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1:31pm on Monday, 11th March, 2024:
Comment
English surnames tend to derive from relationships ("Johnson"), locations ("Welsh"), occupations ("Cooper") and personal characteristics("Short"). The ones based on locations could be related to countries ("Scott"), counties ("Kent"), settlements ("London") or other geographic features ("Hill").
It occurred to me that most of the ones that are from town names tend to be from the north of England and the east Midlands. You hear of people with a surname such as Carlisle, Berwick, York, Durham, Hull, Preston, Bolton, Wakefield, Bradford, Sheffield, Derby, Chester, Warrington, Scarborough, Lancaster, Lincoln, Mansfield, Leicester, Grantham, Burton, Stafford, Crewe, Spalding, Mansfield and plenty of others.
You do get a few from the southwest, but not so many: Bath, Poole, Barnstaple ... I'm drawing a blank after those. Likewise, in East Anglia there's maybe Dereham, Cromer, Wymondham and Hadleigh.
No surnames from the west Midlands spring to mind, and none from the home counties either apart from London, Dover, Maldon and Hastings.
These are traditional surnames; I don't include ones made up by comedians or royalty. They're also the larger towns; I'm sure there will be villages that have associated surnames (Norton Disney, for example). It seems odd that so many are from the north and east of England in comparison to the south and west, though.
I'm sure there's an explanation for it somewhere, but why waste idle speculation on actual fact?
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