The runner up in our top 20 Cornish surnames list is Thomas. Another name from the New Testament, as one of Christ’s disciples Thomas was always going to be a favoured choice for a boys’ first name. This was boosted by the cult of St Thomas, popular among the Normans and the life (and death in 1170) of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. By the end of the 1200s it had become one of the commonest first names in southern Britain.
However, even more so than Richard, it was present in mid and west Cornwall but only sparsely represented in east Cornwall. Its distribution in the 16th century closely mirrors the cultural divide between Cornish-speaking communities and the English-speaking east where surnames had been hereditary up to 200 years earlier. At that time – in the 1300s – there was more choice in surname formation. By the 1500s that choice had narrowed and names such as Thomas, Richard or Rawe dominated surname formation.
Already a surname focused on the west, in the succeeding centuries Cornwall’s mining economy merely served to reinforce this geography. As we shall see, exactly the same applied to Cornwall’s number 1 surname of the 19th century and later.
Cornish studies resources 