4 THE FAMILY OF GALPIN OF Galvin, Gape, and many others which would appear to be entirely different names were they not often applied in several variations of this kind to the same individual even in one document. To show how a name can become altered there was a place in Hertfordshire in the fifteenth century called Galpyns. This appears to be the place marked on some maps as Callipers. In an illiterate age a name that conveyed no obvious meaning and was uncommon very easily got altered, and so it happened that in isolated cases the name got changed, but this was not so likely to occur when several families kept together and the name was well known. Even recently and in London I have known the well-known name Crawford turned into Crowsfoot among uneducated people. Surnames were not in use in England and Scotland before the Norman Conquest, and the earliest are found in Domesday Book, mostly derived from Normandy. Many surnames which are “ accounted names of great antiquity " were first assumed at the time of the Conquest. The employment of a second I name, a custom introduced by the Normans, who themselves had not long before adopted it, became a mark of gentle blood, and it was deemed “ a disgrace for a gentleman to have but one single name, as the meaner sort had." It was not until the reign of Edward II that the practice became general among the common people. Coming to the origin of surnames in England we learn from Camden that those most ancient and of best account were derived from places in Normandy, or in neighbouring parts, and that in fact there was no village in Normandy that gave not its name to some family in England, but at a later date a far greater number of family names originated from the names of places in England. Camden observes scarcely a town, village, hamlet, or place in England which has not afforded names to families. It was usual for a man to take the name of the village or hamlet where he had been born or from which he had come. The place—names were often preceded by a de, but such great changes have many surnames undergone, at the hands of their often illiterate possessors, that it is frequently very difficult and not uncommonly impossible to trace their origin. In the great majority of instances, as Camden well remarks, the place bore its name before the family did its sur- name, and it is a mistake for them to think that their ancestors