Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century Irish Names and Naming Practices
by Heather Rose Jones
(Tangwystyl verch Morgant Glasvryn,
contact@heatherrosejones.com)
© 1999 by Heather Rose Jones; all rights reserved.
Introduction
One of the greatest frustrations in helping clients who want historically
authentic Irish names is a lack of easily available models for how whole
names were put together, and particularly for how personal names in Ireland
interacted with the multi- lingual environment. What I hope to do in this
collection of articles is to examine the personal names appearing in
documents of varying date, background, and linguistic context. These
articles are not meant to be prescriptive in the sense of suggesting that
any practices not found herein are unhistoric -- the scope of the data is
far too small to make any such claim. Rather they are meant to provide some
solid, real-world examples of how some names were recorded in
various contexts, giving the name researcher a place to work from -- a
"feel" for what may and may not be reasonable in terms of
historic plausibility. While I have included glossaries of all the name
elements appearing in the documents (including reference to normalized
modern forms for convenience, when they can be identified) the main focus
of these articles will be on whole-name construction, linguistic forms and
context, and some particular observations on women's names and their
special considerations.
The Red Book of Ormond is a 14th century manuscript (with some portions
supplied from a 15th century transcript) of legal records pertaining to the
Ormond family in Ireland. It was written in Latin by an English speaker.
The accounts, covering the years 1560-65, documents the lives of the
Anglo-Irish Fitzwilliam family. The records were written in partly in
Latin and partly in English
Layout, editting, and publishing
Arval Benicoeur.