Was there a law against middle names in England?
I have come across a few instances in the tree where middle names were removed because "Middle names were illegial for non-royalty in [insert time period]".
I know that people didn't use middle names in England at the time, so the changes were almost certainly correct, but I wanted to verify that there was actually a law prohibiting it. The thing is, I can't find anything about said law, except for here: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/why-no-middle-names.htm
(There's also a WikiTree forum where it was brought up, but their source is implied to be the same page.)
I should hope that the National Park service would do their research, but I can't find it anywhere else, and they don't cite any sources. Does anyone know whether the assertion is correct?
Answers
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Hi @BraydenGraves A couple of sources in this article. Specifically:
“In early times the common law of England recognized only one Christian name and one family name,” said Elsdon C. Smith, the late names expert. “A middle name or initial was held to be immaterial and could be disregarded,” he added.
There is a big difference between illegal and recognized.
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The person who wrote that NPS piece was making unwarranted and subconscious assumptions left and right, mainly along the lines of "it's true now, therefore it must have always been true".
Take, for example, this assertion: "For centuries in Europe, a legal name consisted of a given or first name and a surname (or patronymic)."
The actual truth is that for centuries in Europe, nobody had ever come up with any concept even vaguely resembling a "legal name" — and even once countries started trying to keep closer track of people by requiring them to use surnames, and to register their desire to change those surnames, those laws only applied to surnames. Given names were not regulated. How could they be, when it was completely taken for granted by everyone (and I do mean everyone) that given names would be translated into the language that was being written?
Another false premise in that article is that middle names existed at all. Even today, in most of Europe, there is no concept of "middle names" as a distinct category from "given names". Some people have just one, others have more than one. Traditions of bestowing multiple names are more common in upper class circles; middle or lower class families vacillate between emulating the practice or denouncing it as pretentious.
Proving a negative is hard, but like you, I have found no evidence of any "old laws" in England regulating the use of middle names.
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I believe it was really just "custom and practice" that affected naming of children in earlier periods. The earliest I can find any English ancestor of mine with a middle name is in an 1803 baptism record. Throughout the nineteenth century it does appear to have become far more common for children to have been given middle names. For some reason, only two of my thirteen cousins (add me to that!) have middle names: it just appears to have been a "family thing" to keep names as short as possible, as - at school - is was rare for me to find a classmate without a middle name.
Actually, what is of greater interest to me is the reason why most of my relatives that emigrated from England to the U.S. are suddenly found with a middle name - well, at least a middle initial. (I never have been able to discover the full middle name in most cases!)
In Scotland, there was an established way for naming children: 1st son named after paternal grandfather, 1st daughter after maternal grandmother, etc. - again none of which involved giving a middle name. A Scottish female work colleague of mine had a name format that I understand became common in more recent times: her middle name was the surname of her maternal grandmother.
In summary, the naming of children in England, Scotland and Wales have followed different patterns, at different periods, in each (of the three countries that now make up Great Britain). None of which have any apparent evidence of being related to legal considerations.
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During the Long Parliament, some people definitely did have multi-word given names. See , which mentions (as relevant to this question):
- Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar
- Praise-God /Barebone/
- If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. "Praise-God’s son, he made a name for himself as an economist. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to go by the name Nicolas /Barbon/"
- Fear-God. "Also a Barebone."
- Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes
- What-God-will
- Joy-in-sorrow
- Fear-not
- Die-Well
- No-merit
- More-triale
- Make-peace. "see William Makepeace Thackeray, the novelist."
- Kill-sin.
If there was a law against bestowing multiple given names, or a widespread refusal by clerks to record them, after that date, perhaps it was a reaction to the excesses of the English Civil war. There might also have been a common cultural urge to be distinct from the Romance-language (that is, Catholic) custom of christening children with multi-component saints' names.
There certainly wasn't any such law in New Spain in the 17th or 18th century. In the hundreds of pages of christening records I've reviewed for certain towns in Mexico in that time period, I've only found a handful of children, if any, with only a single given name. (I did look at two pages with about 10 such christenings across them in a register from the late 15th century recently.) But there wasn't a concept of "first name" versus "middle name"; it was more that each person had a "bucket" of names, so a child christened "María Tomasa" might be "Tomasa María" on one record, and just "Tomasa" on the next, and just "María" on another one. Or worse yet, "Micaela Aparicia" might be randomly called "María Micaela" and "María Aparicia" in various places.
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@davidleelambert The Spanish aren't really part of the picture here, this is strictly an English issue. But the puritan names do seem to be evidence against the law's existence—assuming that the hyphens wouldn't constitute a loophole, of course.
Ultimately, I think that if the law did exist, we probably would've found it by now. There are plenty of weird law lists on the internet, and I'm guessing that if the law was real, it would be on every list that included England.
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My ears are tingling.
Yeah, this was probably me. Thanks to sites like Find a Grave and Ancestry trees and the bizarre conviction of a lot of folks that everybody just always had one, fake middle names are like the grand-spawn of kudzu, Ebola, the blob, and the 1-877-Kars-4-Kidz jingle. It's probably the most widespread form of genealogical data corruption happening right now. (Other than FamilySearch still allowing GEDCOM imports for pre-1800 families. And all of GENI.)
