Nicknames in early medieval England: a socio-onomastic study of agnomina before the twelfth century

Thesis

This thesis asks new questions of the agnomina (or ‘nicknames’) of early medieval England. Rather than subjecting these names to etymological analysis alone, what can their themes, frequency, and distribution tell us about the people who gave and repeated them, and the process of naming itself? Building from a socio-onomastic framework, an inter-disciplinary methodology is advanced, by which a broad range of nickname studies are used to construct hypotheses to bring to our historical data.

A number of methodological challenges stand in our way: legibility, orthographical variation, phonetic modification, and determining culture-specific ‘meaning’. If we can begin to overcome these challenges through two approaches – comparison with broader lexical corpora and reading the context in which a name appears – a degree of ambiguity persists. We must not baulk from this ambiguity: this is an inherent feature of agnomina, and there is substantial evidence to suggest that the people of early medieval England also found the ‘meaning’ of a number of names ambiguous.

Three specific socio-onomastic hypotheses are tested. First, evidence for the use of agnomina as a tool to distinguish between similarly named individuals emerges; this model alone cannot explain the entire range of agnomina and their themes. Second, through the in-depth biographical study of a number of elite individuals, the ability of agnomina to shape how an individual is perceived is made clear: positively and negatively, during their life and after. Finally, the role of agnomina in publicising and reinforcing a community’s norms is tested, and found applicable, among the non-elite communities of later eleventh- and early twelfth- century England.

If the corpus of early medieval English agnomina is not as complete as we might hope, nor as easily interpretable as comparable modern onomastic data, it is nonetheless a crucial tool for the social historian.

Authors: Alphey, TK

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-0nyyq7v6g
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: onomastics; naming; medieval; agnomen; Anglo-Saxon; byname; names; agnomina; socio-onomastics; nickname
• Subjects: Socio-onomastics; Onomastics; History