The Halhed Surname and
its Spelling over the Years

Halhed is an unusual surname, a real benefit to those of us doing family history research. The name has its earliest roots in medieval England. Thus far, our genealogy studies have traced the name and family with certainty to Banbury, Oxfordshire, England in 1517. We have not found any connections to the Halhead families of Westmorland, and connections to earlier Halheds, from 1392 to the early 1500's, living in London, Oxford and Cambridge.

About Surnames and Spelling:

The use of surnames in England Iargely postdates the Norman conquest.  Over the years between 1100 and about 1400, surnames came into more common use among people who were not members of the nobility.  Surnames often identified individuals and families based on a place of origin, an occupation, or a parental relationship.  The name Halhed, it has been suggested, was originally Hallhead, or "head of the hall."

During the medieval period in England, there were many regional dialects, and the English language did not settle into the London-Standard-based English that has become our contemporary language until the 1400's and later.  Spelling and pronunciation continued to evolve, with some significant changes through the 1700's, and even into the 1800's.

Early English spellings were based in part on the writer's pronunciation, and many medieval manuscript spellings continued to be used with the advent of printed books.  There was no one right way to spell a word -- spelling could be varied even within a single document.  The possessor of a name could write it as he or she saw fit, and did not have to write it the same way every time; indeed, the possessor of a name (who might not have been of a literate class) did not necessarily write it at all, but simply made his or her mark and left the rendition of the name to a scribe.  Neither did the scribe who copied the records of wills and property need to be precise about the spelling of names, as long as the record was clear.

In early modern times, say from about 1400 on, the gradual evolution of a middle class enlarged the ranks of the literate, and personal names were more often written by their owners.  Spelling, however, was still very fluid, with names often written more-or-less phonetically. With the many regional spoken dialects still in use in England, the same name was often pronounced and spelled differently in different regions, even though the conceptual origin of the name was the same.

The spelling of English did not really begin to standardize until the later 1700's, following the publication of Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language.  With standardization of spelling and the greater ubiquity of printed materials distributed across all regions to an increasingly literate population, names too became more fixed in their pronunciation and spelling. 

Halhed Spelling Variations over Time:

The  table below has been compiled from multiple sources in which the name Halhed is cited.  In her biography of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Rosane Rocher listed 11 different spellings of Halhed from early records, indicated by a single asterisk below.  Other spellings appear in LDS Soundex search results, and in citations from a variety of other handwritten and printed records. The results mainly span the 16^th through 20^th centuries and are from some 80 locations in England, Scotland and Wales. Given that our Halhed family includes only about 160 individuals born with the surname Halhed (from 1517 to the present!), many of whom clearly adhered to the spelling Halhed, the range of spellings from such a variety of places certainly includes members of the Halhead family of the Kendall area of Westmorland, and possibly other families with the same name.  The variations in spelling that arise from differences in local dialects and pronunciations in medieval times, and from personal preferences and idiosyncrasies in the early modern period, are compounded by variations based on mistranscriptions of handwritten documents of all periods, indicated by a double asterisk below, the most common errors being the substitution of a "b", "d" or "k" for the medial "h"  or "lh"in Halhed.

The variations below are arranged alphabetically, with the most common spellings shown in bold.  The oldest versions of the name, predating 1500, are identified with ME (for Middle English) in parentheses.

One reason for my compiling this list is to highlight the fact that spelling errors often get copied and reproduced again and again, especially once they have been given "legitimacy" by appearing in print. A good example is a certain place name, "Hodsock", which was originally misspelt in the 1569 Visitations of Nottinghamshire, p. 17, as "Hodshalle" — not even close to the original. Many other "references" for John Clifton, who inherited Hodsock Priory when he married [C/K]atherine Cressey, show the name of this place, as "Hodshalle". 435 years after the first error appeared in the visitations, the error is still found in Plantagenet Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families (2004) p. 272; and Magna Carta Ancestry: A Study in Colonial and Medieval Families (2005) p. 220. Along the way, Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Peerage, Baronetage etc. also got it wrong. The same sort of error has happened with the name Halhed -- and probably your surname, too!