Hughes

Hughes is one of the great Welsh surnames whose root word came in from outside. Hugh descends from the Germanic name Hugo, reached Britain through the Picard form Hue in Old French, and travelled with the Norman settlement that followed the Conquest. Several Norman lords encouraged incomers onto their new Welsh lands, and in the south that left the Landsker Line dividing Pembrokeshire into an "Englishry" and a "Welshry". In the north there was no such line: the name was adopted, not imposed. Hugh became Huw, a Welsh baptismal name like any other.

How much of the surname comes from that import is genuinely disputed, and a reader deserves both readings. One has Hughes descending straight from the Norman-carried Hugh. The other holds that the Welsh Hu or Huw is unrelated to the Picard name altogether and carries its own native sense of "fire" or "inspiration": the same idea, remarkably, that sits behind the Irish Aodh.

Hereditary surnames took hold in Wales among the gentry under Henry VIII and spread slowly to everyone else after the union of 1536. When they did, the patronymic ap Huw went two ways at once. Some families kept the ap and compressed it, so ap Hugh became Pugh, exactly as ap Hywel became Powell and ap Rhys became Price. Others dropped the ap and took the English genitive, adding an s: Hughes. Sons of two men called Huw, in one parish, could found two separate surnames.

That fork made Hughes, and it carries a warning. The s is not proof of a bloodline (in England the same ending was taken by servants as readily as by sons), and two Hughes families in one north Wales village need not share an ancestor at all.

The 1881 census fixes the heartland with unusual precision. Measured against the British average, Hughes was densest of all on Ynys Môn, Anglesey, at 37.2 times the national rate, followed by Gwynedd, Flintshire, Denbighshire, Meirionydd, Montgomeryshire, Ceredigion, Radnorshire and Carmarthenshire. Read that list as a map and it climbs the north and west, then stops, which is what distinguishes Hughes from Jones, Davies and Evans, names that mass across the south. A Hughes tracing a line back into Wales is, more often than not, tracing it north.

That ground is the Welsh-speaking heartland and has stayed so: Gwynedd still returned 64.4 per cent Welsh speakers at the 2021 census, and when the Office for National Statistics wanted a rural, strongly Welsh-speaking place in which to rehearse the 2011 census, it chose Anglesey. Genetic surveys in 2015 found north and south Wales to be distinct populations, and Hughes belongs to the northern one.

The nineteenth century pulled the name off that ground. The population of Wales rose from 587,000 in 1801 to 2,421,000 by 1911, and almost all of the increase went into the mining districts; Glamorganshire alone grew from 71,000 to 1,122,000 over the same years. Much of that was movement, and for the slate and upland counties of the north it meant sons leaving. A north Walian Hughes of 1880 was as likely to be at a coal face in the valleys, or in an ironworks like Enoch Hughes (1829-1893), as on the family land.

Others went and did not come back. Welsh workers poured into Liverpool and Ashton-in-Makerfield in such numbers that English, Scottish and Irish families still carry Welsh surnames, and contract miners went to the coal towns of Pas-de-Calais, clustering round their chapels. Ted Hughes (1930-1998), Poet Laureate of England, was Yorkshire-born of an Anglesey-Welsh line, a north Wales name at the head of English letters.

In 1869 an engineer from Merthyr Tydfil named John Hughes took Welsh ironmaking east into the Russian Empire and built a steel plant and several coal mines on the open steppe. The settlement that grew around the works was named Yuzovka in recognition of him, "Yuz" being the Russian and Ukrainian approximation of Hughes; to the Welsh at home it was Hughesovka. It is now Donetsk.

Very few European surnames have named a city; fewer still one built from nothing by a working ironmaster rather than a prince or a saint.

Welsh emigration was never numerically vast (Irish emigration to the United States may have run 26 times greater in proportion to population), but it was concentrated and stubborn about its language. Hughes families went to the slate towns of Pennsylvania and to Jackson County, Ohio, known as "Little Wales". In 1865 the colonists of Y Wladfa took chapel, language and surname to Patagonia.

That scattering was measured in 2016, when the Welsh Government commissioned a study of Welsh surname geography. It found 718,000 people in Wales, nearly 35 per cent of the population, carrying a name of Welsh origin, against 5.3 per cent in the rest of the United Kingdom, 4.7 per cent in New Zealand, 4.1 per cent in Australia and 3.8 per cent in the United States: 16.3 million people across the countries studied. One of them reached the top: Billy Hughes, of Welsh blood, led Australia through the First World War and won it a voice at Versailles.

A second, entirely separate family of Hugheses came out of Ireland. The Irish name Aodh also means "fire", and because clerks Anglicised Aodh as Hugh, the surnames Ó hAodha and Mac Aodha came out of the seventeenth century written as Hughes, or, depending on the clerk, Hayes, McGee or McHugh. The Mac Aodha of the Cinéal nÉogain, the Donegal-Tyrone overkingdom of the Uí Néill high kings, held land around Pomeroy and the Slieve Gallion from the twelfth century and lost most of it in the Plantation of Ulster after 1610. The name is thickest today in Armagh, Tyrone, Monaghan, Donegal and Fermanagh, and stood 34th in Matheson's Irish census of 1890.

That line produced John Hughes (1797-1864), born in Tyrone, first Archbishop of New York, who founded St Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and led Catholic Irish New York through the Famine. It also gave the Dublin comedian Sean Hughes (1965-2017) and Aaron Hughes (born 1979) of Cookstown, who captained Northern Ireland to a record 113 caps.

Chapel Wales runs through the story. The open-air revivals of Howell Harris (1714-1773), born Hywel ap Rhys, founded Welsh Methodism, and that nonconformist world was the culture most north Wales Hughes families were raised inside. The theologian Howell Harris Hughes (1873-1956) carried the revivalist's name in full; Ellen Hughes (1867-1927), writer and suffragist, argued the case for women from the same chapels.

Since then: Arwel Hughes (1909-1988) and Owain Arwel Hughes (born 1942) conducted; Richard Hughes (1900-1976) wrote A High Wind in Jamaica; Cledwyn Hughes (1916-2001) sat in Parliament; Emlyn Hughes (1947-2004) and Mark Hughes played football at the top of the game. For a name that began as one baptismal name absorbed into Welsh and frozen by an English clerk's s, that is a considerable inheritance, and it is still densest on the island where the 1881 census found it.