The name Pickens is believed by some authorities
to have been a variant of the ancient Saxon name of Piggin or Piggins which was probably derived from a nickname for Richard.
Other authorities claim that it had its origin in the word "Piccen" in the Lowland Scotch dialect, and was first used as a
name in the ninth century.
They were Vikings from Norway
who settled the Orkneys and Northern Scotland in 870 AD. They also invaded Northern France
in 910 AD. That area became Normandy and the name Piccen is listed in the Domesday
Book put together by their descendants in 1086.
The word Piccen they claim, seems to have
implied making sharp; to sharpen; as a lance or spear or other pointed instrument. It was also used as the Arms master of
a Viking ship (who kept everything sharp).
The name is found in ancient British records
in the various forms of Piggin, Piggins, Pinkeny, Pinkie, Pickings, Picking, Piggyn, Piggyns, Pickyng, Pycings, Pickyn, Pickin,
Pickins, Picken and Pickens. Families of these names were to be found in various parts of Scotland
and in the English counties of Norfolk, London,
Northumberland, Worcester and Lincoln.
Pickenses were, for the most part, of the Landed Gentry and Yeomanry of Great Britain.
It seems that Robert (of the French court
of King Henry IV, 1589-1610) was the so called Descendant of Picon, or Picken. He is one of four earliest known ancestors
of the Pickens name. The other three are from Edinburgh, Scotland;
Johnne, Andrew, and Peter, all married at the turn of the century. It is likely they were all brothers.
It was during this time that they started
keeping a surname the way we do today. Other branches went from PICON to PICKUN to PICKAN to PICKEN to PICKENS. There are
other spellings as well. Among them are PICKIN, PIKKAN, PICKHANS, PICKANES; these are likely misspelled by the town clerk
who thought Phoenetics was more important than spelling.
About 870 a.d. the Viking "Stirgud the
Stout" and his men landed in the Orkneys and Northern Scotland. They came from Norway
in an effort to expand. The Pickens name comes from this group of Vikings.
Later, under their Earl, Thorfinn Rollo,
they invaded France about 910 AD. They held Paris
under siege until the French King, Charles the Simple, conceded defeat and granted Northern France
to Rollo, who became the first Duke of Normandy.
A descendant of Duke Rollo was Duke William
who invaded England in 1066. William had a census taken in
England in 1086 and compiled the Domesday Book. This Listing
of names has Picken listed and many variations of the spelling as well
Most notably "Pinkeny" which in the 1200's
lived in Picquigny in the Somme in the arrondisement of Amiens
in Normandy.
Ghilo Pinkeny was a Domesday book tenant
in chief in the county of Northampton
and others, and his son Ghilo, founded the Priory of Weedon in Northampton which
was a branch of the original Priory at St. Lucien in Beauvais near Picquigny.
They branched into Yorkshire and acquired Shrover Hall where they were landed gentry. They also established
a seat in Oxfordshire where the name was Pinke.
The Pickens name emerged as a notable English
family name in the county of Northampton
where they were recorded as "a family of great antiquity seated as Lords of the Manor and Estates in that shire."
In the late 1200's many of the Norman families
of England moved north to Scotland
following Earl David of Huntingdon (who later became the second King of Scotland). They expanded into Scotland
where the names were Pinkie, Pickie, and Picken. They settled in Inveresk in Midlothian, Scotland.
Peter Pinkie was listed as a follower of Robert the Bruce in 1303. They flourished on these estates for several centuries
spreading throughout Scotland.
There were Pickenses at the battle of Bannockburn
in 1314 defeating the English who outnumbered them 5 to 1, gaining Scottish Independence. This battle was the first of many
major victories giving the Scots a good reputation for winning battles.
In 1328 the Treaty of Northhampton was
signed between the English King, Edward III and Robert I (Bruce) officially recognizing Scottish independence and Robert Bruce
as it's king. The following year, Earl David was crowned King upon the death of Robert the Bruce and Scotland was well on
its way thanks in part to the efforts of the Pickens family.
