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Its pretty silly, but I always think of the conqueror as Guillaume le Bâtard and the Angevin/Plantagenet monarchs as Henri, Eduourd, Jean, etc when I think of t
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Its pretty silly, but I always think of the conqueror as Guillaume le Bâtard and the Angevin/Plantagenet monarchs as Henri, Eduourd, Jean, etc when I think of this period of history.
English history has kind of retroactively claimed them as being English, but they were not, and we miss out on all kinds of interesting dynamics of the politics of the period if we think of them as being English.
- Ichthypresbyter 5y agoEdward is an interesting one- it is an Old English name. Henry III was exceptionally pious, and decided to name his two sons after Anglo-Saxon kings who were saints (Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr). Of course, William/Guillaume is originally the Norse name Vilhjalmr (the same as the German Wilhelm). While the two elements Wil and Helm exist in Old English names (as in Wilfrid or Anselm), there is no evidence of any Old English name that combines them. Old English sources call the Conqueror "Willelm".
- sillyquiet 5y agoThat's interesting, I always assumed Eduourd was named for 'let's appease the Anglo-Saxons' reasons, not for pious ones. Of course, it's all pretty pedantic, given we are talking about names in Old English and Old French, and an Old French name is as removed from a modern French one as it is from an Old English one, so naming these figures with their modern equivalents for the modern reader makes sense too. I just like reminding myself these early English monarchs were not, in fact, English, and would not be, and would not consider themselves as such, for a while. It also emphasizes how much of a relatively unimportant adjunct of their French lands the Angevins considered England.