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Greetings,
Here's the information we found on your proposed 15th-century English name, "Alden Drake."
Your name is appropriate for around 1200, but not for the 15th century.
Unfortunately, there are several errors in the information you got about "Alden."
The source you found thought that "Alden" came from the Old English name "Ealdwine." "Ealdwine" does translate as "old friend," but Old English names were generally not given based on their meaning. There are names which mean things like "war peace," so we can be fairly sure that Old English people didn't think of names as having meaning.
On top of that, "Ealdwine" wasn't used as a first name after the 13th century. It survived as a surname, and modern people started using that surname (in modern form) as a first name again. But between 1300 and about 1800, nobody used any form of "Ealdwine" as a given name.
To confuse things even more, the late-period form of "Ealdwine" is "Aldwin," not "Alden." "Alden" derives from the Norse name "Halfdan," which was brought to English by the Danes who invaded northeastern England in the 9th century. The form "Alden" was used as a first name in England from around 1150-1300.
"Drake," on the other hand, is very common and was used from the 1100's until the present.
All this means that you have a couple of options, depending on what aspects of your name are most important to you.
If you want to use "Alden Drake," you would have to change your persona. "Alden" would have been used between 1150 and 1300 by someone who was living in a part of England which had been settled by Danish people.
If you want to keep your 15th-century persona, you'll need to change your first name. The Academy Library has a number of name lists; these can be found at
http://www.itd.umich.edu/~ximenez/s.gabriel/docs
Based on the lists, we can suggest the following names:
If you want a name which means "old friend," then you may want to consider a different byname. In period (as today), given names were rarely chosen based on their meaning, but people were often given nicknames which described them. Although, by your period, most names were inherited surnames, you could have a surname which developed from a nickname meaning "friend" or something similar. Some possiblities include:
The arms of Sir Francis Drake are "Sable, a fess wavy between three estoiles argent." This is a black field with a wavy white line running across the middle third of the arms. There are two estoiles (which look like stars with six wavy rays) above the fess and one below.
The arms of Sir Francis Drake are protected by the SCA, so you can't use them. However, you could modify them. If you chose arms similar to those of Sir Francis Drake for the purposes of implying a connection to him, you would have to have a very late-period persona (his arms weren't granted until the 16th century). If you're interested in an earlier persona, we recommend that you design your own arms.
Talan Gwynek, Arval Benicouer, Pedro de Alcazar, Margaret MacDuibhsidhe, Rouland Carre, and Tangwystl verch Morgant Glasvryn contributed to this letter.
We hope that this is helpful, and that we can continue to assist you.
In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel