Diminutive forms in 16th C England

http://dmnes.wordpress.com/2014/09/06/diminutive-forms-in-16th-c-england/

A remark in this post on an onomastics, 

that

it seems like people in the past were a lot less nickname-happy than people today. I’d be shocked to hear of, say, a Renaissance Amelia who went by Amy, or a 19th century pioneer Joshua who went by Josh

got thinking the authors of Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources. The comment surprised them because in the data they’ve worked with over the last decade and a half has included quite a few marriage and baptismal records from late 16th C English parish registers, and they’ve come across quite a few diminutive forms. They decided to cull data from an albeit very small data set (the data which is currently in the Dictionary‘s database, which is a very small excerpt of the data they’ve collected over the years), and do a bit of analysis.

Diminutive forms of names can mostly be classified into two types: Those where the radiconym was also in use, and those where it wasn’t. In the later case, by the 16th C, it may not really make sense to speak of those names being diminutives, if there no longer is, and hasn’t been for a long time, a name that they are a diminutive of.

In this category, we can class such names as Ursula, Wilmot, and Thomasine and their (very numerous) variants. These names derive from Ursa, Willelma/Williama and Thomasse/Thomasa, respectively, but these forms have historically been vanishingly rare in English. (Thomasse appears in French, Guillerma and variants in Spanish, and Ursa in Italian.) A masculine witness to this is Lancelot, and its variants; these are etymologically diminutives of Lance, but the popularity of the Arthurian character meant that the double diminutive form was far more popular than the radiconym.

Of the names where the radiconym was still in common currency, they can further divide the examples into those where the diminutive form is roughly as common as its root, and those where the nickname is substantially less common. In the former category are names such as Alison, Marian, and Isabel. The latter category are the ones that they believe the poster quoted above would find most surprising:

• Annie 1586, 1597 (from Anne)
• Beaton 1581 (from Beatrice)
• Davy 1599 (from David)
• Emot, Emet 1418, Emote 1580 (from Emma)
• Ebbot 1597, Ebbet 1597 (from Elizabeth, or possibly Isabel)
• Eliza 1567, 1581, 1582, 1584, 1594, 1595 (from Elizabeth)
• Elineta 1563 (from Ellen, or possibly Eleanor)
• Kate 1596 (from Katherine)
• Nancy 1583 (from Anne)
• Sybbie 1573 (from Sybil)

And this is only looking at examples which have 16th C citations; they omitted a number of 15th C examples.

This is but a small data set, and thus no strong conclusions should be drawn from it. But they think it’s certainly clear that nicknames were used in the Renaissance, even in as official contexts as marriage and birth records.