GENEALOGY. 585 



their antecedents. And yet among all ranks of people, from the high- 

 est to the lowest, there is some curiosity upon the subject, which, though 

 usually languid, is always ready, should circumstances so direct, to burst 

 into a flame. 



It is a pity, however, that this flame should be fed with improper 

 fuel to the extent that it is. When a new man rises up above the 

 mean to such a degree that he thinks it necessary to inquire into his 

 ancestry, his first conclusion is that he must necessarily be related to 

 the best-known family of the name he happens to bear. Should that 

 name be Howard, he considers himself related to the house of Norfolk ; 

 should his patronymic be Percy, he deems himself sprung from the 

 same ancestry as the Duke of Northumberland ; and if his name be 

 Herbert, he claims affinity with the ennobled family of that name. 

 While his ardor is fresh upon him, in his ignorance he probably applies 

 to some professed pedigree-monger, who at once furnishes him with 

 the missing links between himself and the great family he considers 

 himself to belong to, and affixes to the sophisticated article the trade- 

 mark, the coat-of-arms and crest, which belongs to the real thing; 

 thereby confirming the parvenu in his ideas, and satisfying him that 

 his views are correct. Of course it may be that the Howard in ques- 

 tion is really sprung from the same ancestry as the Duke of Norfolk ; 

 and, indeed, the longer back a family can be traced to have existed, 

 the more likely it is that some of its collateral branches will have sunk 

 down to a lower level of society and have lost all knowledge of their 

 origin. In fact, in the neighborhood of the seat of an old family are 

 usually to be found persons bearing the same name, in all ranks of life, 

 from the yeoman to the laborer. Perhaps they are not all related, for 

 before surnames became fixed in the lower ranks of life the name of a 

 leading family might have been assumed by persons whose connection 

 >with it was not that of blood, but of servitude or tenancy, or of some 

 similar nature. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a practice 

 existed of alienating coats-of-arms from one person to another by deed, 

 and grants by barons to their tenants of their own bearings more or 

 less modified were not uncommon. If this occurred with matters so 

 important as coats-of-arms were in those times, we may be sure that 

 the same thing went on with regard to surnames ; and in the rush to 

 secure a name which must have taken place in the twelfth and thir- 

 teenth centuries, and which worked from above downward, the name 

 of a neighboring family which was already provided with that desirable 

 appendage must frequently, either with or without permission, have 

 been assumed or obtained ; sometimes, perhaps, without any connection 

 at all with the original owners, but merely because such a name was 

 already in existence. 



The earliest documents in which names occur in any plenty, and 

 from which we can judge of their distribution, are parish registers. In 

 these we find that in each parish there is usually a marked preponder- 



