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A Thousand Years of the Hopping / Hoppin Surname
Summarized from the research of Charles Arthur Hoppin and Edward Stuart Hopping by Judith Hopping
The history of the Hopping family begins a thousand years ago in the village of Catherington in the county of Hampshire, 70 miles southwest of London on the English Channel. The first written record of the name Hopping was in Latin, Hoppingus or Hobbingus. The name meant "son of Robert." The first man named Hopping had no other name, since the use of surnames had not yet come into fashion. He was most likely descended from the Saxon and Danish landowners of the region who had all of their land and property confiscated during the Norman conquest in 1066 and were forced to work the land for the manor lord. Hopping's grandfather was probably a villein (somewhat better than a serf) to the manor in Catherington.
The first Hopping's name appears in writing in 1175 in the Magnus Rotulus Pipae, (the second most important written record of old England), a record of the fact that this man Hopping jumped bail for some unknown trespass against Catherington manor rules. He disappeared from the manor and from written record. It is probable that he hightailed it to Devon (125 miles west of Catherington) since shortly thereafter, historically speaking, the name Hopping begins to appear as a surname in records in and around Exeter, and nowhere else in England, for several hundred years.
The earliest-identified direct ancestor of the vast majority of North American Hoppings and Hoppins (and many Hoppings still living in Devonshire and Cornwall), is John Hoppyng of Blakeborough, a gentleman and lawyer who lived in the town of Colaton Raleigh in Devon, England. (The Hopping and the Raleigh families, including Sir Walter Raleigh who was born in 1552, were closely associated socially and commercially during the 15th and 16th centuries). The Blakeborough estate was purchased by John Hoppyng in 1454. The estate house is now called Blackberry and is still standing near the hamlet of Yettington in the parish of Bicton, in the southwestern corner of Colaton Raleigh, a half mile from the northern boundary of East Budleigh. John Hoppyng died around 1480, but he and his wife Joan had two children: Charles, who became a lawyer like his father, and John, a farmer who worked the Blakeborough estate.
The estate stayed in the family through several generations before another John Hopping emigrated from England to East Hampton, Long Island in about 1670 and married Rebecca Hand, the woman from whom the majority of North American Hoppings and perhaps a third of North American Hoppin lines descend. The Hopping family in North America has mixed much through the last three hundred years with other families who were early settlers of East Hampton, particularly the Dimon, Hand, Hedges, and Osborn families, and there are several Hopping lines in which these surnames predominate. Some of the grandchildren of John and Rebecca moved to Morris County New Jersey to found Hopping Town in Hanover Township (now called Florham Park), and one, Gideon Hoppin (who was responsible for dropping the final "g" in the name), to Guilford Connecticut.
Hoppings and Hoppins travelled across America and Canada, north and south and west, so that descendants of John and Rebecca, as well as the descendants of the other Hopping and Hoppin immigrants, now can be found from Florida to Vancouver, from Long Island to Los Angeles. Hoppings and Hoppins also emigrated from Devon to New Zealand and Australia, where their descendants have prospered; it is fair to say that the Hopping family tree stretches around the world.
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