Names and Nicknames

Before we leave our model Norman knights, William ‘the weasel’, and Henry ‘the socks’, their names deserve brief mention. Before 1066, both in England and Normandy, Christian names were only rarely accompanied by nicknames (‘Eric the Red’), trade names (‘Windy the Miller’ and ‘Postman Pat’) or place names (what the specialists would call toponyms, ‘Eadric of Laxfield’). Below the topmost levels of the aristocracy, it was virtually unknown for such names to survive more than one generation or to become in any way ‘surnames’ or family names as we would understand them today. Within any particular family, a limited number of Christian names might be favoured, which can sometimes help us to reconstruct family descent, but even here there was no certain rule. Surnames, sometimes derived from a nickname or place name, sometimes from the Christian name of an ancestor, only began to develop in Normandy on the very eve of 1066. Nonetheless, our William Belet ‘the weasel’ and Walter Hose ‘the socks’ as early as 1086 had joined that select group of men whose families were henceforth identifiable by true surnames. Names that might be thought to be dismissive or pejorative, ‘the weasel’, ‘the fat’ (Gros, or Crassus), the ‘fat headed’ (Grosseteste, name of a famous future bishop of Lincoln), ‘the beaky nosed’ (Becket, name of a yet more famous archbishop of Canterbury), even, notoriously from Domesday Book, Humphrey ‘Goldenbollocks’ (like Robert ‘the Perverted’, or ‘Tesco’ of Colchester, one of the more bizarrely named of the Essex tenantry), not only began to proliferate but to be carried by successive generations as proud badges of descent. By the 1130s, families such as the Fitz Geralds, descended from an ancestor named Gerald, began to adopt not just patronymics, those names beginning Fitz This and Fitz That (son of X or Y) that clutter up the ‘F’ section of the indexes to books of medieval history, but true family names so that the son of Henry fitz Gerald was named Warin fitz Gerald not Warin fitz Henry.

What is perhaps most interesting here is the extent to which the Norman Conquest itself forced families to adopt these new badges of self identification. Newly established in England, families held on to the place names of their Norman birth and the personal names of their Norman ancestors long after they had ceased in all other terms to be anything other than English by birth, breeding and outlook. This great explosion of surnames, for the most part derived from Norman place names, ensures not only that we can attempt to trace the precise geographical origins of large numbers of families established in England after 1066, but that, throughout English history, the names of the greater English baronial or aristocratic families have a distinctly French ring to them. The definitive form of the document known as Magna Carta, first issued in 1215, comes to us from the reissue in 1225 and claims to have been witnessed by twelve bishops, twenty abbots and more than thirty barons. This list of barons begins with the names of a dozen earls or officials known by the names of their English counties, all but one of them from French families and with their French family names specified in Magna Carta in no less than six cases. Of the remaining twenty-two barons, four have ‘Fitz’ names, three have names derived from English places. The other fifteen all have Norman or French toponyms, in the vast majority of cases commemorating the names of places which the barons themselves had never so much as visited but which had cradled their ancestors. England’s greatest constitutional document is therefore to a large extent French. Like later colonialists, scattering ‘Hotel Bristols’ or ‘High Streets’ or bungalows named ‘Windy Ridge’ across the Indian subcontinent, the descendants of the colonialists of the 1060s and 70s remained Norman in name long after they had ceased to be in any way Norman in person.

The arrival of dozens of Norman barons, hundreds of Norman knights and thousands of Norman settlers spelled disaster for the English landholding class. Most of those English thegns not killed at Hastings were dispossessed in the ensuing rebellions or slowly marginalized by their new Norman neighbours. Not everyone lost their lands. There were rare survivals, the quislings of their day, such as Edward of Salisbury, sheriff of Wiltshire, or Thorkell of Warwick, son of a sheriff of Warwickshire, who still appear in Domesday as tenants-in-chief. A list of the knights of the archbishopric of Canterbury from the 1080s includes men named Aethelwine, son of Brithmaer, and Deorman, both of them undoubtedly of Anglo-Saxon descent. Both were Londoners, Aethelwine appearing amongst the witnesses to a charter crucial to our understanding of the role played by the Norman bishop of Rochester, Gundulf, in the building of the White Tower of the Tower of London. In 1125, a man named Ordgar fitz Deorman is still to be found amongst the London ‘Cnihtengeld’, the city’s guild of knights. For the majority of the English landholding elite, after 1066, there were nonetheless few alternatives save for dispossession or exile.