The reason I'm so adamant about stamping them out is that they're most often the result of sloppy editors weakly rationalizing why they dumped sources with different names into one profile. "Half the records say Mary and half say Elizabeth? Oh… Mary Elizabeth. Problem solved." Plus they trigger the system to recommend records that don't belong, and to merge profiles that accurately cover one individual as duplicates of the Frankenstein profile.
And then sometimes they're just ridiculous, absurd. Utterly deranged. These are the same kind of editors that will attach Civil War pension records to 17th century Irishmen.
So yeah, I unrepentantly attack unreliably sourced middle names when I see them. If the name ONLY appears on personal trees and disreputable secondary databases like the US&IMR or Family Data Collection, but not on any contemporaneous documents, it has to be treated as fiction. A legit middle name can always be added back if/when a primary source is found, but it's extremely difficult to scrub a fake one once it's out in the wild and being blindly copied from tree to tree.. If nothing else, whatever we can do to train editors to follow what's actually on reputable, period sources, it can only help. I've found that if an older ancestor had a legit middle name or initial, they tended to use it very frequently.
There is a big difference between illegal and recognized.
For a legal name? There really isn't. If the government only recognized one given name, legally you had only one given name. I haven't seen any evidence of people with one legal name going by two, but it'd probably be considered just a nickname. I have a feeling, however, that if you walked into a 17th C. English courtroom and demanded the magistrate address you by two given names, things would not end well. Ask the puritans how well-tolerated that kind behavior was.
Regardless of semantics, it is a fact that they were exceptionally rare in England and colonial America (except for German descendants) until the late 18th century, when they slowly started gaining popularity, but were still rare at the start of the 19th C., then much common by mid-century (though many still didn't use them) and ubiquitous by the 20th. But that's a lot to type, and if you tell people that only one in a thousand people had them, they're going to insist that their ancestor was that one, and here's a DAR report and a Geocities cite to prove it. Even telling them middle names were restricted to nobility is going to make more people think that proves they have noble blood than think they might have an error in their tree.
But telling people "middle names weren't a thing", "essentially didn't exist", were illegal or not legal or not legally recognized is clearer and generally accurate, and gets better results. I would more than happy to make that statement on a profile and be proven wrong, because it would mean somebody actually made the effort to do the research and improve the profile.
Of course there were aliases and familiar names, patronyms, etc., some other cultures using them earlier than most, and illegitimate children may have had three names. But a legit middle name in England from before ~1725 is something I only run across maybe once in a couple thousand record; more frequently they're transcription errors where somebody transcribed twins or siblings as one person, misinterpreted an occupation or residence as a surname, or just didn't parse a series of names correctly.
A few more articles that I don't see mentioned:
https://genfiles.com/articles/middle-names/
https://www.ancestry.com/c/ancestry-blog/middle-names-whered-they-come-from
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/England_Given_Name_Considerations_-_International_Institute
https://12ft.io/https://www.tribstar.com/features/valley_life/genealogy-fabricated-undocumented-middle-names-for-early-english-colonists-pose-problems/article_d4c07f55-4f49-54c3-adb6-23077e1caa5f.html
https://ancestralfindings.com/tips-middle-name-research/Other fun times I've seen fake middle names:
- People assuming that because later descendent had a middle name, every ancestor on the branch with the same first name also must have had that same middle name.
- "Sr." and "Jr" (usually on US census reports) being mistranscribed as middle initials. Even if only one record out of a 20 has that (false) middle initial, some editors will insist that it's absolute irrefutable proof.
- People who see it in a search result but don't bother to check the record itself to see that it's for a person born centuries later.
- A middle name being added to a parent's name on a death or marriage record for an adult child, decades after the parent died, probably by a spouse or official who never knew them
- An iincorrect name on a death record being interpreted as a middle name.
- People who think that a lot of women named Mary had the middle name Polly, a lot of Sarahs had the middle name Sally, a lot of Betty Elizabeths, Nancy Anns, etc.
- Falsely assuming everybody took their mother's maiden name as a middle name.
- People haphazardly slapping Mary and John at the start of every name, or randomly inserting Ann or Elizabeth as a middle name.
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The person who wrote that NPS piece was making unwarranted and subconscious assumptions left and right, mainly along the lines of "it's true now, therefore it must have always been true".
[…]
Another false premise in that article is that middle names existed at all. Even today, in most of Europe, there is no concept of "middle names" as a distinct category from "given names".
So if it's true in most of Europe today, it must always have been true everywhere in Europe forever? Whether they were thought of as 'middle names' or 'second first names' isn't really the relevant to the fact that almost nobody had them (in these specific places and timeframes being discussed — nobody's making universal declarations about always and everywhere).
Proving a negative is hard, but like you, I have found no evidence of any "old laws" in England regulating the use of middle names.
I don't know either, but whether it was a formal law or an unwritten understanding, the end result was the same, and we should all be treating them like any other piece of unsourced and disputed speculation.
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