Prepping Names for Use: Norman Names

The Middle Ages featured prominently people with names you would never hear today. A lot of the names, especially names that don't have a good analogue in English, are hard to pronounce for Americans and presumably native English speakers. So at the risk of being scolded for cultural insensitivity, I want to boil a list of authentic names from each of our ethnic groups down to a list of 50 names that sound authentic, but are also easy to spell and to pronounce.  This is a game, not an historical dissertation. Stuff is going to be inaccurate, and that's OK!

I'm going to go through this process step by step for you, using Norman male given names as our example set. Wikipedia gives us a list of 188 names commonly given to Norman men in the Middle Ages. In the absence of such a list, I would have used one of the dozens of baby name websites to find a good substitute.

Here is the raw list of names. Click to enlarge:

That's a lot of names! So the first thing I will do is remove the names that are the hardest to pronounce along with names materially similar to others on the list. Obviously I will choose to remove different names than you would remove. I encourage you to do this yourself with your own list of names. See what you come up with! I'll mark those removed names in red:

Condensed, it looks like this:

That's 117 names.  So what now? I have to say, a relatively arbitrary culling. We're still looking to slash 67 names so I'm just going to go at it. This time I'll remove names that don't feel exclusively French, and names that sound too modern, leaving, I hope, a happy medium.

Now with cuts I can only describe as shameful and a butchering of the Norman list, I've gotten to 50:

The last editing step is to Anglicize the names. Again - I know - sacrilege! But here it is Anglicized and condensed:

Finally we can put this into a 1d50 chart so you can just roll a random Norman name when you're playing or when you're making up a Marquess. I also took the liberty of adding the Norman female given names next to the male names, because you never know when you'll need a beautiful French girl to throw a monkey wrench in your PC's plans!