Meijer

Meijer comes down from the Latin maior, greater, and more exactly from maior domus, headman of a household, the phrase that also gave English its mayor. By Middle High German it had narrowed to mei(g)er, the manager of a lord's country estate, and later widened again to mean a tenant, or a free farmer working land he answered for himself. The nearest English word is Steward, from Old English stiweard, hall-warden, which in Scotland hardened into the surname Stuart.

German built longer, more specific names on it, Bachmeier, Bergmair, Niedermeier. Dutch kept the -ij and produced Meijer, with Meijers and De Meijer beside it, while abroad the same name is written Meyer. Meyer ranked sixth in Germany and eighth in Switzerland in 2014, and a 2007 count found 39,801 people named Meijer in the Netherlands.

The office the name records was real and it was local. In Flanders, Zeeland, the Netherlands, Hainault and northern France the ruler's representative in town and country was the baljuw, from the French bailli, and in Flanders the count appointed him. But the Low Countries never agreed on one word for the job. Holland, Antwerp, Mechelen, 's-Hertogenbosch and Turnhout said schout. Other parts of Brabant said drossate. Brussels said amman. At Asse and Leuven the word was meier.

Across the German-speaking lands the equivalent was the Amtmann, the senior official a territorial lord appointed to oversee the administration and jurisdiction of a manorial estate.

A manor was three kinds of land at once, and the man who ran it kept them apart in his accounts. There was demesne, worked directly for the lord's household; dependent villein holdings, owing labour or a share of output or cash in place of both; and free peasant land, owing money rent fixed at the lease but still subject to the manor's court and custom. What was let to nobody was manorial waste, the hedges and verges.

The income he answered for was not only rent. It took in charges for the lord's mill, bakery and wine-press, payments for the right to hunt or to let pigs feed in his woodland, the revenues of the manor court, and a fee on every change of tenant. The steward began as the servant who supervised estate and household together; by the 13th century a large house kept two, one on the land and a majordomo on domestic routine. He minded his lord's castles while the lord was away, checked the taxes of the serfs, and was paid up to three or four pounds a year.

The Netherlands came to compulsory hereditary surnames between 1795 and 1811, closed off by a forced official registration of surnames in 1811. Over 100,000 Dutch surnames exist partly because so many were fixed at once, leaving few generations in which a name could die out. Most families were not inventing anything that year: they had carried surnames for generations, and the people genuinely choosing at the clerk's table were some Jewish citizens and some rural communities in the north east. Napoleon had already required Jews to take fixed names by a decree of 1808.

What 1811 ended was the parallel system. Before it, patronymics ran alongside settled surnames and were official enough that inheritances passed under different last names: a boy born to Jan was Pieter Janszoon, his sister Geertje Jansdochter, contracted to Jansz, then Jansse, then Jans. In the north and east families took an ancestor or a place instead, Halbertsma from a forebear called Halbert, Dijkstra from a dyke. Afterwards the patronymics froze into Peeters, Jansen and Willems. Meijer needed no such freezing. It had been naming men long before a clerk wrote it into a register.

Two roads end at the same spelling. Some German Jews took Meyer or one of its variants as a surname when they assimilated to German culture in the 18th century, because it sits close to the Hebrew given name Me'ir, shining or enlightened. A wholly different origin from the estate steward's job title, arriving at an identical word, and the reason the name carries a Jewish history in the Low Countries as well as a manorial one.

The forename road stayed visible in the Netherlands, where Meijer went on being used as a given name in its own right: the bibliographer Meijer Marcusz Roest (1821-1889) and the painter Meijer de Haan (1852-1895) carried it in front rather than behind. Behind, it belonged to Jonas Daniel Meijer (1780-1834), a Dutch lawyer, to the painter Sal Meijer (1877-1965), and to Jaap Meijer (1912-1993), who wrote both history and poetry. Berthe Meijer (1938-2012) was born in Germany, survived the Holocaust, and became a Dutch author.

Once the name was hereditary it stopped describing anyone's job, and the men who carried it appear instead in the trades of a mercantile republic. Hendrick de Meijer (1620-1689) painted landscapes. Lodewijk Meijer (1629-1681) was a physician, scholar, playwright and Enlightenment radical, four careers in one lifetime and not one of them run on somebody else's estate.

Louis Meijer (1809-1866) worked as painter, etcher, lithographer and draftsman. Willem Meijer (1838-1909) left the Netherlands as a missionary in China, and a second Willem Meijer (1923-2003) was a botanist. The name that once meant a man tied to one estate now belonged to men whose work had no fixed ground at all.

There is an irony in the record worth naming. The meier was the instrument of authority on the estate, the man who enforced the lord's dues; the best-remembered 20th-century bearers of his name in the Netherlands set themselves against a state's authority instead. Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, born Truus Meijer in 1896 and dead in 1978, is remembered as a Dutch war hero and resistance fighter. Selma Meijer (1890-1941) was a pacifist, feminist and resistance fighter.

It runs back before the war. Clara Meijer-Wichmann (1885-1922) was a German-Dutch lawyer, writer and anarchist, dead in 1922. Three women, one surname, and a position on power a medieval bailiff would not have recognised.

Two Meijers put the name onto things that still carry it. Cornelis Simon Meijer (1904-1974), a Dutch mathematician, introduced the Meijer G-function, so the estate steward's surname is now a fixed term of mathematics. Hendrik Meijer (1883-1964) left the Netherlands for the United States and founded the Meijer hypermarket chain; his son Frederik (1919-2011) was an American businessman after him, and so were Frederik's sons Hank (born 1952) and Doug (born 1955). A word that once meant the man who managed another man's property became the name over the door of a business the family owned.

Migration did to the spelling what the record says it does abroad. Frank Nicholas Meyer (1875-1918) was born in the Netherlands and worked as an American explorer and botanist, the -ij flattened to -y on the crossing.

At home the name spread through ordinary Dutch public life without ever gathering into a clan. Eduard Meijer (1878-1929) swam and played water polo; Karel Meijer (1884-1967) played water polo. Johnny Meijer (1912-1992) played the accordion. Cora Canne Meijer (1929-2020) sang mezzo-soprano and taught voice. Mary Meijer-van der Sluis (1917-1994) fenced; Jan Meijer (1921-1993) sprinted. Nearly forty thousand Meijers is what a good job title looks like once it has stopped being a job.