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the orthographic practices of the AS administrative system. Names are the most information-intensive of linguistic material, with low predictability in context, and the context of collection was hardly designed to combat this problem, so we are not surprised to find a document requiring careful linguistic analysis and yielding sometimes disheartening results. Many other AS documents exist only in later, post-Conquest, copies, often in c(h)artularies (collections of transcriptions); during the Middle Ages attempts at consistency of spelling did not rank as a virtue and were probably not even conceptualised. Until the fifteenth century, documents containing names were overwhelmingly written in Latin or French, and what is by origin an English name is often presented in one or the other guise (e.g. in civitate Scrobbensis 901; Saropesberia eleventh century; Salopie or Salopia thirteenth century, all meaning ‘(at) Shrewsbury’ (PN Sa I: 267–71)). Name records need analysis in the light of scribal practice and textual history.

Other AS-period evidence is in inscriptions, chronicles and confraternity books. Coin inscriptions may display kings’ and moneyers’ names and locations of mints. An insight into the special difficulties in interpreting this material may be had from Smart (1979) and Colman (1984: 96–108; 1992: passim). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains personal names mainly of dynastic importance, and placenames which surface according to the sweep of political history – few and random except to the extent that major events happened in significant places. In the absence of an AS DB, the prime source for early English names is Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, finalised in about 731. The confraternity books of Durham and Hyde (Winchester) are lists of names of benefactors, built up incrementally (like chronicles), and giving few hints as to the social and ethnic status of the persons named.

Many documents from the medieval period are now available in reasonably user-friendly editions, but these documents may be of different interest and value according to the degree of local knowledge possessed by the drafter or copyist, and especially for place-name purposes the most locally aware documents tend to be of the greatest value. Legal and central administrative documents may perpetuate errors or archaisms; local documents may give evidence of linguistic innovation. Later the volume of documentation containing name forms increases exponentially. Sources may be public or domestic, published or unpublished, verbal or cartographic.

6.3Personal names

Following Clark (1992a), the term personal name will be used for a name bestowed on an individual as a matter of conscious choice. This concept is to be distinguished from one inherited (patronym or metronym vs family-name (surname)), or one applied because it is appropriate to the person, ironically

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or otherwise (by-name). The term nickname can be used restrictively to mean a personal name not falling into one of the other categories, for example Tug and Nobby, the once-traditional but now almost forgotten names automatically bestowed on men with the surname Wilson and Clark, respectively – bestowed because thought appropriate to the surname, not to the person. For further information see the section on Further Reading.

The AS period is interesting as being the last when the linguistic material of most personal names was English. Since then, only an upsurge of Puritan naming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and some special fashions in the last 200 years of the second millennium have relied significantly on English words. The earliest naming practice among the Germanic peoples was geared to the production of a large number of distinct names, because custom required a single name unique to the individual bearing it – at least ideally. The most characteristic AS names are composed of a single element, usually coinciding in form with an OE lexical word, or of two such elements, selected from partly overlapping lists, where the second relates to the sex of the bearer (not to be confused with the grammatical gender of the word). Scholars call such names monothematic and dithematic respectively; each of the elements is a theme. The two-element structure was the engine which generated a constant supply of new names. Originally the supply was sufficient to satisfy a society with no central records and no large groupings of people in regular interaction with each other, and which therefore could tolerate occasional duplication that might be remedied through by-naming. Later, certain combinations became favoured and therefore replicated, and this led to the emergence of other naming strategies to help achieve disambiguation of reference in context: certainly the creation of surnames in Europe, and possibly the more systematic creation of by-names, though we have no real evidence for the antiquity or otherwise of the latter as a systematic device. The best wideranging discussions of OE name elements are Strom¨ (1939) and Anderson (1941), supplemented by Colman (1992: 71–125), and for an excellent culturally situated discussion see also Insley (2002).

The system is substantially the one inherited from Common West Germanic (CWGmc). In the two-element names, either element might be either an adjective or a noun, and in some instances a bound morpheme with a comparable sort of lexical meaning. A few were synchronically opaque in recorded OE. The list of first elements (protothemes, written X- below) is larger than that of second elements (deuterothemes, written -x below). The themes are not semantically random. Those which predominate have to do with group identification and loyalty (Swæf- ‘Swabian’, þeod¯ - ‘nation’), physical and moral prowess and its rewards (Beald-/-beald ‘brave’, Weald-/-weald ‘power’, Beorht-/-beorht and

Æðel- ‘noble’, Cu¯ð- and -mær¯ ‘famous’), the warrior life (Hild-/-hild and W¯ıg-/ -w¯ıg ‘battle’, -brord and -gar¯ ‘spear’, Beorn- ‘warrior’, Wulf-/-wulf ‘wolf’ or

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names. Other impacts were few; whilst the nobles played at being Knights of the Round Table, the names of the characters of the romances had little impact on their naming habits; children baptised Arthur, Guenevere and Launcelot appeared occasionally but Galahad, so far as I know, not at all, despite his unimpeachable character. The difference between this and the openness to literary and showbiz models since about 1550–1600 is very striking.

The first systematic threat to this canon came in the sixteenth century (for the background to this see Wilson, 1998: chs. 9, 10). The new availability of printed books publishing the literature, mythology and scholarship of classical times offered a whole new name stock. Parents might bestow on their children names from antiquity; aristocratic parents led the way with such names as Penelope and Ambrose being used by the Essex and Warwick families respectively; others were Cynthia, Diana, Ant(h)ony and Mark/Marcus (though Mark might be for the evangelist). Formally, these might be either in the Latin nominative singular form (whatever the source: Hercules, not Heracles; Theophilus not Theophilos) or with anglicisation consisting of the dropping of some masculine suffixes; note that Shakespeare has Antony in Antony and Cleopatra but Antonius in Julius Caesar. In the longer term, anglicised forms dominated: Mark, Claud(e), though their precise form might owe something to conventional modes of spelling derived from French. Only Marcus of male names still current retains its Latin form. In striking contrast, for females, forms of the Latin first declension have become accepted as normal, often alongside vernacularised forms: compare Diana/Diane, Julia/Julie, Clara/Cla(i)re and Helena/Helen Ellen Elaine; but it may well be important that some of these ‘Latin’ forms coincided phonologically (in England) with favoured Italian continuations or revivals of the names (e.g. Diana, Giulia). Since the Reformation these have gradually percolated through the English class system. A few Italian names became current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Ferdinando and Orlando. The latter shows the impact of vernacular literatures in England, since it is the name of Ariosto’s epic hero (Italian for Roland), and Italian-derived literature has been responsible for the import of

Oliver, Juliet (Giulietta), Gulielma and Guido.

These trends secured the position of -a as the mark of female names par excellence (cf. Lieberson & Mikelson, 1995), and which stimulated the popularity of many names in -a from a variety of sources (Anna, Susanna, Eva, Olivia) and in more modern times -a as a formative element used to create distinctively female names from male ones (Roberta, Davina – mainly Scottish, irregularly from David, which itself was more popular in medieval Scotland than in England –

Philippa and Georgia).

These patterns of foreign influence over English naming can be traced unambiguously to prevailing cultural and political circumstances. Italy was the perceived source of much that was admired in the Renaissance. Spain was a source