Norman names

The Normans began as Norse Vikings. In 911 their leader Rollo agreed to settle along the northern coast of France and swear loyalty to the French king, and the territory they held became the Duchy of Normandy. Within a few generations these settlers had traded Old Norse for the local Gallo-Romance speech, converted to Christianity, and adopted the customs of French feudal life. In 1066 the Norman duke William the Conqueror crossed the Channel and defeated the English army at the Battle of Hastings. The Normans and their descendants became the ruling class of England, and their arrival reshaped the English language and the stock of names English families used.

The Norman tag marks names carried into England by that ruling class. Many were Germanic or French in origin, and over time they softened into settled English forms. Alison is one. It began as a medieval French diminutive of Alice, formed with the -on ending common in old French nicknames, and Alice itself traces back through Old French Aalis to the Germanic name Adalheidis, the source of Adelaide, built from adal "noble" and heid "kind, sort." Evelyn is another. It comes from the Norman French Aveline, a name of Germanic root, and it worked first as a surname before the Pierrepont family turned it into a given name in the 17th century. Evelyn was used for both boys and girls at first and only later settled as mainly a girl's name.

This tag is close to its sibling Norman French, and the two are easy to confuse. Norman French marks the language variety the Normans spoke, the Gallo-Romance dialect that fed thousands of words into English. The Norman tag marks the people themselves and the layer of names they brought. Many of those names were Germanic underneath, and they reached English speakers not directly but through the Normans, who had carried them out of France. Alison and Evelyn both show that path, from Germanic roots, through Norman hands, into the English names in use today.