“They caused a monumental effigy of an imaginary ancestor to be carved in the style of the thirteenth century ...they adapted the plate-armour effigy to their purpose by cutting similar arms on the skirts, and they had three rude effigies fabricated by way of filling up the gaps between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

To give but two more out of many cases of similar imposture, the Deardens, many years ago, actually had a family chapel constructed in Rochdale Church with sham effigies, slabs, and brasses to the memory of wholly fictitious ancestors; while in two Scottish churches altar-tombs were placed to the memory of successive apocryphal lairds of Coulthart.  Such are the lengths to which a craze for ancestry has carried some unprincipled persons; and there is no doubt that the arts of the forger are still enlisted in the service of people who crave long descent and do not scruple as to the methods by which they attain it.

Happily, however, the mania for ancestors does not often take such extreme and reprehensible forms; its manifestations are usually rather amusing than criminal.  A common weakness is, however plebeian and obvious in its origin a surname may be, to dignify it with a Norman or at least French cradle.  Thus we are solemnly assured that the Smithsons (a name which bluntly proclaims its own derivation) are “a branch of the baronial family of Scalers, or De Scallariis, which flourished in Aquitaine as long ago as the eighth century.”  The first Cooper was not, as the unlearned might imagine, a modest if respectable tradesman of that name—­no, he was a member of the great house of De Columbers, one of whom was “Le Cupere, being probably Cup-bearer to the King”; Pindar, the patronymic of the Earls Beauchamp, is, of course, a translation of the Norman Le Bailli, and its bearers are “probably descended from William, a Norman of distinction”; while at least one family of Brownes springs lineally from “Turulph, a companion of Rollo,” founder of the Ducal House of Normandy.  After this, one learns with meek resignation that the honourable cognomen Smith is derived from Smeeth, “a level plain”; and that some, at least, of the Parker family had for ancestors certain De Lions, who flourished bravely under William the Conqueror.

Another favourite vanity is to glorify a name by the prefix De: 

“a particle which has been all but unknown in England since the first half of the fifteenth century, and which has never possessed in Great Britain that nobiliary character which the French nation have chosen to assign to it.  De Bathe, De Trafford, and the rest are restorations in the modern Gothic manner.”

It is, we fear, a similar vanity which has displaced such modest surnames as Bear, Hunt, Wilkins, Mullins, Green, and Gossip in favour of De Beauchamp, De Vere, De Winton, De Moleyns, De Freville, and De Rodes.

This ludicrous yearning for a Norman ancestry is responsible for many of the absurdities in the pedigrees of even our most exalted families.  Thus it is that we find such statements as this widely circulated, and accepted with a quite childlike credence: