ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2183 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2183 ************************************ ************************************************* * * * NOTE: Later research turned up additional * * information relevant to this report. * * See the end of the letter for details. * * * ************************************************* From: Lisa and Ken Theriot 16 Jan 2001 Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked whether is an appropriate name for a woman living in France between 1050 and 1400. Here is the information we have found. Basically, you've chosen a fine name for your period, though we will suggest some small changes in form and spelling. is an early form of an extremely common name, but we do not find this spelling in France for your period, except in documents recorded in Latin. Because is the common Latin spelling, it continued to be used in Latin documents long after the vernacular, or everyday, usage had changed. The at the end is a common convention of Latin; a woman whose name was recorded in 1100 as would probably have been known in vernacular usage as , or possibly an even more different form. A census of Paris done in 1292 lists , and the diminutives and [1]. Data from 13th century Lorraine has the spellings , , and . The editor of the Lorraine data states that he found forms beginning with up until about 1250, and exclusively and forms thereafter [2]. Around 1250, the spellings may have been used interchangeably, so we would not be surprised to see , , and in addition to the forms noted in the Paris data. Any of these would be plausible spellings for your period. The names of large areas such as provinces and countries often appeared in bynames as adjectives, like , meaning 'the man from Champagne', rather than , meaning 'of Champagne'. It's much the same as calling someone rather than . We find the term recorded in the 1292 Paris census for [1]. Of course, you would need a feminine form; we find in the same 1292 document. We believe that is the best recreation of this byname indicating your origin. In a different record from 1340, we find the same man recorded as both and [3]. This makes it clear that both forms were found, and were sometimes interchangeable. However, is certainly the more common form. This sort of byname, which identifies you by the region where you live, was quite common in medieval France; but it tended to be used almost exclusively outside the region mentioned. In Champagne, nearly everyone is a Champenois, so the byname isn't a very useful identifier. You mentioned that your persona was serving in the royal court; that's exactly the sort of circumstance where we would expect to see ethnic bynames like this one, so you've made an excellent choice. 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 Arval Benicoeur, Juliana de Luna, Talan Gwynek and Ysfael ap Briafael. For the Academy, Adelaide de Beaumont 16 January 2001 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - References [1] Colm Dubh, "An Index to the Given Names in the 1292 Census of Paris", Proceedings of the Known World Heraldic Symposium 1996 (SCA: Montgomery, Alabama; WWW: SCA, Inc., 1997), [http://www.sca.org/heraldry/laurel/names/paris.html], accessed 16 January 2001. [2] Jacobsson, Harry, _E/tudes d'Anthroponymie Lorraine les Bans de Tre/fonds de Metz (1267-1298)_ (Go:teborg: Gumperts Fo:rlag, 1955), s.nn. Jehan, Gehenne. [3] Morlet, Marie-Therese, _Etude d'anthroponymie picarde, les noms de personne en Haute Picardie aux XIIIe, XIVe, XVe siecles_ (Amiens, Musee de Picardie, 1967), p. 301. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Addendum, Arval, 26 Feb 2005, based on comments from Talan. In discussion of a submission to the Ealdormere College of Heralds, a commenter objected to our use of data from Lorraine in a discussion of French names. He made two main points: Lorraine was not part of France politically, linguistically, or culturally until very late in our period; and the majority language of Lorraine through our period was Frankish, not French. In the introduction to Jacobsson's E/tudes d'anthroponymie Lorraine: les Bans de Tre/fonds de Metz (1267-1298)_ Jacobsson says that the Bans de Tre/fonds de Metz are "e/crits en entier en franc,ais, si l'on en excepte quelques mots au de/but du ro^le de 1220" 'written entirely in French if one excepts some words at the beginning of the roll of 1220'. Examination of Jacobsson's data shows that a great many of the names are clearly French in origin, right down to their French diminutive suffixes of Latin origin. The language of Lorraine was certainly not Frankish: that term, as it is used in English, normally refers to the Germanic dialects of the Franks, especially in what is now France. By the eighth century those dialects had largely died out, and the term 'Frank' had lost its ethnic sense and come to mean simply an inhabitant of northern Gaul. (Doubtless there were still a few rural enclaves of Germanic speakers, just as there were enclaves of Romance speakers around Aachen and Trier as late as the 11th century.) [R. Anthony Lodge, French: from Dialect to Standard, Routledge, 1993, pp. 61-4.] The Middle German dialects of medieval Lorraine are termed Rhenish Franconian dialects in English; the German term is 'Rheinfra"nkisch'. However, as noted above, French was at least the language of record in Lorraine as early as c.1300; and in any case the names are clearly linguistically French. Names from Lorraine are obviously not the very best evidence for much of France; unfortunately, our data do not cover all times and places in medieval France so we often have to interpolate from what we have. In this case, the fact that we found similar spellings used in Paris and Lorraine, despite the differences in local dialects, is fairly strong evidence that those spellings were common to much of medieval France.