Why the BLACK PRINCE was called the Black Prince | Edward of Woodstock | History Calling

why was the black prince called the black prince when his real name was Edward of Woodstock as Royal nicknames go this one is pretty good I think but this famous warrior Prince from 14th century England wasn't even referred to by this moniker during his lifetime and there are conflicting stories regarding its Origins this is history calling where I bring you new videos every week on all aspects of the past and today we're going to look at this ruthless one-time error to the throne and at the Curious tale of how hiki and his Unforgettable name [Music] before I jump in if you love history and would like more of it delivered straight to you please hit the like And subscribe button beneath this video and switch on the notification Bell so that YouTube lets you know when I upload you can also find links to my social media and patreon sites in the description box below Edward of Woodstock was born on the 15th of June 1330 and was the eldest son of King Edward III of England and his wife Philippa of a new I find numerous pronunciations for that one online by the way so I hope I've chosen the correct one the Woodstock referred to his place of birth but he had a raft of other titles a prince from birth he was made Earl of Chester whilst still only two years old Duke of Cornwall at the age of six and in 1343 he was created Prince of Wales from a young age he was heavily involved in the running of his father's realm as he was prepared to someday become Monarch himself at eight years old he was named costos Anglia meaning guardian of England when the king went abroad and he was traveling with him on Military campaigns when he was barely a teenager he began his life as a soldier at the age of 16 when his father knighted him in Normandy and fought soon after at the Battle of Cressy where he was nearly killed or at the very least captured by French forces he would go on to fight four and sometimes alongside his father in many other battles during his lifetime most notably in aquatician in 1355 and at the Battle of Poitier in September 1356 during which the French King Jean was captured and brought to England as a prisoner in 1360 an agreement with the French saw aquatine given to Edward as a sovereign state over which he would be Prince and in 1361 he married his cousin June Countess of Kent a widowed woman in her 30s who already had four surviving children The Prince and Princess of Wales moved to what is no modern day France to manage equity and in 1363 where Edward made himself unpopular through the levying of high taxes his extravagant expenditure and his generally high-handed manner during this time he and June would have two sons another Edward born in 1365 who died at the age of five and the future Richard II who was born in 1367. Edward continued to have to fight to maintain his authority in the region and there were battles with Enrique de trust Amara half-brother and usurper of Edwards sometime Ally Pedro the cruel in fact it was supposedly as an acknowledgment of his military help that Pedro gave Edward the stone known as the Black Prince's Ruby which is actually a spinel which now sits in the Imperial State Crime of Great Britain in reality the Stone's history is a lot murkier and more complex than this Legend indicates though and if you watch my video on it I tell you all about its provenance real and fake there despite repeated bites of ill health and criticism from his father and the English magnets regarding his management of aquatine Edward went on campaign again in 1369 seizing the city of lemouge and largely destroying it in the process though there are conflicting accounts as to whether or not he and his men engaged in a massacre of the citizens but those reports which do exist have certainly helped to build that ruthless reputation I mentioned at the start of the video he returned to England in 1370 and with his health still poor and probably only getting worse he surrendered aquitain to his father in 1372. on the 8th of June 1376 he died at Westminster palace and was buried in Canterbury cathedral in October so where does the title The Black Prince come into this the short answer is it doesn't the earliest confirmed reference we have to him being called by this name dates to the mid-tutor period in 1545 Roger asham whose name you might recognize because he was a tutor to the Future Elizabeth the first as well as Lady Jane gray published a book called toxophilus in which he discussed the aforementioned Battle of Cressy within this discussion he said such life battle also fought the noble black prince Edward another contemporary tutor writer also used this nickname for the long dead Prince of Wales in his book de Rebus britannicus collectania John Leland called Edward Edward a principis cog negri with the Cog short for either cogniti or a slight variation of that word the phrase can be translated as Edward known as the black prince elsewhere in the same book but this time in English He describes him as the black prince this work was published posthumously and Leland died in 1552 so his use of the term cannot post it that year in 1569 the writer Richard Grafton wrote of Edward in his Chronicle of English History that some writers name him the black prince and in the index within the same book he went further when he listed an entry for Edward Prince of Wales and eldest son of King Edward III commonly called the black prince it remained a popular epithet for Edward as the early modern period progressed Raphael hollandshard wrote in his Chronicles of England Scotland in Ireland published in 1577 that the prince was commonly named when he came to ripe years Prince Edward and also surnamed