Family History 1

Origins of the Gaze Family name

 

The starting point for research about family names is the Oxford Dictionary of Surnames. There we find the name GAZE listed with a range of variants, like Gace, Haze, Gayes, Hayes, Wace, Wasey, Gears, Waswo – and so on. 

 

These variations are caused by the spelling of Old and Middle English which used symbols and sounds we no longer have in modern English. The letter pronounced like a rough H looked similar to G, so it is not surprising that Gs and Hs got confused.  And the letter W was spelled with a G in Norman-French (cf war/guerre or ward and guard), so you could have a variant starting with W.

 

Similarly, R could be confused with Y or even P, so Gears and Gayes could look very similar in an Old English document.

 

Coastal erosion near houses at Happisburgh

Gaze families, even in modern phone books, are concentrated in two localities in England. The first is Hucclecote, near Gloucester (actually now a suburb) and the second is Happisburgh (pronounced Hazebra) in Norfolk, which is famous because the coast nearby is eroding at a very rapid rate.

 

The spelling of Happisburgh is because people mistook a double Y for a double P so what was originally HAYYISBURGH became written HAPPISBURGH. There is another Hazebrouk in northern France, which I assume has the same origin.

 

If you look in the local histories and authorities for an explanation of the name HUCCLECOTE no-one seems to know where it came from. Some say UCHEL+COED meaning a wooded hill, but others dispute this.

 

-COTE is a common ending for placenames in England (Northcote, Wattcote and so on) and means an enclosure (dovecote, sheepcote).  It is probably the same as the ending KOT in Indian placenames (eg Pathankot, Rajkot).  My guess is that it referred to a more substantial enclosure like a fort.

 

HUCCLE sounds like MUCKLE.  There is an old saying “Many a mickle maks a muckle” – meaning “Many a little makes a lot”.  Mickle and muckle are dialect words cognate with Greek MIKRO and MAKRO. So Huccle could be similarly the same as a Greek word (H)AKRO as in Acropolis.  Acropolis means citadel, or “Top part of Town”.  The common use of HUCKLE is in HUCKLEBERRY, which some suggest means “the best berry”.  So we can see that Hucclecote could have meant the same as Acropolis, ie the best defended part of the fortress, like the centre of a fighting pa in Maori villages.

 

Archaeologists have uncovered a Roman Villa at Hucclecote, and of course the name Gloucester means it was the site of the “CASTRA” or camp of the units controlling the district of the GLOVI tribe during Roman times.  So at some time Hucclecote was the headquarters of a military establishment, or the residence of the general in charge of the camp.

 

But what about Happisburgh?  Burgh is easy – it is a common ending meaning a town, and like -cote it originally meant the most closely defended part of a town or fortress. Examples are Edinburgh, Loughborough, Hamburg, Naples (Nea-polis), Nagpur, Kanpur (=Khan, as in Genghis, + Pur = Polis = Burgh), Salisbury, Tewkesbury, Brahmanbaria and so on. Another variant is –byr or –by, as in Whitby and Hornby, the Norse equivalent of -burgh.

 

Happis as we have seen is pronounced Haze (or Gaze), and one of the earliest forms of the name is “Gears” or Hears, which I take to be a corruption (?) of HERR, the German word for Master, Lord, Leader, Boss, etc  So Happisburgh would be the fortress of the leader, say, of a Viking or pirate gang or family. Cf Mafia families.

 

My suggestion is therefore that both Hucclecote and Happisburgh mean “the home of the leader”, or “the Boss’s Place”, and that the name Gaze is derived from HERR, meaning leader.

 

I cannot prove it beyond doubt, so the lawyers can still argue, but I think it is plausible and credible and that’s OK by me!

(This is the first of what I hope will be a comprehensive history of our family; please do add anything you think I have left out.)