In 1521 on May the 26th , Martin Luther
was banned by the edict of Worms for his religious beliefs. Any deviation from
Catholicism was considered blasphemous. There was a tremendous effort throughout Europe to spread Catholicism
and keep these Protestant dissidents from converting the masses.
The Scottish would not be told how to think
and so would not stand for any religious persecution. On the English border the Scotch Presbyterians were treated as low life
and so the border was a hard place to live. They were forced into guerilla warfare just to survive. These "Border Reevers"
became the best frontier fighters in the world. There were many of the Edinburgh Pickenses among this group of fighting farmers.
The Border raids were finally quieted when the Scottish king James IV took the English throne as James I in 1603. These fighters
were later used by the English to quiet the Irish.
The French huguenots in the mid 1500's
felt the same as the Scottish about religious persecution, and this common belief of religious freedom forged a friendship
between the Scots and the French that lasted until 1685.
It was during this time,
the late 1500's, that one Robert Picken/Picon from Scotland went to France during the reign of King Henry IV (1589 - 1610). He held a diplomatic post in the Kings Court until 1610 when Louis XIII took the crown. He then returned to Scotland near the English border and lived there until his death. He had family in Edinburgh, Stewarton, Glasgow, and the Kintyre Peninsula. The border had become a friendly place at the time because a Scottish
King sat on the English throne. (James I was also James VI
of Scotland
and the son of Mary, Queen of Scots). This made for what Robert thought would be an easy retirement.
When his son Andrew was
born in 1624, the political climate was getting difficult. Charles I began his reign over England in 1625 and some of the attitudes changed toward the "Wily Border Reevers of Scotland",
so called because of the old hatred between the two countries under Elizabeth I (1558 - 1603). The Covenanters were also uprising
against the English crown and England's religious civil war
was reaching into Scotland. The Scottish king James was no longer king and old hatreds built
up again atop new hatreds. But it was still a tolerable life for Robert Picken/Picon because of his diplomatic status. Robert
Senior died in 1644 and is buried in Lowland Scotland.
There were other Pickenses (Pickan) in Edinburgh
who were believed to be Robert Picon's (Pickens) brothers. A lot of their children moved to Ulster
in the 1620's and 1630's. This was a colonization effort of the English to make Ireland
"civilized".
(See Ulster
History).
In 1644 Andrew had a son Robert named after Andrew's father. Robert was born
in Scotland according to LDS records. He went to France
with his father at a young age. While in France, Robert met
the young widow of a Frenchman named Jean Bonneau. Her name was Esther Jeane Benoit and she was from a Protestant huguenot
family. They began a family there. Among Robert's children were William Henry Pickens, who was born in 1669 (LDS) in France.
His other sons were Andrew, John, Robert, Israel,
and Thomas, and a daughter who married a Davis.
In 1651 Oliver Cromwell defeated Charles and began the commonwealth. The Irish
Catholic rebellion was in full swing in Ireland and the English sent the Presbyterian/Covenanter Scottish armies (who called
themselves God's army) to stop them.
Catholicism was outlawed in Ireland
and the Scots (fighting for the English) tried to convert the Irish Catholic Papists to the Presbyterian faith. That failed
because the Scots didn't want to tell people what to believe. So Cromwell's army took over to enforce the English law.
Andrew Picken/Picon still believed, as most Scots did, in religious freedom
and wanted to avoid that war because it seemed to him to be hypocritical. So he took his family to France
to the town that his father had previously lived in.
The families enjoyed a peaceful existence in France
until 1685 when they revoked the Edict of Nantes. There was no more religious freedom in France
unless you were Catholic. This was a good reason for Andrew and his family to return to Scotland
and find their relatives. So Robert and Esther, his parents and his children, and a host of French friends all went to Scotland
to practice the Presbyterian faith. They became split on the subject of becoming Covenanters. Most believed that everyone
should have the freedom to choose their religion. The Covenanters believed only in the right to be Presbyterian. The Catholics
believed they were the one true religion.
