Owen

Owen is the anglicised form of the Welsh personal name Owain, which the etymologists take back to the Latin Eugenius, noble-born. T. J. Morgan and Prys Morgan, in Welsh Surnames, trace Latin Eugenis into Old Welsh Ou[u]ein and Eug[u]ein, written in Middle Welsh as Ewein, Owein and Ywein, and agree with Rachel Bromwich that Owein is normally latinised as Eugenius, the Irish Eoghan being the same Latin name down a parallel road.

The men who made the name famous carried it as a first name and had no surname at all. Owain Gwynedd died in 1170; Owain ap Gruffudd, called Owain Lawgoch, Owain the Red Hand, in 1378; Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Prince of Wales, around 1415. Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, remembered in English as Owen Tudor, died in 1461, and his marriage to Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry V, began the line that took the English crown in 1485. What follows is the story of the surname their name became.

In 1292, forty-eight per cent of recorded Welsh names were patronymics, and in some parishes the figure passed seventy. A man was his father's son and nothing more: his baptismal name, then ap or ab for son of, or ferch for daughter of, then his father's baptismal name. Evan ap Thomas fathered John ab Evan, who fathered Rees ap John, and not one syllable of it was inherited. The strings ran longer, as in Llewelyn ap Dafydd ab Ieuan ap Gruffudd ap Meredydd, back perhaps seven generations, because Welsh law made it necessary for a man to recite exactly how he descended from an ancestor.

Those laws decayed through the later Middle Ages, and fixed hereditary surnames came in with the unification of Wales and England under Henry VIII in 1536. In Henry's reign surnames became hereditary among the Welsh gentry, and the custom spread only slowly to commoners. Districts where English influence was strongest gave up the old system first, as did town families and the wealthy; in remote rural parishes ap-names were still in use in the early 19th century.

Owain went into the freeze three ways. Where the ap survived as a fused prefix it produced Bowen, from ab Owen, the formation that also gave Powell from ap Hywel and Price from ap Rhys. Where the prefix was dropped, the father's name stood alone, and that is Owen. Where the English genitive s was added instead, in the pattern that made Jones, Roberts and Edwards the commonest names in the country, it produced Owens, a spelling that also does duty for the Irish Mac Eoghain.

Welsh surnames were built from a small stock of baptismal names, and the Protestant Reformation shrank that stock further, so a handful of names came to cover a whole nation. The consequence matters more to a family historian than any etymology: Welsh communities routinely contain families of the same surname who are not related in any way. It cannot be assumed that two people named Owen, even in the same village, inherited the name from a common ancestor.

Robert Owen was born at Newtown in Montgomeryshire on 14 May 1771, the sixth child of a saddler and ironmonger. He left school at nine, was bound apprentice in his tenth year to a draper at Stamford, and at eighteen was managing a Manchester cotton mill of five hundred hands. By twenty-eight he was a partner in the Chorlton Twist Company, one of the largest cotton firms in the country.

In 1799, with two Manchester partners, he bought the New Lanark cotton mills on the upper Clyde from David Dale. They employed about two thousand people, five hundred of them pauper apprentice children housed in barracks at the works. Owen took over as managing partner in January 1800 to prove a thesis the trade held commercially impossible: that the productivity of a workforce and the welfare of a workforce are the same problem.

Over twenty-five years he made New Lanark the most-visited industrial site in Europe. He raised the minimum working age to ten and then twelve, cut the working day from fourteen hours to ten, built the first infant school in the world at the mill gates in 1816, and opened the Institute for the Formation of Character with its evening classes, library and concert hall. He ran a company store at cost price, the direct ancestor of the cooperative store, and ran the village without corporal punishment or piece-work fines. The mill was profitable throughout.

The Factory Act of 1819, the first British legislation against child labour, was largely Owen's draft. His Report to the County of Lanark in 1820 set out the doctrine of the self-governing industrial village that seeded the British cooperative movement, and the Rochdale Pioneers, who founded the modern co-op in 1844, took his principles as their constitution. He founded the community of New Harmony in Indiana in 1825 and returned to England in 1828 to lead the trades-union and cooperative congresses of the 1830s.

He died at Newtown on 17 November 1858, in his eighty-eighth year, back in the market town where he had been born. The New Lanark mills ran until 1968, were saved by a conservation trust in the 1970s and were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001. The principles of the Lanark Report, member ownership, equal voting and surplus shared among the members, are the constitution of a movement of over a billion people worldwide.

Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 at Oswestry, on the English border, into a family of Welsh descent. In the eighteen months before his death at the Sambre-Oise Canal in 1918, one week before the Armistice, he wrote the poetry that has defined the First World War in English ever since.

The name recurs through Welsh letters and Welsh learning with no descent connecting the bearers to one another, or to him, or to the Owens of Newtown. Henry Owen (1716–1795) was a Welsh theologian and Daniel Owen (1836–1895) a Welsh novelist. Sir Isambard Owen (1850–1927) was a British academic and physician; Edmund Owen (1847–1915) an English surgeon; Richard Owen (1804–1892) an English biologist; Gwilym Ellis Lane Owen (1922–1982) a Welsh philosopher. Under the Owens spelling, Mathew Owens is a Welsh space physicist.

Bearers of the name turn up abroad in every line of work. William Fitzwilliam Owen (1774–1857) was an English naval officer, explorer and hydrographer, and Daniel Owen (1732–1812) served as lieutenant governor of Rhode Island and Chief Justice of its Supreme Court. Joshua T. Owen (1821–1887) was a Welsh-American military officer, Evelyn Owen (1915–1949) an Australian military officer and inventor, and Robert Bowie Owens (1870–1940) an American electrical engineer who discovered alpha rays.

In Welsh sport the name recurs with no family behind it: Dicky Owen (1876–1932) in rugby union, Ike Owens (1918–1998) a Great Britain and Wales international at both league and union, Ken Owens (born 1987) a Welsh rugby union player, and Nigel Owens (born 1971) a Welsh international referee. Michael Owen (born 1979) and Syd Owen (1927–1999) were English footballers; Clive Owen (born 1964) and Reginald Owen (1887–1972) acted. None of them can claim descent from another, and that is the point of the name: the Tudor fixing of surnames handed the same word to thousands of unconnected Welsh households, and every family that carries it owns its share outright.