There are no more Chads in England

On the rise of Tom, Dick and Harry

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On an English farm in the year 1114 the workers were listed as being named Godwin, Soen, Rainald, Ailwin, Lemar, Ordric, Alric, Saroi, Ulviet and Ulfac, while the manor was leased by a man called Orm. As Peter Ackroyd wrote in his book on English history, by the end of that century every single one of those names would disappear.

Four years earlier, a boy from Whitby in Yorkshire had petitioned to change his name. His parents had christened him Tostig but, ‘when his youthful companions mocked the name’, the authorities agreed that he could become William instead.

Tostig had once been a perfectly respectable name in England; indeed less than a century earlier it was one which Earl Godwin, the richest man in the country, gave to one of his sons, along with Sweyn, Gyrth, Leofwine and Wulfnoth. 

Godwin’s most famous son was, of course, Harold Godwinson, who had taken the throne in January 1066 after the death of Edward the Confessor only to face two invasions: the first by the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, aided by the same Tostig, which the English king had successful defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Just days later came news that Duke William of Normandy had landed on the south coast, setting the stage for the most momentous battle in English history. It was a day which drastically altered the course of England’s history, one of the results of which was the near-eradication of English names.

While it’s safe to say that most of you won’t have grown up with a Leofwine or Wulfnoth in your class, you will probably know a few people who share the same name as one of the Conqueror’s sons - Robert, Richard, William and Henry.

The drastic changes brought about by the Norman Conquest are indicated by the rapid decline of people giving their children Anglo-Saxon names, which fell from around 85% of the population before the Battle of Hastings to just 25% in 1110, and entirely disappearing by the late 13th century. Since lower-status individuals tend to follow the social norms of those higher up the social ladder, their fashions, mannerisms and belief system, this suggests a total loss of cultural confidence and status among the conquered people.

It is not unusual for the colonised to adopt the naming patterns of their conquerors. Epigraphical inscriptions from Roman Bath show the proportion of Celtic names declining from the second to the fourth centuries, but the pace of change was slow and steady, unlike the dramatic transformation in naming patterns after 1066, which perhaps says something about the loss of prestige associated with English culture.

This led to the loss of such names as Egwinna, Elfgifu, Wulfstan, Penda, Ceadda (Chad), Eadric, Cyneweard, Godgifu (Godiva), Leofric and Uhtred. Today we only see such names in historical drama - Uhtred of Bamburgh, an ealdorman of Northumbria, provided the inspiration for the protagonist in Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom, even if set a century earlier. Scandinavian names, reflecting another pre-Norman wave of migration and which had been especially popular in the Danelaw region of eastern England, similarly declined into obscurity: Godwin’s wife had been a Dane and Harold, Tostig and Sweyn were all Norse in origin.

The likes of Ethelred, Athelstan and Leofwine were replaced by Carolingian names popular with the northern French aristocracy, including Geoffrey, Matilda and Roger, which over the 12th century were joined by the increasing popularity of biblical or Greek names like John, James, Catherine, Margaret and Thomas.

This trend, as is normally the case, saw the middling social class adopting the fashions of the elite, followed in turn by the lower social classes. As Robert Bartlett wrote in The Making of Europe, ‘soon, it seems, the English population of England chose to adopt the names of their conquerors. This process began among the higher clergy and townsmen. The canons of St Paul’s, London, for example, around thirty in number, include only one or two with English names after the start of the twelfth century. Eventually the peasantry took up the fashion. 

‘A list of the peasant tenants of the bishop of Lincoln in 1225, a century and a half after the Norman Conquest, shows how the rural lower class had adopted the names of their lords.’ Of 600 men listed, three-quarters ‘bore a fairly limited number of names – there were fifteen names that were clearly most popular. Of this group three-quarters again bore names of Norman origin. There were 86 Williams, 59 Roberts, and so on. Less than 6 per cent bore names of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Scandinavian origin.’ 

This homogenisation occurred across the continent in the 12^th century, and the theme of Bartlett’s book was the growing domination of the Carolingian – Franco-German – core on Latin Christendom, which led to French being spoken by ruling families from Scotland to Jerusalem, and growing German colonisation in the east.

