Naming practices among the Irish secular nobility in the high middle ages

The Anglo-Norman ‘invasion’ had a profound impact on the names used by Irish families. New names such as Seán and Uilliam, introduced in the thirteenth, became widespread by the fourteenth century. In a number of cases a link can be established between the first occurrence of an Anglo-Norman name in an Irish family and an Anglo-Norman magnate with the same first name in the same region. This may have been the case for women also. Women's names were possibly more open to change, but in this field in particular more research needs to be done. The societies of both the Irish and the Anglo-Normans were patriarchal and as a consequence the naming pattern of the paternal family was usually followed. There are many similarities between the practices in Ireland and those in the rest of Western Europe, but it seems that Ireland differed in that here the eldest son rarely received the name of his paternal grandfather. Within the upper classes, the high nobility seems to have had a different attitude towards imitating Anglo-Norman names then did the lower nobility.