the black prince though he stopped short of explaining when this sobra K appeared elsewhere though he supported grafton's assertion that the name was at least in common usage by the Elizabethan period saying Edward Prince of Wales eldest son to King Edward commonly called the black prince like the first reference this line could be read as a claim that the term was used during Edward's lifetime but it isn't stated definitively circling back to Shakespeare in his play Richard II written in the 1590s Edward is mentioned in act 2 scene 3 where he is called the black prince that young Mars of man a reference to the Roman God of War Mars and an allusion to Edward's famed military progress he pops up in the play Henry V too in act 1 scene 2 he is called Edward the black prince who on the French grind played a tragedy making defeat on the full par of France in act 2 scene 4 comes the line when Cressy battle fairly was struck and all our princes captived by the hand of that black Niam Edward black prince of Wales it wasn't just in texts that the name was used this 1648 imagined image of Edward also Sports the term and in 1669 Roger Boyle Earl of orery published two plays under the title two new tragedies the black prince and trifon suggesting that the name was now so heavily associated with Edward that it was no longer even necessary to explicitly state that it was connected to him orari could just assume that his audience would know who the black prince was you may have noted that I said that the 1545 ashim reference was the earliest confirmed allusion to the name the reason I hedged my bets in this way is that I did come across two unconfirmed references to the term the black prince which supposedly did it to his own Lifetime and that of his son Richard II one comes from a book of material collected by English MP and antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton but later organized and published by William prin in 1657 over 25 years after Cotton's death Cotton's notes provided an abridgement that's the key term by the way of the records held in the Tower of London at the time referring to the Parliamentary records for the second year of the reign of Richard II he said Sunday Nobles are named to examine the revenues arising of the subsidy of wool and to examine all the revenues of the realm Visa the old malt hold of wolves the revenues of priors aliens and all other receipts of the king whatsoever to examine what flees the Nobles and officers received in the beginning of e3 that's Edward III what annuities were granted by E3 or the black prince his son as you can tell when you see this reference in context what we actually have here is cotton summary of the rather a boring Financial record he was reading through in the tar and not a transcript there is no reason to think that the original recordian record called Edward the black prince instead this seems to have been Cotton's preferred way of describing him which is perfectly in line with what we have already seen namely that Edward was commonly called by this moniker by the 17th century unfortunately other writers don't seem to have realized this is what was happening and in 1688 Joshua Barnes wrote a book in which he said that in the records of two Richard two and twelve he is called the black prince this reference is to the Parliamentary records that cotton summarized in his 1657 book and we can tell that Barnes is using Cotton's work to inform his own because he also cites cotton as we've just seen though Cotton's use of the term black prince seems to have been his own choice and not something copied from the Parliamentary rules furthermore when I looked at said parliamentary rules I saw no such reference the second reference to the use of this term during the 1300s also comes from Barnes who wrote elsewhere in his book that the French began to call Edward Lin Noir or the black prince after the battle of Cressy in 1346. his source for this information the French chronicler jean-fuassarte doesn't mention this however and again we seem to have what I would call a phantom Source it looks good at first but when you follow it up it leads nowhere having established that Barnes cotton and fuasart are dead end sources when it comes to back dating the name to the 14th century I therefore continue to believe that the earliest known reference to this term is still the note in the 1545 action book I told you about a few minutes ago we therefore have a 169 year gap between the prince's death and the first definite use of the term black prince to describe him yet asham Leland and specially grafton's work do not suggest that it was a new descriptor at the time they were writing they treated it as though it was in common usage and needed no explanation and it seems very possible that there were indeed earlier references to the black prince which have simply not survived to us this might seem incredible to some of you but bear in mind that there remains no contemporary evidence from the lifetime of Richard III which mentions his scoliosis meaning curvature of the spine yet William Shakespeare clearly knew about it over a century later when he wrote his play on the last plantagenet king and it was confirmed when Richard's bones were discovered in 2012. far more evidence has been lost over the centuries than has survived and it seems that whenever the term black prince was coined to describe Edward it was well known by the 1540s at the latest why was he given this name though there are two popular theories often used to explain the origins of the term the black prince neither one of which has any support in 14th or even 15th century sources the first is that it was a comment on the color of Edward's armor which is popularly reported