The Rymill Family History and Family Tree

The Origins of the Rymill Surname

I have heard three main explanations as to the surname of Rymill and I personally favour one of them over the other two for reasons which I will explain below.

The first and simplest suggestion is that it is Anglo-Saxon in nature, and refers to a place name such as 'Ryal' or 'Ryle' in Northumberland. There is also a 'Ryhill' in Humberside and West Yorkshire. All these place names specifically refer to "rye" the crop. I find this origin slightly odd in that

The next explanation is that the first syllable is derived from 'ra' meaning a 'roe deer', with the suffix 'hill'. If this was the case then all modern names such as Royle would be of the same family.

What I dislike about both the above origins is that there is a strong consonantal loss with the disappearance of the "m" in the middle of the name. And, whilst it is obviously not impossible for this to happen, I find the leap from 'Roe - Hill' to 'Ry - mal' or anything similar quite a distance for language to jump, if there is a more logical 'ancestor' for this word.

The explanation I have always favoured is that of a Norse origin.

There was a Swedish female first name 'Rimhild' which means, rather intriguingly, 'border war'. We have retained the part of the word 'rim' to still mean roughly the same thing, as in an outside edge, or perimeter, i.e. a border.

At some point this Swedish woman, presumably of important enough stature (or perhaps as the only surviving parent) to pass her name on to her child, and so appear some early records of people such as 'Elias filius Rimilde' from the year 1201 ('filias' means 'son of').

What's interesting if this original is the correct one, is that it must have lead to an Anglicisation of the Norse method of naming children. Their surnames did not carry down in the same way that ours do now, and for example a marriage between Knut and Rimhild produced Svein Rimhildson, however that child's surname would have been Sveinson.

The first proper appearance of the surname is in 1327 we find a Robert Rimell.