Hi and a warm welcome to Rootschat.
The further back you get, you will find that spelling becomes more and more "fluid"! Less people were literate, so the vicar (or whoever was writing the info) could spell a name however he thought it should be from what he had heard, and no one would know any different. The next time the name was written, the person writing it could spell it completely differently. As time went on, people began to settle on a particular spelling. But you can find different lines coming down from the same root each adopt a different spelling!
As an example, my own name, Edmonds. We always spell it with the "o", and before I started any family history research would have been very possessive over that spelling, dismissing "Edmunds" for example as being completely different!! However, not so many generations back a variety of spellings on different documents can be found - Edmonds, Edmunds, Edmends. Many lines coming forward seemed to settle on the Edmunds spelling, one line is Edmends down to the present day, as we are Edmonds. As I got even further back to early parish registers, then even more spellings appear, Edmans, Edmins, Emans,you name it, its there!
So I guess it is a similar case for everyone's name.
