ABSTRACT
It could be argued that the service of baptism in early modern England was not, for much of the population, so much a religious rite as a naming ceremony. Not only did it induct the infant into the spiritual and temporal communities, but also, paradoxically, it gave them their individual identity, carried in their forename.1 Names thus marked the place of individuals in society, as Levi-Strauss put it, ‘allotting positions in a system admitting of several dimensions’.2 In recent years the historical study of patterns of naming in pre-industrial England, has begun to receive some serious scholarly attention, mainly directed toward its use as a mechanism for understanding the nature of family life. However, naming patterns can also provide a means of illuminating the wider social system and aspects of popular religious mentality.3 For the medieval period, Cecily Clark observed that,
each personal name not only recorded an individual and conscious response to custom and to the models available but died with its bearer. So being datable and individually chosen as well as multitudinous, personal names reflected social composition and social attitudes in their contemporaneous variety and their evolution.4
