Sarah has written a very nice piece on the darnel story, with excellent illustrations, in the online magazine Atlas Obscura.

‘Darnel(l)’ is a common given or family name (see, for example, Smith and Conley 1954) of English origin, as an online search for the unqualified term will testify. People surnamed Darnell account for about 36 per million of the current population of the UK, 66 per million in the USA and 12 per million in Australia. Genealogy sources agree that the name is directly derived from the plant and there is reason to trace some families to the Yorkshire village of Darnell (Lower 1860), now Darnall, a suburb of Sheffield, where darnel was reputedly grown. According to the Internet Surname Database, the first recorded spelling of darnel as a family name in England is of one Godwine Dernel (1095, Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk). Darnell as a given name is probably derived from the family name.

The surname ‘Darnley’ represents between 1 and 5 per million of the populations of the UK, USA and Australia. Of all the bearers of the name ‘Darnley’, one stands out as of particular significance in history and literature. The father of James I of England and VI of Scotland was Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley; the House of Stuart was, properly, the House of Darnley and Stuart. The ‘ley’ element signifies ‘lea’, hence a field (a ‘lea’) of darnel: for example, in Stow (1580), the spelling of Henry Stuart’s name is ‘Darnley’ and ‘Darneley’, and in the second volume of Holinshed (1586) it is ‘Darneleie’. As we have shown (Thomas et al. 2016), where there is darnel, there is treachery and toxicity: Lord Darnley was murdered in 1567, an event of major political significance at the time and through to the Stuart succession in 1603. Hatfield (2004) has pointed out the parallels between the poisoning of Hamlet’s father and the murder of Darnley. Furthermore, it is significant that one of Darnley’s titles was Duke of Albany; in King Lear, Albany (an anachronistic character – the dukedom was first created in 1398, centuries later than the period of the play) is husband of Lear’s daughter Goneril, and is cuckolded by Edmund. Elsewhere (Archer et al. 2014) we have discussed how, in King Lear, allusion to darnel, and the figure of Edmund – the ‘bastard’, a contemporary term for a malignant weed – encode Shakespeare’s interrogation of the Union of the Crowns.

Knowledge of darnel the plant is fading as intensive agriculture spreads and people depart the land for the cities. Its historical and religious significance subside into history. But it lives on in the names of people, most of whom who are unlikely to be aware of the richness of its meaning.

Archer, J. E., R. Marggraf Turley and H. Thomas. 2014. Food and the Literary Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Hatfield, A. 2004. Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics. Thomson Learning, London, pp. 87-8.

Holinshed R. et al. 1586. The Second Volume of Chronicles (n. pl.: n. pub.), p. 381.

Internet Surname Database: www.surnamedb.com [accessed 17 March 2016].

Lower, M. A. 1860. Patronymica Britannica: a Dictionary of the Family Names of the United Kingdom. J. R. Smith, London.

Smith, H. C. and A. D. Conley. 1954. The Darnall, Darnell Family. American Offset Printers.

Stow, J. 1580. The Chronicles of England. Printed by Ralphe Newberie for Henrie Bynneman, London, p. 1131.

Thomas, H., J. E. Archer and R. Marggraf Turley. 2016. Remembering darnel, a forgotten plant of literary, religious, and evolutionary significance. Journal of Ethnobiology, 36: 29-44.