Twenty years ago I found myself reading a random volume in a secondhand bookshop in Hay-on-Wye – first in total confusion, then in fascination. But after 10 minutes I put the book back on the shelf and walked out. I’m not sure why – perhaps I couldn’t square the price with the money left in my pocket and my strong inclination to be in a pub. Maybe I figured I didn’t really need an old book called Curiosities in Puritan Nomenclature.
It was a mistake, because the bit I’d read contained an unforgettable fact: in the wake of the Norman conquest there arose a terrible shortage of Christian names in England. By the year 1300, a third of all Englishmen were called either William or John.
It was a fact I longed to impart – and I did – but as time went by I began to doubt my source. Perhaps I’d read it wrong. I longed to know more, but I hadn’t retained the author’s name, and after a few months I was no longer entirely confident of the title. My decision not to buy that book gnawed at me intermittently over the next 20 years.
The last time it gnawed – a week ago – it suddenly occurred to me that in the internet age a past failure to purchase something is almost always rectifiable. It took a few seconds to discover that you can now read Curiosities in Puritan Nomenclature (by Charles W Bardsley, 1880) online or download it as an e-book, or have it printed on demand or, if you’re old-school, order a lightly foxed first edition from an American bookseller.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to be re-armed with this weird fact, and some supporting evidence: of the 133 common councilmen in London in 1347, 35 were called John and 17 William. In 1385 the Norwich Guild of St George boasted 128 Johns among its 377 members, along with 47 Williams and 41 Thomases. The Richards, Roberts and Henrys accounted for almost everyone else.
Children of virtue
And that’s not even what Curiosities in Puritan Nomenclature is about. It chiefly concerns the post-Reformation revolution in name-calling, when the Puritans – who scorned the pagan and the popish and therefore almost every first name going – moved first to abstract virtues (Grace, Patience, Humility, even Silence) and then, in a fit of zealotry, to “exhortatory sentences, pious ejaculations, brief professions of Godly sorrow for sin or exclamations of praise for mercies received”. This is how children came to be christened Be-thankful, Abuse-not, Stand-fast-on-high and Fly-fornication. Highly recommended.
A million little facts
I’m sitting in the waiting area of the BBC building where the London-based go to be interviewed down-the-line by regional radio presenters. A man walks out of the booth I’m meant to go in. I ask him how it went in there. He professes to be unsure, because he is a “dumb American”. I tell him I am also a dumb American. He asks me where I’m from, and I tell him. He says he’s just moved there. I ask which town. He tells me, and I say I was born and raised in the next town over. I discover that his office is across the road from where my father’s dental practice was. I ask him what he was talking about in the booth, and he says that he has written a novel, that it has a puzzle in it, and that if anyone solves the puzzle they get $500k. “Oh,” I say. I don’t know what else to say, beyond goodbye. It’s my turn in the booth. By the time I reach the bus stop I know this man to be James Frey, author of the brilliant if not entirely true memoir A Million Little Pieces, who was subsequently publicly vilified and largely redeemed, not necessarily by the same people, and who has indeed just published a book with a half-a-million-dollar puzzle inside. I can’t help feeling the internet robbed our encounter of a bit of its mystery. That, I think, was too easy.
@IAmTimDowling
