I’m studying the Tudors, and at the moment am noticing a divide between the names of commoners - Lambeth, Perkin - and nobility - Henry, Richard, John.
Seeing as the latter set are regarded as typical, normal names and are still pretty prevalent today: when, why and how did ordinary people move away from such names as Lambeth and start adopting those of the upper classes? Was it a smooth, natural transition?
Thanks very much!
Onomastics pools are never random nor "free". Fashion and tradition play an important role, but yes, it is related to class, and to religion as well.
First off, we don't know if Anglo-Saxons were aware of what their names meant or if they cared at all. Christians naming their children "Elf-Friend" or "Elf-Gift" is a bit weird, so historians tend to assume that, while they understood the meaning of the names, they regarded them as a tradition more than something literal. Some Christian versions like Godwin or Godiva (lit. God-friend and God-given) did spring up during the latter Anglo Saxon period. The Normans, on their side, may have forgotten what their names meant, since their Norse language was mostly forgotten by 1066 and the names that meant something in that language had been transformed beyond recognition (Hrolf>Raoulph, Vilhelm>Willelm, etc).
When the Normans took over England, the nobility either was substituted or absorbed Norman culture, and their onomastics changed. That's why Germanic names popular among the Normans like William, Richard and Henry became widespread between 1100 and 1200. Other popular Norman names were Walter, Humphrey, Ralph...
The nobility was especially conservative (or mindful) when it came to names. Naming your baby X or Z may signal anything from social intent to political aspirations. Henry Tudor wasn't born in a family where Henry was a traditional name, but he was given that name because young Henry had royal potential in his blood. The name would rally people to his cause by association. Henry III of England named his son Edward, a thoroughly uncommon name among the Norman nobility, but a name which rang of immemorial English nobility nonetheless; a signal that the English monarchy had left behind their days of living in France and being French first and English second (as well as a sign of devotion towards King Saint Edward the Confessor). And the fact that Henry VII named his eldest son Arthur after his victory in the bloody civil war that had engulfed England for two generations... well, obvious signaling there. Too bad Arthur died an infant, I'd have liked to see if he would have intitled himself Arthur I or Arthur II.
The common people, however, didn't necessarily have such a small pool of names (i.e. the names traditionally , and were much more attracted to devotional names, or general trends. In the 11-12th Century Germanic onomastics, which had been the strongest tradition since the fall of Rome, began to fade, as Christian devotional names took the stage again. John, Thomas, James, Sarah, Anne and Joan take the place of former Anglo-Saxon names like Alfred, Alvin, Edward or Norman names like Walter, Humphrey, Geoffrey, Hugh or Ralph.
The nobility introduced some of these devotional names, but they were much slower to adopt them than the commoners, whose pool of names grew. At some point the Church tried to limit the names people could use for their kids to only Saint's names (I'm unsure if that happened in England, but it was attempted in places like Portugal, France and Poland, with varying degrees of success). John, Richard, Thomas and Henry were some of the most common names, but names of a more obscure (i.e. Anglo-Saxon or maybe even Brythonic origin) also kept on going (like Godwin, Lambert or Chad).
By Tudor times, reading the history it feels like half the population was named Thomas, Henry, Kate and Anne, and that's mostly true. From then on, the pool of names stabilised, with no more sources of new onomastics, until Welsh-inspired names resurfaced before and after the Industrial Revolution, with the mass migration of country people to the cities, and later on literature, TV and radio became the main "name influence mechanism".
There's a research website fill of wonderful onomastics data for the Middle Ages, check it out: