The Hollyer surname and its variants

In 1997, Harry Holyer died and I joined the Guild and took over the study of the three name variants. I found that a lot of the basic data had not been collected or was missing, so I had to embark on much work to get the study on a sound footing. 

So where did the name originate from? 

The evidence bequeathed to me included quotes from surname dictionaries and sundry speculative sources. It’s worth looking at some of these sources, though some of the smaller books on surnames make no mention at all of the Hollier name or its variants. It can be helpful to do so in chronological order, for it must be the case that authors have surveyed earlier works when compiling their own. 

The earliest surname dictionary mentioning the Hollier name is Patronimica Britannica: a Dictionary of the family names of the United Kingdom, published by Mark Anthony Lower in 1860. All he has to say is that Hollier is a mispronunciation of Hellyer, but at least he correctly identifies the latter name as a West Country name meaning thatcher or tiler. The mistake of believing that there is a connection between Hollier and Hellier lives on to this day in sundry Internet sites selling ‘family coats of arms’. To be told that the heart of the Hollier name is in Devon is such obvious nonsense that their assumption of its connection with Hellier (which is a Devon name) is soon discovered. Such sites, peddling such phoney Arms are not above providing phoney facts as well, as long as they make money. Mind you, I note that John Titford, in his 2002 book Searching for Surnames, quotes the Hellier name as being Cornish, rather than from Devon, and despite the fact that the evidence points more towards Devon, it has always seemed to me to sound Cornish, perhaps thinking of places like Helston. In the other direction, the Hellier name does overlap into Somerset and there’s still an outside possibility that the Somerset Holliers that seem to emerge in the mid 18^th century might be connected with a variation from Hellier. 

A rather obscure early source is the 1864 work by Robert Ferguson entitled The Teutonic name system of France, Germany and England. Ferguson analyses the Anglo-Saxon word ‘hold’ meaning faithful or friendly and draws links to the words ‘hulths’ in Gothic, ‘holt’ in Old High German and ‘hollr’ in Old Norse. He suggests that this is the origin of the surnames Holder, Holter and Holler in English, Hollier in French and Holder in Modern German. Obscure it may be, but I suspect that this is the reason behind the Church of Latter Day Saint’s decision to group Hollier along with Holder and Holler etc in their well-known FamilySearch website. 

The Rev. Charles Wareing Bardsley was another of the early researchers into surname origins. In his 1873 work English Surnames, he discusses locative names and says that there are many cases where a place-word is suffixed by a word equally signifying residence, these being ‘er’ and ‘man’. He then gives examples of people who might have lived by a particular tree, such as Beecher, Asher, Oker, Hollier or Holleyman. In the index, he does give one early reference to the name, a William Holyer as mentioned in Broomfield’s History of Norfolk. Bardsley’s A Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames was published posthumously in 1901. Bardsley was neither a linguist nor a philologist. While he was well intentioned, he was not perhaps as rigorous as later writers. He did not seek out the earliest references to the name and like others after him, there is much inaccurate speculation in his work. But his dictionary goes slightly further than his earlier by saying: 

Hollyer, Hollier  (1) Baptised ‘the son of Oliver’, from the modified Ollier, q.v. Aspirates present no difficulty, as will be seen from a perusal of letter ‘H’. (2) Local, ‘the hollyer’, one who dwelt by the holly-bushes; cf Bridger or Holmer. Of course, Hillier (q.v.) may be the parent. 

My research and that of others studying the name Ollier does not support the idea of a link between the surnames; the distribution is quite different and curiously Ollier only seems to appear in the 17^th century, in Cheshire, so this might indicate French immigration. However, some Olliers did change their name to Hollier in the 19^th century. I will return to the Ollier/Hollier link later. 

While not strictly a dictionary, the work of H.B Guppy called The Homes of Family Names is of interest. Published in 1890, it attempts to list where common family names were found in the 19^th century, often using farmers as a group of people who are likely to have stayed near their roots. But all he comes up with is a reference from Nichol’s work Leicestershire where he quotes that “James Hollier was a landowner in Hinckley at the commencement of this century”. Indeed he was, but this rather ignores the many other Hollier (and variant) families living in Warwickshire, Somerset, Hampshire and Kent. 

