Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 423

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 423

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/423

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Greetings,

Here's the information we have about your desired name "Margritte of Ravenscroft."

We looked through a large number of variants of "Margaret." For your period, the only spellings we found were "Margaret" and "Margareta."

In English records of the 12th and 13th centuries the common given names appear in just a few standard forms. The only written forms of "Margaret" in English from your period are "Margaret" and "Margareta" (which is influenced by Latin). We can safely say that "Margritte" is not a believable 12th century spelling of the name.

We're not completely sure how "Margaret" was pronounced in your period, but we're sure it wasn't pronounced "mar-GREET" or "mar-GREET-a." The two most likely possibilities are "MAR-gar-et" and "mar-gar-ET."

There is a place called "Ravenscroft" in Chesire. The references we found don't say how old it is, but we found a citation of "Ravenescroft" which is typical for around 1200.

Thus, "Margaret de Ravenescroft" would be a perfect name for an English woman from around 1200.

We would like to add that if you're thinking about arms, you should avoid a daisy. Because "Marguerite" means "daisy" in French, many SCA people named "Margaret" use daisies in their arms. This is an SCA cliche, and we don't know of any medieval people who made references to their first name in their arms. We recommend that you not do this.

Talan Gwynek, Margaret MacDuibhsidhe, Arval Benicoeur, Walraven van Nijmege, Zenobia Naphtali, and Tangwystl verch Morgant Glasvryn contributed to this letter.

We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to assist you.

In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel