Sozialer Wandel und die Zweinamigkeit im 11. Jahrhundert – eine französische Perspektive

Abstract

Social Change and Binominality in the Eleventh Century – a French perspective. – The paper treats the spread of second names in the eleventh century France and its underlying causes on the basis of sources from the counties of Anjou and Maine in Western. Previous research has focused mostly on toponymical surnames of nobles and seen them as a part of the “mutation féodale” and connected changes in noble family structure. An examination of the sources, however, reveals the importance of the urban population in the development of surnames. After the presentation of some examples of naming in charters and a section on sobriquets, individual variations and the inheritance of surnames are discussed. The second part of the papers treats the sobriquets of the counts of Anjou and Maine in the tenth and eleventh century and the discussion of their meaning in near contemporary texts. It is shown that the sobriquets appear only in the course of the eleventh century and are only contemporary for the counts after 1060. The increasing use of surnames appears to be the result of two coinciding developments of densification: The first is the growth of the (urban) population, the second is an increasing genealogical interest in the families of princes, leading to the creation of genealogies and historiography centered on princely families. Both of these changes resulted in an increasing desire to differentiate individuals bearing the same (first) name.