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Surnames/tags: Blood Bloud Blud

Contents 1 The Most Common Explanations for the Origin of the Surname Blood 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Methodology 1.3 Analyses of the Three Most Common Explanations 1.3.1 Explanation 1 – Blood as a Welsh Patronymic 1.3.2 Explanation 2 - Blood as a Term of Endearment 1.3.3 Explanation 3 – Bloods as Bloodletters 1.4 Tentative Conclusion 1.5 Notes & Sources

The Most Common Explanations for the Origin of the Surname Blood

Author: Garry Michael Blood, 24 Nov 2022

Introduction

How did the surname Blood come into existence on the island of Britain? Aside from the conclusion that it must have somehow been related to blood, its origin and original intent (assuming there was only one) is completely unknown. There are various explanations are summed up in The Dictionary of American Family Names, which various genealogy sites like Family Search and Ancestry use as their stock explanation for the origin of the surname. This has been copied and repeated by a variety of “Meaning of your surname” and “Buy your coat of arms here” websites,^[1][2][3][4] to the point that whichever is the actual explanation, most people assume it must be one of these three. But the reality is all these explanations have serious flaws, some of which are best characterised as fatal. I will address the three most common explanations in this paper, but for the sake of completeness, the less common "fringe" explanations I won’t address are:

• The English Bloods originated from the Ui Bloid clan of Ireland -- But Ui Bloid never developed into a surname in Ireland and Y-DNA analysis of all English Bloods tested so far shows they are genetically West Germanic, not native Irish.
• That Blood came from '"s'blood," a contraction of "God's blood," a Medieval oath or swear -- But the contracted s'blood version didn't appear until the late 1500s, by which time the surname Blood had existed for centuries.
• That Blood started as a toponymic surname for the area around the River Blyth -- But for which only a single source gives an alternate name of "River Blud," and there appears to be no way to turn Blyth into Blud following accepted rules of etymology. Also, the dominant spelling of Blood in use for the first few centuries was Blod, not Blud.

Methodology

Based on the analyses presented in Origins of the Bloods: Word & Name and Origins of the Bloods: Distribution in England, I established three criteria that I believe any proposed explanation for the origin of the surname Blood must meet:

1. The meaning of the surname must have been so closely linked to the word blood in all versions of English that the two have evolved in lockstep ever since.
2. The meaning of the surname must have been widely recognized and widely understood by people in different parts of England.
3. The meaning of the surname must have been such that several unrelated families in different parts of England would have had reason to adopt it in the 250-year period from about 1170 to about 1420.

These are the criteria I'll use to evaluate each of these explanations in turn.

Analyses of the Three Most Common Explanations

Explanation 1 – Blood as a Welsh Patronymic

This is probably the most common of the popular origin stories for the surname and the most ahistorical in that it drags the name out of its secure West Germanic linguistic context and drops it into the unrelated Brittonic branch of Insular Celtic, the branch that contains modern Welsh. This explanation proposes that Blood is a heavily anglicised version of the Welsh patronymic ab/ap Lloyd^[5] or ab/ap Llwyd^[6] or ab/ap Llud.^[7] The Britons, the original population of the British Isles, used a system of creating by-names or descriptors based on the father’s name. Mab and map, both meaning “son of” in Brittonic and OId Welsh, over time became the ab and ap of Medieval and Modern Welsh. So, Huw’s son Daffydd was known as Dafydd ap Huw. Daffydd’s son Owain was in turn known as Owain ap Dafydd, or even Owain ap Dafydd ap Huw. This is a simple and commonly used method of creating patronymic by-names, and versions of it are still used in many cultures today.^[8] So far, so good.

