Medieval Naming Guides: English
English, Old English, and Anglo-Norman Names
I've collected a large number of articles on this subject, so I've broken
it into convenient categories.
Three articles in this collection are especially popular, so they're listed
here for convenience.
- Feminine Given Names in
A Dictionary of English Surnames, by Talan Gwynek
- This dictionary, by P. H. Reaney, contains thousands of dated examples
of full names. All the pre-1600 feminine names names are
presented here indexed by period: before 1250, 1250 to 1450,
and after 1450.
-
Faire Names for English Folk: Late
Sixteenth Century English Names, by Christian de Holacombe
- An excellent primer on late-period English names, including lists of
common men's and women's given names, a list of more than 1000
surnames, and discussion of patterns of name construction.
- English Names from Pre-1600 Brass
Inscriptions, by Julian Goodwyn
- An analysis of names collected from a survey of English funerary
brasses. The data range from the 12th to the 16th century, but are
predominantly 15th and 16th century. The article offers alphabetical
lists of
masculine
and
feminine
given names with frequency counts; I have added lists sorted by
frequency, masculine and
feminine, using data from the
lady's original KWHS article. We've noticed some errors in the
article, so it's worth checking the original data in the
Monumental Brass index of the Ashmolean Library. Julian
included a link to the appropriate section of that website with
each citation in her article; unfortunately, the Ashmolean has
reorganized the website. The data can be found, organized by
county, under the 'catalogue' link.
The Medieval Names Archive is published by
Ursula Georges. It was historically published by the Academy of Saint Gabriel.
Copyright on individual articles belongs to their authors.
http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/english.shtml