Is it true that medieval villages didn't have names?

Question

Recently I've read a certain book about the Middle Ages that has been quite popular with laymen but is held in utter contempt by professional medievists. In fact, I hadn't known the book's reception history before I finished reading it, so I approached it as tabula rasa.

Now, I'm no professional historian myself but I do know a few things here and there, so I spotted some of the glaring errors myself (and of course missed some of the others).

One point which I am almost certain is an error but would like to query you about is this: the book asserted that

[...] villages were frequently innominate [...].

Is it true that medieval villages didn't have names? Is there archival evidence with lists of villages or something like this?

Answer 1

My area of focus is medieval Britain (I wrote a book on medieval names found in Yorkshire), and in that context I can attest to villages and even smaller places having names. And there were a lot of them. Just a quick scan through a manor court roll will give you a lot of place names, sometimes of places that have been subsumed into larger cities today, and occasionally of places we can't even identify today.

Another thing to notice from the court rolls is that, while people didn't necessarily travel long distances, they still got around their local area. Note people of various social levels traveling from many villages throughout the (rather large) manor to appear in court.

Look at English surnames as well. (Here's a list of quite a few.) A large number of them are drawn from places where an individual lived or worked or otherwise spent time. They refer to villages, farms, fields, geographical features, buildings, and more. Naming of places is pretty much universal both now and and historically, at least in the cultures I've studied.

I'd like to see the context of the book statement -- perhaps in context it makes more sense (there must have been a reason, and there is that word "frequently" allowing for some wiggle room), but out of context it just sounds very odd.

Edited to add more:

Google says it's from William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire. This is a more complete quotation:

“Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like.

“Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet, the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible. Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning."

This strikes me as... remarkably clueless, and very much a view of medieval people through a flawed modern lens.

(It's true that at some times people were known by one name, though. But even before hereditary surnames came into wide use, you had many, if not most, people known by a given name and a byname that referred to their parentage, or occupation, or appearance, or personality. And contrary to Manchester's assertion elsewhere on that page, it wasn't just the nobility.)

Answer 2

Some villages had histories and thus names going back to Ancient Roman times. A case in point is Matreium in the Austrian Alps, a small village then and now. So the statement that medieval villages didn't have names can hardly be true in an absolute sense.

As to whether villages were frequently innominate (as the verbatim quote claims), I'm not sure. As there were yet no national postal systems to speak of, there was perhaps no purpose in uniform naming of a domain's each and every village. But place names must have been in use by individuals: it seems just such an obvious concern for basic human discourse (e.g. "Where are you from?", etc.)

Answer 3

Plenty of village names come from the medieval times, so yes, they've existed. An example for the origin of such names can be the usual profession of its habitants. That of course led to existence of several villages with the same name around bigger area. Polish language Wikipedia a provides us with a nice list of such names followed by professions, but they're just an example, as there were many more of them. According to this article, between 10th and 13th century there were more than 150 such names of villages around the Lesser Poland region and more than 110 around Silesia region.

What's characteristic, grammatical forms of the villages' names changed with times. Before 13th century they were pointing at people who lived in the village. In 13-14th centuries they changed the way they could point at the name of village, what could be of course connected with losing of its unique, professional character.

Of course many villages changed their name with time. It could also happen if people lost the connection with previous name (f.e. particular profession didn't exist any more).

Answer 4

Medieval villages in Britain certainly had names. Even before the Domesday survey, carried out under William the Conquerer shortly after his takeover of the English throne, towns and vilages had names. Rural areas too, were named, often for geographical features, the local Lord, or the Church (Kirkby, for example). Former Roman fort-towns were know (are still known) by placenames ending in -chester, -caster and -cestre. Some places are known from written sources to have names from pre-Roman (Iron Age) times right through to the modern era. Take somewhere like York; it was known to Anglo-Saxons as Eorfic and Vikings as Jorvic. Both before the 11th century.

