Cornwall’s top 20 surnames: 19. Hicks

The medieval first names introduced to the British Isles from France by the Normans spawned a bewildering number of variants. In the late medieval period, when the number of first names was shrinking, this had the advantage of helping to differentiate folk with the same second name.

The name Richard was particularly prolific when it came to coining offshoots. Richard and Rickard were interchangeable in medieval times, reflecting two pronunciations. Rickard produced the short forms Rick and Dick, which sometimes became vernacular Hick.

The first map below indicates that Hick in Cornwall must have had many different origins. But it also suggests its heartland lay in mid-Cornwall from the north coast at Padstow through Bodmin to Fowey in the south and Liskeard to the south east. This pattern had become even more obvious by the mid-seventeenth century.

In the early 1500s, only five per cent of Hicks listed in the tax returns had gained an <-s>. By 1641 90 per cent had. How and why had this additional <s> appeared? Surnames ending with <s> originated in the English south-west Midlands – Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Herefordshire in particular – when the poorer classes began to adopt hereditary surnames after the late 1200s. From about 1550 onwards some surnames from first names, like Hick, that did not originally have an <s> began to adopt them too. This was possibly by analogy with the earlier surnames that ended with <s> or possibly it just became the fashionable thing to do when a herd instinct set in.

In Wales when hereditary surnames were adopted after the 1500s an added <s> became particularly common in names like Williams and Jones. It’s no coincidence that this was also the case in Cornwall, where many second names in the Cornish-speaking community only became hereditary surnames after 1500.

In 1861, when there were 440 households in Cornwall headed by someone named Hicks, there had been some drift westwards to the mining districts of Redruth and St Just. However, the original heartland is still visible in the map of Hickses at that point.