Apologies to the Jameses and Nicholls

Despite up to 500 daily visitors (a few days even more) no-one noticed the deliberate (ahem) mistakes in my list of the 20 most common surnames in Victorian Cornwall.  Where were the Jameses? In fact, they should have been found at number 11 in the list. And what about the Nicholls? Why hadn’t they appeared in their expected slot at number 14? These surnames somehow got unaccountably lost in the transition from spreadsheet to blog post, via Word document.

Another New Testament name, James was one of the more popular first names of medieval Cornwall, especially in Cornish-speaking communities. Indeed, its distribution in the early sixteenth century was more closely aligned with the linguistic division of Cornwall than most other surnames. In particular, its frequency in the zone just east of the Camel estuary, where Cornish probably ceased to be the vernacular language around the final quarter of the 1400s, may point to the period when James became adopted as a hereditary surname.

In the middle ages Nicholls was the vernacular and common form of the original Greek name Nicholas. Contrasting with James, it was more likely to be encountered in east Cornwall in the 1600s, by which time it had dispersed widely. The distribution of the surname Nicholas shows no particular difference from Nicholls. Its adoption was no doubt more a matter of luck and the predilection of the local literate class than anything else.

By the ninteeenth century both surnames were concentrated on the west, as we would expect.