The Times of London last week celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a republication of the original issue reporting the victory. The edition also contained the contributions from villages in Nottinghamshire to a fund for the families of dead and injured soldiers and seamen.
Some of the village names - Rempstone, Wilford, Gedling, Bunny, Tithby, Calverton, Beeston, Willoughby, Gotham, Granby - were strangely familiar to me, though not as places, but as people: they were the names of families which I knew in the nearby Leicester in my childhood, or of boys who attended the city's Wyggeston Grammar School, where I studied for two years.
Now all my other education was at Catholic schools, where most pupils were of Irish extraction, and often of Irish appearance. Not so Wyggeston. It was emphatically English and Protestant, and the boys tended to have sallower skin, straighter hair, browner eyes than those at Catholic schools, clearly owing more to the gene pool of Gary Lineker than of Garryowen. And furthermore, many had retained in their family names the hamlets from which their ancestors had come in the middle ages.
And that is one of the extraordinary differences between England and Ireland. Almost no Irish surnames are toponymics: Kilkenny and Monaghan almost alone spring to mind - for Galway, as in the flute-player, is probably a corruption of the Scottish "Galloway".
Otherwise, Irish surnames, and certainly Gaelic surnames, have little or no sense of place. They do have, of course, a sense of family - hence the plethora of Macs and O's, though these do not suggest the easy stability and respect for origin that is conferred by a toponymic.
Edward MacLysaght's Surnames of Ireland reports that the most common name in Ireland, Murphy, comes from Ó Murchadha, which means "sea-warrior", ie, pirate. Kelly comes via Ó Ceallaigh, which probably derives from "ceallagh", meaning "strife." In other words, the two most common names in Ireland both have their origins in conflict, which perhaps tell us something about the conditions in Ireland when surnames were being doled out.
The third most common name, O'Sullivan, is based on the Irish "súil" - "eye" - and is probably offensive. O'Doherty certainly is: MacLysaght says it comes from the Irish "dochartach" - "hurtful". In other words, we clearly have a tradition of giving people insulting surnames. Why does this not surprise me? Probably the fourth most common name, Gallagher, in all its two dozen forms, helps explain the absence of toponymics in Gaelic Ireland; "gall" simply means foreigner. And when strangers had a dark complexion, they were called "dubh gall" - hence Doyle, MacDowell, and the many variants thereof. Just to complete the picture of how outsiders were regarded in medieval Ireland, we come to the name Walsh, as in "Welsh". But the "Wal" of Wales is simply an anglicised form of the universal - and usually unflattering - European term for foreigner, "gall" again.
In other words, ancient Irish society apparently did not do outsiders the courtesy of discovering where they were from and calling them by that name, but instead simply blanket-labelled them as foreigners. Céad míle fáilte, gall.
It is more than a matter of good manners, for what a cultural loss was thus incurred. For who would not be proud to be called Mountmellick, Mooncoin or Moville? How mellifluous it would be to able to introduce oneself as Simon Ennistymon or Cormac Rathccormack. Skibbereen, Parknasilla, Creeslough, Kilcrohane, Lisdoonvarna, Loughinisland, Delphi, Cushendall, Emo, Gweebarra: they all beg to accompanied by a first name. Who could fail to radiate majesty if their surname alone were Grianán of Aileach? ("Good morning, noble lady, my name is the Lord Arkwright of Accrington, peer of the realm: whom, pray, do I have the honour of addressing?" "Éilis Grianán of Aileach," she replies, "charwoman.")
To be sure, some places would make unpromising family names. Tommy Termonfeckin would probably have had a hard time at school, and Denis Dunsink would probably yearn to be called Gallagher or Murphy. It's hard to imagine anyone yearning to be called Bruff or Ullard or Two Mile Borris or Horse and Jockey or Sluggary Crossroads or Hackballscross (which in wiser, happier days was known as Myers' Cross). It is doubtful whether the boy could make it to adulthood with a name like Stillorgan, and all those places called Kill would take a decidedly Anglo-Saxon meaning when turned into a family name, as would their apparent victim, Slane.
In its report on Trafalgar, the Times referred to Lord Nelson by a largely forgotten title, the Duke of Bronté. This honorific apparently prompted the loyal Irish clergyman Patrick Prunty to change his name to Brontë. Nelson's career had many consequences, and he might well indeed have saved the United Kingdom from Napoleonic tyranny; but without him, the most famous literary family in the world would certainly be known today as the Prunty sisters. This would have been rather appropriate, for this little-known Ulster name comes from the Gaelic Ó Proinntigh, which, rather flatteringly for an Irish name, apparently comes from the Gaelic for "generous person".
Were there ever more sublimely generous literary sisters than Anne Prunty, creator of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, dead at 29, Charlotte Prunty, author of Jane Eyre dead at 39, and Emily Prunty, begetter of Wuthering Heights, dead at the age of 30? Perhaps the absence of Irish toponymics was to their advantage: otherwise, with their wretched luck, they'd have been known as the Nobber, Nad or Muff sisters.