April Fools heraldic shenanigans

It is the custom of the SCA College of Arms to create and publish Letters of Misintent on April 1, rather than the more usual Letters of Intent, full of shenanigans of some type or another. Much of the time these are filled with pop culture references made documentable to SCA period by means primarily of the FamilySearch records and the fact that late 16th-century English surnames were often found used as given names as well, but there are occasionally other types of shenanigans, though those are generally funnier to heralds than to layfolk.

This is the second year I've been the East Kingdom's submissions herald and therefore nominally in charge of deciding on a theme (or lack thereof) for the April 1 letter, creating it, and publishing it. Last year, everything was Very Too Much and I didn't get around to it; this year, I was determined not to let it pass me by, as I'm stepping down this summer and I wanted to have at least one with my name on it.

Behold, the East's April 1 Letter of (mis)Intent, the main project I've been working on for the last week and change.

All names on this letter, with the exception of the three that are credited to Lillia, are my work; all of the armory on this letter is the work of my deputy and successor-elect, Drasma Dragomira. (I'm also responsible for the theme, header/footer text, and coordination work of it, but I feel that that part generally goes without saying.)

I am ridiculously proud of this nonsense. I've wanted to do something like this for awhile, given that the practice of registering one's name in several different languages is one of the primary forms of shenanigans my heraldry household perpetrates, and given that "bad art is period" (along with its counterpart, "look at all the adorable derpy animals in every single period armorial!") is one of my favorite soapboxes. The theme is subtle at first glance, but should hopefully become apparent in its variations as you read through the letter.

Besides merely wanting to play, part of my intent in choosing this theme was to showcase the beauty of very common period names, and how much variation you can get with just the resources available on the heraldry.sca.org website: every single name is documented using the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources (my favorite source!), with a name pattern found in SENA Appendix A, and if necessary, a byname sourced from one of the no-photocopy sources found in the Admin Handbook Appendix H and available online. 

The given names and bynames were dated as close together as possible; in most cases, this means the same year, or within a decade or so on either side. There were some where there were just too many gaps in the available data, having restricted myself to the sources above, but even allowing for that, I tried to keep them within at most 100 years.

Additionally, I tried to strike a reasonable balance of gender in the names, as well as representing several different types of byname: patronymics, occupational, toponymic locatives, specific-place locatives, inn-sign locatives. I tried not to have any one language dominant, though I did end up with more English names than any other, and I indulged my own linguistic preferences by putting in a whole two Czech names; I also tried not to go heavy on the A names, knowing how overrepresented those are in the SCA naming pool.

The main struggle I ran into with this project, besides those gaps in dates, was an artistic one: it was surprisingly hard to strike an appropriate balance between showing off the most unusual spellings and variants of each name, and finding variants that would be recognizable enough to the average reader that it would still feel accessible rather than excessively niche. I spent quite a bit of time deciding which header names would form the base of this project, since my criteria were generally that they needed to have several different languages represented, and they needed to have at least three clearly different variants (rather than simply changing one or two letters - Elisabeth vs Elizabeth vs Elsebeth wasn't enough, but Elisabeta vs Elska vs Ysabetta was). There were several more potentials in my starting list, but between running short on time, feeling that most byname pattern options had been represented, and not wanting to overwhelm Drasma with things to link armory to, I didn't feel that it needed much more.

I cannot express in words how much fun this was to put together; frolicking in the DMNES and striving for excessive temporal compatibility is one of my favorite things to do, and I don't get to do it very often these days.