Medieval Name Generator

Medieval people did not have fixed surnames for most of the period. A person was a given name plus a byname that said something true about them: where they lived (Aldric of Wexcombe, Osric atte Well), what they did (Alys Webster, Wat Tyler, Hob Ostler), whose child they were (Robert Fitzalan, Dafydd ap Gruffudd, Ingeborg Haraldsdóttir) or what they looked like (Reginald Longshanks, Heinrich der Löwe). Only in the late Middle Ages did those bynames harden into inherited surnames, which is why so many modern English surnames are medieval trades.

Given names came from a surprisingly small pool. After the Norman Conquest, William, Robert, Roger, Hugh, Ralph, Walter and Geoffrey crowded out Anglo-Saxon names like Wulfric, Leofric and Aethelflaed; women were overwhelmingly Matilda, Alice, Agnes, Emma, Joan, Cecily and Margery, with rarer gems such as Hawise, Avice, Rohesia and Petronilla. Across the Channel the same pattern held with French, German, Italian and Iberian spellings, and the Celtic and Norse fringes kept their own patronymic systems.

This list gives you all of those layers: Anglo-Norman gentry, Saxon farmers, French and German nobility, Italian merchant families, Welsh, Irish, Scots and Norse patronymics, working-class trade names, clergy, chanson-de-geste and Arthurian figures, and a set of fantasy-medieval names that follow the same rules for D&D and original fiction.