Awesome Puritan names
A while ago, for fun, I started doing some reading on some of the stranger naming choices made by the Puritans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. (Yes, for fun. I am a dork.) Here are a few of my favourites:
A Sussex jury roll from the 1600s includes the names Accepted Trevor, Redeemed Compton, Kill-Sin Pimple, Fly-Fornication Richardson, Search-The-Scriptures Moreton, The-Peace-Of-God Knight, Stand-Fast-On-High Stringer, The-Gift-of-God Stringer, and Fight-The-Good-Fight-Of-Faith White, Obediencia Cruttenden, Called Lower, Hope-For Bending, More-Fruit Flower and Meek Brewer. Some other wonderful Sussex names around this time include Safely-on-High Snat, Mortifie Hicks and the marvellously-named Humiliation Scratcher. And let’s not forget Be-Stedfast Elyarde, Faint-not Dighurst, Hew-Agag-in-pieces Robinson, Swear-not-at-all Ireton and Obadiah-bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-irons Needham.
Here’s another good naming method: There was a tradition among some Puritan villagers of opening the Bible and selecting the first name their eyes landed upon, which led to some interesting christenings. One poor child was landed with the name Ramoth-Gilead as a result of this method, reportedly leading a rather bemused parson to ask, “Boy or girl, eh?” There’s some evidence that certain parents, whose reading was perhaps not the best, would simply open the Bible and choose a word at random - hence the existence in Connecticut of Maybe Barnes and a girl by the rather unfortunate name of Notwithstanding Griswold. One child in England was christened Sirs, the parents insisting that it was a Scripture name and citing as proof the passage “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Another Puritan named his dog Moreover after the Gospel passage “Moreover the dog came and licked his sores.”