Ernest Weekly published his book Surnames in 1916. He says: 

First it must be noted that many surnames [ending] in –er, suggesting an occupation or habit, do not belong to this class at all. Some of them are Anglo-Saxon personals e.g. Asker, Asher, Asser from the Anglo-Saxon Æschere, Fricker from the AS Frithugar, Hollier, Hullyer from the AS Holdgar 

and he quotes as an example a William f. Holdeger in the Pipe Rolls. 

The next work of note is William Dodgson Bowman’s 1931 publication The Story of Surnames. In discussing the Anglicisation of French names, in particular Huguenot ones, he quotes the names Olier and D’Olyer as being ‘now Hollyer’. As is so often the case with surname books, he offers no evidence and I’m confident that there are no Hollyers who have any connection with the D’Olier family. The D’Olier family originally used the name Olier when they were resident in France and added the “D’ ” prefix when, like so many other Huguenots, they escaped to Holland, but wanted to emphasize their French origins. A descendant of this family, Isaac D’Olier, came over with William of Orange and fought in Ireland. He was part of the group encouraged to settle in Dublin to increase the Protestant community. But many of the firms who sell ‘instant family histories’, especially those in Ireland, repeat the supposed D’Olier-Hollyer connection as fact. The D’Olier family became quite prominent in Dublin and there is a street called D’Olier Street just south of the famous O’Connell Bridge in the centre of the city. The locals pronounce it as ‘Doll-ear’ Street.

Gustav Fransson in his book Middle English Surnames of Occupation 1100-1350, with an excursion on toponymical surnames (1935) mentions that names ending in -ere or -iere denote someone who lives by a particular topographical feature, e.g. Bechere denotes someone who lives by a beech tree. He cites 4 examples of early names as follows:-

• Adam le Holyer, 1319, Subsidy Roll, Essex
• Adam Holier, 1332, Subsidy Roll, Essex
• Robert le Holare, 1275, Subsidy Roll, Worcs
• John Holere, 1295, Gaol Delivery Roll, Norfolk

and explains that these names mean ‘dweller by the hole, cavity or hollow place’. I am grateful to Peter McClure for this information. He told me that names of this form are actually most frequent in Sussex and the adjoining counties. They are also found in Somerset and Worcestershire and occasionally in the East Midlands.

The best known and probably most respected surname dictionary is that produced in 1958 by P.H. Reaney and revised over many years, including by R.M. Wilson, up to 1997. He says: 

Hollier, Hollyer, Hullyer

Robert le Holyere 1309 Lay Subsidy Beds.

Adam Holiere 1327 Lay Subsidy Essex

Old French: holier, huler, a variant of horier, hurier

Middle English: holer, holyer, huller ‘whoremonger, debauchee’. 

Penguin produced a Dictionary of Surnames in 1967, authored by Basil Cottle. He treads familiar ground by referencing the name as an occupational name meaning ‘whoremonger’ from Old French or a locative name meaning ‘dweller in the hollies’ from Old English. 

1969 saw the publication of Henry Harrison’s Surnames of the United Kingdom. He correctly identifies the three variants as being Hollier, Hollyer and Holyer and opts for the locative explanation ‘dweller by the Holly Tree(s)’, quoting the Middle English holie and holin and the Old English hole(g)n 

Sir William Addison, in his 1978 book Understanding English Surnames says “Few, for example, will know that Hollyer is said to be derived from the Old French word for whoremonger or fornicator” – more or less quoting from Reaney. 

In 1989, another major dictionary was published by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, called A Dictionary of Surnames. They opt for the occupational explanation meaning brothel-keeper:  

Middle English and Old French hol(l)ier (a dissimilated variant of horier, agent noun from hore, hure, a whore, of Germanic origin). It may also have been used as an abusive nickname. Variants: Hollyer, Hullyer, Hollister (originally a feminine form; cf Baxter) 

Moving forward to more recent times, the flow of books doesn’t cease. A History of British Surnames by R.A. McKinley (1990) says: “Some occupational names, including some quite common ones, exist in pairs; examples are Baker and Baxter, Brewer and Brewster, Deemer and Dempster … Hollier and Hollister …”. He goes on to explain that the considered view is that the second names are feminine forms of the occupation terms. 

