Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 3.djvu/626

 6o6 APPENDIX C Latin lists is given as Bogo de Knovil, appears as Boges and Bouges, which fact supports Stevenson's contention, for, if the equivalent of the Latin Bogo were Bevis, the form in the French lists should have been Beuves. Richard, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford (/. 1238), had a son, a cleric, whose name has been latinized as Bozo, Bogo, and Bovo, but Stevenson is confident that these forms are due to error in transcription. ("*) Several of the Counts of La Marche were called Boson. Charles Mercer was living temp. Henry III (Add. Ch. 945), Karolus occurs circa 1233 (Cotton Ch. xi, 38), Symon Karoli is mentioned towards the end of the reign of Edward I (Egerton Ch. 396), and Karolus fil. Karoli de Sislande is named in a grant of lands in Suffolk dated 1275 and 1276 (Add. Ch. 9516, 9517). The following extract from the Rev. A. B. Beaven's Aldermen of London suggests at first sight that Drew was not much commoner 500 years ago than it is now, but in fact Walter fil. Driu occurs 1164-79 (Harl. 43 I. 35), and there was more than one Drew Barentyn in the thirteenth cen- tury, and the name is fairly often met with in the Montagu and other families. " On March 10, 1400, Drew Barentyn represented to the Mayor and his brother Aldermen that his name had been entered in ' the red paper of redemptions of freedom and apprentices of the City ' as Andreas Barentyn on April 30, 1364, and afterwards in the 'black paper of redemptions of Bobo and Bogo, which are the forms in which the Germanic names represented by them were taken over into French. The accent modified the in the nom. to ?<c, written in Anglo-French frequently o^, so that the French nom. of Bobo is Beuves., written in the Anglo-Norman Boeves de Hanstone, jBcf/i, Boves. In this poem the ace. is Bovoun, quite regularly, the first of Bobonem not being affected by the accent. The English "Sir Bevis" uses the nom. Beves and the ace. Bevoun, which (unless it is an editorial blunder) must be due to the assimilation of the first vowel to that in the nom. Now with regard to Bogo, the nom. of this appears written Beughes, Bouges, Bueges, Boeges, in English-French records. These forms no one could con- fuse with Bevis. The g, gh, has the value of w, and the proper form would be Beues, etc. (of. also Drogo, Dreues, Drew, whence the surnames Druce, Drew.) The g spelling seems to have been introduced, on the analogy of Hughes for Hues, specially to avoid confusion with Bevis. In the Annales S. Pau/i, vol. i, p. 302, Bogo de Knovile is called Boves, which at first sight favours the identification with Bevis. But it should obviously be read Boues, when it falls at once into line with the correct descendants of Bogo in French. The ace. of Bogo should be Bouon (and the like), and here if you read v instead of «, you can at once confuse it with Bevis. Whether this ever happened outside the blunders of antiquaries I do not know, hut prima facie it seems an impossibility in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries." (*) He writes: — "The two latter are probably due to the graphic confusion of Botion and BoKon; the first named must be a blunder, since Bozo notoriously produced through the ace. the name Bozon, Boson, and could not conceivably be confused either in the nom. Boce or ace. with either Bogo or Bobo, except in the way one might write Edward for Edmund, Robert for Richard. It would be possible to make out quite a good case for the identity of these names in the Middle Ages founded upon mere scribal blunders."