Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 3.djvu/620

 6oo APPENDIX C formerly of the MSS. department in the British Museum, may be read with advantage: " Charters, of course, must be considered as the best, and perhaps only, original source from which we can gain evidence as to the scarcity or com- mon use of Christian names. They all have testing clauses with a greater or less number of witnesses, and they can be, or are, dated. "The names vary according to the social position of the grantor of the charter. A royal charter of the eleventh or twelfth century would only have, as a rule, the king's tenants 'in capite' or barons as witnesses. These form a very small section of the community, and would be invariably Normans. Charters issued by tenants 'in capite' to their own under tenants, or to monasteries, would have witnesses with names of the same origin as their own in the first place, and a certain addition of witnesses from several lower grades in the social scale of the day. These latter might be attendants on the knight, or members of that large class called 'nativi,' 'villani,' tfc, that is to say the main body of the native popula- tion. Their names would vary considerably according to the part of England in which the charter issued. Though the same Norman Christian names appear everywhere, yet the English or native names difFer according to locahty. Again, from a very early period, in such towns as London there appears a strange admixture of names both Norman and English borne by citizens. It is among this latter class that Edward and Edmund have always survived in rather common use. We must remember that in records and charters we do not as a rule get many names of persons below the rank of holders of property, especially in the early charters, hence the pre- dominance of Norman forms. The evidence of a 'nativus' as a witness was not then of much account. By the time of Henry III the Norman forms had apparently swamped the native in most districts and towns, and the lower classes still using English names are not as a rule on record. Be- cause evidence is not to be found of the use of a Christian name, it cannot safely be concluded that It was not in use. I believe that the supersession of the English or Saxon names by the Norman-French was practically complete by the end of the thirteenth century."(^) Development of In order to understand the influences which were at work in forming the language. the names that have come down to us, it is necessary to bear in mind the development of the spoken and written languages in use during the Middle Ages. At the time of the Conquest, the educated of both peoples (or in other words the clerics) could speak and write Latin, the Normans {^) W. H. Stevenson writes: — "English names are very difficult, and philology is the only clue to them. We have Old English, Old Norse, both from the Danes (very often in older forms than are recorded in the Sagas), and from the Normans, who modified their Norse names in accord with North-French philological changes; we have French names (in various dialects) from the Normans, the Angevins, and the Southern French of Henry Ill's relations and dependents. French personal names are mainly of Frankish origin, but in the South many are Gothic, and the same Frankish name will assume different forms in different dialects. French effects enormous changes in these Germanic names by the operations of its own sound