The Origin of the Surname Quelch
By Carol Baxter, 2012
The origin of Quelch is inadequately explained by the entries found in surname dictionaries.
Carol Baxter's research
Carol determined that the surname is mainly found in southeast England, with its focal point in Berkshire. When she counted all of the Quelch entries recorded in the various British telephone directories for the year 1980 and organised these entries into county-like groupings, she found that Berkshire had the largest number of entries (50).
The Berkshire directories included 2.5 times as many Quelch entries as the Oxfordshire directories, which had the next highest number of entries for a single county (19). Berkshire also had more than 1.5 times the number of entries found in the London/Middlesex/Hertfordshire area (32), which was difficult to separate into individual counties.
When the ratio of the number of Quelch entries for every hundred thousand people (or thereabouts) was determined, it indicated the surname Quelch occurred 19 times in every 100,000 people in Berkshire, as compared with 8 per 100,000 in Oxfordshire and 4 per 100,000 in the London/Middlesex/Hertfordshire area. This indicates that the origins of the surname Quelch probably lie in the Berkshire area.
The number of entries in the International Genealogical Index (IGI) supports this theory. The IGI is an index recording extracts of millions of baptisms and marriages performed between the 1500s and 1800s. When the entries for each English county were examined, they showed that the only counties to include a considerable number of entries are the three listed above: Berkshire (441), Oxfordshire (81) and London/Middlesex (134). However, when the IGI entries are divided into the centuries in which they occurred, a different picture emerges as follows:
County 1500s 1600s 1700s 1800s
Berkshire 5 58 297 81
Oxfordshire 27 45 7 2
London/Middlesex 0 38 22 74
These figures suggest that Oxfordshire might have been the county of origin of the surname Quelch. They also suggest that the surname died out in Oxfordshire late in the 1600s, while it increased in Berkshire during the same period. As no other county included any Quelch entries for the 1500s, and as entries for the six nearby counties included between one and five entries in the 1600s, it seems likely that those with the surname in London and the other nearby counties probably relocated there from the Oxfordshire and Berkshire areas.
Thus, this information suggests that the surname was originally peculiar to the Oxfordshire/Berkshire area. Yet this is not reflected in the surname-dictionary entries that attempt to explain the origin and derivation of the surname.
Surname dictionary definitions and derivations
All of the surname dictionaries agree that Quelch is locational in origin and that the surname's progenitor was "a Welsh(man)". However, they differ in their analyses of the derivation of the surname.
In A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames, Bardsley compares the derivation of quelch from welsh with Gwyllam for William, Quilliams for Williams, and Quhitelaw and Quhitehead for Whitelaw and Whitehead. He quotes examples from London parish registers such as Quilche (1612) and Quelch (1613, 1655). In particular, he notes the different spellings in the references to the same person, Margaret Gwelch and Margaret Quelch (1686 and 1688 St James Clerkenwell), as evidence of this theory. He ends with the ratio: "London 3; Oxford 8". This indicates that he knew of the surname's larger frequency in Oxfordshire.
In History of Surnames of the British Isles, Ewen uses the same example of Margaret Gwelch/Quelch in referring to the derivation of the surname under the heading "evolution by variation and corruption".
However, in Surnames of the United Kingdom, Harrison suggests that Quelch is Celtic/Teutonic for MacWelch, meaning "son of the Welshman".
By contrast, in The Romance of Names, Weekly states that Quelch represents the Welsh pronunciation of welsh.
How accurate are these definitions and derivations?
If quelch did indeed mean welsh, it would seem logical that a reference would be found to quelch in an English language dictionary as an example of a sound or spelling change over the centuries. However, although the entry for welsh in the Oxford English Dictionary lists many spellings of the word over the centuries, none of these spellings include quelch. This suggests that quelch was probably an unusual spelling of the word welsh. As such, it was unlikely to have been the Welsh pronunciation as this, surely, would have been recorded in such an exhaustive dictionary.
Furthermore, the Encyclopaedia Britannica records that Wales is known as Cymru, Gwalia or Cambria. From Gwalia could come gwelsh and hence quelch. However, if this was the case, pockets of the surname should have occurred anywhere Welsh people settled. As the surname appears to have been peculiar to the Oxfordshire/Berkshire area, the evidence does not support Weekly's theory.
The history of the letter "Q" in the Oxford English Dictionary explains that the sound now spelt as qu- was recorded in Old English as cw-. After the Norman Conquest, qu- gradually replaced cw-. The spelling change was completed by the end of the thirteenth century.
In Surnames of the United Kingdom, Harrison uses this knowledge to produce his derivation of Quelch. He suggests that it was Celtic and Teutonic in origin and comes from MacWelch, and that the ma- was dropped while the internal cw- became qu-.
This might seem logical except for the fact that mac is the Irish, Gaelic and Manx word for "son" and no references to the surnames MacWelch or Quelch have been found in Scottish or Irish records or in indexes such as the IGI. Moreover, as Welshmen must have settled all over the UK, as reflected by the fact that Welch/Welsh are common surnames, this does not explain why the surname Quelch has only been found in Oxfordshire prior to the 1600s.
In A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames, Bardsley suggests that Quelch derives from Welsh in the same way that Gwyllam and Quilliam derive from William.
However, Cottle in A Penguin Dictionary of Surnames states that Quilliam is the Manx Gaelic form of the son of William, the "Q" being the remains of Mac, and his theory is supported by the fact that both Quilliam and MacWilliam are found in Scotland. Gwyllam, on the other hand, is the Welsh name for William.
Bardsley and Ewen's examples of Margaret Gwelch/Quelch are used to support their similar theories concerning the derivation of Quelch. However, this is the only occurrence of Quelch being recorded as Gwelch located by the author. As such, this is more likely to reflect an inaccurate recording of the surname. It is important to note that g- and k- form a sound pair (in linguistic terms, g- is the voiced version of k-), so the surname Quelch, which commences with the sound k-, would sound like Gwelch if spoken by someone with a head cold or "adenoids".[1]
Bardsley also compares Quelch as a form of Welsh with Quhitelaw and Quhitehead for Whitelaw and Whitehead. However, as the latter commenced with the sound represented in Middle English as wh- (OE hw-), this has a different derivation to w-.
Interestingly, the history of "Q" in the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that in certain dialects of Middle English, particularly in Scotland and northern England, qu- (spelt as quu-, qv-, qw-, quh-, etc.) was not confined to replacing cw- but was often used to replace ME wh-. Therefore, the root sound wh- leading to the spelling variation quh- has a different derivation.
Although all of these theories are historically accurate in their ability to account for the derivation of the various sounds and spellings, none adequately account for the fact that the surname Quelch was apparently peculiar to the Oxfordshire and Berkshire areas prior to the 1600s. If the above explanations were correct, the surname should appear elsewhere and in other forms. As it does not appear elsewhere or in other forms, this suggests that the surname might have been peculiar to the Oxfordshire and Berkshire areas because it was dialectal in origin.
A Berkshire/Oxfordshire surname?
Evidence has been found to show that the word quelch was part of the Berkshire dialect prior to the 1900s. Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1903) records that quelch was a verb found in the Berkshire dialect meaning:
a) to swallow;
b) Of horses; to make a peculiar noise internally when trotting.
As such, it is possible that the surname developed from one of these dialectal words as a nickname.
Of greater significance, though, is the fact that a twentieth century Berkshire document was found by the author (purely by chance) in which the word quelsh was used to describe a Welshman.
The Pangbourne marriage register, which was transcribed early in the twentieth century, contained the marriage of a man whose name was recorded as "Jeffrey ap Richarde". The word ap is Welsh for "son of" as Welsh people used their father's given name instead of a surname until recently. Against this entry the transcriber wrote: "Evidently the Quelsh? - ap Richard".
Clearly, the transcriber was attempting to communicate that "ap Richard" signified that the person was "evidently" Welsh. As the transcriber was attempting to impart information, he or she would not have used a word that nobody understood. This indicates that quelsh was used in Berkshire as a way of referring to Welsh people as late as the early twentieth century.
Yet the term quelsh is not listed in any major dictionaries. As such, this suggests that Quelch/Quelsh was a Berkshire and Oxfordshire dialectal word describing a "welshman", which is why the surname was originally peculiar to the Berkshire and Oxfordshire areas.
Another possibility
Researcher George Bayliss of Canada has another possible theory. In the late 1500s, a large Quelch family lived in Benson/Bensington parish in Oxfordshire, which lay on the Berkshire border near Wallingford. George raises the possibility that Quelch was a corruption of Colche, a Colche family being recorded in the Feet of Fines (land transactions) for Bensyngton in 1427. However, this does not account for the fact that the word quelsh had a specific meaning in the Berkshire dialect.
Summary
Thus, it seems almost certain that the surname Quelch derives from an Oxfordshire and Berkshire dialectal word for "a welshman".
[1] The author has found that her own surname Baxter was written down as Bagster when her speech was influenced by a head-cold or laryngytus.