One of the most fun things about baptismal registers is getting to see the patterns of names that parents choose for multiple children — both singleton kids over a period of years, and multiples in the sense of twins (I’m not sure I’ve ever come across any baptisms of triplets or higher; unsurprisingly). We’re currently working through a 16th C register from the Walloon Church at Canterbury, containing births, marriages, and burials, and have found two examples of twins in the data, one female and one male. In both cases, the twins are given names which are clearly associated with each other/related to each other. On February 19, 1582/3, Rachel and Lea were baptised, and on September 26, 1594, Isaac and Jacob. Isaac was the father of Jacob in the Old Testament, and Jacob’s two wives were sisters, Rachel and Leah — thus, a clear connection between the two names chosen to give to the twins. (Though it would have been even neater if Jacob’s twin had been named Esau instead of Isaac, to directly mirror the Biblical story!)
Tag Archives: Jacob
Some very special Biblical forms of names
York Gospels, York Minster, © Sara L. Uckelman, 2017
One of the long-term adjunct projects of the Dictionary is to look at how various names are spelled in the earliest vernacular translations of the Bible, because these translations had a significant influence on how the names were spelled when they were used in common currency. Because there are so many Biblical names and so many vernacular translations produced before 1600, added the citations to the relevant entries is an on-going process; we can generally add the Middle English forms from the Wycliffite translation of 1395 right at the start because there is a handy online searchable version of it available. For other Biblical names, we are slowly working through the alphabet adding for (cf., e.g., Aaron, which has forms from the Wycliffite Bible, the Geneva Bible of 1560, and in the next edition will have citations from the Sagrados Escrituras of 1569).
The vast majority of the time, the DMNES editors do data collection for the Dictionary via printed editions; we simply do not have the time, volunteer power, or money to work solely with manuscripts. But every once in awhile, we do get to have an encounter with a manuscript that has names in it, and last weekend on a trip to York, our editor-in-chief had a manuscript encounter which involved both early Bibles and names. In the undercroft of York minster, the York Gospels are on display. The Minster’s website says of the Gospels:
The York Gospels were brought to York in around 1020 by Archbishop Wulfstan and the 1,000 year old text is still used in services today. The Anglo-Saxon book is one of the most valuable in York Minster’s collection and is one of the few surviving items from the Saxon Minster, the location for which is unknown today.
It contains four Gospels rather than the whole bible and is filled with elaborate illustrations as well as a letter from King Canute dated around 1019. It’s believed its original pages were written in Canterbury in around 990AD, with additional pages added to the manuscript by the Dean and Chapter after they arrived in York.
The Gospels are currently on display in the cathedral’s Revealing York Minster in the Undercroft attraction. The book is stored behind glass but visitors can turn virtual pages of the book to take a closer look at some of the illuminated pages using touch screen displays adjacent to the case.
Often when a manuscript Bible is on display, a page with a fancy illuminated initial, or a whole-page picture, are chosen; these are the eye-catching ones that display the true beauty and skill of medieval artwork. But the York Gospel has a rather plain and simple spread on display, something that might seem boring or ordinary to the average viewer.
But to the onomast?
The page that’s on display contains part of the genealogy of Jesus, and thus it gives us first-hand knowledge of how scribes rendered these names in Latin in the 10th C.
What could be more beautiful?
…who was of Aram, who was of Efrom, who was of Phares, who was of Iudea, who was of Iacob, who was of Isaac, who was of Abraha, who was of Thare, who was of Nachor, who was of Seruch, who was of Ragau, who was of Phaleg, who was of Eber, who was of Sala, who was of Cainan, who was of Arfaxat, who was of Sem, who was of Noe, who was of Lamech, who was of Matusale, who was of Enoh, who was of Iared, who was of Malalehel, who was of Chainan, who was of Enos, who was of Seth, who was of Adam, who was of God.
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Why is James a form of Jacob?
Today’s question is another one that probably everyone who has spent any time thinking about names has thought about at one time or another — just how exactly do you get James as a variant of the name Jacob?! The only letters they share are Ja-, which from a modern point of view is a pretty tenuous connection.
The answer is…it’s actually pretty straightforward!
The standard Latin form of the name was Jacobus, but in Italy, southern France, and Switzerland, the -b- became -m-, e.g., Jacomus, eventually giving rise to the Italian form Giacomo and the Provencal and Catalan form Jacme. Very rarely, Jacomus became James in Old French, and when that form of the name got imported into England (early 13th C examples of James in England can be found in the records of King John), it supplanted the more common Old and Middle French forms Jaques and Jacques. This is why you tend to see James only in insular contexts; over on the continent, the Langue d’Oil forms retaining -c- dominated.
