Extracts from the ‘Bar Tree’ (1979) 

By Robert Barltrop

Two possible origins are given in dictionaries of surnames. One of these attributes it to Barthorpe, a Yorkshire place-name. The other derives it from Anglo-Saxon as 'Bera's' or "the barley farmer's' farm. The holder of the name would be a person who lived at either of these places.

Reasons for thinking the second explanation more likely are as follows.

1. Barthorpe Bottoms, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, is a very small hamlet; it has no church, and for admin­istrative purposes is joined with. the parish of Acklam.  Its smallness raises doubts about its use as a surname whose purpose was to identify a person.

2. The name existed in Essex and London in the 1300s. This brings it closer to an Anglo-Saxon origin.

3. In those records it appears as Baltrip or Baltripp. The 1 supports the bar­ley-farm explanation; barley is ‘baerlic’ in Old English.

The ending 'thorp* is Danish for a minor settlement or a small hamlet dependent on a larger one. 'Throp' is Anglo-Saxon, meaning an outlying farm, and belongs to the south of England.

Local pronunciation is largely responsible for the forms a name takes. The ‘a’ may be pronounced long or short, and in the rural accents of southeast England the name is said 'Baaaa-tr'p'. This accounts for the trop, -trip and trup variations. Some people have a tendency to say 'th' for the middle ‘t’ and in Cockney speech, where the glottal stop is widespread; the p could be transformed to 'ck'.

Many people in the past could not write their names, and the spellings we have are due to parish priests and clerks putting the names down as they were spoken. A person's name might be given in several different ways in his lifetime. Definite versions had to be settled on and preserved when official registration of births, marriages and deaths began in 1837, and this led to the belief that they stood for different families who were not related to one another.

Robert Barltrop has carried out extensive research on the Barltrop family surname and has tried to discover the missing link between the Barltrop and Bartrop surnames.

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