So what are we to make of all this? We have to accept much of the evidence of the expert philologists and I’ve no doubt that Hollier may well have meant a person living close to either a holly tree or a hollow. It seems harder to accept that when a surname became hereditary that anyone would be happy to carry on the byname or nickname of their father if it meant a brother-keeper. But then, I suppose you could say that same of names like Cruikshank (bent leg). Perhaps when names became hereditary, the individuals themselves didn’t actually have a free choice. 

Now both George Redmonds and David Hey caution against accepting the evidence from these surname dictionaries, however scholarly they may be. The more modern approach asks us to interpret the work of philologists alongside the genealogical evidence. The early names quoted by Reaney may perhaps be just bynames and not hereditary, but in any event, even if they were hereditary, they may have died out and not be the source of the surname in more recent times. 

What of the evidence? 

So how does the evidence stack up from the work I’ve done on the names? Firstly, the names Hollier, Hillier, Hellier and Hullier are quite distinct. Only with Hallier is there a question mark. Hillier is focussed on Wiltshire, Hellier in Devon (though the overlap in Somerset cannot be ignored) and Hullier is very strongly based in Cambridgeshire. Hullyer/Hullier is so focussed on northern Cambridgeshire that I am prepared to accept the explanation that it is a Dutch name brought over to England by the dyke builders of the 17^th century, who did so much to drain the Fens. Hallier, when not a transcription error for Hollier, is almost entirely associated with Wickwar in Gloucestershire, at least when using the IGI as a source. Given the lack of Holliers in Gloucestershire, it seemed these were separate names. But then I noticed that the name Hollister (said to be a feminine form of Hollier, you’ll recall) is, from the IGI data, also strongly focussed in the Wickwar area of Gloucestershire. Even the 1881 Surname Atlas CD shows this fairly well. So far, I haven’t been able to figure out whether this is a coincidence or if it may be significant to the origins of the name. 

Both Reaney and Fransson quote a number of early of records of what they consider might be ancestors of today’s Hollier families. The problem is that all the distribution evidence suggests that Essex, Bedfordshire and Norfolk cannot be the source of the name as it developed from the late middle ages. The name is almost unknown in these counties. Yes, I have found some other early records from these counties, but both the Beds and Norfolk ones seem to be Hullyer, rather than Hollier, though spelling is hardly stable in these early times. 

The true distribution of the name can be found from the early records in the IGI. I plotted these in Steve Archer’s Genmap and to remove the impact of any single transcription errors, only plotted parishes with two or more records before 1700. The plot is based on the 1992 version of the IGI, so does not include any Holliers in the Isle of Wight, but equally does not feature the more recent influx of Patron Submissions. The result is shown below.

What it shows is very interesting, though not as dramatically focussed as those which David Hey has published in his books to show how families tended to stay close to their origins. There are a number of features of the distribution that are of note: 

• The name is almost unknown in Scotland, Wales, the North of England and East Anglia;
• There is a focussed group that starts from a single point in North Warwickshire and expands out over time;
• Across much of Southern England, there is spread of locations where the name is found, with no particular pattern or focus

The Warwickshire group seems to be a single family origin. An early reference is from 1325 and mentions an Adam de Holyer being witness to a land deed at Canley in Stoneleigh. The focus of the family seems to be Shustoke, where there is a record from 1373 of a John Holyer, bailiff of John de Clynton, knight, in his manor of Shustoke, Warwickshire. In 1433, there is a record of a Roger Holyer holding property in the nearby Parish of Arley. By the time parish registers started in 1538, there are frequent records of Hollyers at Shustoke and surrounding parishes in North Warwickshire. However, the name had also by that time spread out to the neighbouring counties of Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Oxfordshire. Families in Worcestershire may also be part of this expansion. The fact that this group almost certainly has a single family origin does not mean that the name in this case is locative. As David Hey has shown, names with an occupational origin may become hereditary just once. However land owners and bailiffs don’t sound like candidates to have been Brothel-Keepers! 

