The Question of the Goodrick Goodricke Goodryke Name Rumbles on.

My letter to Oxford D.N.B and the reply.

Sirs,

I have been asked now on a number of occasions to come out and write why I am so passionate about the spelling of my family name and what evidence do I have to support the correctness I insist upon. Your reply has made sure that I put pen to paper.

I here challenge any of the incorrect publications to correct my findings with original authentic documentation and I will apologise and go away.

My findings are: -

The spelling of the family name and source in one manuscript version of the 1563-4 Heralds Visitation of Yorkshire the surname occurs as Godrike (College of Arms Ms: H19/23) and in another as Godryke (College of Arms Ms: 1D5/1020). In the 1584-5 Heralds Visitation the same surname occurs as Gooderyck (College of Arms Ms: 2D5/39). Despite this it is very annoying when one family occurs under two obviously different spellings in a new source such as the Oxford D.N.B. (2004) particularly if there is another distinct family of one of the spellings. I see here no evidence of the terminal "H".

Visitation of Lincolnshire p157, & Lincolnshire Pedigrees pages 415, 416, 417.)

Thomas Godryke Goodricke or Goodryke The Bishop of Ely spelt his name thus, when the 39th and last Episcopal Lord Chancellor, and keeper of the Great Seal. The correct mode of spelling for Thomas surname shows no terminal "h" it is Goodryke just that. During his service as Lord Chancellor he would often just put himself as "Ely" we do have family letters to and from his brother Henry Goodryke at Hunsingore Manor at that time using the correct spelling. Regarding the origin and different modes of spelling, the name is Saxon, and the earliest spelling I have found in original documented family records, is Godric (1200 - 1280) & Goodryke (1493) to date (see development of Goodrick Heraldry on this site.) The Goodricke terminal "e" stayed with the line of Thomas Goodricke Bishop of Ely and brother Henry Goodricke of Hunsingore (Later Ribston who died 1556), as it appears the terminal "e" from reliable evidence to have been adopted by this branch of our family.

The use of the terminal "E" in the seventeenth century was very erratic. The mistake is so often repeated of confusing the two families of Goodrick and Goodrich. This has given me, and my predecessors many occasion for fruitless inquiry. We have yet to find any authentic documentation or evidence to substantiate a connection between the two families. And I may state that I have never found any incorrectness in authentic documents and neither I nor any other that I know researching the Goodrick family knows of any connection between the two families subsequent to the year 1500. This is born out in several Grants of Arms at the Collage, also a Pedigree at The College of Arms. Ref Vol 2. D.14. P149, B Signed by Henry Goodrick and Richard Goodrick, 23rd July 1678, along with recorded visitations by the heralds listed for the family the heraldry is very different for the Goodrich family. In the last one hundred years the name has been spelt by church recorders in many ways by sound which means accent plays a part by poor spelling and so on but on close examination and exhaustive research Godric Goodryke Goodricke & Goodrick are the family names and spellings. I have collected family pedigrees going back to very early times and I promise you I have nothing to show any connection between the two family names. Thomas Goodryke or Goodricke Bishop of Ely and 39th Lord Chancellor belongs good or bad to my family and not to Goodrich.

Even the Lord Chancellor's office has acknowledged that the spelling might be incorrect after examining the family trees. The History of the Goodricke Family by

C A Goodricke and up dates in the British Museum along with the various old visitations carried out by the heralds, I find by far the most accurate information available. I find it most frustrating that eminent scholars insist on using publications of question rather than researching authentic and original documents (The Oxford D.N.B.) (2004). As a historian and family member I feel very frustrated that records containing mistakes are not amended even when substantial evidence has been submitted. "Certain medieval texts differ on the names, dates and spellings of those names." I believe that the Lord Chancellors office records contain many such mistakes of my ancestor. References found in the Department's own historical records of ancient and modern Lord Chancellors; and cross-referenced in Richard John King's 'Handbook to the Cathedrals of England' 1862 (pub. John Murray, Albemarle St. Oxford) and Ely Cathedral by W.H. Fairbairns (pub. By the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge printed 1928 Campfield Press St Albans). Although the department carried out considerable research in the field, the office has not elaborated on the nature of that research apart from some source material. I quote "After making many comparisons across a number of publications, we concluded that the Handbook of British Chronology, Edited by Sir F Maurice Powicke LL.D., Litt.D., F.B.A and E.B. Fryde, D.Phil. 2nd Edit, published by the Offices of The Royal Historical Society would be our main source of information. I am sure you will agree that this is a well respected and authoritative body and therefore, it is from this publication that the list on our web page was complied."No sorry I do not agree.

All of the source material listed consists of "authorities", i.e., other books and compilations of material at best, of a secondary nature. All this does is to compound the mistake. My family have spent several hundred years recording our wonderful old family, its achievements and failings, only to find that today’s generation use inaccurate publication and not authentic original documentation for research, historical fact the correct information (my primary objective) should be made available to all interested students.

Hopefully this has put forward the family opinion on the origin and of the spelling of our name.

And will make some of the well-read scholars sit up and do some proper research using authentic original documentation.

I remain a frustrated user of the O.D.N.B. warts and all.

