Re: Geoffrey Plantagenet's name (contempory evidence for the name

As I do not have a copy of Douglas Richardson's book "Plantagenet
Ancestry", I am getting a bit confused about which "Geoffrey
Plantagenet" is being discussed on this list. However, here is some
information I have written about "Geffrey Plante Genest" who is
generally believed to have fathered the Plantagenet surname of some 300
years later. I should be interested in any additional relevant
information. In particular, I should be interested in primary source
evidence for the contemporary use of the the name Plantevelu (Planta
Pilus) by the ninth-century founder of a new duchy of Aquitaine, Bernard
Plantevelu.

I had previously thought that the earliest reference to "Plantegenest"
as the nickname Geffrey the Fair, count of Anjou was dated to the 1170s
but I note that Douglas Richardson gives an earlier usage dated to the
1150s.

I have published a summary of the methodology giving rise to the
following sense to the Plantegenest name in John S Plant (2005) Nomina,
28, pps. 115-133.

SENSE TO THE PLANAGENET SURNAME

The Plantagenet name is often incorrectly applied as though it were the
surname of all (or many) of the English kings throughout the 350 years
from Henry II to Richard III but contemporary evidence for its early use
is sparse. As John Gillingham (2001) [John Gillingham, The Angevin
Empire, Second Edition (London, 2001), p 3.] remarks:

"But although Henry II's father Count Geoffrey was known as Plantagenet
it was not until the fifteenth century that this term came to be used as
a family name, and for the story that the name came from the sprig of
broom (Planta Genista) that he liked to wear in his hat to be put into
writing we have to wait until the nineteenth century."

We may quibble about John Gillingham's statement that the `sprig of
broom' story did not appear in print until the nineteenth century. This
is in error for, in 1605, William Camden wrote of Plante Genest that he
was so called because `he ware commonly a broom-stalk in his bonnet'.
Even so, Gillingham is not alone in doubting this story -- 1605 is long
after the first evidence in the 1170s for Geffrey's nickname. Rather
than just as a fashion accessory for his hat, we might surmise that it
is likely that the nickname Plante Genest was an echo of the earlier
name Plantevelu. It is of course possible for both explanations to hold
true: the name Plantegenest was an echo of Plantevelu and Geffrey Plante
Genest reinforced that association by wearing a sprig of broom in his hat.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (2000 version) makes similar points though
it credits a different story of how Geffrey's nickname may have originated.

"Although well established, the surname Plantagenet has little
historical justification. It seems to have originated as a nickname for
Count Geffrey and has been variously explained as referring to his
practice of wearing a sprig of broom (Latin genista) in his hat or, more
probably, to his habit of planting brooms to improve his hunting covers.
It was not, however, a hereditary surname, and Geoffrey's descendants in
England remained without one for more than 250 years, although surnames
became universal outside the royal family. ... The first official use of
the surname Plantagenet by any descendant of Count Geffrey occurred in
1460, when Richard, Duke of York, claimed the throne as ``Richard
Plantaginet''."

Hints of the hunting explanation for the name appear, in a less fanciful
fashion, in the Complete Peerage [Complete Peerage, Volume XI
Appendices, p.~141] which largely dismisses hunting in favour of
Geffrey's liking for a `sprig of broom' in his hat.

"Mrs Green says that Geoffrey was so called ``from his love of hunting
over heath and broom'' (Henry II, p.~6). This may be deduced from Wace
(loc.~cit,):

E al contre Geffrei son frere,

Que l'en clamont Plante Genest,

Qui mult amout bois e forest.

However, it is more likely that Geoffrey's love of wood and forest was
inserted for the purpose of rime than as an explanation of his nickname."

