Davis

David is the patron saint of Wales, and unlike the patrons of England, Scotland and Ireland he was a native of the country he protects. Welsh calls him Dewi Sant. He was bishop of Mynyw in the sixth century, born by tradition at Henfynyw in Ceredigion, and died on 1 March in either 589 or 601. Almost everything told of him comes from the Buchedd Dewi, the Life of David written by Rhygyfarch around 1090, which historians treat with caution: Rhygyfarch wrote partly to win the Welsh church a standing equal to Canterbury's.

His rule was severe even by monastic standards. His monks pulled the plough themselves rather than yoke draught animals, ate only bread with salt and herbs, drank only water (hence their nickname, watermen) and owned nothing, so that even to say "my book" was an offence. The dove is his emblem; the leek, his other, is the symbol of Wales itself. His last sermon left the language one of its best-known lines: "Gwnewch y pethau bychain", do the little things.

What made the surname is the scale of the cult. The poem Armes Prydein of around 930 prophesied that when all seemed lost the Cymry would unite behind David's standard and drive out the English. Rome recognised him under Pope Callixtus II in 1120, and more than fifty churches in south Wales carried his dedication before the Reformation.

His shrine at St Davids in Pembrokeshire drew pilgrims through the whole Middle Ages. Vikings stripped its precious metal, a new shrine was raised in 1275, Edward I prayed at it in 1284, and Bishop Barlow carried off its jewels and relics between 1536 and 1548.

Devotion on that scale runs straight into the baptismal register. Naming a son for Dewi was the plainest act of piety and of Welshness a family could make, and Dafydd became one of the small handful of names Welsh fathers used over and over. That matters more here than anywhere else, because Welsh surnames were built out of first names: a crowded font makes a crowded surname list. The Reformation narrowed the stock of baptismal names further, and David lost nothing by it, a scriptural Hebrew name no reformer could object to, and a national name at the same moment.

There is a second and quite separate root, which Davis families in the English west should know. Biblical David stayed in fashion among Tudor English parents in the southwest, well away from any Welsh influence. Not every Davis came over the border.

When Welsh patronymics froze into fixed surnames, some kept the ap in reduced form at the front: ap Hywel gave Powell, ap Rhys gave Price, ap Hugh gave Pugh, ab Owen gave Bowen. With Dafydd the prefix was dropped altogether and an English possessive s added instead. Davis and Davies are not two names but the same patronymic written by two sets of parish clerks.

The split tracks a border, not a bloodline. Davis fixed in the English-side parishes of Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Somerset, Davies on the Welsh side in Monmouthshire, Brecknockshire and Glamorgan. The registers give the game away: one family across two generations appears as Davis at a baptism and Davies at a burial. By the census of 1841 the two spellings together stood among the four commonest surnames in England and Wales. Search both spellings: the one on your certificate was the clerk's choice, not your ancestor's.

The name is thickest along a band running from the Welsh March into industrial England: Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and the Birmingham and Black Country conurbation. That is the anglicising edge, where Welsh Davids were entered in English registers and where Welsh families later followed work into the ironworks.

The second concentration is the West Country (Somerset and Bristol, Dorset and Wiltshire, Devon and Cornwall) and that one is Tudor English naming, not Welsh migration.

The best-documented Davis of the age of sail was born in Devon around 1550, on the English side of the divide. John Davis made three Arctic voyages between 1585 and 1587 hunting the north-west passage. He never found it, but he charted the Greenland coast and sailed the water that has been the Davis Strait ever since. Few families anywhere can point to an ocean carrying their name.

His second legacy lasted longer. The Seaman's Secrets, published in 1599, was the standard English-language navigational textbook for the next two centuries. In 1605 he piloted the first English East India Company voyage to the Spice Islands, and died that same year.

The first great Davis emigration was religious. About 1681 a group of Welsh-speaking Quakers asked William Penn for land in Pennsylvania where they could conduct their affairs in Welsh, and in 1684 he ordered forty thousand acres laid out west of the Schuylkill as a single barony. The boundaries were fixed in 1687, but by the 1690s the land had been carved between counties and self-government never came.

What survived was the map (Radnor, Haverford, Merion, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth) and a substantial Davis contingent settled in those townships. After the Civil War 104 Welsh families from the Tract went south and founded a Welsh presence at Knoxville, Tennessee.

Two further channels carried the name across. The seventeenth-century tobacco-planter emigration took a Davis stream into the James River valley of Virginia, the line from which Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, descended. After 1845 an industrial Welsh emigration ran the surname into the anthracite coal valleys of Pennsylvania and the steel and glass towns of Ohio.

Raw American surname counts are not a measure of Welsh descent. Many African American family names originate in slavery, when enslavers imposed their own surnames on the people they held; Davis is one of the names distributed that way, and no link to Wales or the West Country follows from it. The honest measure is the Welsh Government's study of Welsh-origin surnames: 718,000 people in Wales, nearly 35 per cent of the population, carry one, against 3.8 per cent in the United States, 4.1 per cent in Australia and 4.7 per cent in New Zealand: 16.3 million across the countries studied.

At home the name heads a sport and a great orchestra. Joe Davis (1901-1978) founded the modern snooker World Championship, and Steve Davis, born in 1957, took six world titles between 1981 and 1989. Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013) conducted the London Symphony Orchestra from 1995 to 2006. A saint's name, a strait, a coalfield and a snooker table is a great deal of ground for a surname that began as son of Dafydd.