Difference between revisions of "Burton"

Revision as of 20:52, 10 March 2022

The name Burton may be a place name or a surname. There are also two common nouns, a slang phrase, and some uses derived from the (proper noun) names.

• Burton as a place-name is not uncommon. It is usually derived from the OE elements burh, 'fortified' (see also Borough - burgh), and tun, 'farmstead'. There are many Burtons in the UK, of which the largest is Burton upon Trent, a famous centre of beer brewing in Staffordshire, and more abroad. 'A burton' may be a beer brewed in, or around this this town. The East Riding contains several Burtons:
  • Burton Agnes, between Bridlington and Driffield, was named when the manor was owned by Agnes de Percy, a great heiress of the 12th century; but this is not certain.
  • Burton Constable was a manor granted to the Constable of Richmond Castle in the 12th century.
    • (There is also a village called Constable Burton in Richmondshire, in the North Riding. It is just east of Leyburn. It too was named when the manor was granted to a Chief Constable for the Earl of Richmond, in 1100. This Constable was called Roald.)
  • Bishop Burton is a village three miles west of Beverley, on the Hull - York road (A 1079). A pub, the Altisidora, is opposite the pretty pond ('the Mere') in the centre of the village. Bishop Burton College, on the York side, is a land-based FE and HE college, specializing in agriculture and equine studies. The village is named from its having been a manor of the Archbishop of York since before 1086.
  • Cherry Burton, a village three miles north-west of Beverley, is presumed (by Mills & Room) to be derived from the cherry-trees grown there.
  • Burton Pidsea is a village some 10 miles east of Hull.
• The surname Burton is not uncommon. It is not possible to establish which place-name of many may have given rise to any family which carries the name.
  • Sir Montague Maurice Burton (1885–1952; knighted 1931) was an immigrant (as Meshe David Osinsky) from Kurkel, Russia (now Lithuania) in 1900. He founded Burtons (below). He was followed by his sons Raymond Montague Burton (1917–2011), who founded Topshop while Chair of Peter Robinson, Stanley and Arnold.
    • Burtons was the most usual way of referring to the largest manufacturer of men's tailoring in the UK after World War II. More formally it was Montague Burton, The Tailor of Taste, Ltd, then Burtons the Tailors, and later Burton Menswear. To wear a Burton's suit was a respected way into the world of office work. From having had 400 shops in all, it retails now only on line.
  • Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890; knighted 1886) was an explorer, linguist, translator and writer. He was famed for having made the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise as Mirza Abdullah of Bushehr (1853), publishing his account of the feat in Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 3 vols, 1855-1856. After several expeditions, his next big venture was to find the source of the White Nile (that of the Blue Nile had been known since the 15th century). In company with Lieutenant John Hanning Speke, he set out from Zanzibar in 1857, on an expedition marred by illness and misfortune. They found Lake Tanganyika in 1858, after which Speke travelled on to discover (and name) Lake Victoria. His report of this to the Royal Geographical Society began a celebrated academic controversy with Burton, whose published his own report The Lake Regions of Central Africa (2 vols., 1860) and later The Nile Basin (1864). His best-known writings are the translations: The book of the thousand nights and a night: (16 vols., 1885–8), which "has become the pre-eminent English translation of the Middle Eastern classic. It is the keystone of Burton's literary reputation" (ODNB, 20202). Burton included many erotic tales. The Carmina ['Songs'] of Caius Valerius Catullus (1894); The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883); The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi (1886). These books reveal Burton's keen interest in sexual matters, unusual in a person of higher social class at this time.
  • Richard Burton (1925–1984), born Richard Walter Jenkins Jr., was a distinguished actor, known for Shakespearean performances on stage and in film, where he became one of the most highly paid stars in the film industry. He was well known for a wild lifestyle; an alcoholic whose drunken escapades were often reported, he suffered from back pain caused by injuries sustained in a street brawl in his youth. His sexual affairs were widely known, and his eventual marriages (1964, divorced 1974, and 1975-1976) to Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he had starred in the films Cleopatra (1963) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), were constant fodder for tabloid journalism.

• In rigging on masts and loading derricks, a burton is a small tackle consisting of two blocks, used to multiply the strength of someone hauling.

• To 'go for a burton' was slang (mostly in the RAF) in the Second World War for 'to be killed', or 'to be shot down'.