewels, birds, nymphs, etc. And of course, names from the Bible were once very popular.

I think perhaps the most popular woman’s name seventy years ago was ‘May’, but oddly seldom as a first name. I was usually added to another, Daisy May, Sarah May, Laura May, etc. (Pause for ribald jokes).

I was thinking about this when I was perusing one of the charts Susan sent me.

I was particularly intrigued by Thomas and Ruth (b 1794 and 1795).

Apart from names, I noticed first that Thomas seems to have been a posthumous son, born (or baptised?) in 1795, the year after John died.

Thomas, unlike his father, lived to a ripe old age, as did his wife Ruth, 87 and 79 respectively. Maybe this is because they were country folk, plenty of fresh air and hard work, partly protected from the diseases of the towns. No doubt their food was plain and simple, with plenty of vegetables, if not fruit. Lincolnshire people, however poor, have usually had plenty to eat.

I wonder if they were even then god-fearing people, forswearing drink and tobacco, although I find it difficult to imagine Thomas without a pipe.

And then there are all those children, the last, Samuel being born when Ruth was 46. Another lesson there in longevity, perhaps. Samuel himself lived to be 80. He and his father spanned three centuries, just.

It’s interesting that they had two sons called Joseph. I assume this is because the first died. I hadn’t noticed people doing this before except in mediaeval royal families. I think Edward III lost children and later gave their name to another child. As I recall, he and also King John used to use the same names for their illegitimate children, so that they had two or more families growing up in parallel.

The names Thomas gave to his children are all pretty standard for the times and are not uncommon today. I wonder if Princes William and Henry will lead a revival of those names, which oddly were the names of Thomas’ first two sons. His daughters were Sarah, Susanna and Ann, names still in use, with variants.

Only Cornelius is intriguing. I wonder if anyone knows why it was chosen. Did Thomas like classical history and read about the Punic Wars? Has it been passed down like so many Hundleby Christian names?

Note: Susan tells me that the name 'Cornelius' seems to have been introduced as a Hundleby name from Ruth's family, the Bradleys, as were Susanna and Nathaniel, both Biblical names. But no-one seems to know why Cornelius was chosen originally.

Away from Thomas I notice a use of mother’s maiden names being used as forenames. Bennett Warren Hundleby, for example, and Stanley Truman Hundleby sound very American. I named my own first son, James, Barrett, after his mother, but that was done in conscious imitation.

Interesting link:

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=184