 NCE BIRTHS START TO OCCUR, you will need to begin providing names for your new family members. You may choose to invent original names, or you may want to use an existing cultural/linguistic identity.
To aid you in the latter the following tables show names from some of the royal and noble houses of Europe during the mediaeval period (roughly from the 10th to 16th century). There is also a table of name equivalences across all the languages shown.
These names will also be used by the game system to generate names for new members of NPC families. Each NPC family will be assigned an identity with a specific house, and that will be the primary source of names for the family; the secondary source will be the wider pool of names from the appropriate linguistic background.
Each table shows:
- the name of the house
- the range of dates during which the names occur
- the names of the heads of the dynasty at the start and end of the range
- the language of the names and house
- the names, separated by gender, male first, and ordered by frequency – the number of times the name occurs in the period covered.
The names come from a number of sources: Wikipedia has proved invaluable, particularly in being able to use different national versions of Wikipedia to compare name equivalences across different languages.
Some notes on the names and houses:
- The core timespan is roughly 1000-1600 CE, but this has been used as a guideline rather than a hard rule; also in some cases, such as Pictish and other Gaelic names, there are no suitable dynastic lines to draw on in this period, so earlier timespans are used.
- The tables are based only on names of family members born into the family, not those who married into it.
- In royal houses, dynastic changes are usually ignored; for noble houses, each table generally shows the names for only one dynasty which held the particular title; in some cases this means that there is more than one table for a title, each for a different family.
- In some areas the holding of multiple titles by one family was a frequent occurrence, so the same names can occur in both houses.
- There are considerably more male names than female names; this is not because more boys were born into these familes than girls, but because record keeping was not perfect during the mediaeval period, and chroniclers attached more importance to recording the names of boys who might inherit titles than girls.
- Families tended to repeat traditional names from one generation to the next, but also infant mortality was high, so names were often 're-used' when a son or daughter died, and another child would be given their sibling's name. Even more surprisingly, it was not completely unknown for two living siblings to have the same name.
- Double-barrelled names have been split into their two parts.
- Gaelic names, particularly Irish houses, have been very difficult to research, and so the number of names shown is less than in some other areas.
- Names in Russian and other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet have also been difficult to research, and the transliterations are as accurate as I have been able to make them – which may not be perfect.
- In the table of equivalent names across languages, some of those shown are archaic rather than modern equivalents, for obvious reasons. The table not an exhaustive one; it is based on trying to find equivalents for all the dynastic names shown in the main tables.
There is, of course, no reason to stick to these names. Please feel free to find names from other sources or to make up names for your characters - however, anything excessively silly may be replaced by the GM with something more appropriate from your family tree.
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