Green

English Greens are not necessarily Irish Gwynn nor German Grün, medieval colour bynames converged. The English version anchored on three medieval roots: the descriptive byname for someone of pale or yellowish complexion (still preserved in the Middle English green meaning 'unripe' or 'inexperienced'); the locative byname for a man whose house stood on the village green (the common open ground at the centre of every medieval English village, the social heart of the parish before enclosure); and the May Day costume byname for the man who played the part of the Green Man or Jack-in-the-Green in the medieval village May Day procession. The three converged at parish-register fixation in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Cross-channel and cross-Irish convergence then complicated the surname-history. Welsh Gwyn (white, fair, blessed) anglicised to Gwynn then to Green at parish-register clerk's discretion across the Welsh March from the fifteenth century. German-Jewish Grün Ashkenazi-immigrant names anglicised on the same pattern from the late nineteenth century. Irish Ó hUaine (descendant of Uaine, green) anglicised to Green at Irish-immigration parish-register entry across the nineteenth century. The four-way convergence makes the modern Green name one of the most genealogically ambiguous in the English-language surname catalogue: the parish-register baseline is required to distinguish a Sussex-village-green Green from a Welsh-borderland Gwynn from a Mile End Ashkenazi Grün.

The Robin-Hood-and-Greenwood folklore tradition gave the name a second cultural register that the English-Romantic and Victorian readers picked up. The fourteenth-century Lincoln Green dye associated with the Sherwood outlaws compressed across the late-medieval and Tudor period into the Green-Man iconography of the parish-church carvings (the foliate head of the Green Man appears in over a thousand surviving English parish churches; the same iconography runs into the modern post-1960s landscape-mysticism revival). May Day, Whitsun, the parish-green dance, the maypole: the cultural ground out of which the surname rose has been one of the most-revived English folk-cultural domains across the post-Victorian and post-1960s periods.