Throughout history one of the consequences of immigration was marriage between indigenous people and newcomers. Intermarriage, or exogamy, is the sexual union of an indigenous person and a foreigner, sanctioned by society, with the aim to produce offspring. Exogamy can be taken as a sign for assimilation between the two groups, and it can be seen as an agent producing it. In cases where immigration itself followed a military takeover there may have been, as we have seen, amongst the conquerors a surplus of young men looking to settle down with local women (see also Chapter IV.2). For our period intermarriage has been studied particularly by scholars of the Norman Conquest, amongst whom in the 1970s and 1980s Cecily Clark and Eleanor Searle dominated the historiographical debate by arguing that intermarriage after the Norman Conquest must have been substantial enough to explain the widespread change in naming patterns as well as legitimization of landholding by newcomers through marriage to English female landholders. The influential work of Cecily Clark was based on onomastic evidence which pointed to women's insular names surviving longer in the twelfth century than those of English men, who were given Continental names very soon after the Conquest. While acknowledging the absence of statistical evidence, she argued that intermarriage of foreign (French) men to indigenous English women was the most likely explanation for this pattern.