Minding My P’s and Q’s — Plaxy

The novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901) was immensely popular in her day, but is now largely unknown.

A couple of days ago, I re-organized my index, and in the process, I noticed that poor P and Q had both been sorely neglected, poor loves. A great candidate for P was put forward by Elaine (thank you!) and as for Q, British Baby Names’s Q Names article has pointed me in the direction to go when I tackle a Q tomorrow (thank you, too)!

First P. My choice is Plaxy. Look it up, and most say that it is a Cornish girl’s name, of uncertain origin, but possibly derived from Praxedes, itself from the Greek praxis ‘a doing’, ‘success’ and ‘accomplishment’. The ultimate source of all this is a certain Charlotte Mary Yonge, a prolific 19th Century novelist and writer on names. Charlotte Mary was probably the first person to make a rigorous study of names, in contrast to the fanciful and colorful nature of books on names which preceded her work. The first edition of her History of Christian Names was published in 1863, with a revised edition appearing in 1884, and it has formed the basis for books on names ever since. But Charlotte Mary, as proficient as she was, still made mistakes.

Plaxy is one of them. A slip of a single letter. Not a single genuine example of Plaxy exists prior to the publication of Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius in 1944.

The real name was staring Charlotte Mary in the face whe she made the connection with Praxedes — the real name is Praxy.

Unlike the mysterious Plaxy, Praxy is found as a given name from the 17th Century — though not in Cornwall. Most of the early examples of the name actually come from Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset. Like Cornwall, they all belong to ‘the West Country’ — as the South-West Peninsula of England is known — but that’s as close to Cornwall as Praxy gets.

Hand in hand with Praxy are other forms of the name – forms which hark back more closely to Praxedes, such as the unambiguous Praxede, and the quirky Pracsydda. Others include Praxey, Praxsi, Praxadis, Praxedis and even Praxadise, but the commonest is Praxed. And while I haven’t found a Praxy in the 16th Century, there are examples of Praxed, Praxadis, Praxi and Praxe — which I think must count!

But who was Praxedes, and why was her name in use in the 16th Century South-West?

Praxedes was a shadowy Christian saint — known as Prassede in Italian — said to have lived in Rome the 2nd Century. Why such an obscure saint should be commemorated in South-West England is a bit of a mystery. It is a fact that the South-West did have a bit of a thing for unusual names in the early medieval period. Families which remained Catholic after the Reformation in the 16th Century also tended to embrace the names of Catholic saints previously little used before. However, we don’t know for certain when Praxedes was first used. It might well have been much earlier. Praxy and friends are not common in the records we do possess, and before the introduction of Parish Registers, many, if not most, of the population of the British Isles lived their lives without their names ever being recorded on paper.

But there is one very intriguing potential source of the use of Praxedes in Wiltshire in the Middle Ages. You see, it just so happens that in 1230, the rector of St John’s Chapel at Eastcourt in Wiltshire — a man called John of Abingdon — was also the Cardinal Priest of Santa Prassede in Rome. This wasn’t uncommon; until the re-organization of the Church of England in the 19th Century, priests often had more than one ‘living’, especially the likes of a cardinal. It would have been known in Eastcourt where their rector was based; the humble curate left to look after St John’s would have no doubt frequently mentioned the cardinal at St Praxedes in prayers. He might even have been the one who first suggested Praxedes as a name at the baptism of a baby girl — all those years ago, in the mid 13th Century.

Fast forward several hundred years to a science-fiction author choosing a name for his character, who picks up a copy of CMY and plucks Plaxy from its pages. It is almost certainly Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius which is responsible for the what little use Plaxy has seen over the last 50 years.

As for Praxy and Praxed, they had all but died out by the mid 19th Century, but there must have been at least a memory of the name for Charlotte Mary to pick it up. It may be that it was its obscurity in her day which led to the mistake. Plaxy, Praxy – what’s a shift between an ‘l’ to ‘r’ in the grand scheme of things? They’re both great names.

Q to follow tomorrow!

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