Starting in 1535, however, Henry VIII began the process of absorbing Wales into England both politically and legally. Part of this process was the requirement for the Welsh lords to use fixed surnames instead of their hereditary patronymic system. Once the Welsh aristocracy began doing it, the Welsh people followed along.^[9] This explanation proposes that some Welsh people with a patronymic of ab/ap Lloyd, ab/ap Llwyd, or ab/ap Llud in their ascendant line^[10] adopted a fixed surname of Blloyd, Bllwyd or Bllud. Through sound changes over time these became Bloyd, Blwyd or Blud and then, so the explanation goes, Bloid or Blud or Bloud and then Blood. These sound changes are possible, especially if the names were anglicised. This process is how the Welsh patronymics ab Evan, ap John, ab Owen, ap Richard, and ap Rhys became Bevan, Upjohn, Bowen, Prichard, and Price. In theory then, there’s no reason it couldn’t have happened with ab Lloyd, ab Llwyd or ab Llud to create Blood.^[11]

Problems with this Explanation:^[12] First, there’s the problem of chronology. The Welsh only began to adopt surnames widely in the early 16th century and the process wasn’t complete in some areas until the early 19th century. Blood was first documented in Wales in 1658, yet it had been present in England since at least 1220 and possibly as early as the mid-11th century. How is a Welsh surname first found in England over 300 years before the Welsh began adopting surnames? And not just in England, but in Kent, on the opposite side of the island of Britain from Wales.

English Maelor

Second, there's a problem of geographic distribution. Blood first appeared in Wales only in a very limited area of the extreme northeast – in the Flintshire exclave known English Maelor -- and only in very small numbers. It also wasn't present in any significant numbers in the English counties that bordered Wales in the 16th to 18th centuries. There seems to be no logical reason for this if it was derived from the given name Lloyd, since Lloyd was a widespread name in Wales at the time. Why did only a single small family in English Maelor decide to adopt the surname, and apparently in its final form and not an intermediary form like Bloyd, Bloid, or Blud, if that’s what really happened? Perhaps the explanation is in the name; English Maelor was called that due to the large English population in this little corner of Wales.

Blood & Variants in Wales to 1750

The table to the right illustrates the problems with this explanation in terms of both chronology and geography. Bloods appear in Wales far too late and in far too limited numbers to have originated there. Even when we include possible variants of Blood found only in Wales (those shaded in grey), the problem remains. It’s hard to argue this is a Welsh name when it makes such a poor showing in Wales.

Third, this explanation is countered by the historical record concerning these three Welsh patronymics:

• Ap/ab Lloyd: What's clear from examining the parish records for Wales from the 16th and 17th centuries is that the surnames that evolved from ap/ab Lloyd were primarily Lloyd and possibly Floyd -- but not Blood.^[13] Lloyd appears as a surname in Wales at least as early as 1523, and it is believed to be even older than that. Floyd, in the form Floide, appears in Wales in 1580.
• Ap/ab Llwyd: First attested in 1300 when the Welsh knight Sir Gruffudd Llwyd,^[14] anglicised as Griffith Loid, submitted a petition to the English king.^[15] Llwyd is next attested in Wales in 1527 with Humphrey Llwyd,^[16] in 1532 with Marged ferch^[17] David Llwyd, in 1547 with David ap Llwyd,^[18] and in 1588 with John ap Pirs Llwyd. This strongly indicates the surname that came from ab/ap Llwyd is Llwyd and possibly Loid in its anglicised form. While he still doesn’t predate the fourteen earliest examples of the surname Blood in England, Sir Gruffudd Llwyd is by far the oldest example of someone documented using one of the three proposed Welsh ancestors of the English surname Blood.
• Ap/ab Llud: There are only three examples of Llud as a Welsh family name, all from the 16th century. These are John ap Poll Llud in 1530^[19]; Richard Llud from sometime between 1538 and 1544^[20]; and Edward ap Richard ap David Llud from sometime between 1558 and 1579.^[21] But in all three cases Llud was already a surname, found without the ab/ap prefix. In fact, in the third example the record states that Edward ap Richard ap David Llud was also known as Edward ap Richard ap David Fludd, indicating ap Llud became Flood, not Blood.

Fourth and lastly, Y-DNA evidence contradicts a Welsh origin for the English-origin Bloods that have been tested. All Bloods tested so far^[22] are members of Haplogroup R-A6093, a branch of Haplogroup R-U106. As is the case for R-U106 from which it derives, R-A6093 is without any question a West Germanic haplogroup, probably originating on the North Sea coast in what is now the Netherlands in about 200 CE. Y-DNA analysis of a group of R-A6093 carriers of various surnames shows that their Most Recent Common Ancestor lived in the north-central English Midlands in about 600 CE. In addition, the participants who are genetically close to the Bloods in the study all have English surnames,^[23] meaning that at least this one line of Bloods began the process of adopting surnames in England and not Wales. While the Y-DNA evidence does not invalidate the Welsh derivation explanation for other Bloods from outside the English Midlands, when combined with the evidence laid out in the previous three points it does make for a hard uphill climb for this explanation.