This is what David Cody, Assistant Professor of English, Hartwick
College had to say about the Covenanters:
"The Covenanters were supporters of the Scottish Covenant of 1638, which was
a national protest against the ecclesiastical innovations in the Scottish Church
imposed at Edinburgh and subscribed to by various nobles, ministers, and burgesses.
Those who signed the Covenant, which was initially neither anti-royalist nor anti-Episcopalian, though it became both, declared
that they would defend their religious beliefs against any changes not mandated by free assemblies and the Scottish Parliament.
The term was also applied to their spiritual heirs who opposed the reintroduction of episcopacy in 1662.
"Some Covenanters were also signatories of the Apologetical Declaration which
declared war on all established political officials, soldiers, judges, conformist ministers, and informers. This document,
however, provoked a response upon the part of the authorities which became known as the Killing Times: during 1684-85, at
least 78 persons were summarily executed for refusing to retract their allegiance to the declaration, and many others were
executed after trial. Despite often brutal repression, especially during the period between 1678 and 1685, the excluded ministers,
supported by the local aristocracy and independent peasantry, maintained an underground church in the south-western parts
of Scotland."
South Western Scotland is where our ancestors moved to at the time, Kintyre.
But in England
the Covenanters were quelled and the Presbyterians were the lowest of second class citizens. Presbyterian marriages were considered
not valid and they were labeled as fornicators. Anyone seen with a Presbyterian Covenanter was arrested with him and whole
prisons were built to house them. It was a bad time near the border for humble Scottish cattle ranchers who were just trying
to make a living.
Their land could no longer support them due to the ravages of war, and the
English demanded outrageous taxes and rents. This caused so many people to leave Scotland
that whole towns were left deserted. The massive emigration was compared to great swarms of bees rising out of the field.
A lot of the Pickenses went to the faraway tip of the Kintyre
Peninsula to escape the strife and farm new land. It was 140 miles to the nearest
city (Glasgow) along a thin strip of land, and it was only 14 miles across the
water to Ireland (Ulster).
Eventually Campbeltown became a busy port for refugees.
Then came the revolution of 1688 and Presbyterianism was restored as the state
religion in Scotland.
In 1685, when the Pickenses arrived back in Scotland
from France, they found that all their relatives had moved
to Ulster, Northern Ireland.
In the search for peace and religious freedom most of them followed the rest of their Clan to Ulster
by way of Campbeltown, Argyll, Scotland.
It seems that on their way through Scotland some members of
the family stayed in the towns the went through.
To have retained the name of Picken since the 16th century is actually very
difficult for our Scottish origins. At that time they changed their names to reflect where they live or where they are from.
They also changed spelling because of illiteracy. Although, Presbyterians pride themselves on being literate, often a man
could not spell his own name and it was spelled by the Town Clerk however he thought it should be spelled.
As we go back into the 17th century,in Stewarton, the name Picken disappears,
but the same Christian names appear, at the same farms, with the surname Pudzan, with the following variations:
Pudzean; Pudzein; Puidzan;
Puidzane; Puidzean; Puidzane; Putzane; Putzane; Puidzeane; Putzan; Putzane and Puydzean! These are farms that are later occupied
by Pickens! This could be put down to different clerks recording the meetings of the Court, or to a problem with transcription,
as some are clearly the same people under a variety of spellings. These surnames however, can all be linked to only 12 farms
or locations.
CLANS
Although the surname Pickens isn't a Sept, there are many of our ancesters
from Clan MacDonald. The Alexanders are from that clan. Also Many are from Clan Campbell. These two clans sometimes fought
over land, but basically occupied the same area, the Western Isles and the Kintyre
Peninsula. Ancestors of both clans have origins in Clan Bruce of the same area