to have been black though no one seems to know exactly how this story came about Joshua Barnes made what might be an oblique reference to this story saying that one reason Edward was called this was that he was dyed black by the terror of his arms again he suggested that this story came from jean-fuassarte and it was picked up and repeated in 1824 by Sir Samuel Merrick yet though does not appear to be any such comment in floss Art's work and the tale is therefore another wild goose chase there is pictorial evidence for this Theory as well as documentary for this picture was once thought to show the prince on the bases of the sitter's dark clothing even though what he's wearing isn't really armor we also see the black armor myth perpetuated in this 1888 picture of Edward at Cressy standing over the dead body of the Bohemian King the description given of the portrait on the website of the Telfair museums in Savannah which holds this painting even reiterates the fable about the connection between the name and the armor as does a page on the website of the royal collection trust in the UK but again I can't emphasize enough that there isn't any indication in the original sources that this is true Sir Samuel Merrick wrote that there was no evidence that the prince had worn black armor but that he might have worn a black circle and carried a black shield whilst competing in tournaments so that quote it might have been from the covering of his armor that he was so cold the second theory is that the name refers to Edward's conduct whilst Camp hitting in France and in particular to his cruel treatment of locals caught up in his Wars Shakespeare certainly insinuated that this was the root of the Super K remember his comparison of Edward to the God of War his assertion that the prince had perpetuated a tragedy on French ground and the line Henry V which read when Cressy battle fiddly was struck and all our princes captived by the hand of that black name Edward black prince of Wales this is the earliest evidence I've come across for the name being a reference to the nature of Edward's deeds and character the idea was picked up on by later writers though to explain the term in 1631 John Weaver whilst considering Edward's funerary Monument said let me view the Sumptuous Monument still remaining of Edward surnamed the black prince so by named not of his color but of his dreaded acts in battle in 1642 fellow English writer Thomas Fuller provided a barely reworded version of Weaver's text writing that Edward was so called from his dreaded acts and not from his complexion Barnes also said that it was for his Dreadful deeds in war that Edward acquired the surname Lenoir from the French again he gave fuasad as the source for this information but again I read the cited section and couldn't find anything which corroborated this to make matters even more confusing Samuel mayrick then repeated this story also giving the suru fuasart reference and perpetuating the myth that there is some basis for the black prince story dating back to the Middle Ages what we seem to be seeing is a series of writers copying the ideas of earlier authors dating back to at least Shakespeare none of them provide any real evidence to support the idea that Edward was known by this name during his lifetime or that it stemmed from his actions on the battlefield Weaver and Fuller's comments also indicate that there was some confusion even in the early to mid 17th century about what the name was meant to refer to with some supposing that it might have been a comment on the prince's skin tone not that they thought he was actually black but in the 17th century this might have been used as a way to describe a white person with an olive skin tone or a deep tan Queen Anne Berlin was called swarthy in the 16th century for instance simply because she didn't happen to be as pale as some of the other ladies at court it's interesting though that Shakespeare Weaver and Fuller did not feel the need to dispel any myth about the color of the prince's armor leading me to wonder if that theory hadn't emerged yet as for Edward's possible misdeeds as I told you earlier he was just 16 at the time of the battle of Cressy and was nearly killed himself and though there were reports of massacres at the siege of limous in 1369 these stories are disputed he was unpopular in aquati and it is true but this was largely due to his taxation policy extravagance and personality in short we have no conclusive evidence as to when or why Edward began to be called the black prince and the best we can say is that the name appears to have been in common usage by the 1540s and that it was associated with his dreaded acts by the time Shakespeare was writing in the 1590s over 200 years after the death of this one-time Prince of Wales before I go thank you as always to my wonderful patrons whose support helps me to make this a viable career and to those of you who donate to the channel using the thanks button underneath videos as your support is also much appreciated let me know in the comments below why you think Edward might have gained the name the black prince and until next time keep learning

Channel: History Calling

Views: 151,921

Keywords: why was the black prince called the black prince, why the black prince was called the black prince, was the black prince's armour black, was the black prince a bad person, why is the black prince famous, why the black prince was famous, where the black prince got his name, famous medieval prince, medieval english royal history, where did the black prince get his name, famous warrior prince, what colour was the black prince's armour, History Calling

Id: RYtoFAKqEl0

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023