Protestant Exiles from France/Book First - Chapter 15 - Phillippo
Phillippo.
The true spelling of this Norwich refugee surname is said to be Phelipôt. If in search of the earliest French names in that city, we must consult the Book of Discipline, in which the first date is 29th April 1589, or the baptismal register begun on 22d June 1595. (The French Church began about 1572, but the earliest entries and dates are lost.) On 25th December 1595, “Pierre Phillipot” appears as the head of a house; on that day his daughter Sara was baptised. The tendency in pronouncing the surname was to drop the first vowel and to emphasise the second, so that a usual form of the name was “Phlipot.” “Flipote” was a feminine baptismal name coined in honour of the family (see 25th November 1604). On 7th September 1595 we find “Ernou Fphlipot” registered as a sponsor at a separate baptism. As “Ernou Philipo” he appears as a father on 8th October 1609. In the same year Ernou and Marie “Phlipot” are sponsors to Marie, daughter of Pierre Phlipot, the same person as the Phillipot[1] of 1595. The first diacre belonging to the family signed himself “Elie Phlippo” on 15th April 1625. There seem to have been two Elies, senior and junior. The latter married Marie Desquire in 1633, and a Jcnne Philippo was married to Jan Lempreur in 1684 (see Burn).
In 1646 Onias Phillippo was reprimanded by the consistory of the French Church for having been married without annonces (or banns); but he regained the confidence of the congregation and was elected an ancien; as such he signed the Discipline on 2d December 1658 as “Onias Phlipo”;. he is registered as a father on 6th January 1650. He signalized himself by his kindness to the Huguenot refugees from the dragonnades of Louis XIV. A colony of these industrious exiles had been formed in Ipswich in 168 1; in the following year some of them came to Norwich. The Rev. Francis Blomefield, in his History of Norfolk, writes, “On the 19th of May 1682, a company of French Protestants came from Ipswich to Onias Philippo who had hired a great house at Pockthorp Gates, Norwich, and employed them there. This occasioned a mutiny which came to that height that the mob broke open one of their houses and misused a woman so that she died in the second or third day after. The French that dwelt there were forced to quit the street that night.” Again he says, “The poor, being still discontented with the French which were left in the city, took occasion to assemble at the execution of a malefactor; and coming in a large body into the market-place, they declared that the French came to underwork them, and that they would quit the city of them. Accordingly, going to Mr. Barnham’s in St. Andrew’s parish, they pulled them and their goods out of their houses, abused their persons, &c, till the trained bands [militia] were raised to appease them, when the principals were taken and made to pay dear for their folly.”
The most famous man of the Philippo family was not Elias but Elisha. He signed the Discipline as an ancien on 2d December 1658; his signature was “Elisha Phillippo.” Elizabeth, wife of Elizé (i.e., Elisée, the French word for Elisha) Philippo, appeared as a sponsor at a baptism on 10th July 1653. Blomefield (History, vol. ii., p. 291) writes, “In 1672 Mr. Elisha Philippo, soap-boiler, a Frenchman, was chosen High Sheriff of Norfolk, and carried out his office with much reputation.” An English county gentleman is chosen by the crown to fill the office of High Sheriff and serves for one year only. Part of the existing property of the French Church of Norwich is “An Annuity of £5 under the Will of Elisha Phillippo”; his Will was dated 25th August, and proved 6th December 1678 in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.
- ↑ The English surname Philpot was probably originally Philipot, and of old French or Norman origin. This was the spelling adopted by John Philipot, Richmond Herald, a once famous antiquary, a native of Eltham in Kent, who died in 1645, and by his son Thomas, M.A. of Clare Hall, Cambridge, who, among other books, published “Poems” (1646) and Antiquitas Theologica et Gentilis (1670). The dedicatory epistle to the latter booklet is signed Thomas Philipot.