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  Bilbrey Coat of Arms / Bilbrey Family CrestThe surname of BILBREY was a locational name 'of Bilby' a township in the parish of Blythe, County Nottingham. The name is also spelt BILBY and the earliest of the name on record appears to be Robertus de Bilbry, who was listed in the Yorkshire Poll Tax of 1379. Habitation names were originally acquired by the original bearer of the name, who, having lived by, at or near a place, would then take that name as a form of identification for himself and his family. When people lived close to the soil as they did in the Middle Ages, they were acutely conscious of every local variation in landscape and countryside. Every field or plot of land was identified in normal conversation by a descriptive term. If a man lived on or near a hill or mountain, or by a river or stream, forests and trees, he might receive the word as a family name. Almost every town, city or village early times, has served to name many families. Ralph Alway and May Bylby were married in London in 1544 (no church recorded) and Anne, daughter of Francis Bilbye, was baptised at St. James's, Clerkenwell, London in 1635. The acquisition of surnames in Europe during the past eight hundred years has been affected by many factors, including social class and social structure, naming practices in neighbouring cultures, and indigenous cultural tradition. On the whole, the richer and more powerful classes tended to acquire surnames earlier than the working classes and the poor, while surnames were quicker to catch on in urban areas than in more sparsely populated rural areas. These facts suggest that the origin of surnames is associated with the emergence of bureaucracies. As long as land tenure, military service, and fealty were matters of direct relationship between a lord and his vassals, the need did not arise for fixed distinguishing epithets to mark out one carl from another. But as societies became more complex, and as such matters as the management of tenure and in particular the collection of taxes were delegated to special functionaries, it became imperative to have a more complex system of nomenclature to distinguish one individual from another reliably and unambiguously. A later instance of the name mentions George Torrat and Frances Bilby who were married at St. George's Chapel, Mayfair, London in 1730. |
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