Evaluation Against the Three Criteria:

1. The meaning of the surname must have been so closely linked to the word blood in all versions of English that the two have evolved in lockstep ever since. -- FAIL. The Welsh derivation explanation has nothing to do with the English word for blood, and therefore no reason the two would have evolved in concert with each other.
2. The meaning of the surname must have been widely recognized and widely understood by people in different parts of England. -- FAIL. The average Englishman or Englishwoman would have had no idea how Welsh patronymics worked or the meanings of the names from which they derived. The further from Wales, the truer this would be.
3. The meaning of the surname must have been such that several unrelated families in different parts of England would have had reason to adopt it in the 250-year period from about 1170 to about 1420. -- FAIL. No English family would have any reason to adopt a surname based on a Welsh patronymic, and Welsh surnames were not being created and adopted in this period anyway. That process didn't start in earnest until after 1538.

Conclusion for Explanation 1 - Blood as a Welsh Patronymic: For us to accept this explanation, we would have to accept that a Welsh surname evolved in England more than 300 years before the great majority of the Welsh began the centuries-long process of creating surnames, but only became established in one small corner of Wales from the 1650s. We would also have to ignore the results of a decade of Y-DNA analysis that shows the Midlands Bloods (the largest concentration) are genetically West Germanic and not Welsh. Simply put, this explanation has no basis in fact and we might as well characterise it as impossible.

Explanation 2 - Blood as a Term of Endearment

This is the proposal that Blood derived from a term of endearment used for close family. This explanation seems to be heavily based (at least given the number of sources that quote it) on a line from one of Geoffrey Chaucer's works, which reads: “Now beth naught wrothe, my blood, my necë dere” (Now don't be angry, my blood, my dear niece).^[24] The idea is that the common noun blood was used just as much as a term of kinship and friendship in late medieval England six hundred years ago as it is in some forms of urban slang today. In theory, like the small number of other surnames known to derive from terms of endearment or family connection (e.g., Friend, Cousin, possibly Love), Blood became normalised as a surname and began to be passed on independently of any feeling of affection or kinship.

Problems with this Explanation: As genealogist Desmond Holden wrote, “This suggestion is doubtful. Our ancestors had plenty of words to describe one's relatives - even down to son-in-law: e.g., Odham.”^[25] There are two problems with this explanation. The first is one of chronology. The quote from Chaucer, the earliest surviving example I can find of blood being used as a term of endearment, is from Book 2 of his Troilus and Criseyde, which he composed in London in the mid-1380s. Let’s say blood as a term of endearment had already existed for fifty years prior to Chaucer using it, so coming into at least limited use in London in about 1330. But even in London, the surname Blood dates to 1321 and in England in general in dates at least as far back as 1220 and probably further back into the last decades of the 12th century (ca. 1170). For Blood to have come from the term of endearment we would have to assert that the term of endearment was much older than Chaucer’s first written use of it in the 1380s but went completely unrecorded anywhere by anyone until he penned Troilus and Criseyde. There is no compelling reason for such an assertion other than just wanting the explanation to be correct.

The second problem is one of commonality. It just doesn't seem to have been a particularly common term of endearment in Middle English, even though that idea could be construed from one of the much lower-order definitions of the word. In reality it just meant a blood relation, as it often does today.^[26] But as Holden stated, English was already rich in nouns for blood relations and most people used those, to include Chaucer in the quote cited above (i.e., niece). Blood certainly doesn't appear on any lists of Middle English terms of endearment, even those by specialists in the literature.^[27]

Evaluation Against the Three Criteria:

1. The meaning of the surname must have been so closely linked to the word blood in all versions of English that the two have evolved in lockstep ever since. -- PASS. As both words were derived from and meant blood in at least a metaphorical sense, then this would have likely happened.
2. The meaning of the surname must have been widely recognized and widely understood by people in different parts of England. -- FAIL. There's no evidence that using blood as a term of affection for a close relation was ever widespread in England. It may have been limited to Chaucer's London, or possibly just to Chaucer himself given the dearth of other examples.
3. The meaning of the surname must have been such that several unrelated families in different parts of England would have had reason to adopt it in the 250-year period from about 1170 to about 1420. -- FAIL. Blood as a surname was already well-attested by the end of the 14th century, predating Chaucer's use of the word in the term of endearment sense by around a century. If blood in this sense was already in common use from about 1200 then why does it only appear for the first time in a work from the 1380s?

