“Look at the surnames all around you and see what you can make of them. They are part of our language—a part that became fossilized long ago. But though like fossils they preserve old forms, they are still very much alive1.” – C.M. Matthews, How Surnames Began
Chestnut is one of the many words in the English language with French origins. When William the Conqueror left Normandy and crossed the English Channel in 1066 AD, his ships carried not only an army but also a conquering language. His victory at Hastings and the conquest of England that followed began a centuries-long intermingling of Old English and Old French, transforming English vocabulary.
The French pedigree of chestnut is clear. It appears as chesten-nut in the 16th century, while in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, written several centuries earlier, it takes the form cheysten2. Another common form in Old English was chesten3. All of these derive from The Old French word chastaigne, which itself had many variants including chastaine, chastengne, and, the one that most concerns us here— chastain4.
In Modern French, chastain has evolved into châtaigne for an actual chestnut, châtain for an adjective, typically used to describe chestnut-colored hair, and châtaignier for a chestnut tree. The word chastain hasn’t been a part of the French language for centuries, making our surname a fossilized record of an extinct word; a faint echo from the life of the original bearer of our name.
It was during the Medieval era in the 11th to 12th centuries, when Old French was still spoken, and chastain was a common word, that surnames first arose across much of Europe, including France5.
With a burgeoning population after declines in the previous centuries, making towns and cities more crowded, and a decrease in the number of common first names (which was due to the popularity of naming children after a handful of Christian saints) individuals with the same given name were living more closely together. The following example from England is typical of the ensuing confusion:
The sheriff of Essex was ordered by a writ of King Henry III in 1230 to hold an enquiry into whether a loan of 60 shillings which is demanded by summons of our Exchequer…from Richard son of William in the time of lord John the king our father, was made to Richard son of William of Stapleford or to Richard father of Robert of Tilbury; and if the same Richard, the father of Robert…was called Richard son of William or Richard son of Robert6?
The befuddlement is palpable. Clearly bureaucrats, tax collectors, beadles, and other officials needed a reliable way to identify individuals. As a result, nicknames, landmarks, parentage, and other means were used to give people a second name.
In general, surnames fall into four categories: descriptive, occupational, patronymic, and toponymic7. For English surnames, descriptive names are obvious—Little (though, keep in mind, this could have been given in jest to someone who was actually quite large), Swift, and Strong. Occupational names are also obvious in many cases—Cook, Miller, and Baker being typical examples. Patronymic names identify parentage—Williamson and Johnson, for a son of William and a son of John. And finally, toponymic—names that describe where a person was from or some topographical feature near where they lived. Examples of this are Forest, Cave, Bywaters, Hill, Townsend (town’s end), and Hawthorne (someone who lived near a particularly distinctive hawthorn tree).
We can also see the same categories with French surnames. For descriptive we have LeGros, meaning fat. For occupational—LeFevre for blacksmith. Martin is patronymic, and Duval means “of the valley” and so is toponymic.
In 11th and 12th century France, where we can confidently place our Chastain ancestors when surnames originally took root, groves of chestnut trees dotted the landscape. This was especially true in the south of France where our Chastains lived. Chestnuts, often referred to as the bread tree, were an important food source in Medieval Europe. Harvesting chestnuts was, and still is in some places, a communal event in the fall; an occasion for celebrations and festivals. So chestnut trees would have been a significant and obvious part of the landscape.
Bearing this in mind, imagine a village in southeastern France in the 11th century where two residents named Peyre, one a butcher and the other a merchant with a grove of chestnut trees behind his house, live next door to each other. How could they be distinguished in the records? As C.M. Matthews explains in How Surnames Began, “Like many good old customs [the use of surnames] simply grew of its own accord because it was needed, and the soil it grew in was conversation. When people wanted to distinguish one man from another with the same Christian name, they would add a word or expression to identify the one they were speaking of, just saying the first thing that came into their heads without any thought on the matter8.”
And so the official recording the payment of taxes might have used the first thing that came to mind for each. Or he might have borrowed what had already arisen in conversation around the village. Either way, one of them became Peyre Boucher and the other Peyre Chastain. Matthews continues, “Thus the origin of a surname is seldom an official affair, but a snippet of conversation from the past. It may come from words spoken light-heartedly seven or eight hundred years ago9.” It’s easy to see how, then, almost one thousand years ago, one of our ancestors, living near an ancient grove of chestnut trees, was given the second name Chastain.
1. Matthews, C.M. How Surnames Began. p. 141.
2. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. p. 90.
3. Soanes, Catherine and Angus Stevenson, eds. Oxford Dictionary of English.
4. Hindley, Alan, Frederick W. Langley, Brian J. Levy, eds. Old French—English Dictionary. p. 116.
5. Whitebook, Susan. “French Family Names.” In A Dictionary of Surnames eds. Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges. p. xlv.
6. Wilson, Stephen. The Means of Naming. p. 160.
7. Matthews. pp. 8-9. Hanks and Hodges in A Dictionary of Surnames list seventeen categories of surnames, but they all fall under the four categories discussed here.
8. ibid. pp. 7-8.
9. ibid. pp. 7-8.