Cashford

Recorded as Casford, Caseford, Cashford, Castford, Cosfort, and more usually Cosford, this is an English surname. It is from either of the two Cosford villages. The first is in Warwickshire and recorded as Cosseford in the index to the Curia Regis rolls in the British Museum for the year 1246. The place name derives from the pre 7th century personal name "Cossa," and describe a shallow river crossing owned by a man called Cossa, who probably charged tolls to cross. Another Cosford, near Hadleigh in Suffolk, was recorded as Corsford in the Curia Regis rolls of the same year. It has as its first element the Welsh word "cors", meaning a fen, to give the apparent meaning of a ford crossing a fen. During the Middle Ages when migration for the purpose of job- seeking was becoming more common, people often took their former village name as a means of identification, resulting in a wide dispersal of the name, and a transposition of the spelling. Recordings of the surname from church registers of the city of London include the marriage of John Cosford and Margery Bowdron, which took place on August 7th 1581, at St. Bartholomew the Less, the wedding of Lucy Casford and John Bushnell at St Mary Woolnoth, on May 11th 1673, and that of John Cashford and Sarah Weatherly at St Mathews, Bethnal Green, on April 11th 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was sometimes known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.