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Why is Jack a nickname of John?
Continuing our series of posts where we answer questions we’ve received (usually via FB), here we devote a post to the question of why Jack is a nickname of John and not Jacob. After all, the only letters that Jack and John have in common are J- — not much of a connection! For answering this question, we can do no better than quote Withycombe, s.n. Jack. We’ve added a few extra comments [in brackets]:
[Jack], the commonest pet-name for John, has caused a good deal of difficulty owing to the natural assumption that it must be derived from the French Jacques and should therefore logically represent James rather than John. The problem was cleared up by E. W. B. Nicholson in a little book entitled The Pedigree of Jack and of Various Allied Names (1892). He showed that there is no recorded instance of Jack, Jak, Jacke, or Jakke ever being used to represent Jacques or James, and that no statement in favor of the French connexion has been produced from any early writer. He then proceeded to elucidate and illustrate with examples the development of Johannes [the standard Latin nominative form] to Jehan [the standard Old and Middle French oblique form] and Jan [the standard Middle Dutch form], whence, by addition of the common suffix -kin [a uniquely English suffix], we get Jankin, which as a result of French nasalization becomes Jackin [this is the same nasalization that gets us Harry from Henry], and was finally shortened to Jack. There was a similar development from Jon to Jock (the Scottish form of the name).
Not much to say beyond that! Except that we do not have access to Nicholson’s little book ourselves, and would dearly love a copy. If anyone has one they could spare…
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Monthly topic: Medieval roots of modern names, part 1
Though we may be all about the medieval names at DMNES central, this is, for most of us, because we are interested in names in general, medieval or modern. So it should be no surprise that one of the highlights of the onomastic year is when the US Social Security releases their baby name data for the previous year. These lists are always a curious mix of the eminently traditional and the bizarrely modern, and there is little way to predict where a name will occur in the list on the basis of which of these two camps it most falls in. We thought we’d spend time this month looking at the names in the top 1000 and tracing back their origins. Are the new-fangled ones as new as they seem? What are some variations people could consider if they want a different twist on an old-fashioned name?
We’ll start in this post with the top 10 boy’s names:
- Noah: Number one name Noah is part of a venerable tradition of taking names from the Bible, but as we’ve discussed before. The name was used rarely in medieval England due to the mystery plays, but only became popular at the end of the 16th C.
- Liam: Liam is one of those name which is not medieval but derives from medieval origins. It is a diminutive of Uilliam, the Gaelic form of William which was in use since the Anglo-Normans invaded in the 12th century. However, the truncated form didn’t arise until after the 16th C was over.
- Mason: Originally an occupational byname, this derives from Old French maçon, masson ‘mason’.
- Jacob: This name and number seven below have, even more than Noah, a venerable history of use. Jacob can be found throughout Europe, while James is a distinctly English form of the name, even though in origin it derives from the Latinized French form Jacomus, which became Jacme in the vernacular.
- William: This is one of the few names of Germanic origin that not only didn’t fall out of use over the course of the 11th and 12th C, but became, if anything more popular. From William to Guillaume to Wilhelm to Guglielmo, the name adapted itself depending on the vernacular in which it was used. It also gave rise to a plethora of nicknames, including recognizably-modern ones like Will to unusual forms like Willick, Willeke, Wilquin, and Guilemon.
- Ethan: This Biblical name has always been more popular in the US than elsewhere, due to the fame of the Revolutionary hero Ethan Allen. We don’t yet any examples of the name, but given the trend for adopting obscure Biblical names that we’ve documented before, we would not be surprised to find some post-1550 examples in French, English, or Dutch.
- James: While James may be a distinctly English form of the name, it still has equal right to be called a Biblical name: This is how Jacob’s name was spelled in the Wycliffite translation of the Bible into English from 1395.
- Alexander: Another name which has been a classic for millenia, ever since one of the greatest military figures the world has ever seen swept onto the stage. The etymological origin of the name, deriving from Greek elements meaning ‘I defend’ and ‘mankind’, has also contributed to the popularity of the name. Medieval nicknames tend to differ from the standard modern Alex, with Sander, <Sanders, Zander, Sandry, Saßa, and Sandrin found in German, Dutch, English, French, and other contexts.
- Michael: Another name of Biblical origin. This name was popular throughout Europe, and, interestingly, it was so without having been the name of a pope, other major religious figure, or a king.
