The Name "Lamkin"- Friedman 1977
The Name "Lamkin"
by Albert B. Friedman
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 90, No. 358 (Oct. - Dec., 1977), pp. 465-466
NOTES AND QUERIES
The Name "Lamkin"
In his suggestive article on the ballad "Lamkin" (Child 93), John DeWitt Niles mentions me as supporting Anne Gilchrist's idea that the name implies Lamkin was a Flemish mason.[1] Her line of reasoning is that Lamkin was the diminutive for Lambert, the patron saint of Liege and a popular saint in Flanders generally, and therefore a common Flemish Christian name. She also, as Niles notes, "calls attention to the number of Flemish craftsmen who lived or worked in the British Isles during the late Middle Ages and subsequent centuries, some of whom bore this name." Since Niles can find only one version where the formal version Lambert is used, he doubts the nationalistic slur against the Flemings in the name.
A popular anthology does not give one much space in which to maneuver, and I therefore could not support Gilchrist with circumstantial references. Now that Niles has raised the issue as to the Flemishness of Lamkin, in fairness to the Gilchrist hypothesis, I should do so. As she failed to realize, the Flemish quality of the name is much more in the -kin than in the Lam-, the connection with St. Lambert. For though Niles finds only one Lambert, we do find in the versions, beside the obvious variants like Lankin, Lambert Linkin and Lampkin, such names as Bold Dunkins where the -kin is determinative.[2] Wileken appears to have been a derisive nickname for a Fleming in a versicle of "black" propaganda against the Flemings reported by the chronicler Matthew Paris about 1250.[3] Ewen observes that -kyn is a common suffix in the personal and surnames of wool mongers from Flanders. Names of this kind in the index to the Hundred Roll "preponderate in the South and East, being those counties most convenient for trading and communication with the Low Countries." The use of-kyn as a diminutive suffix in native English personal names, Ewen believes, was probably imported from Holland and Flanders in the twelfth century, although it had occurred sporadically in personal names even in "pre-Conquest days."[4] Bardsley likewise attributes the increasing commonness of this diminutive in personal names from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries to "incomers from Brabant and Flanders."[5] Thus any likely name in -kin connoted a person of Flemish origin and was therefore an appropriate nickname in a ballad or satire villifying a Fleming.
Certainly names in -kin were employed in this way in the sixteenth century. A satire against the Flemish knights who attended Anne of Cleves on her journey to London has a chorus which begins, "Hoyda, hoyda, jolly Rutterkin!,"[6] a taunt echoed in Skelton's Magnificence.[7] In his "Why Come Ye Not to Court?" he labels the Flemish "Flanderkyns" (1. 922). The clown Frisco in William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1598) says that the best way to speak perfect Dutch (Flemish and Dutch are synonymous for the Elizabethans) is to get one's mouth full of food first and then "brumble it forth full-mouth, as 'Haunce Butterkin slowpin frokin' " (I, i). There are also characteristic -kin words in Lacy's Flemish drinking song in Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday (II, iii).
Making Lamkin a specifically Flemish mason does not of course tell against Niles' central point, the ballad's connection with the Baumeister legend.
Claremont Graduate School
ALBERT B . FRIEDMAN
Claremont, California
Footnotes:
1. "Lamkin: The Motivation of Horror," Journal of American Folklore, 70 (1977), 58.
2 Ibid., p. 50.
3. See my article "Medieval Popular Satire in Matthew Paris," Modern Language Notes, 74 (1959), 673-678, from which I have borrowed the instances below.
4 C. L. Ewen, A History of the Surnames of the British Isles (London, 1931), pp. 278-28 1. Compare his Guide to the Origins of British Surnames (London, 1938), pp. 62-63. In addition to his references, see The Cely Papers: 1475-88, ed. H. E. Malden (London, 1900), pp. 154-155, where an unscrupulous Flemish wool trader is called "Wyllykyn."
5. C. W. Bardsley, A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames (London, 1901), p. 25.
6 Printed in Early English Lyrics, ed. E. K. Chambers and Frank Sidgwick (London, 1926), p. 248, from B. M. Addit, MS 5465.
7 Complete Poems, ed. Philip Henderson (London: J. M. Dent, 1931), p. 198.