Payne

Payne could wound in Middle English, rustic, pagan, country-bumpkin barbs from Norman lips, yet the same cheek survives as a badge: we were here before your French polish. By the early modern period the sting had gone; the name simply marked families who kept the spelling when gentler cousins smoothed it to Paine.

The Norman-French paien root produced two principal branches across English parish-register history. The first is the byname tradition: a man who farmed the land rather than the lord's hall (the paysan meaning) or a man whose Christian credentials were doubted by his clerical neighbour (the paganus meaning, applied jocularly in the post-Conquest period). The second is the personal name tradition: Payne was a recorded Christian forename in the Anglo-Norman gentry from the twelfth century, given as a paradoxical badge of humility to children whose parents wanted them named for the unfashionable peasant rather than the fashionable saint. The forename usage is recorded continuously in the Domesday and Pipe Rolls of Henry II through to the late fifteenth century.

The spelling fork between Payne and Paine crystallised in the early modern period. The American radical Thomas Paine (1737–1809), born at Thetford in Norfolk and emigrant to the Pennsylvania colony in 1774, fixed the Paine spelling for the American transatlantic-political tradition through his Common Sense (1776) and The Rights of Man (1791); the Payne spelling kept the original English form across the Devon, Dorset and Cornish parish records where the surname density is highest in the modern census. The split is one of the cleanest spelling-by-political-allegiance forks in the English-surname catalogue: republican-Paines in the eighteenth-century American settlement, Anglican-Paynes in the Devon-Cornwall coastal parishes.

The Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin doctoral thesis at Harvard in 1925, on the spectral analysis of stellar atmospheres, established that hydrogen and helium are the overwhelmingly dominant elemental constituents of the stars and (by extension) of the universe; the thesis was rejected by Henry Norris Russell of Princeton on its first presentation as too radical to be correct, and the result was only generally accepted after Russell's own 1929 paper independently confirmed it. The 1925 thesis is now generally regarded by the history of astrophysics as the single most consequential PhD dissertation in twentieth-century astronomy. Cecilia Payne, who had been born at Wendover in Buckinghamshire and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge before emigrating to Harvard in 1923, married the Russian-American astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin in 1934 and was the first woman appointed to a full Harvard professorship in 1956.