History of British surnames: the influence of the ancient Romans

You may never have thought about it, but the Roman occupation in part of today’s Great Britain has left much more than the ruins of villas. The Romans, in fact, brought the idea of ​​having different names together with the viaducts and the Hadrian’s Wall.

In fact, all male citizens had two names, one and what we now call surname. Slaves would have only one name, but 3 names would typically be assigned to young people from good families. The first name period indicated as “praenomen”, and period also simply a name, e.g. Gaius, or Julius.

The second of the three names is the “nomen” and identified the family or the tribe in which the boy was born. Julius and Annaeus are examples of “women”, but they weren’t necessarily hereditary. The third name period intended as “cognomen”, and age is purely descriptive and almost always negative. This will seem rather strange to us, but for the Romans, it was normal to give unflattering names to their sons.

Girls were usually given only one name, typically a feminised male name, like Julia, Cornelia and Aurelia.

The Romans remained 400 years, and even though English has words that clearly come from Latin, they are were imported from the French of the Normans rather than directly from the Latin of the Romans. The same goes for surnames; some surnames clearly have Roman origins. Still, we do not know if they remained after the Roman occupation or if they are important conditions later after the Norman conquest of 1066. Some examples of surnames of Roman origins are Martin (quite common), Vincent and Patrick. However, many Roman nomen still survive as first names like Claudia, Marcus,  etc. Only from the Middle Ages onwards did surnames become hereditary, but we will look into it another .time

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Liyana Parker

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