“William’s decesaed son was, of course, a slip of the pen. I meant to say George III’s deceased son, the Duke of Kent.

“the last saw the extinguishing of all hope for the Stuarts at Culloden.”

As regards the Stuart line, here in Scotland, many Catholics refused to take advantage of the Roman Catholic Relief Acts of 1778, 1791 and 1793, because these required an oath of allegiance to George III. However, here in Ayrshire, the Sheriff Court books show a large number taking the oaths in the autumn of 1807, my own forebears amongst them and one finds the same thing throughout Scotland. I fancy this was not unconnected with the death of King Henry IX (the Cardinal Duke of York) on 13 July of that year

William had no legitimate son. Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, George III’s fourth son, who was, as you say the Duke of Kent; but he was William IV’s younger brother, not his son. Her mother, a German princess, was also named Victoria.

Victoria was descended from English kings in two lines. One, which I mention above, was Henry II through his daughter Matilda, who married the arch-Guelph Henry the Lion. Their son was William of Winchester, Lord of Lüneburg. By and by, his line descended to George Louis, the son of Sophia of the Palatinate, who was the granddaughter of James I/VI (England/Scotland), who was in turn the great-grandson of Henry VII through his daughter Margaret Tudor, wife of James IV. George Louis became George I on the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne in September, 1714. Sophia died just three months too soon, else she would have inherited the crown herself due to the Act of Settlement of 1701, which, because, there was alive a 13-year-old male Stuart, James the Old Pretender, son of James II, posed a danger, as the Whigs and William III saw it, of a return of a Roman Catholic to the English throne. They thus sought out the Hanoverian claimant descended from James I and Anne of Denmark, namely, Sophia.

Thus through just one pair of great-great-grandparents, Ernest Augustus,Duke of Brunswick and father of George I, and the Electress Sophia, Victoria was a direct descendant of two kings: Henry II and James I. That led directly to the Jacobite risings in 1708, 1719, and, of course, 1745, the last saw the extinguishing of all hope for the Stuarts at Culloden.

On William IV’s death in 1837, the crown of the United Kingdom descended to Queen Victoria, the daughter of William’s deceased son, the Duke of Kent. The crown of Hanover, under the Salic Law, descended to her uncle, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. It was annexed by Prussia in 1866.

This peculiar rivalry had immense consequences, more in Italy than in Germany probably. An interesting footnote to the controversy was that when Barbarossa at last triumphed over his cousin Henry the Lion, henry was deprived of his properties under feudal but left with the duchy of Brunswick. Eighteen generations later one of his descendants, through his son William, was Queen Victoria, though it was not through that line that she came to the throne: she was also the granddaughter of George III.

The watermen functioned as cabs for people going to and from ships moored in the Thames. The lightermen ferried cargo to and from ship to shore.

I think this was discussed in the 1986 book and TV documentary “The Story of English”. The term came from ca. 16th century England, and referred to boatmen who used their vessels for many tasks (i.e., not only to fish but also to ferry people from one side of a river to the other, etc.). They were more than fishermen or ferrymen, thus the more generalized term “watermen” to describe them.

The term fell out of use in England, but stayed in the boondocks. I gather that is not unusual—the
Motherland moves on, but the folks out in the boondocks keep the old ways. In fact, the peculiar dialect of Smith andTangier Islands probably is a vestige of Shakespearean speech. The accent of the islanders is said to resemble that of some English counties.

It would be very cool if indeed they were; I mean, it’s almost exactly the same word, and so very old.

It’s just something I found in an etymology explanation online. There wasn’t much information about the trajectory of the evolution of the word, only how the word “water” was said in various languages of the past. Not that many words remain intact like this for so long, that’s also why I wonder just how much of a linear link there could be between the two words.

Apart from the obvious trade-based surnames (Mason, Miller, Smith, Taylor) one has Cooper (a barrel-maker) Fletcher (an arrow-maker, from French Flèche =arrow) Redman (Reed man, a thatcher) and many more.

My own family name of Seymour comes from the original home of the family, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés in the île de France. A member of the family settled in Scotland in the 12th century. The arms borne by the various branches of the family all include one or more of what Scottish heralds call a “clove gillyflower,” blue on gold. It is, of course, the fleur-de-lys of the île de France, with the colours reversed. By a curious coincidence, my great-uncle was billeted there, during the Battle of the Marne.