family shield

[monkhouse]

why on the Hindley shield is the image of a deer with antlers on when the name means female deer in the forest        Hind       ley means forest      ?  anybody ?    thanks .

[davidbappleton]

Many times the charges on the shield do not bear any relationship to the surname.

David

[MaecW]

I'm inclined to go with Monkhouse here and guess that these were originally canting Arms showing a Hind. Perhaps some early warrior decided that a hind was not mascho enough for him and had it changed to a stag    What is the earliest visual representation of the Arms ??

Maec

[monkhouse]

I also think it was changed to a stag over time as more Masculine originally the tribe hunted hinds in areas that were more plentiful and settled in present day Hindley.  I think the Hindley name  would have also  have been before  1066 ?    thanking you both.   Martin

[MaecW]

I don't understand your reference to a tribe.

The name hind ley means, as you observed, the meadow or forest glade where the hinds gathered (grazed ?).  There are currently two places in England noted in Wikipedia with this name, one in the Manchester area and the other in Northumberland, but there may be others that are just a dot on the map.

Surnames were not generally adopted in England before the 14th Century so the most likely origin of the Hindley surname is that it was adopted by somebody who came from one of the villages of that name (e.g.: Martin of/from Hindley became Martin Hindley.) In the same way his brother (say, Peter) was the village baker so became Peter Baker.

Some of the land-owning families (nearly all of Norman/Breton/French origin) did start using family names earlier, mainly because of the need to have legal records of the ownership of land. I am not aware of any family names in use in the British Isles in 1066. The English King was Harold Godwinson (he was, literally, the son of Godwin) and the Norman leader, William, was simply known as William the Bastard. 

Hope this helps,

Maec