The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #157686 Message #3723416
Posted By: Richie
13-Jul-15 - 06:06 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Why didn't Lamkin get paid?
Subject: RE: Origins: Why didn't Lamkin get paid?
Here's another excerpt: The Name "Lamkin" by Albert B. Friedman
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 90, No. 358 (Oct. - Dec., 1977), pp. 465-466
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).