Welcome to Nomina Britannica. This site is an output of an Irish Research Council funded project Personal names, migration and ethnic identity in medieval Britain, carried out by James Chetwood in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork. The project, which ran from 2022 to 2024, uses personal name evidence to examine the transformation of ethnic, cultural and linguistic identities in the region from the end of the fourth century to the middle of the ninth.
What’s it all about?
Nomina Britannica is a repository of all the names examined in the project, as well as the people recorded as bearing the names. As such, there are two types of entry, one for names, and one for people. Name entries detail linguistic and historical information about a name, including etymology, morphology, component elements and recorded forms. People entries record biographical information on the persons recorded by each name, including when and where they lived, the historical sources in which they were recorded, and (where available) further information about their activities.
What’s in there at the moment?
The IRC funded portion of the project focused on identifying names of Brittonic origin (the Celtic language spoken in lowland Britain before and during the Roman period) as well as the languages descended from it (such as Welsh and Cumbric). As such, the majority of the names in this release are Brittonic in origin. There are however a smaller number of Irish and Latin names included, as well as some Old English ones (including a number that were seemingly used to denote the ‘British’ identities of their bearers).
How will it develop in the future?
In future releases, more names will be added to the site in the aim of creating a comprehensive database of the names of the people of medieval Britain. Further functionality will also be included to enable searching and filtering by the metadata related to entries in the database.