Cumberbatch

I like to discover unusual names, and Benedict Cumberbatch, star of the new BBC series Sherlock, has one of the best I've come across in a while.  When he appeared on Alan Carr's chat show Chatty Man recently, they discussed his name, and Benedict admitted to being teased about his surname.

This led me to wondering: what did Cumberbatch mean?  Where did this name come from?

There is a village near Chester named Comberbach which is found on one of John Speede's maps from 1610.  It is located in a hollow near a brook.  This name is a literal description, as comber or cumber means dweller in a valley.  A combe is a small valley, much like cwm is in Wales.  There are other, more well-known combes in the UK - such as Ilfracombe and Babbacombe in Devon, Castle Combe in Dorset, etc.  Bach or batch means dweller near a stream.  The word comes from the Old English bache or baece.  So the name Cumberbatch means dweller in a valley near a stream.  Hardly likely to apply to Benedict Cumberbatch today, though.

The earliest known reference to a man named Cumber is in Sussex in 1332, before that a William le Combere was mentioned in Cambridgeshire in 1260.  Batch, however, appears even earlier, as de Bache in 1212 in Lincolnshire.

So Benedict Cumberbatch may have a very unusual name, one that got him teased as a child, but it has a long history and one he should be proud to own.

Sources:
Cumberbatch, Robert (2010) Cumberbatch Surname Origin [online] www.cumberbatch.org/Surname%20Origin.htm (Accessed 29 January 2011).
Reaney, P.H. (1997) A Dictionary of English Surnames, rev 3rd ed., Oxford University Press.
Images:
Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock (2010) [online] BBC publicity photo (Accessed 17 February 2011). 


Juliana