Samuel Merrill, 1928, reprint 1983

Merrill: the Name and Its Variations - Chapter II, pp17-27

Origin of Surnames

   Surnames were not common in England before the eleventh century. When they came into use some were derived from places, some from baptismal names, some from trades or offices, and others from miscellaneous sources, these latter being in their origin largely nicknames based upon personal characteristics or upon the names of animals, birds or other things. To which of these classes our family name may be assigned, I regret that I am unable to say.

Battle Abbey Roll

   The search for the origin of the Merrill name has led many to inspect the Roll of Battle Abbey—the list of Norman knights who survived the battle of Hastings, and who were rewarded for their military service by grants of English land from the Norman Conquerer. As General Merrill wrote, “There are among the names on Battle Roll three which may have become Merrill in after years.” But the true Roll “has not come down to our times, and the various lists we possess are of subsequent date, and more or less apocryphal in their character.”(*) Many names are said to have been inserted in after years by the monks of the abbey, for mercenary considerations, and the Roll is now considered of little or no historic value.

Is the Name Anglo-Saxon?

In a little book entitled “Surnames as a Science,” published in London in 1883, Robert Ferguson, M.P., seeks to derive “Merrill” from a German origin through the Anglo-Saxon. Few of us will thank him for his efforts. “Marlingen,” he says, is a Bavarian family name, and it appears in the Anglo-Saxon as “Merlingas.” The “ing” in this name “is a patronymic, as in Bruning, son of Br–n.” The ending “ingas” is of the nominative plural, Merlingas thus denoting sons or descendants of Merl. According to this theory, some family among the Saxon hordes which invaded England in the fifth and sixth centuries may have been under the patriarchal leadership of a man named Merl, and all the individuals in the group accordingly took the name Merlingas, or sons or followers of Merl.

   But Mr. Ferguson wastes his efforts in etymological abstractions, and gives no evidence whatever to show that the English surname Merrill has anything in common with Marl and Marling, all of which names he undertakes to derive from the same Anglo-Saxon source. A little phonetic similarity is insufficient to prove community of origin.

The Huguenot Theory

   Another theory, which has found many supporters, is that the family is descended from Huguenots who migrated to England after the bloody events which marked St. Bartholomew’s day in Paris in 1572. To quote again from General Merrill:

   “I have no doubt, and have everything short of full proof, that we come of the English Merrill family who fled from France after the massacre of St. Bartholomew. They belonged to the DuMerle family of Auvergne, and the DeMerle family of Dauphiny. The evidence of the coat-of-arms is to my mind conclusive, taken with all the other facts.” (See page 115.)

   Bishop Stephen-M. Merrill and his brother, James-Warren Merrill, in their little book, “Joshua Merrill and Family” (1899), arrived at a similar conclusion. They say, “The name Merrill, according to the best information now in reach, originated in the French-speaking Cantons in Switzerland several hundred years ago. . . . The original form of the name, and that still prevalent in Switzerland, was Merle. The Rev. J. H. Merle, D.D., the learned author of the ‘History of the Reformation,’ (D’Aubign”s history), is an example.”

   Merle is a French common noun meaning blackbird, and it is an old English name for birds of the same species. The French also use the word, in a figurative sense, to denote a crafty, swaggering fellow, and Lor’dan Larchey, in his “Dictionnaire des Noms,” (Paris, 1880), intimates that Merle as a surname was presumably first applied to some quarrelsome person.

   But the theory that the English name “Merrill” is derived from the French “Merle” seems to depend altogether on phonetic resemblance for support. It ignores the fact that the Merrill name was found in England long before the sixteenth century. (**)

* Mark Antony Lower, quoted by the Duchess of Cleveland in “The Battle Abbey Roll, with Some Account of the Norman Lineages,” (London, 1889), vol. I, p. v, note.

** A correspondent wrote to me of a Merrel, a member of the French Senate some thirty years ago, who said his family had lived in Bordeaux for two or three generations at least. The Senator wrote that, so far as he was aware, none of his family had ever removed to England.

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