Origin of Culpepper

I remember reading somewhere years ago about the Cole family being connected to the family that were peperers (grocerymen). The speculation was made on the basis that the Colepeper coat of arms had COLE features included in it. The assumption is that sometime before 1150 a Cole married a Peperer and became Colepeper.

From: Rob Culpepper (E-Mail)
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007
To: Lew Griffin and Warren Culpepper
Subject: Culpepper surname origins

I thought I’d bounce some ideas off of you and Warren about the Culpepper ancestry prior to Thomas the Recognitor, and about the origin of the Culpeper surname.

I’ve been looking into this intermittently during the last year or so and I’d just like to introduce the idea that ancestry preceding “the Recognitor” may have been  Norman  - and that the origin of the name is Norman, originally referring to some place/property.  I’ve listed my reasons below.

1. Hereditary appellations in England were just beginning to take hold in the century following the Norman invasion of 1066.  In fact, the growing fashion among Norman gentry in England (the only kind of English gentry by the 1080s - the displacement of Saxon gentry was nearly total) helped to eventually “mainstream” the practice in England - but this process took 200 years.  Hereditary surnames were virtually non-existent among Saxon families in pre-conquest England (and among the Jutes who supposedly settled Kent), and the rare exceptions tended to be French in origin - usually immigrants from Normandy.
   
   So the reason that Thomas the Recognitor is the first Culpeper of record has everything to do with the fact that surnames themselves had barely gotten a good start in the England of 1170.  And of those surnames that existed, only a very small percentage went back further than a generation or two.  It was not until late in the late-1200s that usage was general among non-gentry.  For the Welsh, surname usage was not general until the 1500s, and the Scotts not much earlier than that.

2. The record we have (Villare Cantianum, presumably taken from “pipe rolls” existing at one time) names Sir Thomas de Colepeper, and of course the use of the French “de” as part of the Recognitor’s surname means “of” as in “John of Gaunt.”  Almost all usage of the “particule”, “de”, in the England of the late 11th  and 12th centuries - so soon after the Norman Conquest - was in connection with a French name, e.g., Hugh de Lacy, or  Roger de Beaumont, Hugh de Umfraville.

3. The use of “of” or “de” signified relation to a property/place.  Just prior to the conquest the Norman-French were beginning to adopt the name of an estate or manor as an hereditary surname, sometimes including “de” in the name, sometimes not.  A key feature of the social system in Normandy was the preservation of large estates, e.g., the practice of gavelkind - passing on entire estates to the oldest child.  In this context, the development of place-related surnames makes perfect sense and place-oriented surnames were pretty much all there were in Normandy, that early on.  It is significant that the Normans, pre-conquest, were beginning to pass on names such as “de Tracy”, for example, with the particule “de” as part of the surname, whether the actual estate/property was still owned or not.
   
   This differs from the later English custom of using “of” in the way that we’re familiar with - e.g., Thomas Culpeper of Bayhall - because in the latter English usage, you had to have the property to use the title.  In another example, a Walter Culpepper, I believe, was bequeathed a piece of land which enabled him to appropriate the title “of Wigsell”, thereby enhancing his marital prospects.
   
   This difference in custom is probably why there are no English surnames today incorporating “of”, but you commonly see names from the other European countries beginning with an “of” equivalent - “de” (French and Spanish), “von”, “van” and so on.
   
   So, Sir Thomas de Colepeper the Recognitor, would fit this pattern.  The use of “de” in the surname makes no sense to me, whatsoever, unless “Colepeper” had, at the genesis of the surname, referred to some place.

4. Thomas would have been far less likely to have been appointed Recognitor, were he not Norman.   If he were born in 1170, one hundred years after the Conquest, the Normans had all the power in southern England and had pretty much displaced the entire Anglo-Saxon ruling class.  It would be another 50 to 100 years or so before the Normans would even begin to inter-marry with Anglo-Saxons in any significant way.

5. Finally, the notion that the first Culpepper was an Anglo-Saxon grocer seems highly improbable:
   
   The linguists who compile these surname catalogs are attempting to give origins for very a large number of names and apparently base their claims solely on patterns of  linguistic similarity.  The linguists who speculate about the Culpeper surname are virtually certain to have had no access to, much less the time to consider, the information we have - i.e., records identifying real people who lived at the outset of surname usage.
   
   Even if you look at linguistics, the name origin sources I’ve seen identify the word “pepper” as having connections to early French as well as early English.  Additionally, Norman French, due to the Normans’ Viking origins, had vestiges of Germanic vocabulary.  In modern Swedish the English word pepper = pepper, in Norwegian = pepper, in Danish = peber.  So on the face of it, linguistics do not appear to preclude a Norman origin for the name.
   
   Though linguistics do not appear to preclude Norman origin of the name, i.e., place/title origin, the record of Thomas de Colepeper around 1170, weighs heavily against the “sham grocer”  idea.  In 1170, surnames were new to the English gentry and gentry were the earliest adaptors - so the sham-grocer origin would have had to be very recent indeed to 1170, probably Thomas’ father or grandfather at the very earliest.

So the idea that the son or grandson of an Anglo-Saxon grocer/pepperer, not to mention illegitimate practitioner of this trade, could have taken on a name that would have been known to contemporaries as meaning literally “sham grocer”, become a knight in Norman-controlled England, inserted a “de” into his name either gratuitously or to make it sound as if he was of Norman descent, and then been appointed to government office in Norman England, simply defies credulity.

Lew Griffin's Response

Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007
To: Rob Culpepper
Cc: Warren Culpepper
Subject: Colepeper surname origins

Thanks for sharing your research with us, you've done a great job laying out the case that the Colepepers were of Norman / Viking origins.  I have always favored the idea that the  Colepeper surname came from a place name / property name -- the only problem is that we've never been able to identify the place or property in question, nor the root meaning of "Colepeper."

I agree with you that the word seems to be Germanic in origin, and that this is not inconsistent with a Viking / Norman origin.  However, as a place name, it might well have been an Anglo-Saxon or Jute place or property in Kent or Sussex which was confiscated by the Normans after the Conquest.  So the place, Colepeper, could be Anglo-Saxon or Jute, or even more ancient, while the surname, de Colepeper, is Norman.

If you have reason to believe that the de Colepeper surname originated in Normandy or elsewhere, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Stephen Oppenheimer, in The Origins of the British, notes that the estimate for the number of Normans who actually came to Britain in the Conquest is in the low tens of thousands, which would have been one or two percent of the population at the time.  Most of the so-called Viking genes in Britain were there by about 13,000 years ago.  When the Celtic language swept through as a language of commerce, these folks spoke Celtic.  After the Anglo-Saxon conquest, which again, only introduced probably one or two percent to the existing population, these folks spoke a Germanic language again.  So language and DNA are often two different things, particularly so in the British Isles.

Again, thanks for sharing your research. You have made a significant and useful contribution to our Culpepper family history.