The Ubiquitous Smith

Any collection of English-speaking people has a lot of people named Smith. Perhaps the Chinese get their revenge for the "more chins than a Chinese phone book" joke with something along the line of "more Smiths than an English phone book." (Admittedly, it doesn't make much sense, but Chinese comedians go in for the absurdist school more often.)

Anyway, here's my question: why so many Smiths? I can think of two explanations, and I don't know which is correct.

1. The Middle Ages needed a lot of smiths. Not only did every town have one, but every town had more than one. Stroll through a medieval hamlet with your eyes closed and you'd think you were hearing the beginning sounds of O Brother, Where Art Thou?. (You'd also step in poop. Probably human poop. Don't stroll through a medieval hamlet with your eyes closed.) When so many workers are smiths, it makes sense that a big portion of later generations would be the descendants of smiths.


2. Smithing was lucrative. It was the "computer repairman" of its day. Extra-normal profits, à la Malthus, get turned into extra-normal numbers of children. So between the rise of last names (according to Wikipedia, before 1400) and the end of the blacksmithing era, people named Smith had more children than people not named Smith.

Wikipedia also says it is commonly adopted by people seeking anonymity because of its prevalence, but that would just affect the magnitude of the difference, not the existence of a difference.

So which is correct? It doesn't seem to me that smithing was any more vital than, say, baking, and though Baker is a common last name, it's not as common as Smith (in fact, it's not even in America's top-ten list). Starting from an age when most people lived on bread, why are there now twice as many Smiths as Millers? (Saying Smiths emigrated more doesn't work, because Smith is still the most-common surname in Britain.)

Extra-normal profits require market power to maintain. The Middle Ages generally lacked the necessary mechanisms to restrict entry. (Right? I know guilds came to be a big deal, but how Mafia-like were they? It seems most explanations for the Industrial Revolution suppose a pre-Revolution lack of coordinating institutions, the kind necessary to maintain entry requirements for certain professions.) So if smithing was profitable, it would attract entry, but then stop attracting entry when profits returned to normal. Would that short-lived increase in smiths be enough to create the modern world of Smiths on every block?

I don't know which story is correct. I could look for medieval occupation studies to see how common smithing was. I don't think any census will be old enough to see if smiths had larger-than-average families back when smithing would have been a high-wage profession. Maybe there's some reason people named Smith are hornier than the general population, so they have a lot more kids even now. But I don't really want to find out if that's true, because I know people named Smith (who doesn't, right?), and I don't want to think about them getting all hot and bothered.

via oneofthebest

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