Wood

The oldest form of the name in the English record is not Wood at all but de la Wode, entered against a Hertfordshire tenant in 1242, literally "of the wood", a clerk's shorthand for a man whose holding sat at the treeline rather than on the village street. Behind it lies Middle English wode, from Old English wudu, from the Proto-Germanic widu: the ordinary word for standing timber and for the ground it covered. It said where a man lived and what he lived beside, and in a manor court that was identification enough.

A second and much rarer Wood came from an insult. Old English wōd and Middle English wode meant frenzied, wild, out of one's senses, and the man set down as le Wode in Worcestershire in 1221 (twenty-one years before the Hertfordshire tenant) was being labelled, not located. The two roots collapsed into a single spelling within a few generations, which is why no Wood line can claim the name means only one thing: most ancestors were named for the trees, a few for their temper.

The name was fixed in an age when the men who wrote it down did not write English. After 1066 the language of official documents moved from Old English to Latin and the ruling class spoke Anglo-Norman, so a Norman scribe recording a wood-dweller's byname reached for his own vocabulary and produced de Bosco, from the Old French bois. The same family could stand as atte Wode on one roll and de Bosco on the next, with no change of blood, only a change of clerk.

The wood was newly a legal thing to live beside, too. William's government imported the forest laws, setting aside great tracts of England as royal forest where the king's deer and the king's timber outranked the tenant's plough, and the Domesday survey of 1086 catalogued who held what, wood and waste included. To be named for the wood in that century was to be named for a jurisdiction as much as for trees, a boundary a man could be fined for crossing.

Hereditary surnames entered England from the top. The Norman incomers marked themselves with de and the name of a Norman village or an English estate; the habit spread from the feudal nobility and gentry downward, and by the fourteenth century most English and most Scottish people carried a surname, with Wales following only after the union under Henry VIII in 1536. In late-medieval England fixed names were also resisted in places, on the suspicion that they were an instrument of taxation.

Because the wood was everywhere, so was the byname. Wood was coined independently in every county that had trees and a clerk, which is how it comes to stand 26th among surnames in England, Wales and the Isle of Man, 53rd in Scotland and 78th in the United States with no single founding line behind those numbers. The four-year study led by the University of the West of England, published in 2016 as the Oxford English Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, traced 45,602 surnames and found over 90 per cent of them native to Britain and Ireland; its leader Richard Coates ranked names taken from a place (a hill, a village green, a wood) beside Smith and Baker as one of the founding classes.

Wood worked as a building block as much as a name. It heads Woodward, Woodhouse, Woodman, Woodcock, Woodruff and Woodstock, and tails Greenwood, Eastwood, Westwood, Northwood, Underwood, Hazelwood, Inglewood and Kirkwood: each one a different family in a different wood, and none of them a branch of Wood. Woodd, Woode, Wode and Woods are the same name written by different hands; the compounds are not.

Emigration added a layer the English rolls cannot show. Wald, the German equivalent, was routinely anglicised to Wood by German-speaking emigrants settling in the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa, so a diaspora Wood may descend from a Hessian forest rather than a Hertfordshire one: the same word, translated instead of inherited. Wald survives unchanged among the families who never made the crossing.

In 1662 the Wood family bought Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, one of the great fortresses of the north: begun in 1190 by Robert Fitzrandolph, third lord of Middleham and Spennithorne, to watch the road from Richmond to Skipton, and carrying a keep of 105 feet by 78, among the largest in England though it rises only two storeys. The Nevilles held it from 1270, and Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker, raised the boy who became Richard III in his household there after Wakefield in 1460.

What the Woods bought was already a shell. Henry VII seized it after Bosworth in 1485 and it stayed in royal hands until the reign of James I; under Elizabeth I, Lord Huntingdon proposed pulling it down and building a manor house out of the pieces. Sir Henry Linley took it in 1604, and the sale to the Woods followed in 1662, a purchase of a name and a hillside rather than a working castle.

They kept it for 227 years, until 1889, longer than the Nevilles' own two centuries, and let it go to ruin. Its dressed stone walked down the hill into the walls and outbuildings of the village below, which is why Middleham's houses are partly built of a castle. What survives is in the care of English Heritage, and the Wood tenure is remembered less for anything raised at Middleham than for what was allowed to fall.

Ralph Wood I (1715–1772), the "miller of Burslem", was apprenticed to John Astbury in 1730 and learned coloured glazes working with Thomas Whieldon at Fenton Low. He set up his own salt-glazed ware at Burslem in 1754, was modelling human and animal figures, stags above all, by about 1760, supplied models to Josiah Wedgwood, and is credited with the first Toby jug, the "Toby Philpot" of around 1762. His brother Aaron modelled the useful tablewares and fathered Enoch Wood.

Ralph Wood II (1748–1795), related through his mother to Wedgwood, coloured his figures with overglaze enamels and sold them to Wedgwood in 1782 and 1783, but the business ran on rougher ground than his father's: a Bristol shop from 1773 to 1781 whose assets went in bankruptcy, while his brother John kept the Burslem works going. He also employed John Voyez, the French-trained modeller Wedgwood had dismissed and then prosecuted, who served a sentence in Stafford Gaol in 1769 and whose hand is read in the thick-lidded eyes, flattened noses and pugnacious faces of the Wood figures.

Ralph Wood III, baptised in May 1774, carried the Hill Potworks on after his father until his own death in 1801, and the Ralph Wood figures stopped with him. The models outlived the family: the best of them were still being pressed, imitated and copied long after the last Ralph, and attribution has grown cautious enough that pieces once given to the Woods are now hedged as "Whieldon-type".

Henry Joseph Wood was born above his father's optician's shop at 16 Oxford Street on 3 March 1869, taught music at home by his mother Martha Morris, playing the organ at St Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury from the age of twelve, and admitted to the Royal Academy of Music in 1886 on the strength of that organ-playing. He learned conducting under Ebenezer Prout and spent 1887 to 1889 as répétiteur at the Royal English Opera House before the touring-opera and Crystal Palace work of the early 1890s.

Robert Newman's proposal of February 1895 (cheap nightly summer concerts at the new Queen's Hall in Langham Place) handed him a platform he then refused to surrender for fifty consecutive seasons, from 1895 to 1944, across roughly five thousand Prom performances and thirty-eight Last Nights. What he did with the platform mattered as much as the endurance: the first English performances of Mahler, Sibelius, Strauss, Schoenberg, Ravel, Debussy, Bartók and Janáček were his, along with Elgar's Enigma Variations at the Queen's Hall in 1899 and Holst's Planets in 1920.

He was knighted in 1911 and made a Companion of Honour in 1944. The Queen's Hall was destroyed in the Blitz in May 1941 and the concerts moved to the Royal Albert Hall, where they have been held ever since; the BBC had taken them over in 1927 and retitled them the BBC Proms in 1976. Wood died at Hitchin Hospital in Hertfordshire on 19 August 1944, ten days into his fiftieth season, having conducted its first ten concerts.