[3][4] However, Geoffrey Hodgson shows that both distribution of the name and DNA suggest a Norse-Irish origin, making “son of Oddgeir” a more likely derivation.
The Hodgsons of Hebburn, a mine-owning Catholic family living in the North East of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Surtees 1820, vol.
77, 319, James 1974, Hodgson 2008), bore a heraldic coat of arms, blazoned as "per chevron, embattled or and azure, three martlets counterchanged".
For centuries before James VI's assentation to the throne of England (Union of the Crowns), the remote Anglo-Scottish borderland region had been the lair of unruly clans and gangs of robbers that were largely beyond the reach of the law.
The suppression of this legal system led to a generalised breakdown of Reiver society (Robb 2018).