Someone asked a question about whether there was a taboo against regular medieval people using the same name as their kings. I had some data already for France c. 1300, but when I looked for the question again, apparently it had been deleted. But rather than let it all go to waste, here's what I had!

We know the names of thousands of people who lived in Paris in 1292, when a census was taken. It was edited and published as "Le Livre de la taille de Paris” in Paris sous Philippe-le-Bel, ed. Hercule Géraud (Paris, 1837), pg. 1-179. There is a list of names, where they’re from (if not France), where they live in Paris, and how much they owe in tax. It’s not a census of the entire city and it doesn't list every single person who lived there, but it’s still extremely useful.

It's a huge amount to take in and it’s all in French, but some places online that have done most of the hard work of compiling all the names and professions: "Names in the 1292 census of Paris" (www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/french/1292paris.pdf), and "An Index to the Given Names in the 1292 Census of Paris" (https://heraldry.sca.org/names/paris.html)

Based on those lists, the 10 most popular names in Paris in 1292 were (or were various forms of):

1. Jean (2320 people)

2. Guillaume (1275)

3. Pierre (917)

4. Robert (743)

5. Nicolas (498)

6. Richard (416)

7. Thomas (392)

8. Raoul (324)

9. Estienne (286)

10. Simon (272)

Some other people with names typically used by royalty at the time are Henri (262), Philippe (148), and much lower down, Louis and Charles (9 each). (There is also one Napoleon!) So only 148 adult, tax-paying men shared their name with the king, Philip IV, and the previous king, Philip III, and only 9 shared their name with the king before them, Louis IX, who was declared a saint only a few years later in 1297.

Not many tax-paying women were recorded, but the 10 most popular names (in various forms) are: Joanne, Marie, Alice, Agnes, Emmeline, Petronella, Marguerite, Isabelle, Mathilde, and Nicole. And my favourite part of the entire census: there were 21 women named Tiffany.

For approximately the same time period in southern France, there are 892 men listed in Early Gild Records of Toulouse by Sister Mary Ambrose Mulholland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), which is far fewer than in the Paris census but still useful. The data has also helpfully been mined online: "Languedoc Names circa 1300" (https://www.s-gabriel.org/names/arval/toulouse/toulouse.html). The top 10 in Toulouse were (including numerous variants):

1. Peyre (156)

2. Guilhem (127)

3. Bernat (107)

4. Ramon (104)

5. Arnaut (83)

6. Jehan (73)

7. Pons (41)

8. Jaime (19)

9. Vidal (16)

10. Bertran (15)

Medieval naming patterns have more to do with family tradition than with taboos or purposely avoiding specific names. The royal house in France was, ultimately, just one specific family, so they had their own naming traditions; other people, even people who lived in Paris, had their own, and neither avoided nor favoured royal names. An exception may exist in the evidence from Toulouse - there was only 1 Philip and 1 Louis. Here I would speculate that they weren't big fans of the Capetian kings who subjugated the south of France in the previous decades...

I know there is a ton of work about medieval naming patterns in England, but I don't know it/have access to it, unfortunately.

Last sunday I begun writing a reply to a "Fascism, why?" question by /u/BEBBOY - which took me quite longer than I hoped, and which is still half done anyways.

Nonetheless, given how I didn't have time to put together a proper week, I hope you won't be too disappointed by it (if you are a regular, many of those points have been touched upon already).

Also, I am going to add here a short summary of the 1919 political elections, since I mean to keep up with the idea that this is indeed

Week 89

 

The national elections of November 16^th 1919 – as reported by the Central bureau of statistics, in February 1920, under supervision of A. Aschieri – for the XXV legislature; the first held with the new proportional system.

Voters were 56.6% of the electoral body (5,793,507 over a total of registered voters of 11,115,441 – 10,239,326 having right to vote) – down from the 60.4% of 1913 (5,100,615 over a total of 8,672,249) – but, as the report explains, there was a substantial problem with the determination of the actual electors, due to the tendency of the local administrations to keep names within their lists even in the event of death, emigration or relocation to another province (to give an idea of the size, the last clean up of the lists in 1894 had reduced the electoral body from 3,006,345 to 2,159,214), so that the tentative estimates provided to the Ministry of Interior before the introduction of the new electoral law (9.7 to 10 millions) might have been more accurate than the official list. To give another estimate, of 157,093 electors who had previously been recorded within the municipality of Rome, only 105,394 could receive their electoral certificate – the others being listed as “nowhere to be found”.