One might add that Geffrey was most famous for his marriage in 1128 to
the heiress apparent to the English thone and for his conquest of
Normandy in 1144. This may well have been more in the mind of the Norman
poet Wace (1135-74) when he wrote his poem which can be taken to allude
to Geffrey's love of increasing his lands like his predecessor
Plantevelu. His augmentation by marriage and conquest can be taken to be
evoked by the Plante Genest metaphor of a germinating shoot. When John
of Marmoutier referred to Geffrey Plantegenest in the 1170s he was
writing to please Plante Genest's son Henry II (nicknamed Fitz Empress)
and, with the Plantegenest nickname, he may well have been alluding to
Geffrey's gallantry.

The Latin meaning of planta was a `shoot for propagation' and this had
led on to the `hairy shoot' meaning of the ninth-century name Plantevelu
in Aquitaine. Connotations of generation should be placed in the context
of late medieval metaphysics rather than modern biology.
Transubstantiation became an article of Christian faith in 1079 though
it had been believed by many earlier. By the early thirteenth century,
Western European scholastics were developing elaborate schemes for man's
soul with its vegetable, animal and intellective components. Geffrey
Plante Genest's nickname probably related to his powers of generating
through marriage the shoots of an Empire, for he augmented by marriage
his family's Angevin claims.

Names of philandering were popular though, with the
mid-thirteenth-century Savoyard connection, there may have been some
interchange of influence between English and Swiss Plant-like names.

English:

Plantebene - pleasant shoot

Plantefolie - wickedness shoot

Planterose - risen shoot

Swiss:

Plantefoi - planted faith

Plantamour - planted love

Planteporrets - porrected shoot

Plantefor - planted conscience

With the Queen's uncle Boniface of Savoy as archbishop of Canterbury and
his compatriot Peter of Aigueblanche as bishop of Hereford, the Savoyard
influence may have been more godly than the `hairy shoot' tradition
implied by such names as Plantevelu and Plantefolie.

Those who knew scholastic teachings may have been aware of religious
aspects to Plant-like names. Johannes Scotus Erigenea wrote in the ninth
century that bone, nail and hair contained only insensitive vegetable
life (cf. Plantevelu). Atto, bishop of Vercelli (924-61) complained of
the practices of meretriculae in his diocese who baptised turves and
branches as coparents. Avicenna (c980-1036) maintained that the soul of
plants was shared with animals and humans. Averroes (1126-98) reiterated
a scheme for the generation of life from the elements, such as clay,
through plants and animals to man. Robert Grosseteste (c1175-1253) and
others wrote significantly about the vegetable soul with its powers of
nutrition, augmentation (cf. Planterose, Planteporrets) and generation
(cf. Plantevelu, Plantegenest). The human soul had three components:
vegetable; sensory; and intellective. Roger Bacon (c1214-c1294) said
modern philosophers taught that only the intellective soul was directly
created by God (cf. Plantefoi, Plantamour, Plantefor).

As scholastic ideas became better known, a more developed metaphysical
explanation for the Plantagenet name may have come more to the fore. By
those times the English word plant was coming to mean more a grown
shoot rather that just a shoot, and the word genet had animal-life
sense as a civet cat or a horse. The civet cat is elongated and hairy --
this may be compared with the Swiss name Plantaporrets, associated with
the elongated leek plant, as well as with the `hairy shoot' meaning of
Plantevelu. The sprig of broom also is hairy. More generally,
Plantagenet can be associated with transubstantiation through the
vegetable (planta), animal (genet as a civet cat or horse) and human
genera. In particular, the word {genet} means a small Spanish horse and
the Plantagenet name may have come to evoke an image of the young
Geffrey, as a scion or establisher shoot (planta), at one with his mount
(genet) in 1128 in his pre-nuptial joustings at Rouen.

By the mid-fifteenth century, Plantagenet had become a royal surname,
relating to the renewal of the immediate male line, following the
madness of the Lancastrian king, Henry VI who was replaced by a king
from the rival House of York. The Plantagenet name embodied a sense of
this creative renewal as well as indicating that the House of York
descended, like that of Lancaster, from Geffrey Plante Genest, their
common forefather of some three hundred years earlier.