Names themselves weren’t codified as personal descriptors until the Domesday book. The idea behind taking a name appropriate to one’s current circumstance was that identity isn’t static. The concept of one’s public and private self, separately or together, changes with age and experience (as do the definitions of public and private); and the name or the label or the identity package is an expression of that concept. The child is mother to the adult, but the adult is not merely the child a bit later in time.

From Charlotte Prodger's Bridgit... (a Turner Prize nominee)