For the first time – explained Aschieri – we are able to include informations on the political parties in competition within our statistical overview, since the new system also favors the collection of this kind of data. This part is nonetheless still lacking, since in Italy we don't have yet a precise identification of well defined and organized parties […] Only two of them have been able to deploy their forces to the engagement with disciplined method and centralized direction, and they managed to gain notable successes. As for the others, a statistical record is not always possible, due to the presence of blocks formed more often as a consequence of common interests than of a concordance of political views, so that it wasn't possible to isolate and measure the forces of each party. […] Lastly we provide a collection of the symbols identifying the lists taking part to the competition. It's reasonable to assume that the figure printed on them had some ideal correlation with the political ideas of the party or of the candidates […]

The new proportional electoral law – introduced with Royal Decree n. 1495 of September 2^nd 1919 – had rounded up the electoral body with the inclusion of all males 21 years old (by May 31^st 1919) and of those younger than 21 who had served (“active service”) in the Army or in the Navy.

The electoral colleges had been left unchanged but, where necessary, merged in such a way as to allow for the election of at least ten representatives (hence the formation of the Ferrara-Rovigo electoral college out of two different provinces within two different regions!) for a total of 508 (that's what they say, but colleges actually started at five elected representatives) – within each college the lists had to be submitted, twenty days before the elections, with a signed petition of 300 to 500 recorded electors, and they were to include a number of candidates equal or lower than the maximum number of eligible representatives.

The elector was to vote for the one list of his choosing, not for the candidate. An additional preference could be expressed for one of the candidates within the list of their choice, or (not both) for one to four candidates outside of the list, if the list was “incomplete” (that is with less than the maximum number of eligibles). The sum of list votes, preference votes and additional votes formed the “individual number”, which determined the rank of each candidate within their respective list.

The number of elected candidates for each list was determined by the amount of votes gained by each list, with the addition of the “additional preferences” gained by the candidates of the list normalized with the number of eligibles within the college. This defined the “electoral number” which was then used for computing the number of elected representatives with the D'Hondt method (which may be better known in the US as Jefferson method).

Notably, the proportional system had been introduced without changing the number of representatives elected within each province (so that colleges formed by merging two provinces elected the sum of the representatives destined to each province), which had been set in 1891 after the estimates of the 1881 census – this in exception to the deliberations taken already in 1882 which instructed to correct periodically the colleges with the results of each census.

This point especially was a fairly contentious one, since the socialist – traditionally stronger in the larger urban centers – could argue (with some reason) that the choice of leaving the adaptation to the new census hanging had been made to prevent their electoral affirmation. With this in mind, the number of electors per representative within each college was estimated as follows

Electoral College	Number of elected representatives	Number of electors per representatives
Alessandria	13	63,075
Ancona, Pesaro and Urbino	9	67,272
Aquila	7	65,276
Avellino	7	60,762
Bari	12	76,545
Bergamo	7	77,070
Bologna	8	73,260
Brescia	8	76,306
Cagliari	7	75,695
Caltanissetta	5	71,174
Campobasso and Benevento	11	60,205
Caserta	13	63,823
Catania	10	80,254
Catanzaro	8	66,591
Chieti	6	66,758
Como and Sondrio	11	71,965
Cosenza	8	65,328
Cremona	5	70,716
Cuneo	12	56,144
Ferrara and Rovigo	8	71,498
Firenze	14	72,139
Foggia	6	79,123
Genova and Porto Maurizio	17	70,399
Girgenti	6	68,900
Lecce	10	77,823
Lucca and Massa Carrara	8	70,217
Macerata and Ascoli Piceno	8	67,490
Mantova	5	70,601
Messina	8	68,247
Milano	20	87,138
Napoli	17	77,021
Novara	12	65,127
Padova	7	75,567
Palermo	12	68,283
Parma, Modena, Piacenza and Reggio Emilia	19	67,811
Pavia	8	64,699
Perugia	10	71,278
Pisa and Livorno	7	68,537
Potenza	10	48,591
Ravenna and Forlì	8	69,451
Reggio Calabria	7	67,200
Roma	15	87,104
Salerno	10	58,849
Sassari	5	67,664
Siena, Arezzo and Grosseto	10	68,492
Siracusa	6	84,004
Teramo	5	65,493
Torino	19	64,529
Trapani	5	74,112
Treviso	7	72,594
Udine and Belluno	12	80,148
Venezia	6	77,860
Verona	7	69,468
Vicenza	7	74,319
-----------	---------------	--------------
Total and Average	508	70,561

 

The number of valid lists submitted had been 283 (of which 99 “locked” - that is, with the maximum amount of possible candidates), with a total of 2,073 individual candidates (2,141 listed names due to 68 of them running in two colleges) running for 508 chairs (for a 4.2 ratio – a marked increase from the previous elections, held with a single-member college system, when the ratio had been 2.5).

The best represented profession was the legal one (36.6% - they also made up for 215 elected out of 501), followed by propagandists and workers (12.6%) - a category destined for the most part to the socialists (propagandist was used to refer to professional politicians and organizers – specifically, there were 60 over the total of 2,073, of which 31 managed to be elected), professors and teachers (12.1%), engineers and architects (5.3%), publicists (4.8%), land workers (4.3%).