probably the common French name Drouet
or Drouot, assimilated to the English Druitt, which we find in 1273.
And both are diminutives of Drogo, which occurs in Domesday Book, and
is, through Old French, the origin of our Drew. But in many cases the
name has been so deformed that one can only guess at the continental
original. I should conjecture, for instance, that the curious name
Shoppee is a corruption of Chappuis, the Old French for a carpenter,
and that

Jacob Shophousey, registered as a German cutler, came from
Schaffhausen. In this particular region of English nomenclature a
little guessing is almost excusable. The law of probabilities makes
it mathematically certain that the horde of immigrants included
representatives of all the very common French family names, and it
would be strange if Chappuis were absent.

This process of transformation is still going on in a small way,
especially in our provincial manufacturing towns, in which most large
commercial undertakings have slipped from the nerveless grasp of the
Anglo-Saxon into the more capable and prehensile fingers of the
foreigner--

"Hilda then learnt that Mrs. Gailey had married a French modeller
named Canonges. . . and that in course of time the modeller had
informally changed the name to Cannon, because no one in the five
towns could pronounce the true name rightly."

(Arnold Bennett, Hilda Lessways, i. 5.)

This occurs most frequently in the case of Jewish names of German
origin. Thus, Loewe becomes Lowe or Lyons, Meyer is transformed into
Myers, Goldschmid into Goldsmith, Kohn into Cowan, Levy into Lee or
Lewis, Salamon into Salmon, Hirsch or Hertz into Hart, and so on.
Sometimes a bolder flight is attempted--

"Leopold Norfolk Gordon had a house in Park Lane, and ever so many
people's money to keep it up with. As may be guessed from his name,
he was a Jew."

(Morley Roberts, Lady Penelope, ch. ii.)

JEWISH NAMES

The Jewish names of German origin which are now so common in England
mostly date from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when laws
were passed in Austria, Prussia and Bavaria to compel all Jewish
families to adopt a fixed surname. Many of them chose personal names,
e.g. Jakobs, Levy, Moses, for this purpose, while others named
themselves from their place of residence, e.g. Cassel, Speyer
(Spires), Hamburg, often with the addition of the syllable -er, e.g.
Darmesteter, Homburger. Some families preferred descrip