Figure 1. ancient oak, sherwood FOREST, NOTINGHAMSHIRE, ENG.
London photography.org.uk. 2021. Terence Lane
In 2021, I decided to investigate the origin of the Sherwood name. Not surprisingly the search led to Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. The famous Forest was originally called ‘Scirwuda’, an old English word which meant a woodland belonging to a shire.1 It is first mentioned in a charter dating from 958AD granting land in the north of Nottinghamshire to the Archbishop of York. The charter lists 'Scirwuda' (Sherwood Forest?) as a boundary mark for the land granted to the archbishop.2
Over time, Scirwuda was adopted as a surname, it evolved into the Shirewood, and from Shirewood it changed to Sherwood. So how did we get the ancient name of Sherwood, a name that evolved for well over a thousand years?
Prior to the thirteenth century, surnames were rare in England. By 1400, most English people had a surname, most likely for identification purposes as the population increased. Surnames came from several sources, nicknames, a person’s physical characteristics, their occupation or the place they lived.
People with the Sherwood surname got their name from the place they lived. Place surnames are divided into two types, topographical and habitational. People with habitational surnames were named after the place they came from, for example, Windsor and Lancaster.
The Sherwood name is frequently associated with Sherwood Forest. I wanted to know if those with the Sherwood name had ancestors who originally came from Nottinghamshire. In other words, did all Sherwoods have a single place of origin, Sherwood Forest? Unfortunately, I can find little support for this idea.
One of the earliest references to the Shirewood/Sherwood name wasn’t found in Nottinghamshire.2 It appears in the Assize Rolls of Yorkshire in 1219 where William de Shirewude was listed. The name appears again in 1260, with William Shirwood, schoolman and treasurer of Lincoln. Lincoln and Yorkshire are counties which form a border with Nottinghamshire.
I have not been able to trace our Sherwood family back to Nottinghamshire or to Sherwood Forest. The family line ends for now with Stephen Sherwood (c.1720-1774) He lived in Hertfordshire, 190 kilometres south of Nottinghamshire. I should point out that Stephen’s birthplace is at present not known. I assume that he was born not far from where he lived and died, in Weston, Hertfordshire.
If the family didn't get their name from Sherwood Forest, then there was one other possible explanation. The second type of place name is topographic. Topographic surnames come from the features of the landscape. People with the names Hill, Lane, and Brooks were most likely from places that had these physical features.
I suspect that we inherited the Sherwood surname in much the same way. Scirwuda the medieval word from which Sherwood evolved is made up of two words, ‘scir’ which translates as a shire and ‘wuda’ a wood. Resulting in Shirewood which appears to have been an early spelling of our name.
An authority on the origin of English surnames, P.H. Reaney held the view that the ‘Sherwood surname was most likely given to people living in a wood by a shire boundary’. These woods or forests may have been referred to as the “Shirewood” by the local inhabitants in medieval times.
Our earliest ancestors could very well have lived near one of these wooded areas and as a result were given the Shirewood surname.
If our surname began as Shirewood around the thirteenth century, then at some point it evolved into the current spelling of Sherwood. One of the earliest recorded spellings of the ‘Sherwood’ surname was in 1313, when Catherine Sherwood, married Richard d'Olyer of Yorkshire.
Distribution of the Sherwood name
If the surname was given to individuals who lived at the edge of a forest, (a shirewood) then the name should appear in more than one location. I say this because of the abundance of wooded regions that must have existed throughout England centuries ago.
To find out how widespread the Sherwood name was in the mid to late 16th century, I looked at baptism data.3 The earliest records l could find were baptisms from 1538 to 1599. For this 61-year period, Sherwood baptisms were recorded in 30 out of 40 English historic counties. It was obvious that those bearing the Sherwood name were well dispersed throughout the country by 1599, perhaps even earlier.
1538-1599 Sherwood Baptisms Historic Counties
Map the APPEARANCE of sherrug
Six of the seven Sherrug baptisms that took place in Hertfordshire were the children of Stephen and Sarah.
Sherrug baptisms 1600-1799
ENDNOTES
1. "scir" WordSense Online Dictionary (12th September 2021) URL: https://www.wordsense.eu/scir/
"wudu" – WordSense Online Dictionary (12th September 2021) URL: https://www.wordsense.eu/wudu/
2. Gaunt, A., 2021. Archaeology and History of Medieval Sherwood Forest. [online] Sherwoodforesthistory.blogspot.com. Available at: <https://sherwoodforesthistory.blogspot.com> [Accessed 17 September 2021].
3 "England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975", database, FamilySearch
