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Origin / History of the Wickes Name

Recorded in a very wide range of spellings including: Week; Weeke; Wick; Wike; Wix; Wyke, and patronymics: Weekes; Weekson; Wickson; and Wixon, this is an English medieval surname of Roman – Latin origins.  Where the suffix is an ‘s’ it may denote a short form of the patronymic -son, or describe a person who was actually resident at a place rather than from it.  Its relative popularity of some thirty spellings is because it is topographical from residence at a wic, a popular place name or suffix to a place name, and a loan word from the Latin ‘wicus’ describing a settlement or farm, one usually associated with the dairy industry.  In a few cases it may have described a farmer.  There are a number of places called Wick, Wike, Wyke and Week in England and Scotland, as well as names such as Gatwick, meaning the goat farm, or Droitwich, a military camp or similar from 'dryt', meaning a horse troop, and Wicken in Cambridgeshire, which describes 'several farms'.  The earliest examples of the surname in published records includes: Alueredus de Uuica of the county of Somerset in the pipe rolls of 1084; Goscelin del Wich of Worcestershire in 1184; and Jordan de la Wike of Gloucestershire in 1194.  Later recordings include: Nicholas Wixon, a christening witness at St Botolphs Bishopgate in the city of London in 1577; and Symon Weeks of Devonshire, aged just sixteen, he was an early emigrant to the New World in 1634.

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