This article looks in detail at the development of the spelling of CREE in Scotland and attempts to show where the name might have originated. A further article examines the very earliest Scottish records for further evidence about the origins of the surname CREE.

OF CRE... CRE... CREY... CRIE... CREE

Examination of records relating to Perth shows that different spellings of the name Cree were used at different periods. Apart from some periods of overlap, the spelling is by and large consistent within each period. The earliest records we have found refer to John of Cre in 1459 and 1462. A century later, we find Johne Cre, Richart Cre, Walter Cre and Patrick Cree referred to in a document of 1547. Early deeds from 1570 to about 1610 use the spelling CREY. These overlap with the development of the spelling CRIE which lasted into the 19th Century. Again there is overlap as the modern version, CREE, starts to emerge early in the Eighteenth Century.

Cree probably always pronounced the same.

It is important to realise that these spelling variations are not due to changes in the spoken version of the name, which probably remained very consistent over the whole period. They simply mark the changing ways in which the sound which we now write as -EE- was written down. This double E combination did not exist before about 1700, the sound that it now represents being written as -IE or -EI, before that as -EY, and even earlier as -E. The name Cree, however it was spelled, has probably always been pronounced as we pronounce it today.

This is shown by the parallel development of other words such as THREE and the city of DUNDEE. These both went through exactly parallel developments: THRE to THRIE to THREE and DUNDE to DUNDIE to DUNDEE. (Parallels to the shortlived CREY spelling are less certain.) Black (Surnames of Scotland, Black G.F., New York 1946) quotes the spelling CREF for the placename now spellt CRIEFF.

Significance of OF

Of great significance is that the earliest version of our name. John OF CRE occurs in both 1459 and 1462 in lists of members of the Perth Guild Court. The context of these lists shows clearly that the use of the OF prefix indicates a locative surname. Of the 29 names in the 1459 list, six contain the prefix "of", Four of these can be identified as locative names, a fifth is uncertain (John of Quitsone) and the sixth is John of Cre. Of the 48 names in the 1462 list, nine include the "of" prefix. All of these (if we include John of Cre) can be identified as placenames. Examples are John of Haddington, Thom of Dunde and John of Lyn (known to be an immigrant family from Kings Lynn in England). Most are actual names of identifiable towns and villages, a few are more general locative descriptions such as Thom of Brig (=Bridge) or Will of West, which may or may not be the names of actual places but nevertheless clearly point to the use of the prefix "of" in conjunction with places at that period, at least in the context of the Guildry Book.

CREE probably from a placename - CRIEFF or CREICH

The question then arises as to which place the name CRE refers to. In an area which was largely Gaelic speaking until the end of the middle ages, we must bear in mind that the process of Anglicising Gaelic place names often resulted in the dropping of the final "soft" consonants of Gaelic. Thus Dundee was once Dun Deagh and Abernethy was Aber Neitheach. (Scotland's Place Names, David Dorward, Edinburgh 1995). So the most likely candidates as sources of the name Cree are the town of Crieff, about 15 miles west of Perth, and the village of Creich about 15 miles east (near the Fife shore of the Tay estuary).

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey.

Dorward derives Crieff from the Gaelic craobh, a tree, and it is still a place surrounded by woodland, while Creich (also spelled Criech on modern maps) comes from the Gaelic crioch meaning a boundary. It would seem likely then that an ancestor of John of Cre, a few generations earlier in the period of surname formation, adopted his surname because he had come to somewhere, possibly Perth, from Crieff or Creich or another place with a similar name.

We can now see a possible line of development of our surname from a place name Crieff or Creich to the earliest surname form, OF CRE. See a more recent article tracing this development

This is Part 2 of a three-part article. See also:
Part 1: Spellings of the surname Cree
Part 3: Links to place names