Coat of Arms & Family Crests Store
  Cockcroft Family Crest / Cockcroft Coat of ArmsThe surname of COCKCROFT was a locational name of 'Carcroft', a hamlet in the parish of Owston in the West Riding of Yorkshire - dweller at the cockcroft. Local names usually denoted where a man held his land, and indicated where he actually lived. Early records of the name mention Richard de Cocckecroft of the County of Yorkshire in 1296. Thomas de Carrecroft was listed in the Yorkshire Poll Tax of 1379. John Normanston and Ann Cockcroft were married at St. George's, Hanover Square, London in 1764. The bulk of European surnames in countries such as England and France were formed in the 13th and 14th centuries. The process started earlier and continued in some places into the 19th century, but the norm is that in the 11th century people did not have surnames, whereas by the 15th century they did.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 notable member of this name was Sir John Douglas Cockcroft (1897-1967) the English nuclear physicist, born in Yorkshire. He was educated at Manchester and Cambridge, and he became Jackonsian professor of physics at Cambridge. He became the first director of Britain's atomic energy establishment at Harwell in 1946, and was appointed master of Churchill College, Cambridge in 1959. |
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