Why So Many Medieval Children Shared a Name
If you’ve ever tried to trace a medieval family and found three different “Johns” in the same household within a generation, there’s a good reason, and it isn’t the one most people assume.
The standard historical guess has long been that children were named after their father or grandfather, following a straightforward patrilineal logic. The actual baptismal records point somewhere else entirely: a child was overwhelmingly named after its principal godparent — the person who physically lifted it from the font — not after a parent at all. Studies of surviving records show the pattern holding up strongly: in one set of citizenship proofs from York, roughly two-thirds of godsons shared their godfather’s first name, and among the nobility the figure runs even higher.
Combine that custom with an unusually small pool of popular names in circulation — late-thirteenth-century serf lists from three villages show only around three dozen male names and twenty female names in use at all, with John, William, Thomas, and Robert dominating the male side, and Matilda, Margaret, Emma, Alice, and Agnes the female — and it becomes almost inevitable that the same handful of names would turn up repeatedly within one family, purely by the ordinary coincidence of choosing godparents who happened to share names with each other, or with the parents themselves. Two brothers sharing an identical first name wasn’t a case of grief-stricken parents reusing a dead child’s name, as some historians have assumed — it was simply what happens when the available name pool is this small and godparents this influential.
The practical upshot for anyone naming fictional medieval characters: stick to a tight handful of common names for a genuinely authentic feel, and consider giving a character their godparent’s name rather than their father’s.
Browse all historical mystery titles by M. J. Westerbone at westerbone.com/books.