What Would Your Choice of Baby Names Be If Your Child Had Been Born in Medieval England?

If you’d had your children in medieval England, say sometime in the 1200s or 1300s, what would you actually have called them? 

The romantic answer is that you’d have picked something lovely and unusual. The real answer is that you’d have had almost no choice at all. 

Let me walk you through it, because the story of medieval English baby names is far stranger and far funnier than you’d think.

Medieval England ran on a tiny handful of names, and I mean tiny. When Edward III’s officials carried out a survey in 1377, roughly half of the men counted were named John or William. Half. 

Add Thomas, Richard, and Robert to the pile, and you’ve accounted for about three-quarters of the entire male population. 

The women were barely better off. In the early 1200s, one woman in every six was a Matilda, and just five names covered more than half of all the women on record.

Picture your village. Ten men leaning on the fence, and two or three of them answer to John. It’s chaos. So when I say you’d have had no choice, I mean it. 

The Norman Conquest Ruined the Whole Party

It wasn’t always this way, mind. Before 1066, England was full of wonderful, Anglo-Saxon names. Wulfric. Leofric. Godwin. Egbert. Names with a bit of weather in them.

Then William turned up with his boats and his archers, and everything changed. Within a couple of generations, the old names were dropped in favor of the Norman ones the new ruling class brought over: William, Robert, Richard, and Henry. 

It wasn’t forced on people so much as chosen by them. Ordinary folk wanted to sound like the winners, not the conquered. Nobody wanted to be marked out as a peasant by an old-fashioned name, so up and down the country people reached for the fashionable Norman ones instead. 

And the man who started it all did rather well out of his own name. Before Hastings, he was William the Bastard. Afterward, William the Conqueror. Suddenly, every second baby in England was a little William.

If You’d Had a Boy

So, if you had a newborn son sometime around 1300, here’s your realistic shortlist, and what each name was telling the world.

William was the safe, aspirational choice, the name of the Conqueror himself. It comes from old Germanic roots meaning something like “resolute protector,” a will and a helmet bundled together. You couldn’t go wrong with it.

John was the other giant, and it only grew. It means “God is gracious,” and it rode the wave of devotion to St John. By the late Middle Ages.

Robert meant “bright fame,” another Norman import. It’s a solid, knightly sort of name. It was also the name William the Conqueror gave his own eldest son, though poor Robert Curthose spent his life fighting for a crown he never got. 

Richard meant “brave ruler” or “strong ruler,” and thanks to Richard the Lionheart, it carried a real swagger. 

Henry, “home ruler,” was the choice of kings and the sort of name that whispered authority and a steady house.

And then Thomas, which really took off after Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his own cathedral in 1170. Nothing boosts a name quite like a martyr. Within a generation, little Thomases were toddling about everywhere.

If You’d Had a Girl

The girls’ list was just as narrow, and the meanings tell you exactly what medieval parents hoped for in a daughter.

Matilda was the queen of them all. It means “battle-mighty,” which I rather love for a baby girl. It was royal, too. Matilda of Flanders stood beside William the Conqueror and ruled Normandy while he was off invading, so the name carried real weight. In everyday English, it is often softened to Maud.

Alice meant “noble,” and it was one of the most popular of the lot. Agnes meant “pure” or “holy,” a name to hang a hope on. Joan, the girls’ version of John, meant “God is gracious,” and it was as common among women as John was among men.

Emma meant “whole” or “universal,” and it was wildly popular. It had royal history behind it, too, thanks to Emma of Normandy, who was married to two kings and mother to two more. 

Then there’s Cecily, from the Latin Cecilia, with the rather poetic old meaning of being blind to one’s own beauty.

If you wanted to reach a little higher, there was Eleanor, made popular by Eleanor of Aquitaine, the queen who ran two kingdoms, and Isabella, who spread through royal marriages across France, Spain, and England, though Isabella of Angoulême gave it a whiff of scandal that clung to it for years.

The Beautiful Names You’d Have Lost

Almost all of those Anglo-Saxon names simply died out. Æthelred, Wulfstan, Leofric, Godwin, all gone within a few generations of the Conquest.

A precious few clung on. Edmund survived. So did Edgar and Edwin. And Alfred, the name of the only English king ever called “the Great”, hung on partly out of sheer respect for the man. But the biggest survivor was Edward, and only because of the cult around Edward the Confessor. Name your boy Edward, and you were keeping a little candle of old England alight in a country now run on Norman names. 

How on Earth Did Anyone Tell the Johns Apart?

When two or three men in every village share a name, life gets confusing fast. So people started tagging each other with a second, describing word to keep everyone straight.

John, who ground the corn, became John the Miller. John, who lived up the hill, became John of the Hill. John, whose father was Robert, became John, Robert’s son. 

Do that for a few hundred years, and you can see exactly where our surnames came from. Miller, Hill, Robinson, Baker, Smith, Thatcher, every one of them born out of the simple problem that there just weren’t enough first names to go round. 

Your surname, whatever it is, is very probably a medieval solution to a medieval headache.

So, Which Would You Have Chosen?

Put yourself back in a 14th-century cottage with a newborn in your arms and only a handful of names to pick from. A William or a John to play it safe and help your child blend in. 

A Matilda, if you wanted a bit of battle-mighty steel in your daughter. An Edward, if you were still loyal to the old England underneath the new. Or a Thomas, if you’d felt the pull of the martyr in Canterbury.

We think of naming a baby as this wide-open, deeply personal choice, a chance to say something about who we hope they’ll become. For most of the Middle Ages, it was nothing of the sort. It was tradition, faith, and fashion, all deciding for you. 

So tell me, which one would you have picked?