Conclusion for Explanation 2 – Blood as a Term of Endearment: This explanation has little to recommend it. It’s not that it’s impossible or even particularly implausible. It’s just that it strikes me more as an idle musing that became an explanation even though there was virtually no evidence on which to base it.

Explanation 3 – Bloods as Bloodletters

This explanation asserts that the surname Blood derived from the ancient medical treatment of bloodletting, and so is an occupational name for people once called bloodletters. In this explanation, the occupational name Bloodletter was eventually shortened into Blood. This is a surprisingly complicated scenario and will require a lot of explaining.

For context, here’s a general outline of key developments in the history of the name Bloodletter, whether used as a surname, by-name, or personal descriptor:

• The oldest reference to Bloodletter as a personal name is in 1095, when Walter Blodletere is recorded in Bury, Suffolk. Blodletere appeared to have already been more akin to a true surname rather than a personal descriptor as he was recorded as Walter Bloodletter and not as Walter the bloodletter.
• From the 13th and 14th centuries there are 19 records of people with Bloodletter as either a surname or a personal descriptor; the majority of these are either Blodletere or le Blodletere, reflecting the spelling of blood in Middle English. Other spellings are Blodleter, Blodletter, and Blodelater.
• By the time the first instance of the surname Blood appears with certainty in 1256, Bloodletter as some form of personal name had been recorded six times in six different parts of England.^[28]
• From the 13th to 14th centuries, people using Bloodletter as either a surname or a personal descriptor are found widely distributed in England: in Derbyshire; Gloucestershire; Leicestershire; London and adjacent areas of Middlesex and Surrey; Norfolk; Northamptonshire; Oxfordshire; Somerset; Suffolk; Sussex; and Yorkshire.
• The last definite use of Bloodletter as a personal descriptor occurred in 1315 with John le Blodletere of Rye in East Sussex.^[29]
• The last time Bloodletter is recorded as a surname was in 1376 with Roger Blodlatere of Castre, Northamptonshire.
• The last reference to Bloodletter as a by-name came in 1408 with Roger Scharp alias Blodeleter, also of Castre, Northamptonshire.

The idea of Bloodletter being the surname from which Blood was derived, or at the very least that bloodletting was the practice from which Blood was derived, has much to recommend it:

• The oldest instance of the surname Bloodletter predates the first documented example of the surname Blood by 170 years. Therefore, there’s no chronological problem with Blood deriving from Bloodletter.
• Bloodletter appears to have originated independently in several parts of England in the span of a few centuries, exactly what one would expect from an occupational surname.
• Blood, likewise, appears to have originated in at least three and as many as five places in England in the span of about a century, slightly later than the appearance of Bloodletter. This is just what we should expect if it evolved from the Bloodletter surname, but it’s also consistent with an origin as a separate by-name or surname for a practitioner of bloodletting.
• As the two oldest English surnames containing the -blood- element, it’s natural to infer that they must have had some relationship, and this explanation appears both plausible and sufficient.

But in the mid-15th century another name also containing the -blood- element appeared. This was Blooder and its many variants, a more logical candidate for a shortened form of Bloodletter than Blood is, for reasons we’ll address later. The first record of this new surname is one Adam Blodyr of York in 1441, and then two Henry Bloders of York in 1485 and 1503. What’s going on here? There are two possibilities:

1. Blooder is the surname that evolved from Bloodletter. We’ll note this possibility as Bloodletter>Blooder. Or,
2. Blooder was an unrelated creation of yet another surname incorporating the -blood- element, so Bloodletter|Blooder.

