h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I came across the following site showing british surnames as at the 1881 census

http://www.britishsurnames.co.uk/1881census/

When I scrolled down the summary by county I was struck by the dominance of Smith in almost every county in England (and many in Scotland).

The exceptions were also of interest, being (only)

Cheshire (Jones)
Cornwall (Williams)
Cumberland (Graham)
Devon (Harris)
Dorset (White)
Herefordshire (Jones)
Northumberland (Thompson)
Shropshire (Jones)
Westmorland (Atkinson)

All the other counties are dominated by Smith.

The geography intrigued me. The exceptions are all on the Welsh border or on the Scottish border and then the three in the south west

Cornwall favours Williams, but in Devon this is shaded out by Harris with Williams a very close second.
Williams is the most popular in Plymouth, Tavistock, and many others in the west - as well as Bideford.

I was curious what factors influenced these patterns of popularity. Surnames were adopted in the middle ages, and I wonder what different factors were in play that resulted in the different pattern - all in the "celtic fringe" of England.

Neither Williams or Harris are brythonic themselves, meaning the son of William and Harry respectively, but both are popular in Wales as well as in the south-west.

I was also interested to see that the top names for Herefordshire and Shropshire appear almost exclusively popular "Welsh" surnames.
In Cheshire Jones heads the list but Smith is second. In Dorset White narrowly headed Smith

Ozzie Exile,

I think that the differences in types of surnames between the “Celtic” west and eastern Britain are due to the preference for more locational names in the west, such as names ending in ‘combe’ or ‘cott’ in Devon, rather than the occupational names, such as ‘Smith’ or ‘Cooper’, which seem to be more popular in the east.

As blacksmiths must have been just as common in the west as in the east at the time when surnames came into being (in about the 13th century), it might have been expected that the “Smith” surname would have been equally common all over Britain, except perhaps in Brythonic or Gaelic speaking areas, where the Brythonic or Gaelic equivalents might be expected, but this is not the case. A good guide to the geographical densities of surnames in 1881 and 1998 can be found in this website:-

http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/

Here we can see that the “Smith” surname occurs at a much lower frequency in the west than in the east.

One exception to the general east/west split between occupational and locational names seems to be the region of the Danelaw, where Danish Viking locational surnames such as “Thorpe” and surnames ending in “by” (such as “Enderby”) are common. In Lincolnshire, for instance, “by” place names such as “Ashby”, “Ulceby”, “Bigby”, “Grimsby”, etc. are as common as “combe” place names are in Devon.