Surname:Honnyng

Early References

There are references in the Domesday Book to people called Honning or Hunning, in Shropshire, Essex and Lincolnshire, but these Anglo Saxon men had this as a single given name, not an inherited family surname. The concept of surnames, passed on down the generation, did not really appear for a further two or three hundred years. However these several, dispersed men called Honing gave their names to the villages they owned – such as Honington in Shipston on Stour, which appears in Domesday as ‘Huningeham, a name supposed to have been derived from Huninge, a Saxon possessor, and ham, a dwelling-place or habitation”. Similarly Honington in Lincolnshire, and the Norfolk village of Honing, may well have been so named.

When surnames did emerge, firstly with the aristocracy and gentry, then more widely in the 13th and 14th centuries, one source of surname was the place-name the family came from, or owned. For example the John de HONING, a Rector in Norfolk and Suffolk in the early 1300s, was most likely simply ‘John from the village of Honing’, to distinguish him from other Johns who were living in Norwich at the time. For the land-owning class, the Latin ‘de’ would indicate ‘of’ the manor – i.e. the owner or landlord of the village, such as Sir John de WINGFIELD, lord of the north Suffolk village of Wingfield at the time.

By the time of Edward III, in the 14th century, more men (and a few women) are recorded with surnames of DE HONING or HONING (with all the homophonous variations in spelling discussed below). These clusters of families occur around Norfolk (a John HONYNG appeared in Northbirlingham - only ten miles south of Honing - in 1422, and HONINGS occur in Norwich the following century), Cambridge (where a Richard HUNNYNG was living in the 1330s and a Thomas HUNNING was a Bailiff in the 1470s), and most numerously in South Lincolnshire. Whereas it is likely that members of the same cluster are related, it is not necessarily the case that the Lincolnshire cluster are related to the Cambridge or Norfolk ones.

Norfolk Origins

One theory is that, originating from the Norfolk village of Honing, individuals and family groups migrated West, into Cambridgeshire, down to London, but mostly up to Lincolnshire. An alternative theory is that the Norfolk and Suffolk DE HONING family took their name from the Norfolk village, while the unrelated cluster in Lincolnshire derived their surname from Honington, a few miles further north in Lincolnshire. A third possibility is that the family immigrated from Europe, where the surname Honing is more common, derived from the word for ‘honey’.

Lincolnshire Origins

For the study of the family origins of William HONNYNG, therefore, it is only possible, with any degree of certainty, to go back as far as the 15th century, to the marshy lands around the Wash.

It is at this time that the first members of the HONYNG family appear in the area: John HUNNYNG and his wife Senicla in Algarkirk in 1317; Alexander HONNYNG living in Ropsley, East Lincolnshire in 1334; and (another?) Alexander HUNNYNE a generation later in 1372 acting as bailiff for a property in Kirton near Boston.

The family spelt its name in literally dozens of ways; even William, a professional clerk, varied the spelling of his own surname. But for him I have used the form HONNYNG, as that is the form used in his first autograph, from the original manuscript he actually wrote, hiding in a wine cellar in France nearly 470 years ago.