There are at least four areas in England where Bloodletter and Blooder might show some continuity with each other, which would be evidence that one had evolved from the other. In order by oldest first these are:

• In Northamptonshire

1216 – Alice le Blodlater

1336 – William Blodelater

1376 – Roger Blodlatere

1408 – Roger Scharp, alias Blodeleter

1585 – Elizabeth Bloder

• London and adjacent areas of Middlesex & Surrey

1235 – William Bloodletter

1560 – Jone Bloodder

1561 – Gardney & Henry Bludder

1563 – Thomas & Henry Bludder

1566 – Unnamed Blodder

• In Leicestershire

1271 – Thomas Blodletere

1313 – John & William le Blodletere

13thC – John & Simon Blodletere

1551 – John Bludder

1552 – Mary Bludder

1553 – Agnes Bludder

• In Norfolk

14thC – Gold le Blodletter

1605 – Dionis Bleader

1612 – Unnamed Bloder

1617 – John Bleeder

1620 – Sarah Bleeder/Blooder^[30]

1620 – John Blooder

Yet, the three earliest records of Blooder occur in York, a place with no previous instances of Bloodletter. And even in counties in which both names are found, the gap between the last Bloodletter and the first Blooder is usually measured in centuries.

With the beginning of mandatory parish records in England in 1538 records of Blooder and its variants proliferate. From 1551 to 1700 there are nearly two hundred examples of the surname in England, in the same counties as in the 13th to 14th centuries plus Essex, Nottinghamshire, and Shropshire.

Variants of Blooder from the 15th to 17th centuries include Bleader, Bleeder, Bloder, Blodder, Blodier, Blodyer, Bloodder, Bloodyer, Blouder, Bluder, and Bludder. Bleader, Bleeder, Bloder, Blouder, Bluder, and Bludder survived into the 20th century. Bloder and Bluder still exist today.

Overall, there’s insufficient evidence to determine with certainty if Bloodletter evolved into Blooder (i.e., Bloodletter>Blooder) or if Blooder was an independent creation (i.e., Bloodletter|Blooder), but this is something we’ll come back to again later. Re-introducing Blood to the analysis generates five more possibilities:

1. Blood evolved from Bloodletter and neither are related to Blooder (Bloodletter>Blood|Blooder). This is the original form of Explanation 3 since it makes no mention of Blooder.
2. Blood evolved from Bloodletter via Blooder (Bloodletter>Blooder>Blood).
3. Blood evolved from Blooder and neither are related to Bloodletter (Bloodletter|Blooder>Blood).
4. Blooder evolved from Bloodletter, but Blood evolved from neither of them (Bloodletter>Blooder|Blood).
5. Bloodletter, Blooder, and Blood originated independently of each other (Bloodletter|Blooder|Blood).

The Morphology Problem: I will consider each of these possibilities in-turn, but first there's a problem of morphology^[31] that needs to be discussed as it affects each of these possible origins of Blood to some degree, but especially those indicating an independent origin of Blood from bloodletting (|Blood). As nouns, blood is different from blooder and bloodletter in that blooder and bloodletter are agent nouns. An agent noun is derived from an action verb and identifies the person or thing that carries out that action, such as runner from the verb 'to run' or reader from the verb 'to read.' Agent nouns end in -er, meaning “one who does [the action described by the verb]." Most occupational names are agent nouns and so use the -er suffix to show action, e.g.: Archer, Brewer, Carter, Fletcher, Piper, or Roper.^[32]In this case, blooder and bloodletter are agent nouns describing the person who carries out the action of bloodletting. So as surnames, Bloodletter and Blooder fit this pattern -- a Blooder is one who bloods or bleeds someone; a Bloodletter is one who lets blood from someone. But Blood does not fit this pattern.^[33] In contrast to blooder and bloodletter, blood is a common noun -- in this scenario it's merely the by-product of bloodletting. Even if blood was the intended outcome of bloodletting (it isn’t -- medical relief or cure is the intended outcome), it would be like the miller choosing the surname Flour and the weaver choosing the surname Basket. But they aren’t flour or baskets; they produce those things as millers and weavers. It’s a fundamental and important difference. Blood as a traditional occupational surname based on an agent noun simply doesn’t work, either morphologically or practically. I can find no case of an occupation choosing its outcome or product, let alone its relatively unimportant by-product, as a surname. The latter would be equivalent to the carpenter deciding that Sawdust would be a good surname. It just didn't happen.

