Robert Easton - The Good, the Bad And the Unready: the Remarkable Truth Behind Historys Strangest Nicknames

[ The Curious Stories Behind Noble Nicknames ]

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First published in hardback as Fat, Bald and Worthless 2006
Published in paperback as The Good, the Bad and the Unready 2008
1

Copyright Revd Robert Easton, 2006
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
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9780141903590

To

Harry the Dirty Dog

I was in the British Library last year searching for material on Charles III, the sixteenth-century duke of Lorraine, and on the reason for his nickname the Great. The catalogue revealed the existence of a work with the promising title The House of Lorraine by one Rachel Lindsay, and so I ordered it from the stacks, only to find it was a Mills and Boon romance set in Paris. Held close in his arms, her head against his breast, began the last paragraph, Nicole no longer felt any anger against him everything that had happened in the past was suddenly of no importance. While Lindsays House of Lorraine might not be the best source of information on Charles III, and the heroines easy dismissal of the past might be a little over the top, her words were a healthy reminder that, as The Good, the Bad and the Unready demonstrates, recorded history is a veritable minefield of contradictions and injustices.

How cruel of history, for example, to give the well-meaning if naive Anne Boleyn the perpetual moniker the Great Whore. How unjust of it to label for eternity the magnificent Charles II of France not for his devotion to Church and nation but as the Bald, for his supposed lack of hair. How kind, on the other hand, has nickname history been to others. Take for example the repulsive king Edward II of England, who, given his spoilt childhood, his callous and cruel indifference to all his subjects (including his wife), and his woefully inept military strategy, was perhaps one of the most embarrassing monarchs in English history. That he is known as Edward Carnarvon, referring to the castle where he was born, rather than Edward the Atrocious or Edward the Vile, is surely a travesty of nickname justice.

But thats the point. There is no justice in nicknames. Sometimes they are conferred upon an individual on a whim, sometimes after considerable reflection. Sometimes they are bestowed sarcastically; sometimes they couldnt be more serious. A person may be known for a physical attribute over which they have no control, or for an act of cruelty or generosity entirely of their own making. Nicknames. We all have them, whether we know it or not, and more to the point, whether we like it or not.

The English essayist William Hazlitt observed that a nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. Archibald the Loser and Hugh the Dull would surely concur. John the Perfect, on the other hand, might disagree. Thomas Haliburton, the nineteenth-century humorist, meanwhile, noted that nicknames stick to people, and the most ridiculous are the most adhesive. Elizabeth the Red-Nosed Princess and Wilfrid the Shaggy would probably nod their heads in agreement.

And yet I would suggest that nicknames (bynames, soubriquets, cognomens, monikers or epithets while they all mean slightly different things, they are used for the most part interchangeably) should not be disregarded as mere onomastic trivialities, but celebrated as adding colourful detail to history history that can so often be presented as bland and dull. The first three kings of Portugal, in many history books, are listed as

Alfonso I

|

Sancho I

|

Alfonso II

when they could be referred to as:

Alfonso the Conqueror

|

Sancho the Settler

|

Alfonso the Fat

This book pays homage to the humble yet capricious nickname. It champions and delights in a system of nomenclature that pays no heed to social status nor indeed to historical accuracy. It rejoices in a world where monarchs do not have numerals after their names but appellations such as Bald or Worthless, and where nobles are prominent not for their military genius or diplomatic success but for their moral fibre or the size of their nose.

While the word nickname itself (deriving from eke name, meaning also name or additional name) is only a few hundred years old, nicknames themselves are as old as the hills or at least as old as the time since people have occupied hills. For nicknames have been around for as long as people have wanted to find an affectionate, familiar or spiteful way of describing each other. Before the fourteenth century, hereditary surnames were extremely rare and so people used soubriquets and epithets to tell people of the same name apart. In Viking culture, men called Einar were two a penny; only one as far as we know rejoiced in the intriguing extra name of Buttered Bread. The eleventh-century Domesday Book often singled people out by profession or, as in the case of Roger God Save the Ladies, by other, less specific qualities.