PREDATORY NOMENCLATURE AND DYNASTIC EXPANSION IN EARLY MEDIEVAL WALES
David E. TIzomtofl
This paper examines the “naming strategy” of the Second Dynasty of Gwynedd which dominated Welsh politics during the ninth and tenth centuries. It is argued that as the dynasty established itself in Gwynedd and then expanded its power through most of Wales, it adopted the personal names characteristic of the various earlier dynasties which it had replaced, perhaps to support onomastically this political expansion. Furthermore, when the dynasty became segmented into two main branches during the tenth century, it seems that the northern branch tended to employ personal names associated with earlier northern dynasties, and the southern branch those associated with the south.
Names are the very stuff of prosopography: without a knowledge of anthro— ponymic information, the prosopographer would be unable to identify and distinguish between individuals in the primary sources and thereby reconstruct or “reconstitute” the kinship and other interpersonal connections which form the basis of the prosopographical approach to history.‘ For long, onomastic studies remained largely the preserve of linguists, and only recently have scholars—such as the late Cecily Clark for medieval England—begun to study personal names from a more distinctly historical and prosopographical perspective.2 The study of
1Material from an early version of this paper wasfirst presented to the Celtic Seminar at Jesus College, Oxford, on 18 January 1996. I am grateful to Prof. D. Ellis Evans and the other seminarians for their useful comments.
2Many of Clark’s works have been published in the collection Words, Names and History: Selected Writings, ed. Peter Jackson (Woodbridge, Suff., 1995); but more specifically, see her “English Personal Names ca. 650—1300: Some Prosopographical Bearings,” Medieval Prosopography 8/ 1 (Spring 1987), 3 1—60. For ongoing onomastic research with a strong prosopographical perspective, we might note the series Etudes d’anthroponymie médiévale, under the direction ofMonique Bourin and others, and the resulting volumes of Genése médie’vale de I’anthroponymie moderne (Tours, 1990— ); the Table Ronde “Onomastique et Parenté” organized by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan and _ Christian Settipani; and the ongoing German project described by Jorg Jarnut, “Nomen er Gens: Political and Linguistic Aspects of Personal Names from the 3rd to the 8th Centuries AD.
