Norman French names

Norman French was the variety of Old French spoken by the Normans, the descendants of Norse settlers who had taken land in northern France and given their name to Normandy. When their duke William won the English throne at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, this speech came with him. For generations the Norman French formed England's ruling class, its landholders, clergy, and court, and their language reshaped English at every level. It supplied thousands of new words, a fresh stock of personal names, and a habit of hereditary surnames that English had not carried in the same way before. Many of the names gathered here entered English through that channel.

A large share of them began not as given names but as Norman surnames and descriptive bynames, labels attached to a person that hardened into family names and, centuries later, were revived as first names. Russell comes from the Old French rous, meaning red or red-haired, through the diminutive Roussel, a byname for someone of reddish coloring. Mallory comes from the Old French maleure, meaning unfortunate or ill-fated, a nickname for a luckless person. Marshall began as a Norman French word for a servant who tended horses, then climbed in rank until it named a high officer of the royal household and the army. Each traveled the same road: an ordinary description, then a surname, then a name given at birth.

Some names here reached English through Norman French without being French at root, and the honest account says so. Harvey descends from a Breton name built from elements meaning iron or battle and eager or blazing, carried into England by Bretons who fought and settled among the Norman ranks. Avery comes from a Norman French form of a Germanic name, either Alberich, meaning elf ruler, or Alfred. Evelyn goes back through an English surname to Aveline, the Norman French form of the Germanic Avelina. These are Germanic and Breton names in origin, but it was Norman French that delivered them to England, which is why they sit here rather than under the broader Old French tag, the medieval French of which Norman French was one regional variety, or on the modern French page.