If your name is Pickles, why not drop me an email to tell me about yourself?
The "Oxford Dictionary of Surnames" says that the surname "Pickles" (and its various different spellings) is a Middle English (medieval) word meaning a smallholder - a farmer with a small farm. The examples that it gives of place-names including the word "Pickles" all come from around the Pennines of England - from the West Riding of Yorkshire and from eastern Lancashire.
The Pickles family seems to have started somewhere in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and then
to have spread outwards. In the days before the Industrial Revolution you
could imagine farmers squeezing a meagre living out of the hills and valleys on
the eastern side of the Pennine hills, scraping a living out of the common land
that was shared by all. Sheep farming, wool and weaving
went together. Weaving started literally as a cottage industry, with
handlooms in the ground floor of the weavers' houses. This lifestyle was
impacted by Enclosure Acts and by the Industrial Revolution. Common land
was enclosed and sold off to wealthier families, partly to make more efficient
and productive agricultural use of land and partly to help the British
government fund its military efforts in multiple wars such as the Napoleonic
Wars. The traditional users of the common land were given small
"allotments" instead. People who had led a subsistence-farming life for
centuries had to give up
farming and moved down into the valleys to take up jobs that paid wages, still working as weavers
and using their looms in their houses. Large new mills were built,
and the weavers' children often worked in these, followed later by their fathers
(once a woman was married, she no longer went to work). The mills and
towns grew together,
and the towns grew and offered more services and a wider range of job
opportunities. The railways grew and linked the towns together.
In my branch of the Pickles family, I can follow this trend from the
1700s to the present day as the employment of the head of the family
changed from handloom weaver to machine weaver to draper to railway
clerk to insurance agent to marketing manager. Many of the earlier children's birth certificates are signed with a simple
cross - the "mark" of the mother or father registering the birth,
because they were unable to write even theor own names.
The Pickles family expanded - across England, and across the seas. You can find members of the Pickles family all over the world today - they are much more widespread than I had ever thought! Look on the Internet - or in a telephone directory when you are visiting a different country - and you may be surprised how many of us are out there. Some have been famous, most of us have not, but we all know where our family came from originally - a little corner of the Pennine North of England hundreds of years ago.
Send mail to chris@picklesnet.com
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Last modified:15 April 2022