In the period of these documents the folk of what would become Catalonia didn’t use surnames, which can be extremely frustrating when trying to distinguish them. If they use two names at all, then the second one is either their father’s, by way of identification, or a nickname or ...
There are no firm rules on this usage, but as a matter of social fact it would have been difficult for a serf to impersonate a knight, and the penalty for doing so was grave. The vast majority of Sicilians assumed formal, hereditary surnames only in the early decades of the fifteenth ...
“Xianbei-ization” (Xianbei hua 鲜卑化), later emphasized by Dien (Dien, 2007), argued that Xianbei culture was for its part also consciously promoted, Xianbei surnames maintained among the elites, and Han peoples occasionally Xianbei-ized through surname adoption. Beyond defining hybridization,...
Many surnames today come from an ancestor's career during the Medieval period. Mason is the job title for someone working with brick and stone. Thatchers were roofers that laid straw thatch to create a waterproof covering. Even the name cooper comes from barrel making careers....
From a broader social history perspective, simply mapping the relations between people and places mentioned in these records (including, for instance, those expressed by notation of residence, origin, or even suggested by toponymic surnames) has significant value. Drawing on multiple datasets, we ...