The Latin word "alias" means "at other times, at another time, previously". English has a long history of alias names. In many ways this is not surprising. In the early Middle Ages into the High Middle Ages, a person's "real name" was their given name. Any additional names they acquired were descriptive in some way (relationship, occupation, location or descriptive of the person) and usually at best a quasi-formal name element. Such additional descriptive name were given by the people around them or a clerk to identify one person to the exclusion of other people in the surrounding population. Therefore a clerk, for instance might focus on John's occupation as a carpenter and record his name as "John le carpenter" while his fellows might focus their attention more or John's startling red hair and call him "John Redheved" or his father, and call him "John the son of Ellis". A different clerk might write John's name down as "John le Carpenter alias Redheved" or "John filius Helis Redheved" or "John Elis le Carpenter" or simply "John Elis". The alias sort of record demonstrated in "John le Carpenter alias Redheved" appears as early as the 13th century. At the same time, starting more or less at the top of society, people began to occasionally use the same descriptive name for a man's son as they had for the man himself. This was the beginning of inherited surnames. The process of turning descriptive names of various sorts into inherited surnames was a process that began in the 12th century and was not complete at the end of the 16th century.

By the beginning of the 16th century, large numbers of the English were using inherited surnames, some were still using various informal descriptive names, and some of them were deciding between various inherited family names. Additionally, in an era of unsettled pronunciation and spelling rules, some people found themselves using a variety of forms of the same name. And then, of course, there were some people who found changing identities to their material advantage, in a criminal way. In the 16th century most of the English conceived a "real name" being composed of a single given name and a single inherited surname. There were, of course, vanishingly rare examples of people with two given names or two surnames, but for the majority, a single given name and a single surname was the norm.

For some reason, though names with alias in them occur in the historical name dictionaries of Reaney and Wilson's A Dictionary of English Surnames and Hanks, Coates and McClure's The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, from the 13th century on, the vast majority of them are 16th century or later in date.

Below are two tables of alias names from the 16th century. The first list is of alias names that are not linguistically related to each other. The second list is of alias names that are related linguistically to each other, usual of the same origin, though some may be sound-alikes or distinct names that were regularly confused with one another. Robert Doore alias Sadlar or Dore appears on both lists because his record records two variants of Doore as well as another unrelated surname.