A recent vogue for supposedly traditional Irish names, as documented in David McWilliams’s book The Pope’s Children, has led to an increase in popularity for Siobhan, Sinead, Catriona and Sean, the second most popular name for baby boys last year. But all of them are relatively recent arrivals, according to a study by a Trinity College postgraduate student, published in the Journal of Medieval History.
Freya Verstraten, the author, said: “The arrival of the Anglo-Normans caused a radical change in Irish names. Unlike the Norse, who made use of Irish names for their children when they settled in Ireland, the Anglo-Normans didn’t assimilate smoothly. Although they did inter-marry, Irish names for children with an Anglo-Norman father — and therefore an Anglo-Norman surname — were very rare.”
While the Anglo-Normans snubbed traditional Irish names such as Conor, Cormac, Niall, Brian and Brigid, the aspirational lower nobility began to use the newly imported names. So Eoin, the Irish derivation of the biblical John, eventually gave way to Sean, the Anglo-Norman adaptation. Now seen as traditionally Irish, Sean is the 75th most popular name in America and the 39th most popular in New York state, due to the large proportion of Irish Americans including actor Sean Penn.
Other names introduced by the Anglo-Normans include Eilis, Liam, Seamus, Ralph, Richard and Muiris, all of which only began appearing in Irish records after the invaders turned up.
In the study, Verstraten says: “The lower-class nobles may have imitated the names of their Anglo-Norman neighbours to facilitate an easier entry into their culture, or it may have been a political statement showing their alliances.”
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Members of the lower nobility also adjusted their surnames to make them “easier on the ear and eye” for members of the new culture and to facilitate communication with the King of England’s officials.
In contrast, the Anglo-Normans resisted Irish names. Sean Duffy, a senior lecturer in medieval history at Trinity College, said. “We haven’t found a single example of an Anglo-Norman father calling his son an Irish name for the first 500 years after they arrived.”
Donnchadh O Corrain, a lecturer in history at University College Cork, agrees that a number of names seen as quintessentially Irish aren’t Irish at all.
“Patrick, for example, wasn’t adopted as a name in its own right until the Anglo-Normans began using it. Until then, it had only ever been used reverentially as Maol Padraig or Giolla Padraig, the servant of Patrick,” he said.
O Corrain points out that wealthier nobles retained their ancestral titles such as Conor and Cormac and did not submit to the “Anglicisation” of their first names until the “linguistic landslide” of the 19th century. “The upper nobility, due to many other concessions they made to the new culture, felt no need to adopt Anglo-Norman names,” Verstraten said.
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“With a new powerful elite coming in, these families sought to stress their ancient claims to leadership over their respective territories to make apparent the distinction between them and Irish families lower on the social scale.”
The Irish experience is the opposite to what happened in Scotland, where Anglo-Norman settlers embraced local names. “Whereas the English and Scottish rapidly assimilated with the Normans, the resistance by the colonists to integrate with the Irish was deliberate,” Verstraten said.
“They were ordered by their government not to ‘degenerate’ and lose their sense of ‘Englishness’. This meant that by the 14th century, the Irish and the Anglo-Normans were not allowed to marry.”
Duffy believes Ireland’s homogeneity was partly to blame. “There was a much greater ethnic mix in Scotland. Ireland, as an island country, was quite isolated and there was always a ‘them and us’ attitude. If you weren’t a ‘Gael’, you were a ‘gall’, an outsider.
“The Irish have always been open to experimenting with names, from flirting with glamorous Roman names in the 6th and 7th century to genuflecting in the direction of religious names after the country became Christian.”