Surnames, as thus defined, appear in French documents toward the close of the 10th century. However, in documents in which the same Latin form rendered both the baptismal name itself and all the variant hypocoristics, confusion between namesakes could be avoided only by the addition of identifying particulars, or surnames. In everyday life people who had received the same name at Baptism might be known by differing hypocoristic or diminutive forms of it, and this must generally have been the case when, as often happened in the later Middle Ages, the same baptismal name was borne by two or more living children of the same parents. The continued vogue of the five names mentioned above actually raised to nearly twothirds the proportion of 14th-century Englishmen bearing one or another of them. Once a name had gained favor, its success was prolonged by the custom, copiously attested for the English landowning classes but almost certainly not peculiar to them, whereby the name given to a child at Baptism was that of one of the godparents, unless longstanding family tradition or devotion to a particular saint dictated another choice. Of the names actually current at any given time, fashion concentrated popularity on relatively few: more than half the Englishmen named in 13th-century records are called John, William, Robert, Richard, or Henry. 850, and resistance to other innovating influences was protracted e.g., the Church generally favored only names with religious associations. The sources of Germanic name formation had dried up by c. Various circumstances combined to restrict the number of names in general use during the Middle Ages. Their universality was further emphasized by the fact that in written documents the same standard Latin forms translated them everywhere. Though vernacular forms naturally differed from language to language and though local popularity, such as that of Alan in Brittany, Baldwin in Flanders, and Edward in England, might affect distribution, the dominant names were then common to most of the countries of Christian Europe. Even in thoroughly Romanized areas this name itself was, from the 5th century onward, increasingly likely to be of Germanic origin: in Gaul the proportion of Germanic to other names -1 to 3 in the 5th century - had become 3 to 1 by the 7th century, and four centuries later the few Greek and Roman names in use were almost all those of scriptural saints. Reaction to this extravagance created a welcome for the principle observed by the barbarian invaders, that the individual had but one name.
Under the empire the "three names" ( praenomen, nomen, and cognomen ) that had earlier sufficed to designate the citizen were often swelled by the multiplication of cognomina to an unconscionable number. The last traces of the Roman system of personal nomenclature scarcely outlasted the 6th century in the West.
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