Now, let's look at each possible development scenario in-turn:

Possibility 1, Bloodletter>Blood|Blooder: This possibility suffers from a geographic distribution problem. Even though both Bloodletter and Blood are widely distributed in time and space they don’t overlap much geographically. That seems odd if one was derived from the other.

• Until 1400, Blood and Bloodletter only overlapped in London, Oxfordshire, and Sussex even though Bloodletter was present in 11 counties and Blood in 10.
• By 1600, they still only overlapped in 8 counties even though Bloodletter was present in 13 counties and Blood in 25.

Possibility 2, Bloodletter>Blooder>Blood: This possibility suffers from an evolutionary problem even if we accept the Bloodletter>Blooder part happened, which is by no means certain. The possible progression of Bloodletter into Blooder in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, London, and Norfolk seen previously isn’t accompanied by a particularly convincing further development of Blooder into Blood or any of its variants in those areas:

• In Northamptonshire, the last Bloodletter was recorded in 1408 (that was Roger Scharp, alias Blodeleter mentioned previously). The first Bloods appeared in the county over 160 years later in 1569, and the line of Northamptonshire Bloods survived until 1635 before disappearing. The only example of Blooder in the county appears in 1585 with the baptism of Elizabeth Bloder. This small family either moved on or died out quickly as there are no further records of Blooders in Northamptonshire.
• In London and the adjacent areas of Middlesex & Surrey, the only Bloodletter ever recorded was in 1235. Bloods then appeared 86 years later in 1321, and up to 1559 there are 33 records of them in the city. The Blooder name only appears in 1560, some 240 years after the Bloods were established in London. From 1560 to 1700 there are 132 records of Blooders in London, mostly as Bludder, the dominant variant there. From this same period there are about 50 records for Bloods. Not only does this situation not support Blood evolving from Bloodletter via Blooder, if anything it’s evidence that Blooder evolved from Blood!^[34] This is also unlikely, however, as the dominant London Bludder variant is mainly found in Stepney, Reigate, Aldgate, and St Botolph’s, whereas those parishes had very little Blood presence. That does not seem to square very well with either name evolving from the other. The situation in London appears more like two surnames developing separately and in parallel after the late arrival of Blooder, rather than one evolving into the other.
• Norfolk is like London in that we have a single very old occurrence of Bloodletter, this time in the 14th century, then a break of well over a century before the first Blood was documented in 1532, then the first variants of Blooder appear in 1605. There are 25 records of Bleader, Bleeder and Blooder in Norfolk from 1605 until 1701, then the line appears to have then gone extinct. Bloods disappeared from the Norfolk record from 1665 to 1711, but then reappeared and continued to the present day. So, Blood predated these Blooder variants in Norfolk and outlived them all. Like in London, the evidence here points to parallel development and co-existence of two similar surnames, not one evolving into the other.
• Only in Leicestershire do we see a progression that could support Possibility 2. The last example of the Bloodletter name in that county is in the 13th century. A small family of Blooders then appeared in the record from 1551 to 1558 around Loughborough. Subsequent appearances of the name were one-offs in Stoughton (1642) and Hoby (1643), both to the east of the county town of Leicester. But the first Bloods in the county appear in 1634 nearly 15 miles southeast of Leicester in the village of Hinckley. While the timing is plausible, the very different locations in the county, even for the period 1634-1643 when the two names co-existed, is not very convincing as evidence for Possibility 2.

Possibility 3, Bloodletter|Blooder>Blood: This possibility is demolished by the overwhelming evidence that Blood is much older than Blooder. By the time Blooder appeared for the first time in York in 1441, Blood had already been documented 119 times, from Northumberland to Kent, and as far back as the 12th century. The older name could not have evolved from the younger.

Possibility 4, Bloodletter>Blooder|Blood: That is, that Blooder descended from Bloodletter, but Blood was unrelated to either of them. But even in the areas where Bloodletter and Blooder both occurred, the very large chronological gap between the former and the first example of the latter -- between 177 and 325 years -- tends to indicate the two names were not directly related. Rather, it indicates they both stemmed from a common practice or idea, i.e., bloodletting. This the only reasonable conclusion in light of the morphological problem.

