Found some interesting information on the name Sherwood recently. Check it out.
Prior to the year 1050 there was no such thing as a family name handed down from father to son. But the fashion once started, and it seems that everybody tried to outdo everybody else for the next two hundred years in bestowing names upon their hitherto surnameless neighbors.
And it was then, we fancy, that some man living in or at the edge of a forest--”the Shire Wood”--was given the pretty, poetical name, which has since been corrupted into Sherwood, and which is from the Anglo-Saxon scire--a shire, and wudu--a wood.
The writer says a “pretty, poetical name,” having often heard the expression--once by a Congressman from Virginia, who said to him in the city of Washington that without jesting it was one of the prettiest surname he had ever heard. Be this as it may, one thing can be certainly be said for it: It is genuinely English.
That the name has been written in many different forms will be apparent from the numerous examples of which we append a partial list as follows:
Scirewode, Shyrwode, Schiwode, Shirewode, Shirwode, Shirewood, Shyrewood, Shorwood, Sharhod, Sharswood, Shearwood, Sheerwood, sherewood, Shirwood, Sherwood.
In the Literary Digest for December 29, 1928, under the name Sherwood, may be found the following note, which is of interest in this connection:
The name Sherwood is an English name signifying “belonging to Sherwood, Nottingham.” In the fourteenth century the spelling was Sherwode, Shyrwode: in the thirteenth, Scher (e) wode, Scirewode: in AD 958 Scirwudu” (the first element is rather Old English scir, bright, light colored, than Old English scir, district, shire).
