apparently the Addicoat name was 'anglicised' from the french name, pronouced d'arrcoat...not sure of the spelling...that may explain why its hard to trace past the Addicoat name in the 1700's...
Here's a romantic theory for you ...
I theorized, from the phonetic spelling, that the name would have been d'Arcote. There is in fact a street by that name in France today. But no Arcote in France. However, a search found a reference to "d'Arcote" in a 19th century history of England in French ... and it transpires that Arcote was the French version of the name of a place in India where a significant battle between French and English forces took place in 1751. It is called Arcot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_ArcotAs I was reading the old history text, I wondered why I had never even heard of the French in India. Googling
history france "in india" found me some info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_IndiaFrance was the last of the major European maritime powers of the 17th century to enter the East India trade in a significant way. ... The first French expedition to India is believed to have taken place in the first half of the 16th century [i.e. 1500s], during the reign of François I, when two ships were fitted out by some merchants of Rouen to trade in eastern seas; they sailed from Le Havre and were never heard of again. In 1604 a company was granted letters patent by Henri IV, but the project failed. Fresh letters patent were issued in 1615, and two ships went to India, only one returning. ...The map there shows the earliest French colonial empire as including eastern North America and a large part of what is now eastern/northern India, extending south to Pondicherry -- on google maps today, this is Pudacherry. Arcot is about 100 miles north, in what is now Tamil Nadu state.
An 1875 book called
Legends of the Black Watch has a story called The Massacre at Fort William Henry [NY state], in 1778, in which the Compte d'Arcot, "a high military noble, who had covered himself with distinction in India", figures. There is only one other reference I could find to Count d'Arcot, in an 1843 Illinois newspaper for which, without paying, I can only see the OCRed text, which refers to an Amerindian woman who had a child who she said "had no claims to the throwne, but was in fact the property of a French emigrant, the Count d'Arcot".
The Black Watch book refers to him as "this soldier of fortune; for such he was, having been created Count d'Arcot and Knight of St. Louis for his bravery at the recapture of that city of Hindostan, the capital of the Carnatic" [i.e. the city of Arcot]. Perhaps he was the source of the name now found in France. Googling
france "d'arcot" finds the Bois d'Arcot - Arcot Forest - in France, between Paris and Dijon. There are also various family trees on line with the name d'Arcot/Dargeot in the area of Loubs, France, near the Swiss border (also shown there in the last century at
www.geopatronyme.com).
So unfortunately, in any event, this Compte d'Arcot's name dates from the Carnatic Wars in the mid-18th century, and not from the 16th or 17th century. That still leaves the possibility that someone, for instance a man who was there in the earliest days of France's adventures in India, took his name from the city at an earlier date. The French at the time (as anyone who has searched early French records in what are now Canada and the US knows) were quite fond of multiple names: so-and-so
dit (called) such-and-such. Various parts of the Drouin collection at Ancestry show the names Arcoite, Arcott(e), Arcouet(te), in French Canada and the US.
Was wondering whether the name might have made its way to the Channel Islands and thence to Cornwall. Jersey Heritage has no record of any variant of the name, though:
http://search.fibis.org/frontis/bin/aps_person_search.phpFamilySearch has a baptism in Devon in 1612 that is an error for the name Arscotte. FS does find early Arcot events in Hereford, and also a Mary Arcot buried in 1809 in Bengal, India.
Ah wait, I find an earlier historical reference ...