Possibility 5, Bloodletter|Blooder|Blood: The possibility these names came into existence independently cannot be falsified by the evidence. The fact the first Blooders in York were not preceded by any known Bloodletters in that city, and the very large time gap between the two names where they did overlap, indicates these surnames originated independently from one another as this possibility proposes. Taken at face value we would assume this means all three originated separately from the practice of bloodletting, but as we’ve seen there’s a serious morphological problem with this for Blood. While an independent origin from the practice of bloodletting appears likely for Bloodletter and Blooder, the same cannot be said for Blood. Blood must have originated not only independently of the other two, but also independently of their likely shared source as well, i.e., bloodletting. As an explanation, Possibility 5 is the least inconsistent with the evidence and in my view is the most parsimonious interpretation of it.

Evaluation Against the Three Criteria:

1. The meaning of the surname must have been so closely linked to the word blood in all versions of English that the two have evolved in lockstep ever since. -- PASS. In all of these scenarios, Blood is linked to blood.
2. The meaning of the surname must have been widely recognized and widely understood by people in different parts of England. -- FAIL. If we were evaluating only Blooder and Bloodletter this would be a pass, but for Blood the fact we still can't discern what the meaning could have been in the context of this explanation dictates this criterion is not met.
3. The meaning of the surname must have been such that several unrelated families in different parts of England would have had reason to adopt it in the 250-year period from about 1170 to about 1420. -- FAIL, and for the same reason 2 was a fail. There're obvious reasons why families might have adopted Blooder or Bloodletter, but no obvious reason in this scenario for adopting Blood as their name (see Morphology Problem).

Conclusion for Explanation 3 - Bloods as Bloodletters: Just like the multiple originations of Bloodletter in several places in England at about the same time, the multiple inventions of Blood likewise point to something widely known that was associated with the substance blood. It’s this relationship to blood that compels me to keep Bloodletter, Blooder, and Blood grouped together. Therefore, I believe that Bloodletter|Blooder|Blood is most likely correct, and all three names arose independently of each other, even though Bloodletter and Blooder did both describe practitioners of bloodletting. But this still leaves us with the unanswered question, “To what was the surname Blood meant to refer?” We can be confident it referred to blood, but how, why and in what way? That remains an open question.

Tentative Conclusion

Blood is not a Welsh surname and there's virtually no evidence to support the notion that it was based on a term of endearment. The explanation that it came from the practice bloodletting is nearly as improbable, but this explanation is probably at least pointing in the correct direction -- that the people who adopted the surname Blood were stating some association with the bodily fluid blood.