- Benjamin: Like Noah, Benjamin is an Old Testament name whose common use dates to the 16th C.
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An onomastic calendar: February
- February 1: Edward III was crowned king of England in 1327.
- February 2: Bona Sforza, queen consort of Poland, was born in 1494.
- February 3: Douce of Provence married Ramon Berenguer in 1112.
- February 4: Hrabanus Maurus died in 856.
- February 5: Aegidius Tschudi, Swiss writer and historian, was born in 1505.
- February 6: Dunnchad mac Domnaill, king of Mide, died in 797.
- February 7: Pandulf IV of Benevento died in 1074.
- February 8: Mary Queen of Scots was executed for treason in 1587.
- February 9: Agnes Sorel, mistress of Charles VII, died in 1450.
- February 10: Robert the Bruce murdered John Comyn in 1306.
- February 11: Elizabeth of York, queen consort of England, was born in 1466.
- February 12: Charles the Fat was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 881.
- February 13: Catherine Howard was executed for treason in 1542.
- February 14: The feast day of Saint Valentine.
- February 15: Pope Pascal II established the Knights Hospitallers in 1113.
- February 16: German philosopher Philipp Melancthon was born in 1497.
- February 17: Charles III, Duke of Bourbon, was born in 1490.
- February 18: Mary I of England was born in 1516.
- February 19: Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473.
- February 20: Edward VI was crowned king of England.
- February 21: James I of Scotland was assassinated in 1437.
- February 22: Robert II of Scotland became king in 1371.
- February 23: Justinian I orders the building of the Hagia Sophia.
- February 24: Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar in 1582.
- February 25: Theodoric the Great negotiated for peace with Odoacer in 493.
- February 26: Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia was born in 1361.
- February 27: Henry IV was crowned king of France in 1594.
- February 28: Pope Saint Hilarius died in 468.
- February 29: Oswald, Archbishop of York, died in 992.
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Masc/Fem names: When do they differ?
We mentioned in our previous post how Latin records are so nice for uniquely identifying the gender of the bearer of names — someone who is filius Edwini is the son of a man named Edwin, while if he were filius Edwine he’d be the some of a woman called Edwina.
But how often is this merely a requirement of Latin grammar, that every word have one of three grammatical genders, and how often is this reflective of the underlying vernacular practice? Naturally, this depends on what the vernaculars are, and those which descended from Latin (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) are much more likely to keep an explicit grammatical distinction in the names. In Iberia, that shows up in the preponderance of women’s names ending in -a (though, of course, there are exceptions, such as Spanish and Catalan forms of Beatrice). In Italy, you see the same marking of feminine names, but often paired with a distinctive masculine ending in -o (as can be seen in the list of masculine/feminine pairs in 15th C Florence). In France, southern dialects tend towards Iberian practices, while in northern dialects, masculine names are generally unmarked, while feminine forms are derived by adding an -e (earlier) or doubling the final consonant and then adding an -e (later).
In England, however, the Latin forms often introduced distinctions not present in the vernacular. Withycombe, p. xxxv notes that:
Latin records of the 12th to 15th centuries show that the custom of giving masculine names to girls was also common in England; they appear in Latin with feminine endings, e.g., Philippa, Nicholaa, Alexandra, Jacoba, but it is clear that girls so named were in fact baptized and called Philip, Nicholas, Alexander, James, etc….Other names which were commonly used for girls were Gilbert, Aubrey, Reynold, Basil, Eustace, Giles, Edmund, Simon, Florence.
When the only references we have are in Latin, it is difficult to obtain evidence via which to test Withycombe’s assertion about the vernacular. However, once we start seeing records in Middle English and Early Modern English, then it is possible to see to what extent the feminine vernacular forms resemble the masculine.
The majority of our examples of Philipa in England are from the 16th C, and the majority of these are variants without the terminal – (in fact, most of the examples with the -a are restricted to Devon, suggesting a regional early adoption of the Latin form as the vernacular.)
Feminine forms of Nicholas were never very common in England, and inspection of the entry for Nicole is only partly confirmatory of what Withycombe says. The vernacular forms have all lost the -a, but none of them have the -as. Instead, vernacular forms like Nichol and Nycoll look much more like the French feminine form of the name (and the spelling we took as the header name). This makes it more likely that girls named Nichol in the vernacular were named in accordance with the imported French form than simply given the masculine English form.
