THE MUDDLE FAMILIES

THE LINEAGE & HISTORY OF THE MUDDLE FAMILIES OF THE WORLD

INCLUDING VARIANTS MUDDEL, MUDDELL, MUDLE & MODDLE

[Home] [Origins] [Early Records] [General Notes] [Master Index] [Contact me]

MEANING AND SPELLING OF THE NAME

The only attempt that seems to have been made to define the meaning of the name Muddle or its variants was by R A McKinley in his The Surnames of Sussex published in 1988. On page 401 in the section on ‘Surnames derived from Nicknames’ he defines the name Moodle as:

Moodle is a rare surname which has survived in one part of Sussex over a long period. The name le Model appears in the lay subsidies for 1327/8, and 1332, at Sheffield, near Fletching; William le Model, who was holding land at Goring in 1321, was probably the same as the William le Model listed at Sheffield. There are a few other references to the name in Sussex during the Middle Ages,but it survived in the north of the county, and in 1524-5 it occurs, as Modyll, Moodle, or Modle, at Mayfield, and at Greenhurst, near Buxted. These places are not very far from Sheffield, and the surname had evidently survived for some centuries in one part of Sussex, but not, so far as can be seen, anywhere else in the county.

Le Model is probably a form of 'Middle', found as a surname in other counties, with the meaning either of someone who was middling in terms of size, or of someone who was the middle one of three siblings. The name Middle is certainly found in a locative or topographical sense in some parts of England, but forms such as atte Middle or atte Model have not been found in Sussex, despite the county's profusion of topographical surnames, Model is still a Sussex surname, though very rare. The surname Moodley, found in Sussex at the present day, may have developed from forms such as Moodle.

Even though McKinley discusses the fact that vowels in early Sussex names are very variable he seems to have missed the fact that the first vowel in this name changed from ‘o’ to ‘u’ in the period spanning the late 16th century to early 17th century resulting in the name surviving as Muddle. During this period the name was frequently spelt differently even in the same document, but generally it seems that documents produced by national authorities more frequently spelt the name as Muddle, whereas local records, which were probably produced by scribes with lesser education, tended to use forms such as Muddell, Modle, Modyl, etc. For about three generations at Rotherfield the name was spelt as Muddell in the parish registers, but the same people were referred to as Moddle in the manorial rolls. In the Mayfield parish registers the following spellings, Moodle, Mooddle, Modle, Muddell, Muddle and Mudle, were used from the start of the registers in the 1570s to the 1650s then the spelling settling on the form Muddle with the occasional use of Mudle. It is possible that this change in vowel was started with the Great Vowel Shift that took place in English between about 1390 and 1420 that resulted in most vowel sounds being shortened, the change from 'o' to 'u' being typical.

I don’t find McKinley’s explanation of the name’s meaning very convincing and tend to favour the possibility that le Model was a nickname based on the meaning of the word model as used in a term such as ‘model citizen’ meaning a person of exemplary conduct on whom others should model their behaviour. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) quotes this use of the word from the early 17th century, and though this usage has continued for the four centuries until the present day, can it be assumed to also extend back nearly four centuries to the late 13th century? And is this just my fanciful romantic view of the name’s meaning?

Alternatively the name may be derived from what the OED gives as the probable evolution of muddle as a verb from the mid-14th century which is: to bathe or wallow in mud or muddy water; to grub or root in the ground; to throw into the mud; to occupy oneself in dirty or messy activities; to rummage among distasteful matters; to throw into the mud; to make muddy or turbid; to mix together; to confuse, mismanage or put in disarray. So it's possible that the name is an occupational one related to an activity in the name's origin area of Ashdown Forest, which was certainly an area where things were dug from the ground, such as turf and peat for fuel, gravel for roads, sandstone for building, and iron ore for smelting. With Sussex's old reputation for having the worst roads in the country that turned to rutted liquid mud in the winter, it seems likely that any activity that involved a lot of digging in the ground would have been an extremely muddy and messy occupation that could well have resulted in anybody involved being named after this characteristic of their trade.

Another thing to consider is that the name was possibly subjected to what is called Folk Etymology, which in the case of surnames means that a name which sounded similar to an everyday word got changed to that word, and Muddle can certainly be considered an everyday word.

From the mid-17th century to the early 19th century the name settled almost exclusively into the spelling Muddle. But then from the early 19th century some family members seem to have started to feel uncomfortable with the name and started to modify it, mostly to the spelling Muddell, there being many independent instances of this change in nearly all family lines. A branch of the 'Framfield Muddles' who migrated to New Jersey in the USA in the late 1830s changed its name to Muddell and one family of this branch further changed its name to Medell when it moved on to Illinois in the mid-1840s. The 'Wimborne Muddles' who moved to London uniquely changed their name to Mudle, the only instance of the deliberate use of this spelling. One member of the 'Buxted Muddles' who migrated to Canada in the early 20th century had his name changed by an immigration official to Moddle, and his descendants are probably the only people now going by that name. Some family members seem to have objected to the name so much that they changed to a completely different name, mostly using the maiden name of a wife or mother.

To produce some consistency in the histories of the various Muddle families I have used the spelling Muddle for all the early generations, except when quoting from records, and only from the early 19th century when family members started to deliberately change the spelling of the name have I used this modified spelling, showing when it changed, though even at this time it could take the passing of a generation or more for the new spelling to be used consistently.

Top of page