Reply Letter from Henry Summerson Reaseacher O.D.N.B

Gentlemen

Thank you for your messages about the spelling of the name Goodrich in the Oxford DNB.  I must apologise for having been slow to respond to them.  The rendering of early names, as you will appreciate, is full of difficulties, and it is very seldom possible to say that there was a single `correct' form of any one name before the seventeenth century at the earliest.  The DNB's policy is to use a contemporary form wherever possible - the forms a name took after a subject's lifetime are irrelevant in this context.  It is inevitable that we should be influenced by existing preferences when there is a choice to be made, as there very often is - we want our readers to be able to find the subject they are looking for without undue difficulty - but this is not the decisive factor.  The sixteenth-century bishop of Ely illustrates the problems exactly.  His name appears in contemporary documents in several different forms.  Taking as an example those provided by volume VI of the Letters and papers of Henry VIII, he is named as Goodryche, Gooderyche, Goodrige and Gutryche, as well as Goodryke and Goderyke.  He preached as Goodriche at Sir Thomas Lovell's funeral in 1524, and appears as Goodrich when he gave his opinion on Henry VIII's divorce in 1530 (Letters and papers IV, nos. 366, 6247).  It is not without reason that Goodrich has come to be the form well-nigh universally used by Tudor historians - Geoffrey Elton, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, John Guy and many others render it thus.  That said, there is no doubt that the form ending in -yck, -yke and -ycke was also widely used by the bishop's contemporaries, and it is in the light of this fact that I discussed the points you raised with Dr Felicity Heal, who wrote the article on the bishop.  We decided that there was no good reason to drop the existing form, which has contemporary usage as well as subsequent familiarity to commend it, and which will remain the form used in running text in the Dictionary, but that it would be appropriate to amend the headword in the articles on both Thomas and his cousin Richard in its online version, so that the surname appears with an authentic variant as `Goodrich or Goodryck' - the latter seems the best form as it is the one used by the scrivener who wrote the bishop's will (National Archives, PROB11/37 fol. 76v).  Thank you for bringing this point to our attention.

Dear Dr Summerson,

The only way perhaps in which I might be able to show you that there is existing a standardised spelling of Goodrick historically speaking, would be to show that the spelling was always the same over the centuries in various categories of legal documents, in family wills for instance in a way I can because none have the terminal "h".  At one level, this changed with Henry VIII and the Reformation, I believe I am right in saying, probably because the very basis of legitimacy had to be redefined in line with the new status of the King and the distribution of former Church lands to the new class of aristocrats and gentry created by the Crown to underpin support for its hazardous venture of defiance against the rest of Western Christendom.  This meant masses of legal documents, deeds, affidavits, and the like, which would have had the effect of introducing a degree of standardisation, since inconsistency in this department might, one supposes, have lead to legal dispute as to the identity of citizen in question.  The class of civil lawyers, which would have multiplied greatly at this time, may well have begun setting new standards in orthographic accuracy.

 I do not insist on a single historical spelling for my family’s name but offer a choice but none with the terminal "h".  I do feel that spelling the Bishop’s name ‘Goodrich’ is affront with so much documented evidence to the contrary.   To me it is fascinating that the Bishop may have been descended from (St) Godric, the hermit of Walpole.  I feel that it is certain that he would have been, particularly as the Bishop of Ely but also as a man from a (Lincolnshire) fenland, or edge of fenland, family, aware of Godric’s tale.  Godric is a Saxon name, and its etymology is inevitably Teutonic.  >From the point of view of someone with more than a little acquaintance with modern German, it seems likely that the first syllable of this name is the equivalent of the modern words <gut> (good) or <Gott> (God); and that the second syllable equates to the modern word <Reich> (empire, kingdom, "reach").  What seems to me to be at issue here, as we struggle for a sense of the ‘correctness’ of Goodrich as a spelling of the name, is the pronunciation, or the likely historical pronunciation, of the "-ric" in Godric?  In modern German, the "ch" in <Reich> is pronounced like the "ch" in Scottish "loch". I have delved into theories about the pronunciation of the Anglo-Saxon spellings of the last letter of the "c" in Godric and the way in which this might have changed over the centuries, in order to arrive at a degree of clarity about it. I suggest that, in text at least, the name would have been subject to a process of Latinisation by monks and scholars using it, producing "Godricus" / "Godricum" / "Godrico", etc, since the name would have been declined like any other Latin noun.  This would have led to a "hardening" of the final "c" (so that it would have been pronounced like a "k".  So, even if it had once been pronounced like a modern German "ch", this effect would have soon been lost.  It is also my opinion that the "-ck" /  -"cke" in the vernacular form of the name would be a way of indicating a proud Saxon provenance. And, the "cke" in "-ricke" may well have been pronounced like the "ch" in modern Scottish "loch".  Because of these and other considerations, I do find it odd, and a little offensive, that the ODNB has spelled the name with a "ch", because the "ch" in modern English is pronounced "tsh", which makes it quite unlike the German / Saxon "ch".  It may be that the affront one feels in the ODNB’s spelling is rooted in the threat of mistaken association with the name of the viscounts Goderich, a courtesy title of the 19^th century earls De-Grey, earls of Ripon, barons Grantham, who were indeed of an entirely different family, whose family name was Robinson.  It is still however curious that the Goderich title would seem to have the same etymology as my family name.  It may be I need to research the origins of the Goderich title to find out whether there was an association of any kind to the Goodricks / Goodricke’s.  The title would have been a creation of the Crown, which might have fallen into abeyance, later to be picked up by the Robinson family as an honour of the second, or third, or whatever, creation.

I could go on and on with this disquisition, but time forbids.  I do think I am right to insist that the Bishop’s name be spelled with a "-ck". I also think that your argument about the way in which modern scholars have represented the name is very weak, to say the least.  An historian whose main task is to present a coherent picture of the history of his period, has absolutely no time to research the spelling of surnames, even if they are aware of an element of dubiety in his chosen usage.  Very probably, and more than likely they simply inherit the mistake of an earlier historian without being in the slightest aware that it is indeed a mistake.  I stick by my guns.  I insist most emphatically that your spelling at the very least is misleading, because of the Gooderich / Robinson connection. Even in the old ODNB the alternative spelling was on offer so why change that now, which is even more confusing?