Close cousins: Warren and Warne

According to most surname dictionaries Warren and Warne have different origins. Warne was traditionally supposed to be a name derived from places in Devon and Somerset; Warren from a place in northern France or from the first name Warin or Werin. Even the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names retains the distinction, although suggesting that Warne could sometimes be a ‘reduced form of Warren’.

What light might their distribution throw on this? In the early sixteenth century tax records the two names are intermixed. Most spellings at that time were Waryn or Waren – found mainly in east Cornwall. Meanwhile just three Warns were recorded, widely spaced at Kenwyn in the west, St Issey in mid-Cornwall and Talland in the south east.

Parish registers in the later 1500s provide several examples where the same person is named in some records as Waren and in others as Warne. For instance John Warne of St Issey is recorded as such in 1596 and 1599 but as John Waren in 1600. It looks as if the names were interchangeable at a time when spelling was erratic, unpredictable and dependent on the whims of clergymen and tax collectors. The 1641 map bears this out, with an intermingling of the names, although Warne was at that time more concentrated on some places than the more evenly spread Warren.

That had reversed itself by 1861 (for maps see here), by which time Warren was more likely to be encountered in the west. As for an origin for these names, that’s more likely to lie in the personal name Waryn or Warin. This first name was still being used in Cornish-speaking west Cornwall in the 1600s but had apparently gone out of fashion in most of the east.

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