We’ve identified the most popular forenames given to boys in Cornwall around 1500. But to do the same for girls presents us with a data problem. The lay subsidy lists of 1524/25 that were used to identify male names include far fewer females. In fact, only 143 in the eight (out of nine) Cornish hundreds where the records are available. This contrasts with 1.123 men in Penwith alone. Nonetheless, 143 should be enough to give us a clue.
Meanwhile, in East hundred, stretching from Antony and Saltash to Launceston, the records for 1524/25 are unavailable. However, those for 1545 exist and these provide another 166 named women. This is a much higher proportion than found across the rest of Cornwall so it is best to look at East hundred separately.
We find that four of the most frequent five female forenames appear in both lists. Joan, a feminized John, is well out in front, reflecting the dominance of the name John among men. Joan was followed in popularity by Alice, Elizabeth and Agnes. Margaret was more numerous in the east, while Thomasia/Thomasina made the top five in the rest of Cornwall in the 1520s.
The tendency has been to assume that, by the late medieval period, there was a bigger pool of girls’ names from which to choose from than there was for boys. This is borne out by the Cornish data. Although Joan was dominant, it was nowhere near as dominant as John was among boys. Moreover, the proportion of women bearing the most frequent forenames, whether in the 1520s or 1545, was much smaller than the equivalent for men.
And here’s another puzzle. The number of women named in Penwith (just four), Kerrier (20) and Pydar (14) was very low when compared with elsewhere in Cornwall. What does this imply? Were there fewer widows in western parts? Were they poorer and therefore not liable to pay the tax? Were they more likely to have resided in households headed by men? Or were there cultural factors at work as these three hundreds happened to include the majority of the Cornish-speaking parts of Cornwall?
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