ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2003
http://www.s-gabriel.org/2003
************************************

6 Apr 2000
From:  (Josh Mittleman)


Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!

You asked whether <Bernadette Mareschal de Vallee/> is an appropriate
name for a 16th century French woman.  Here is what we have found.

We discussed the first two elements of your name in our previous report
[1].  We have one new piece of evidence: We've found late 15th or early
16th century examples of <Mareschal>, thus verifying the spelling that you
want to use [3].  Please note that while <Mareschal> is a fine surname for
your period, we're fairly certain that it would not have implied that your
father was a farrier.  We believe that by the 16th century the French had
long since adopted inherited family names.  A woman surnamed <Mareschal> in
16th century France might have been the descendent of a farrier, but her
surname only means that her father's surname was also <Mareschal>.

<Vallee/>, with an acute accent mark on the second 'e', is not a correct
French word or name as far as we can tell.  No French word ending with a
double 'e' has an accent on the second 'e'.  Perhaps it's just a typo for
<Valle/e>, with the accent on the first 'e'.  This is a modern surname,
apparently derived from the word <vallet> "little valley" or <valleix>, a
dialectal variant of the same word from the Limousin region.  The surname
<de Vallet> originally meant "from (a place called) Vallet".  There is a
modern place of that name, in the Loire valley.  We don't know whether it
existed in your period, but since the place name preserves an older
spelling of the word, it is not unlikely that it dates at least to the 16th
century.  If you prefer your name to mean "from (a place called) Le Vallet"
or "from the small valley", we recommend you use <du Vallet>.  Note that
the Old French <le vallet> was masculine, while its modern derivative
<la valle/e> is feminine [2, 4].

We aren't sure how commonly the French used compound surnames in the 16th
century.  We have a few examples, so it is certainly a possibility; but
judging from the data we have, it wasn't particularly common [3].


We hope this letter has been useful.  Please write us again if any part of
it has been unclear or if you have other questions.  I was assisted in
researching and writing this letter by Aryanhwy merch Catmael, Talan
Gwynek, Walraven van Nijmegen, Adelaide de Beaumont, Blaise de Cormeilles,
and Julie Stampnitzky.

For the Academy,


  Arval Benicoeur
  6 Apr 2000


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References

[1] Academy of Saint Gabriel report 1911
http://www.panix.com/~gabriel/public-bin/showfinal.cgi?1911

[2] Dauzat, Albert, _Dictionnaire Etymologique des Noms de Famille et
Prenoms de France_ (Paris: Libraire Larousse, 1987), s.nn. Valle, Duvallet.

[3] Aryanhwy merch Catmael and Talan Gwynek, "Names Found in Commercial
Documents from Bordeaux, 1470-1520" (WWW: privately published, 2000).
http://www.ellipsis.cx/~liana/names/bordeaux.html

[4]  The Getty Information Institute Thesaurus of Geographic Names (WWW:
Getty Information Institute, 1999). 
http://shiva.pub.getty.edu/tgn_browser/