did, people light lamps and give them names and so name the child after the one which continues burning the longest, from thence conjecturing that he will live a long time" (Hom. in Cor., xii, 13). Similarly he commends the practice of the parents of Antioch in calling their children after the martyr Meletius (P.G. 50, 515) and urges his hearers not to give their children the first name that occurs, nor to seek to gratify fathers or grandfathers or other family connections by giving their names, but rather to choose the names of holy men conspicuous for virtue and for their courage before God (P.G. 53, 179). There are other historic examples of such a change of name in adult converts. Socrates (Hist. Eccl., VII, xxi) wrote of Athenais who married the Emperor Theodosius the Younger, and who previously to marriage was baptized (AD 421) receiving the name Eudoxia. Bede wrote that King Caedwalla went to Rome and was baptized by the Pope Sergius who gave him the name of Peter. Dying soon afterwards he was buried in Rome and his epitaph beginning Hic depositus est Caedwalla qui est Petrus was pointed out (Bede, "Hist. Eccl.", V, vii). Later Guthrum the Danish leader in England after his long contest with King Alfred was eventually defeated, and consenting to accept Christianity was baptized in 878, taking the name Æthelstan. Practice regarding names Various Fathers and spiritual writers and synodal decrees have exhorted Christians to give no names to their children in baptism but those of canonized saints or of the angels of God, but at no point in the history of the Church were these injunctions strictly attended to. They were not observed during the early or the later Middle Ages. In extensive lists of medieval names, such as those found in the indexes of legal proceedings which have been edited in modern times, while ordinary names without religious associations, such as William, Robert, Roger, Geoffrey, Hugh, etc. are common (around the year 1200, William was by far the most common Christian name in England), there are also a number of exceptional names which have apparently no religious associations at all. These include Ademar, Ailma, Ailward, Albreza, Alditha, Almaury, Ascelina, Avice, Aystorius (these come from the lists of those cured at the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury). A rubric in the official "Rituale Romanum" mandates that the priest ought