CORBETT

Family Names - Totemism and Names - CORBETT - The Corbyns and the Corbetts (Corbeaux) came over to England with the Conqueror, and, we may suspect, were of the Lodbrog ⁽¹⁾ stock, descendants of Kraka, as the younger Ragnar thrust up the Seine and took Paris in 845, and his son Bj�rn ravaged in Normandy and other parts of France in 843 and 857, and another son, Sigurd, and a nephew, Guthrod, were there also in 891; so that it is far from unlikely that they left some descendants behind them in Normandy. (3)

The Roll of Battle Abbey - CORBETT - spoken of by Ordericus as "the faithful and very valiant men," i.e., Corbett and his two son, who were employed by Roger de Montgomerie in the government of his new earldom of Shrewsbury.

⁽¹⁾ It is generally taken for granted that where at an early period families bear animal names, they were held to descend from a bestial ancestor. The sons of Lodbrog, who harried the coasts of England in the ninth century, brought with them from Denmark a raven banner, embroidered by their sisters. It had this virtue, that before the battle it spread and flapped its wings. Now this raven banner had its significance. The Lodbrog sons were the descendants, not the actual sons, of one Ragnar Lodbrog, who died about the year 794. He left no legitimate issue. His posterity, the royal race of Sweden and Denmark, descended from a concubine named Kraka, "the crow". Eigher the family substituted a raven for a crow, or, what is more probably, the English chroniclers mistook a crow for a raven. But this seems to show that the descendants of Lodbrog ollied to an ancestral crow as the source of the family. Moreover, Ragnar's death-song (not that of the first, but the second Ragnar) is called "The Song of the Crow.". We may suspect that the story of Kraka is really a r�chauff� of an earlier tale in which the ancestress was represented as an actual crow.