Worth remembering that Hugh was bishop of Hereford, on the Welsh border -
and Wales notoriously did not accept the Roman insistence on clerical
celibacy. (And wasn't clerical celibacy at parish level the result of the
Gregorian 'reforms'?)
I think, though, that the usual interpretation of the Map family name is
that it comes from the Welsh map/mab/ap = son of. Welsh names normally took
the patronymic form until the C16 at least. Thereafter they were slowly
converted to conventional surnames, usually by eliding part of the ap - so
that ap Rhys became Prys/Price, ap Harry became Parry, ap Owen became Bowen
etc. In the case of the Map family we assume that English-speaking
neighbours dropped the patronymic proper and kept the 'map' part..
Best wishes
Maddy
Dr Madeleine Gray
Department of Humanities and Science
UWCN
'Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought'
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