In contrast, the pattern in the Southern counties may suggest several independent origins, consistent with the idea of the name being locative. That said, several of the locations are quite close to the coast, so migration by sea is a possibility. Early settlements include: 

• Berkshire, mainly around Reading;
• Hampshire, in the New Forest area and the Isle of Wight
• Sussex, at Hooe
• Kent, in the Romney Marsh area

In the manuscripts of the Corporation of New Romney, there is a reference from 1399 of a Robert Holier being paid to ride to Sandwich, London and along the coast 'to obtain news as to the arrival of the present King' [Henry IV]. There was also a Holyer family owning land at Hooe in East Sussex with an earliest known reference from 1440. A record of 1444 suggests that the landowner at Hooe was ‘John Holyer of Canterbury’, so suggesting a link back to Kent. The Hooe community thrived for a long time, but disappeared in the 18^th century. Equally, the Berkshire group dwindled in the 19^th century and no modern families descend from these groups. 

If some groups died out, others suddenly expanded. Several instances can be found where expansion originates with a single ‘portal couple’. Other early lines die out (at least the male ones carrying the surname), while all later families descend from this single couple. There are a handful of records of the Holyer name in Kent, starting with the 1399 event mentioned above. But it was when John Holyer married Elizabeth Gregory in 1737 in Canterbury Cathedral and settled in Woodchurch, to the north of the Romney Marsh area, that the extensive Holyer and Hollyer families from Kent expanded to be the dominant group that persists to this day. My own line is from this family, as are all modern day Holyers and they all descend from this one couple. 

A similar situation occurs in Somerset. A tiny handful of early records have been found, though those at Nunney and Wells are likely to be transcription errors for Hellier, a name which is found principally in Devon, but crossing over into Somerset. But then Samuel Hollier married Grace Plumbly in Burrington in 1749 and the first two generations of their descendants produced plenty of males who produced big families and by the 19^th century, the Somerset Holliers, concentrated in a handful of villages in the Axbridge Registration District had become the largest group of Holliers, even overtaking the Warwickshire and Leicestershire groups. Aside from a single record from 1722 in the neighbouring village of Wrington, there are no other reliable earlier Hollier records from that area that I have found so far. Almost all of that part of Somerset is not included in the IGI. Had the family moved from elsewhere? Or had there been a single name mutation from Hellier which gave rise to the Holliers in this part of the country? 

Another example concerns the Holliers in Northamptonshire. Not featuring in the IGI, but research in parish registers has shown a line starting around 1660 in Weedon (Edward Hollyard) that continues in that part of the country even today, but in the early generations, virtually only one family in any generation existed. They seemed to produce too many girls for the name to expand. It hung on a thread. But then John Hollier and Sarah Leatherland, who married in 1786 in Lower Heyford, managed to produce enough boys for the line to start to expand. So again, we have a ‘portal couple’ through which all modern day descendants have their ancestry. 

Hampshire provides a similar interesting pattern. The earliest reference to the Hollier name in Hampshire is from 1493, when a John Hollier was recorded as owning land at Sway. Early parish register entries from the mid 16th century show Holliers at Boldre, Milford and Brockenhurst in the New Forest area. It seems likely that the Holliers in the Isle of Wight descend from this group, as the earliest references there are in Freshwater, to the west of the island. However, by the 19th century, all the mainland families except one seem to have disappeared. It is only from the town of Fordingbridge, where Hollyer/Holliers were well established by the beginning of the surviving parish registers in 1642, that all the 19^th century Hollyer and Hollier families in the Portsea district originate and all these from just one couple who married in 1776. 

Some of you may at this point be thinking: “what’s so special about the concept of a ‘portal couple’?” Of course within every family group there must be a single couple who were the progenitors of that line, the ancestors of all known modern members of that family. What is surprising to me is that of the four cases described above, in three (Kent, Somerset and Hampshire) the ‘portal couple’ are also the earliest proven ancestors I have found in that line.  

In his book Family Names and Family History, David Hey has analysed the distribution of many surnames and shown how many names, despite spreading far and wide, still tend to focus around their point of origin. To keep his research within reasonable bounds, he only collected and plotted deaths in the period 1842-1846, as this would represent individuals probably still living close to their roots. As One-Namers, we tend to have more complete data on vital records, but I thought it might be instructive to copy David’s approach to see whether the pattern matched the older distributions. 