Notes & Sources

1. ↑ https://www.houseofnames.com/blood-family-crest
2. ↑ https://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Blood
3. ↑ https://forebears.io/surnames/blood
4. ↑ https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=blood
5. ↑ Lloyd is a given name thought to mean grey or grey-haired. It was and is a known Welsh given name, dating from at least the 1540s and probably much earlier.
6. ↑ Llwyd means grey and may be the original form of Lloyd. It is first recorded as a Welsh given name in 1748.
7. ↑ Llud means ash. It is not recorded as a Welsh given name, but Lud with a single -l is recorded as a rare given name from 1725. Lud means glue in Welsh, which probably explains its rarity.
8. ↑ In Iceland the method is still to attach -sson or -sdottir to the children’s names, so Gunnar’s son Magnus is Magnus Gunnarsson, and his daughter Frey is Frey Gunnarsdottir. The equivalent in English was also -sson. later becoming just -son (e.g., Paul Stevenson). In Hebrew the son’s name is followed by ‘bar’ and the father’s name as in Yeshua bar Yusef; and in Arabic bar changes to ‘bin.’ These are just a few examples from around the world.
9. ↑ See The History of Welsh Surnames by Ben Johnson, online at https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-History-of-Welsh-Surnames/
10. ↑ When surnames were being created among the Welsh there was no requirement that one had to use one’s father’s name as the basis of one’s surname. Some people did, but some reached back to grandfathers or great grandfathers to form their surnames. There are cases of people in the same family selecting different surnames as it suited them.
11. ↑ Sometimes ab/ap Lludd is added to the list of candidates, probably under the mistaken belief that Lludd was just another form of Llud. But in Welsh the -dd- is a diphthong and not just a doubled consonant as it is in English. In Welsh, the -dd- is equivalent to the soft -th- in English and so Lludd would be pronounced hlooth and not hlood. This should have resulted in Blooth or Plooth, not Blood.
12. ↑ A problem that isn’t a problem is the apparent contradiction with the way the Welsh patronymic system works. In Welsh grammar, the rule is that ab is used for a name that starts with a vowel but ap is used for a name that starts with a consonant. So, Dylan son of Emyr is Dylan ab Emyr, but Dylan son of Richard is Dylan ap Richard. But a review of Welsh parish records from the 16th and 17th centuries shows this rule was often ignored; there are plenty of examples of ab used when the following name started with a consonant. So ‘ab Lloyd,’ ‘ab Llwyd,’ or ‘ab Llud’ are entirely plausible even if they technically shouldn’t exist.
13. ↑ Despite their Welsh appearance, the surnames Bloyd, Loyd and Loid first appeared in the mid-16th century in parts of England far from Wales. This either indicates there were older English lines of these surnames or that there were pockets of Welsh immigrants in England in the 16th century who were perhaps compelled under English law to adopt surnames more quickly than occurred in Wales.
14. ↑ One of the rare early adopters of surnames among the Welsh aristocracy mentioned earlier.
15. ↑ https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C9293999
16. ↑ https://biography.wales/article/s12-LLWY-HUM-1527
17. ↑ “Daughter of,” the feminine equivalent of ap/ab.
18. ↑ https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4451820
19. ↑ https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D948988
20. ↑ https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3776733
21. ↑ https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C7491419
22. ↑ Blood Family Y-DNA Project, hosted by FamilyTreeDNA at https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/blood
23. ↑ These surnames are Ashmore, Chittam-Elliott, Coker, Highfield, Hyde, and Jackson.
24. ↑ Found in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Book 2, Line 594. Online at https://www.agnesscott.edu/english/troilusandcriseyde/book-two.html
25. ↑ Holden, Desmond. The Peak Advertiser, 24 Feb 2003, p.39. Online at https://names.gukutils.org.uk/Blood.shtml
26. ↑ The Middle English Dictionary -- entry for blọ̄d, meaning 6c. Published by the Regents of the University of Michigan, last updated Nov 2019, online at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary / entry for blọ̄d at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED5268
27. ↑ "Medieval Terms of Endearment," a blog article by A Clerk of Oxford, 30 Nov 2011 (https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2011/11/medieval-terms-of-endearment.html : accessed 7 Feb 2023)
28. ↑ Walter Blodletere in Suffolk in 1095; Alice le Blodlater in Northamptonshire in 1216; Radulfus le Blodletere in Gloucestershire in 1216; Richard le Blodletere probably in Middlesex from sometime in the 12th century; William Bloodletter in London in 1235; and Stephen le Blodletere in Derbyshire in 1252.
29. ↑ There may have been one slightly later instance, but it can only be narrowed down to sometime in the 14th century.
30. ↑ There are several examples in Norfolk of Bleeder and Blooder being used interchangeably for the same person.
31. ↑ In linguistics, morphology is the study of words and how they form.
32. ↑ For the sake of completeness, some of the occupational surnames that aren’t agent nouns include Bowman, Cook, Sheppard/Shepherd, Bailey (official of the bailey of a castle), Boatwright (maker of boats), Cartwright (maker of carts), Clark (clerk), Gage (an assayer), Hayward (keeper of fences), Marshall (keeper of horses), Sherman (shearsman), Stewart/Steward (warden of the hall), Stringfellow (maker of bowstrings), Tillman (a ploughman), and Wheelwright (maker of wheels). But in most cases, these at least fulfill the requirement of being “one who does X,” i.e., one who keeps horses or the man who tills.
33. ↑ And remember, we have absolutely no evidence Blood is a shortened form of a previous name. It has existed in the same form since it was first recorded possibly as far back as the early 12th century.
34. ↑ Nobody that I am aware of thinks Blooder evolved from Blood.