More Cornish surnames from places: Bosence, Buckthought and Carbines

Here are three more uniquely Cornish surnames that stem from placenames.

In 1545 we find Richard and Thomas Bossens living at Sancreed in west Penwith. They no doubt lived at or were from the hamlet now spelt Bosence. This means house of the holy men which makes perfect sense given that Craig Weatherhill points out that it’s next to the site of a medieval chapel. The surname grew in the parish of Sancreed, although a lone William Besence could be discovered in St Clement parish east of Truro in 1641. During the early 1600s the Bosence surname had also moved to nearby Paul parish and in the later century appeared further east at Redruth, moving out from its single point of origin.

Buckthought looks a more unexpected candidate as a Cornish name. Its first appearance was in the parish register of St Wenn in mid-Cornwall, when Richard Buckthought was buried in 1670. In the same year an Agnes Buckthought was baptised at nearby St Columb Major. However, the clue to the origin of the name lies in the entry of a Richard Buckthorpe among the list of men protesting their loyalty to the Crown in 1641 in St Wenn. This was very likely to be the same man whose death was registered in 1670. The baptism of Christian Buckthorpe at St Columb in 1668 also shows the simultaneous presence of the two names. The conclusion is clear – Buckthought was a local spelling variation of the unfamiliar Buckthorpe, which name derives from a Norse placename in East Yorkshire meaning Buggi’s farm. How and why some people from there migrated all the way to mid-Cornwall before 1640 is an interesting but unanswered question.

Carbines is a little more straightforward. The Cornish word Carbons means a paved road or causeway and there are at least five examples. Two of those are in mid-Cornwall, at Roche and St Austell, and the other three in the west at St Hilary, Lelant and Stithians. It seems that the two most western places, where the word had already lost its /n/ by 1400 and become Carbows, gave rise to its use as a surname, as we find people named Carbows and Carbons at St Hilary and St Erth in 1524. The more usual change was for this name to become Carbis, as in the placenames. But in the 1600s examples of Carbins emerged in west Penwith and Carbens on the Lizard, fossilising the original placename and providing another unique Cornish surname.