We don’t yet have any examples of Alexandra in England; Withycombe herself has only two early 13th C examples, adding that
Alexandra is found in England in 1205 and Alexandria in 1218, and these may have been named after a 4th-C martyr, though they are more likely to be mere latinizations of Alexander used as a girl’s name….Lyford 1655 gives Alexander as a f. name, and an early-14th-C English legendary gives Alisaundre as the name of the mother of St. Thomas of Canterbury
Further data will need to be collected to see more clearly how this feminine name appears in the vernacular.
Similarly, we have very few examples of Jacoba in English contexts, and curiously, all of them are diminutive forms: Jacobin, Jackett, and Jakett, all of which could equally easily be used by men.
Of the other names Withycombe mentions, only three of them do we have feminine examples from England. We have a handful of 12th-14th C examples of Basile in its Latin form Basilia, but our only vernacular example, in the 16th C, is not Basil but Basile, the usual French form. Eustacia in the vernacular is Eustice. The third name, Florence, is curious in that we have plenty of vernacular feminine examples of this spelling, — but no masculine ones! In fact, vernacular forms of the masculine version tend to end in -t, e.g., Florent.
It wasn’t until the end of the 16th C that you regularly start seeing Latinate forms, like Olivia, Isabella, Joanna, etc., instead of Olive, Isabel, Joan, etc., used in the vernacular. This is due in no small part to the influence of Shakespeare on English naming patterns at the turn of the 17th C, as he preferred Italian or Latinate forms of names in many cases. This penchant for the Latin -a ending can still be seen today, with the preponderance of feminine names given in English-speaking countries being ones ending with that letter or sound.
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Protestant names: Old Testament influences on men’s names (part 2)
In this post we continue where we left off, with the next installment of Old Testament names and where they show clear influence of the rise of Protestantism in the second half of the 16th C.
Gabriel: The name of one of the archangels, this name was moderately common in France, Italy, and Iberia throughout most of the later Middle Ages, but was rare in England before the 16th C.
Gamaliel (entry available in the next edition): This could be considered an Old Testament name or a New Testament — a minor character by this name appears in each — but either way, this name typifies the pattern that we are investigating. It’s the name of a minor Biblical character, it was essentially unheard of before the end of the 16th C, and in the 16th and 17th C, we can find it used amongst both French and English Protestants.
Gideon: The judges were a popular source for names, and Gideon is another example of this. Our examples are spread across all three of our sources, from the 1560s on.
Hezekiah: The major and minor prophets were another popular source. Our single example of the name, Esechias, shows the typical medieval spelling of names which in modern English are often spelled with -iah (for example, as seen with medieval Elias as compared to modern Elijah) — we’ll see this quirk of spelling again below.
Isaac: The name of the son of the great Hebrew patriarch, Isaac shows up in the medieval mystery plays, so the name was not unheard of in England prior to the 16th C, and outside of England it can be found in the 12th and 13th C, but in the 16th C, it is especially associated with the Protestant contexts that we’ve been investigating.
Isaiah: The name of another prophet, perhaps one of the most important in the Old Testament, we find it in a variety of French spellings in the registers from Caen.
Israel: The name given to the Biblical patriarch Jacob, after he wrestled with God. Unlike the name Jacob itself (which was, throughout the Middle Ages and after, so popular that there is no plausible way we can appeal to it as evidence for our pattern! A similar story can be told of John, so we will be omitting both from consideration in the present context.), Israel was never so popular, but we have a handful of examples in English and Dutch at the end of the 16th C.
Job (entry available in next edition): Another eponymous character of one of the Old Testament books, Job’s story of perseverance in the face of adversity made it a popular choice after the Reformation for parents seeking meaningful names. However, prior to the 17th C, it still remained rare.
Jonas (entry available in next edition): Better known in modern English in the form Jonah, the medieval form Jonas reflects the Greek spelling of the name. While the name was used rarely in Germany and Switzerland in the 12th and 13th C, in the 16th C, our examples all come from Protestant contexts.
Jonathan (entry available in next edition): The name of the beloved friend of King David, Jonathan can be found in Dutch contexts in the 16th C.
Josaphat: The name of one of the kings of Judah, we have a single example from Caen in 1565.
Joseph: A curious name in that there is no clear time of context in which it was ever especially, or ever especially rare. It, unlike many of the other names that we’ve considered, was not especially taken up by the Protestants.
Joshua: This name is the same in origin as Jesus, but the two names were almost uniformly treated as distinct. The name was never popular, but the handful of instances that we have are all from Protestant contexts.
Josiah: Like Hezekiah above, the medieval spelling of Josiah was generally -ias rather than -iah, and we can see this spelling appearing in Dutch, French, and English.
That’s enough of the list for now, we’ll return to it again in our next post!
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