Beards Of Essex

Estimates vary, but there are around 15,000 people in the UK with the surname Beard, meaning that it is about the 680th most common name in the country¹.

To give that a sense of proportion, there are only 211 people in the UK with my mothers surname of Freeston, which comes in at 14,684th. Beards are to be found in virtually every part of the country in the 21st century, but the distribution polarises significantly the further back in time that you go.

In 1841 almost half (47%) of all Beards recorded in the census were located in just 5 places: Gloucestershire, London, Derbyshire, Essex and Staffordshire, with another quarter (26%) found in Cheshire, Lancashire, Worcestershire, Cornwall, Yorkshire and Sussex². Many counties in which they were numerous by 1911 – Middlesex, Warwickshire, Monmouthshire, Surrey, Glamorgan, Kent, Nottinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hampshire, and Berkshire – are simply later overspill. Beards in Scotland were virtually non-existent and the Welsh lines are almost certainly of English origin.

It’s not possible to go back any further, but it might be assumed that the distribution would have been narrower still 100 years previously. However, it does seem that there are 6 distinct clusters:

• London, which is hard to accurately attribute since many of its inhabitants will have arrived from elsewhere over the years
• Essex and Cambridgeshire (the focus of this website)
• Gloucestershire (going back to at least the 1480s – and I note that one family tree found on the web suggests a link with Derbyshire³)
• Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Lancashire (with records going back to 1400 in Derbyshire – if you ever see a Beard coat of arms, it likely comes from here⁴)
• Cornwall and Devon (going back to at least the 1620 in Devon – with a link to Cambridgeshire being suggested⁵)
• Sussex (again, goes back to at least the 1490s – there is an Archive of the Beard family of Rottingdean at the National Archives⁶)

Beard Distribution in England Wales 1841 vs 1911 Census