The results are mixed. Essentially, because the Hollier name and variants is fairly uncommon and not focussed on a single place, the number of deaths in any given Registration District is usually only 1 or 2. Only Birmingham and Axbridge manage 5 deaths in the period 1842-1846. The presence of stray entries in Durham, Lancashire and Wiltshire distract from the underlying picture, which does at least show the groupings in the West Midlands, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Kent. But on its own, the technique doesn’t deliver good results. What this should mean is that academic researchers can gain benefit from drawing on the larger bodies of data collected by One-Namers. 

The Huguenot problem 

I have already noted above that some sources quote the Hollier name as being derived from the Huguenot Isaac D’Olier, who came over with William of Orange and settled in Dublin, being admitted as a burgess of the city in 1697. Clearly, he would not be the source of families recorded in Warwickshire from 1325. Yet the idea of a Huguenot link persists. It is probably due to the rather similar name Ollier, which is principally found in a very focussed area in Cheshire and North Staffordshire. Indeed, not only is it focussed even in relatively recent times, but there seem to be no records prior to the mid 17^th century. Stella Walker (no relation), who has researched the line, suggests that “it is probably French or Huguenot and it seems possible that 2 or 3 brothers came to Cheshire in the 17^th century and probably most of the Olliers in England are descended from them”. Lawrence Ollier has also researched this name and concludes that perhaps their origin was slightly earlier in the 16^th century but probably not before this. Supporting the idea of French immigrants, he finds the frequent early use of spellings like Oleheyer. Say that phonetically and its French origin is clear. Of interest is a will of William Oleheyer of 1705 who signs it as William Ollier.  

John Blandy, a respected retired urologist wrote a paper about Thomas Hollier, Samuel Pepys’s surgeon, and postulated the idea that Hollier was successful as a lithotomist because he used a secret operation to remove bladder stones known only to the Huguenots. And, he said, Thomas Hollier was a Huguenot. When I challenged this (knowing that Thomas Hollier the surgeon came from a lowly family of cobblers in Coventry) he said he was told this by the Huguenot Society. So it seems that the Huguenot Society believes that Hollier and Ollier are the same name, but based on my studies, I would refute this. 

And yet… there are some intriguing coincidences which I have found. Some of the 18^th century Hollyers in Coventry were silkmen, that is, in the silk ribbon making business for which Coventry was then renowned; an industry created by the immigrant Huguenots. Could some Huguenots have changed their name to that of Hollier/Hollyer, a name already in wide use in Warwickshire? Well, further analysis shows these silkmen to have been descended from Wine Merchants and although I cannot positively trace this line back before a marriage in 1687, there is a quite credible possible ancestry that can be found without invoking any Huguenot factors. 

But let us return to the Ollier/Hollier issue. We know that some people with the separate Cheshire/North Staffs name of Ollier became Holliers in the 19th century. But was there any other connection between the names? There is much stronger evidence that Ollier may be a Huguenot name and as noted above, it seems that the Huguenot Society have opined that Ollier and Hollier are the same name. In his 2004 book The Distinctive Surnames of North Staffordshire, Edgar Tooth states: 

"Hollier is usually construed as a nickname for a lecher, whereas Ollier is a maker or seller of oil. Yet these two surnames occur side by side during the 1500s in the Penkridge parish registers; Thomas Hollyer buried on June 5th 1573, and Margaret Ollier baptised on April 5th 1579. The loss or addition of the initial "H" is almost universal in local dialects, so there is no problem here on that score, so the likelihood remains that the two names are simply variants of each other and are toponymics for a dweller by a holly bush." 

I choose to disagree. To reach such a firm conclusion based on just one baptism and one burial is very poor analysis. The fact that neither Ollier nor Hollyer seem to feature again in Penkridge is ignored. The facts seem to suggest that both these people are either strays from the more common territories of their respective surnames, or one is simply a transcription error by the parish clerk. Only if there was continuous coexistence of the name variants over several generations would it be safe to assume that the spellings were interchangeable, as is the case for Hollyer and Hollier in Warwickshire. It is sad to see such poor research in such an important book. 