Answer 5

Many towns and villages took their name from the ruling family, the owners of the village.
For example the town of Bronkhorst in the domain of Gelre in the Netherlands is named for the family Bronckhorst (old spelling, the C has since been dropped) that ruled over the area and had its castle there. That keep was probably first built in the 1100s, when the lords of Bronckhorst came to power there.
Fantasy names, with no relation to the surroundings or history/political situation of a town were probably rather less common.

Answer 6

There is a grain of truth to what Manchester says. First of all, realize that in medieval times, the population was much more rural and people were more spread out than they are now. There literally hundreds of little crofts for every town. Many of these would have no name, or have some offhand name that was used locally.

This is not just a medieval phenomena. If you pay attention you will notice that the same situation prevails today. Many small communities, especially in rural areas, have no name. For example, north of Cazenovia lake in New York are several small residential communities with their own cemetery and airport, but none of these has an official name.

In the old West it was kind of a joke when a town was "too small to have a name". Sometimes they would give local joke names to transient towns, like "Dirtpatch" or some such.

France is kind of notorious for having small villages without names. During World War II it was a real problem because American soldiers would get instructions like "go 5 miles and turn left at the next village", and then they would turn at the wrong village because many of the smaller villages had no names, so you had to guess which village was meant. Nowadays, a lot of these villages have been given names but in 1944 it was different.

You can also experience the nameless village phenomena by going to rural Africa.

Answer 7

1) I think we're taking Manchester out of context here:

The quote starts:

“Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like.

“Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason...

It's been a few years since I read the book but clearly Manchester is talking about names from the perspective of the peasants who lived in them and not anyone else. They had little to no reason to refer to their village by anything other than "our village" anymore than they needed last names to identify individuals.

Manchester didn't mean that the villages literally had never been named by anyone ever. He meant that the peasent prespective on the world was so small that they individually did not require or know names that identified individuals or their village to peoples distant from the village itself.

We forget that:

1) culture and language were stratified by class in the medieval age, the nation state in which every social class in a polity was of the save ethnic group had not yet evolved. That meant that nobles spoke one language, the urban middle class another and the peasants yet another. Lack of direct communication made local variation of the same language very extreme.

So, no doubt the local tax farmer from the city had a name for each little village, and perhaps the clerks for the nobles had another but that doesn't mean that the peasants in the village knew what either name was or spoke the language the name was in.

People name things for labels. The same thing can in have as many names as there are reasons to label it. There is no such thing as true canonical name.

2) There were no quantitative spacial maps.

Look at the Doomsday book. It's not a map, it's a list of properties and surviving population with vague spatial inferences of relative direction and distance. If all you had was the Doomsday book, you could not recreate a map of England nor likely navigate to any small place mentioned in the book with any reliability.

All navigation, even at sea, was done by sequential landmarks. Miss one and you were lost. To navigate to a particular village you would have to know and follow precisely, a specific series landmarks making the correct turn at each one.

3) People who actually had knowledge of the wider world most likely wouldn't bother to go through the hassle of helping out a lost peasant. He would have to find someone of his own social class, from at least his general area, identify that individual as such, and then try and solicit help.

So, you're a peasant that calls your hometown "our village" day-to-day. Maybe you've heard someone else call it something or the other in a language and dialect you don't understand. Then an army comes through, binds you, blind folds you, beats you and keeps you hungry and dehydrated while they march in what to you is a random direction. Lose track of your local landmarks for just one branch and your lost.

When they let you go, which way do you run? Whom do you ask for help? The nobles who impressed you in the first place or their servants? Ask to see their copy of the local version of Doomsday book because...oh wait your illiterate. Doesn't matter anyway because they can't understand you and can't be bothered to try.

You likely would have to find an actual chain of fellow peasants, one captured local who knew someone captured a little further away who knew another and so on until you could follow the chain back to someone who lived within spitting distance of your home. How likely was that?

The village could have dozen names and be every public record and famous throughout the land for reasons unknown to the peasant but if the peasant can't map what he knows about the village with what distant outsiders know, he can't find his way home.