The value of this principle lies here : that it is a simple and easy mode of showing, to some extent, to what family an individual belongs ; it promotes family union ; but its chief advantage lies in the facilities which it affords for conducting inquiries into the condition of the ancestors of persons who may feel any curiosity on the subject, which, without the indications afforded by identity of surname, could be attended with very little success, when it was attempted to ascend beyond the recollections of persons still living.
This mode of designation, we believe, prevails in most other countries of modern Europe. In England it is almost the universal plan. The royal house of England forms an exception, an unchangeable surname having never been adopted by them. In this respect the house of Brunswick is like the houses of Saxe, Nassau, Bourbon, Orleans, and a few others, from the persons who were of prime note in that state of society when the rule was, "one person, one word," and being afterwards too conspicuous by rank and station to need any such ordinary mode of distinction as that which the adoption of an invariable addition to the name would have given them. This was once not peculiar to the royal house of England in this island (the Stuarts, it may be observed; and perhaps the Tudors, but not the Plantagenets, were a temporary exception, being families of inferior rank, who were raised by circumstances to the possession of the regal dignity), for the earls, in the first two or three centuries, seem also to have disdained a practice which assimilated them too nearly to the classes next below them. Thus the persons distinguished in Domesday Book as Comites, are Comes Hugo, Comes Rogerus ; and never, we believe, with names of addition which descended to their posterity. But all these great houses have become long ago extinct.
There is also an exception to the modern rule, of another kind. There are still some remote and rudely-cultivated districts, in which the inhabitants are better known by some by name, as of the house in which they live, or as the son of some person well-known, than by any unvarying addition to their name properly so called. This is said still (or at least no great while since) to be the case in some parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, and is certainly the ease in parts of Wales, but it is probable that the extension of education will bring all parts of this island into subjugation to a plan which has such obvious convenience.
If it is inquired when the system on which we now proceed was first adopted, the fact which has just been stated, that even now the system is not universally prevalent, will show, what is indeed the fact, that, like many other things, it has made its way by degrees. There is not, we believe, a single instance before the Conquest of persons iu genea logical succession bearing the same surname ; and it is also quite certain that in the mass of the population of England after the Conquest, the descendants of the Saxon population, there can rarely, if ever, be shown an instance of successive individuals of the same family being distinguished by the same surname in the two centuries immediately succeeding the Conquest. We have indeed but imperfect means of pursuing the inquiry for those two centuries. The names of the people of those centuries lie buried in unpriuted records and chartularies. But if there are exceptions, and Saxon families in these centuries to he traced using an invariable as well as a variable_ name, it is in that remarkable clam, who still exist in no very small number, who have one of the old Saxon appellatives In the place of the surname, such as Thorold, Swaine, Aldred, TherougAgosei (Turgot), Godwin, and the like.
But we find in Domesday Book that several of the Normans and other people from the Continent, who became settled in England at the Conquest, and soon after that event, are distinguished by names of addition, which are not merely personal, but names which were borne by themselves and their poaterity after them. Such are Darcy, A rund Derereux, Ballid, Berk a , Laci, Perci, and others, people just. below the rank of the comitee, and who, gaining great possessions and great power, were afterwards very conspicuous in English history. These are the persona, we conceive, who first set the example of the practice which has since beome all but universal among us.
The disposition which always more or less exists to imitate what is done by a superior, is probably the principle to which we are to refer the change in this point which we find to have taken place by the middle of the 14th century.