Medieval surnames are the names which people held in medieval Europe, a long span of the continent’s history generally identified as running between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century down to the advent of the Renaissance and the early modern era in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was during the medieval era that the modern surname practices which are found in countries like England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany first emerged. This did not begin though until the High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1300). Instead for much of the medieval era, the period known as the Early Middle Ages (c. 400–1000), the use of surnames in Europe was limited and people were usually just described as being ‘of’ somewhere, hence Augustine of Hippo, Isidore of Seville, Henry of Huntingdon and so forth.
The collapse of Roman naming conventions
The fall of the Roman Empire led to the collapse of many things in European and Mediterranean society. For instance, roads were no longer repaired and eventually decayed over time, as did the Roman aqueducts, while centuries of Greek and Roman learning were lost. One thing which is rarely noted about this cultural collapse is that it also led to an abeyance in the use of surnames. The Romans had developed a complex system of naming conventions, including the equivalent of surnames. These were triple barrel, including a personal name, a direct patronymic or wider gens or family/clan name and a cognomen or alternate name for an individual based on personality or some other family specific. Hence, Gaius Julius Caesar had Gaius as his personal name, Julius indicated that he was from the gens or clan Julii or Iulius, while Caesar was the name of the branch of the Julii that he hailed from. This was a sophisticated system that spread across the Roman world, but like so much else of Roman culture it broadly disappeared during the fifth and sixth centuries.[1]
Early medieval naming conventions
Apart from some residually ‘Roman’ elites in the cities of Italy, people in regions like Gaul (modern-day France), Germania and Hispania began reverting to using a simple combination of a personal name and a toponymic during the Early Middle Ages. The personal name was usually derived from the long list of Christian saints, while the toponymic was typically a description of where the person was from. So, to stick with one of our earlier examples, Henry of Huntingdon, one of the great chroniclers and historians of twelfth-century Europe, was known as such because he lived for much of his life in Huntingdonshire in the region straddling the English Midlands and East Anglia.[2]
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This distinction does not always indicate the place a person hails from. It could just as easily describe a place which they became associated with for much of their life. Isidore of Seville, the great fifth/sixth-century theologian and scholar, for instance, did not some from Seville in Spain, but was bishop of the city and diocese of Seville for three and a half decades between 600 and 636.[3]
Of course not everyone across early medieval Europe followed these basic toponymic surname conventions in the centuries following the fall of Rome. In Norse Northern Europe some people already followed patronymic conventions whereby their surname indicated that they were the son of some individual. Others latterly acquired names which were not surnames so much as descriptors of their achievements. Thus, the great Anglo-Saxon historian of the early eighth century, Saint Bede, became known as Beda Venerabilis, ‘Bede the Venerable’, so venerated was he for his composition of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the foremost work of English historiography written in early medieval times.[4]
The evolution of surnames in the High Middle Ages
Things gradually began to change in High Middle Ages, the period running from around 1000 to 1300. There were reasons for this. Europe was re-entering a period of pronounced economic and social growth and progress. As it did so, more people began travelling around trading and visiting other cities on governmental, cultural and economic business. As they did they needed better ways of identifying themselves to others than a simple personal name and a place of origin. Similarly, as government bureaucracies were re-developed after centuries of stagnation, officials needed ways to identify people more broadly, otherwise a guild overseer in London could have been dealing with dozens of John of Londons. Finally, aristocratic and warrior lineages became much more concerned with tracing their heritage back to famous ancestors and patronymic surnames developed as a way of doing so.[5]
All of this led to ever more sophisticated ways of identifying people using surnames. Some of the surnames which now emerged were still toponymic ones, but more evolved from their early medieval predecessors. Consider the name Devereux, a name which proliferated around parts of England, south-eastern Ireland and northern France in the High Middle Ages. The name sounds like a proper modern surname, but it is effectively just a phoneticised version of a medieval toponymic. The stem of it is ‘D’Evreux’ meaning ‘of Évreux’, Évreux being a town in the Normandy region of France. After the Norman conquest of England some of William the Conqueror's followers who settled in Britain hailed from Évreux and over time they became known as Devereux.[6]
Others were based on things other than toponymic details. For instance, some surnames developed during this time as physical descriptors. The very common Italian surname Rossi comes from rosso meaning ‘red’. As such this surname developed as a way of describing people who had red hair or a red beard. Others were based on lines of descent. This is common in Scandinavia and other Norse regions like Iceland where the tendency for surnames to end in ‘sson’, indicating that someone is the ‘son of’ a certain person, became entrenched in late medieval times.[7]
Finally, other surnames emerged which indicated the occupation of an individual or a near ancestor. A good specimen of this is the Spanish Cavallero, a name which indicates that someone in that family line was once keenly associated with horses, as the root of the surname is caballo, the Spanish for ‘horse’. The name might have first been applied to a cavalry fighter, knight or some such. Other examples include surnames like Baker and Smith in England which emerged to describe a baker and a blacksmith.[8]
The modern influence of medieval surnames
Clearly these names lost their practical significance over time. After all, as any visitor to Italy will confirm quite quickly, very few people called Rossi have a red beard or red hair. Yet centuries ago in the High Middle Ages, or late medieval era (c. 1300–1500), or perhaps even as late as the early modern period (c. 1500–1700), an ancestor had hair that was red enough, or became associated with the color red in some way that the name Rossi stuck to them.[9] Similarly, very few people with the surname Robinson today are the ‘son’ of a man called ‘Robin’, but back in the medieval past when the name first entered that family line, someone was called Robin and their son then became known as Robinson. Although present in England or America, a Robinson might well be of Norse medieval origin, given the prevalence of the ‘son’ usage in Norse surname development in medieval time.[8]
See also
- Fall of the Roman Empire
- Early Middle Ages
- British surnames
- French surnames
- German surnames
- Spanish surnames
- Dutch surnames
- Portuguese surnames
- Scottish surnames
- Welsh surnames
- Sephardic Jewish surnames
- Italian surnames
- Roman surnames
- Lombard surnames
- Venetian surnames
- Serbian surnames
- Welsh surnames
- Slovene surnames
- Austrian surnames
- Alsatian surnames
- Belgian surnames
Explore more about medieval surnames
- Whity Chartulary record collection at MyHeritage
- Not Smith and Jones – Rare British Surnames On The Cusp Of Extinction at the MyHeritage blog
References
- ↑ R. B. Steele, ‘Roman Personal Names’, in The Classical Weekly, Vol. 11, No. 15 (February, 1918), pp. 113–118.
- ↑ Nancy Partner, ‘Henry of Huntingdon’, in Church History, Vol. 42, No. 4 (December, 1973), pp. 467–475.
- ↑ Andrew Fear and Jamie Wood (eds), A Companion to Isidore of Seville (Leiden, 2020).
- ↑ Bede. WorldHistory.org
- ↑ Surnames Historic UK
- ↑ Walter Bourchier Devereux (ed.), Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex, in the Reign of Elizabeth, James I and Charles I, 2 volumes (London, 1853), I, pp. 1–18.
- ↑ Why ‘-son’ rises in our surnames. The New European
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Surnames. Culture UK
- ↑ Rossi History, Family Crest & Coats of Arms. House of Names