During the Tudor period of the 1500s, would people have used nicknames for their children in intimate settings?
I know the name pool at the time was considerably smaller than it is now, so many children had the same name. Would it be likely that a child named Elizabeth may have been called Lizzie by a parent, or Anne nicknamed Annabelle?
Thanks!
Absolutely! Not only would they have used them in intimate settings, these pet forms show up in written documents (such as christening records, marriage records, legal records, etc.). I've been research medieval European names for more than 20 years now, and have found numerous examples of pet forms in 16th C English names. You can browse The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources to see collected examples (e.g., in the entry for Elizabeth you can find the 16th C English pet forms "Besse", "Bessy", "Ebbatt", "Eliza", "Ellyce", "Ebbet", and "Ebbot", just to give an example). If you want to read more about nicknames in medieval Europe (not just 16th C England), I've written a variety of posts on the topic for the DMNES's blog, which you can read at https://dmnes.wordpress.com/tag/diminutives/