Re-evaluating English Personal Naming on the Eve of the Conquest

Between 850 and 1150, the names of the people of England underwent a fundamental transformation. The old Germanic system of dithematic naming was replaced by system of monothematic names in which a diminishing number of names became shared by an increasing number of people. This is often seen as one of the many consequences of the Norman Conquest, and is assumed to have gone hand in hand with a switch to continental names. This article analyses three corpora of names from the pre-Conquest England in an attempt to re-evaluate the transformation in medieval English personal naming.