Family Lessons 119: Emma & Thurstan

Emma and Thurstan. They sound like the good-looking young couple who bought the detached house around the corner. She is a GP and he an artisan candle-maker. They have two delightful children, Tarquin and Poppy, who attend trombone and ballet lessons each week. Sadly, I write of actual people about whom I know even less. My 20th x great-grandfather was Thurstan de Cruce who died in Wigan, Lancashire, around 1367. His wife, my 20th great-grandmother, was Emma.

Thurstan is a rather unusual name today though Emma is common enough, and was counted among the most popular girls’ names in the later twentieth century. Thurstan probably derives from the Norse god Thor (from which we also derive ‘Thursday’) and the word for rock, hence, Thor’s stone. To have such an obviously pagan name in the later Middle Ages was not apparently problematic, seeing as a Thurstan became Archbishop of York in 1113. Emma was popular among the Normans and even the odd Saxon queen bore the name, which is Germanic in origin, and related to Amelia, Emmeline and Emily. It comes from the Germanic word ermen, which means ‘universal’ or ‘entire’.

There is no evidence that Thurstan and Emma were anything other than good medieval Catholics, attending Wigan’s parish church and engaging in endless rounds of litigation as landowners from that period were wont to do. They have been dead over 600 years, but they are still alive, somewhere, albeit in a disembodied state. If they turned to any god or saint other than Christ Jesus, lost they are; if they found wholeness and meaning in anyone but Him, awaiting judgement they must be. Whatever else they got up to, whatever reputations they enjoyed or suffered, it is only now their names that are known, and their relationship to Jesus Christ which will count for anything.