This Franco-German dominance went hand-in-hand with the adoption of universal saints across the West at the expense of local cults, and so ‘the highly localised name repertoires of the early Middle Ages were replaced by a more standard pattern in which the universal saints were increasingly common.’ It was a process not unlike the growing ubiquity of restaurant and coffee shops chains across modern western cities.

He notes of the kings of Scotland and the rulers of Mecklenburg, once pagan Slav Abodrites, that ‘The early generations exhibit indisputably regional names. Duncan, Malcolm and Donald, for example, are names that would be found nowhere in Europe in the eleventh century except in Scotland. Similarly, Niklot, Pribislaw and Wartislaw mark out their bearers unequivocally as Slavs.’ Within five generation Gaelic and Slavic names had largely disappeared, and ‘Part of the change, both in Scotland and in Mecklenburg, is simple cultural emulation of a powerful neighbour. Scots called themselves William and Henry, the names of the Norman kings of England; the Slavs adopted Henry and Hedwig, the names of important German rulers and saints.’ 

Europe became so homogenised that by the later medieval period the majority of Englishmen went by only a handful of names – William, Henry, Thomas or John. Henry the Young King, the eldest son of Henry II, was a spoiled prince known for his ruinously large entourage, and once held a celebration of ‘great magnificence’ only for his friends called William - 110 of them.

English names almost entirely died out, only to revive in part because of Henry III’s attachment to the cult of Edward the Confessor. Edward was a strange man, and the murky evidence of the period suggests some less than saintly characteristics, and his Cause was certainly helped the politics of the age, since he was half-Norman and William based his claim on their kinship. 

Edward had also founded Westminster Abbey, which Henry III rebuilt in its current form, and such was his devotion that Henry named his first son in the saint’s honour. This Edward, one of the most effective but perhaps least sympathetic of medieval kings, was succeeded by his youngest son, another Edward, who in turn was followed by a son of the same name. As people began to refer to their three kings as Edward the First, Second and Third, so pre-conquest rulers of the name – Edward the Confessor but also Edward the Elder and Edward the Martyr – were omitted from the system of listing kings. Still, their name endured.

The revival of Edward was followed by the re-emergence of Edmund, built on the cult of the East Anglian king who had been martyred by the Vikings. Edward III named his fourth son Edmund and St Edmund appeared on Richard II’s Wilton Diptych alongside the Confessor. Alfred began to grow in popularity following Matthew Parker’s publication of Asser’s Life of Alfred after the destruction of the monasteries, which resulted in a growing cult of that great king.

Alfred’s grandson Athelstan, the first king of England, had once been considered a greater figure, something that can be hinted at by Ethelred the Unready giving his first son that name, but his popularity has waned, and I don’t think we will see that name reviving anytime soon.

Athelstan did enjoy something of a revival in the late Victorian period, a time when Anglo-Saxonism enjoyed its greatest popularity, in part because of national confidence but also pro-German feeling among the British upper class, which began to retreat with the Franco-Prussian War and completely collapsed after 1914. At the time there was a marked revival in Anglo-Saxon names such as Oswald, Edgar, Cerdic/Cedric, Edith, Etheldreda, Egbert, Hilda, Mildred, Osbert and Wilfrid.

When I was growing up ‘Ethel’ was still a stereotypical elderly woman’s name – there was a character of that name in Eastenders – but all of these have since largely disappeared, although Boris and Carrie Johnson recently named their son Wilfred. Chad became a popular name in the United States in the 20th century, but has since rapidly fallen away, while Oswald, tarnished both by Britain’s most notorious fascist and the man who killed Kennedy, seems especially doomed. While Ireland has seen a revival of Gaelic names with the decline of Christianity and saints like Michael and Patrick, there is no sign of any similar Anglo-Saxon naming revival in England. Like with poor Tostig of Whitby, we would find the social embarrassment too much.

When our son was born, I briefly toyed with suggesting Athelstan but knew it would never be allowed, and thought about how cringeworthy it would be shouting it across the playground. But with our younger daughter I did lobby for Elfrida, a beautiful and now rare Old English name which means ‘elf counsel’, but this was vetoed. She ended up being christened Eleanor - a name we’re all happy with, but yet another victory for our French cultural overlords.