Origins elsewhere 

As our One-Name Studies are worldwide in scope, I need to say something about the origins of the name elsewhere. The name as found in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India have all been traced back to emigrants from England. Several US families also originate from England, but the notable exception is the Hollier name in Louisiana and nearby southern states of the USA. There, the name is known to descend from three brothers who came from Nantes in France in the early 18^th century. Even today, the Holliers in southern USA pronounce their name the French way (Ol-yeah, but sometimes now pronouncing the H as well). 

The US censuses also record families from Germany and indeed the IGI and VRI do show a few, but on the whole it is France where the name is found in large numbers. Of interest is that the name Hollier has a distinctively different distribution in France from the name Ollier. 

The other factor influencing the name in the USA is the impact of Anglicisation of names as immigrants came through Ellis Island. So a Swedish Holger family became Holyer and a Ukrainian Holiat (meaning Goliath) became Hollyer. 

Name Variants 

As One-Namers, we are familiar with the concept of name variants. Derek Palgrave coined the term ‘deviants’ to distinguish between true variant names, that people themselves used and those other spellings that parish clerks, census enumerators and other record takers used. We don’t often get to see what names our forebears actually used. Evidence may come from signatures or perhaps MIs, but many folk were not literate or left little written evidence. We know that John Holyer, the ‘portal individual’ of the Kent Holyers signed his name as Holyer on his marriage bond of 1737 and on his will of 1772. But the Canterbury Cathedral registers recorded his marriage as Hollier. No doubt that was what the name sounded like. 

But the sheer variation in deviant spellings within a single parish register can sometimes be surprising. Here is the sequence of baptism records from St Martins in the Fields for the family of John and Elizabeth Hollier: 

1630 John Hollier

1632 Thomas Holliard (later buried as Hollyer)

1633 Matthew Hollier

1636 Samuel Hollier

1638 Elizabeth Hallier

1639 Susanna Hollyard

1642 Maria Hollyer

1644 Symon Hollier (who is thought to have emigrated to Virginia and started a dynasty of 6 generations called Simon Hollier)

1646 Edward Hollierd 

The addition of the final letter d is found elsewhere in London in the 17^th century. Samuel Pepys’s surgeon, Thomas Hollier, was often referred to in the great man’s diary as Hollyard and his children’s baptisms were variously recorded as Hollier, Hollyer, Hollyar, Holliar and Hollyard. The extra d doesn’t sound like something that a modern ‘London’ accent might append, so it’s hard to know exactly how the name might then have been pronounced. The final d is not found in the North Warwickshire heartland of the Hollier name, but has been recorded in Shropshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Sussex. The extra d is almost unknown after the 17^th century. 

One interesting document is the PCC will of John Hollier of 1697. He was a Mercer from Shrewsbury. He was admitted as a burgess of the city in 1664 and was Mayor in 1692. He is quoted as having had his own Arms. So we can assume he was literate. But when his will was drawn up, it was in the name of John Hollyer, but at the end of the document he is referred to as John Hollier. Even in legal documents, the variation of spelling seems to have been considered of no importance. 

All the evidence I have collected suggests that the only genuine variants (spellings that the individuals themselves used) are Hollier, Hollyer and Holyer. However, one can draw up the following chart to show all the permutations of deviant spellings that have been found:-

Of the three main variants, since the 19^th century, it fair to say that Hollier dominates and is 5 times the frequency of Hollyer, while Holyer is almost entirely confined to the Kent family that stemmed from Woodchurch. Most of the West Midlands families used the Hollier spelling. The Somerset and Oxfordshire families also used Hollier alone. However, the further one goes back, more cases can be found where both Hollyer and Hollier are found together, in places such as Berkshire, Sussex and Hampshire (including the Isle of Wight). The main changes during the 19^th century were the gradual adoption of the Hollyer spelling by some of the Kent Holyers (but both co-exist today) and a few of the Cheshire Olliers that adopted the Hollier name.

Conclusion 

No One-Name Study is ever complete, so in that sense, there can be no conclusion. Research continues to try to link more family groups together. Some progress is being made in reconstructing and linking the families in Oxfordshire, but any link to the families in Warwickshire to the north remains undiscovered. I try to document as much as I can on my website at www.hollyer.name and record interesting snippets on the associated ‘Blog’.