Stone Fewings

Double-barrelled surname, usually created following a marriage between two families have no overall meaning as a unit, but the separate parts have their own history and derivation. In this instance, the name Stone is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and is either a topographical name from residence by a notable outcrop of rock, a stone boundary marker, or a monument, deriving from the Olde English pre 7th Century "stan", stone, or a locational name from any of the various places throughout England named with this word. These places include: Stone in Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Kent, Somerset, Worcestershire and Staffordshire, generally recorded as "Stane" or "Stanes" in the Domesday Book of 1086. Early examples of the surname include: Richard de Stone (Worcestershire, 1275), and Robert atte Stone (Sussex, 1296). Nicholas Stone, the Elder (1586 - 1647), designed the tomb of the poet, John Donne, at St. Paul's, London. The surname Fewings, recorded in Church Registers of England and Wales under the variant spellings Feewens, Fewen, Fewing and Feuns, is believed to be a Welsh patronymic form of the Middle Welsh male given name "Ewein, Ywein", from "Ieuan", John, ultimately from the Hebrew "Jochanann", "Jehovah has favoured me (with a son)". On November 19th 1549, Elysabethe Feewens and William Laiton were married at St. Olave Old Jewry, London, and on June 26th 1832, Amy Fewings married Edward Jenkins at Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan, Wales. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Robert Ston, which was dated 1212, in the "Curia Regis Rolls of Oxfordshire", during the reign of King John, known as "Lackland", 1199 - 1216. Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.