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 ...
acquiring Chinese writing, administration and methods of government (Chen,1931,2002). “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 ...
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 ...