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of the manor which
he held in Staffordshire, the only variation of this name that had
occurred in the old home locality was to change the spelling from Peshale to Peshall. It
would seem therefore that it would be certain that our family name had by
this time become fixed and unchangeable.
If however there
came a time when the family for any reason desired to change the spelling
of their surname and yet keep the old appellation, then the natural
sequence of change would be to add an r so as to emphasize the long drawn
sound peculiar to the first element of the name and to drop the silent h
which must have been trying to the sensibilities of their friends who
were not cockney Englishmen. It is therefore interesting to notice that
this is what actually began to occur among the learned clerks and
recorders of public and ecclesiastical records, at the end of the
fifteenth century. Or more accurately at about 1486, which was the time
of the few years which brought to a close the life of Sir Hugh of Horsley
who was knighted at Bosworth Field.
Henry Harrison who has had access to an old manuscript relating to the
Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) gives the following quotation:
Sir Robert Tunstall a noble knight
And come of
Royal ancestrie
Sir John Savage
wise and right,
Sir Hugh Persall there was three.
[Percy's Folio
MSS. of Bosworth Field.]
The important
point to be impressed upon the reader's attention is that all the
authorities agree that this change in the way the name was spelled on the
public records began contemporary with the close of the life of Sir Hugh
of Bosworth Field. We desire also to say
that we have approached this remarkable variation in the family name from
this point of observation, so as to raise in the reader's mind the
inquiry as to why such a change should have come about at all and what
could have induced it to have occurred at this particular time after the
surname had come to be so well established with the members of the family
and why it should have happened in Staffordshire where the name had been
known for over three centuries without any material variation. And we
have also directed attention in this way to this remarkable occurrence
because for a long time, before we knew the real underlying reason for
this change, we were possessed only of the common information that
subsequent to 1486 such a variation did occur in certain Staffordshire
localities in the spelling of our surname.
In studying this
subject it will be well to remember that no matter which word in the
English language one may be considering it is certain that primarily it had
its beginning, as an English word, in some historical incident of great
or trifling import. Hence it has come to be an axiom arising from the
solution of dialectal problems that very much of our history as an
English speaking people lies hidden in the words of our daily use. This
so far as family history is concerned can be as truthfully said of one's
surname. For example, in the present instance it happened that at the
Battle of Bosworth Field the family divided in their allegiance between
the two claimants to the English throne. At that period there were three
different divisions of the family in Staffordshire, namely: those of
Horsley and those of Ranton who supported the
side of Lancaster.
They changed their name
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