Wherstead

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. THE VICARS' BAPTISMAL NAMES. How m: nyare there who might have done well in the world had not their character and spirit been depressed and Nicodemused into nothing.?Sierne. WE now come to the Christian names of our list; and in them, too, we find embedded some not uninteresting history. What...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. THE VICARS' BAPTISMAL NAMES. How m: nyare there who might have done well in the world had not their character and spirit been depressed and Nicodemused into nothing.?Sierne. WE now come to the Christian names of our list; and in them, too, we find embedded some not uninteresting history. What first strikes the eye with respect to them is that, of all the twenty-eight on the roll, the last is the only one who had received more than one baptismal name. On my pointing out this to the late Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penryn Stanley, he replied that he had noted the same fact with respect to the far longer list of the Deans of Westminster who had preceded him: that only one beside himself had two Christian names. There are many instances of these binomial appellations of an earlier date, but the practice of giving them did not become general till about a century ago. They only begin to appear in the Wherstead baptismal register at about that time. We may suppose that the practice originated in a real want. The usual baptismal names were not more than fifty-two, and many families, too, had the same surname. Hence would arise some confusion, for many individuals must have thus come to have the same names. If, however, two baptismal names were given, this confusion would be avoided. The innovation was also recommended by the desire felt by the parents to give their infant the names ofmore than one of their relatives or friends. But in this, as is the case with everything, it was possible to raise objections on the other side. And here the opposition came from the lawyers, who for a long time, but in the end un- availingly, fought against the two names, taking what appeared to be the unanswerable ground that a man might be either Dick or Tom, but that it was not poss...