Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English

language.

This is episode 117.

What's in a name?

In this episode we're going to take a look at names.

We all have one.

In fact we have more than one.

Most everyone today has a personal name and a surname.

And many of us have one or more middle names as well.

But that wasn't the case in the Anglo-Saxon period.

Before the Norman Conquest most people in England and most people in Europe only had one name.

But that started to change after the Norman Conquest as people began to acquire a second

or additional name.

At first those second names were not a redditary.

They didn't pass from parents to children like modern surnames.

But around the current point in our overall story of English in the early to mid-1300s,

those second names started to become a redditary family names.

Children began to use the surname of their parents.

And our modern naming conventions finally started to emerge.

So in this episode we'll explore how names have evolved over time.

And we'll see how those changes reflect the overall evolution of English in the middle

ages.

...