The Good, the Bad and the Unready

The Good, the Bad and the Unready
is a hugely entertaining and highly original investigation into the vainglorious, unfortunate and sometimes downright insulting names that pepper the history books, from Brandy Nan to Fulk the Surly, and from Hugh the Dull to Magnus Barelegs. Anyone with a love of the quirky side of history will enjoy the capricious world of noble nicknames, where military tacticians can be celebrated for their drinking habits (Michael the Drunkard), successful diplomats can be mocked for their diminutive stature (Ladislaus the Elbow-High), and a vicious tyrant can be kowtowed to (John the Good).

Revd Robert Easton (childhood nickname Ridiculous Robert) has spent years gathering together the best and worst nicknames given to the rich and powerful over the centuries, and
The Good, the Bad and the Unready
is the result: a uniquely irreverent look at both history and the inventiveness of the English language.

Preface

Acknowledgements

The GOOD, the BAD and the UNREADY

List of Entries by First Name

Bibliography

Index

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 Lindsay’s
House of Lorraine
might not be the best source of information on Charles III, and the heroine’s 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 that’s 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 couldn’t 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

when they
could
be referred to as:

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.

The Good, the Bad and the Unready
focuses on history’s nobility, a group of people who, on the face of it, have no need for nicknames. Mass acquaintance, however, and therefore public scrutiny, has provided no protection whatsoever from the slings and arrows of outrageous nickname fortune. Chroniclers, it seems, and the common people whom they cited, have felt compelled to comment via a nickname on those in power, even though they have needed no additional identification.

Some of these aristocratic nicknames are galling in their obsequiousness. Outlandish, hagiographical cognomens such as ‘Light of the World’ and ‘Father of Letters’ (as in the cases of the emperor Sigismund and Francis I of France respectively) fail to tell us much about the recipient, but instead only serve to highlight the fawning nature of their historians. Mercifully, these are in the minority. Other nicknames, meanwhile, give a fairly obscure figure of the past a more prominent place in history than might be expected. It is almost exclusively because of their
nicknames, for example, that ‘James the Dead Man Who Won a Fight’ and ‘Black Agnes’ are known by more than a clutch of scholars and a few descendants researching their family history.

This book considers some 400 aristocratic individuals and considers whether their epithets fit the bill. Their nicknames fall into a number of loose categories.
¹
These include:

The Toponymic

Usually pretty uninteresting, and therefore rarely given much space in the following pages, these are names stating the geographical origin of the individual. They are not what one might call ‘true’ nicknames inasmuch as the aristocracy regularly conferred such names upon themselves: they denoted not only their place of origin (such as the linguistically aberrant ‘John of Gaunt’) or place of residence (such as ‘Henry Bolingbroke’), but also stated that they owned land and were therefore people of importance.

Where these nicknames were not self-conferred, as in the case of ‘Emma the Gem of Normandy’ or ‘William the Rake of Piccadilly’, the stories behind them are usually worth greater examination. But even this seemingly straightforward giving of names has its foibles. That there is a character called ‘John the Scot’, who wasn’t Scottish at all, reinforces the fickle nature of this genre.

The Physical (General)

A host of nobles in this book have nicknames which fall into this category, some deservedly, some without any merit whatsoever. These are nicknames that refer to an individual’s general appearance, for example ‘Philip the Handsome’, who was, by common consent, pretty good-looking, or ‘Richard Crookback’, whose disability appears to have been a certain playwright’s fabrication.

It’s hard, but fun, to imagine one of the more uncomplimentary of this species of nickname being used within earshot of its recipient. Only the bravest or stupidest of subjects, for example, would have addressed Henry I, king of Navarre, by his nickname of ‘the Fat’, even though by most accounts it was an entirely fair epithet. And though indeed vertically challenged, King Ladislaus I of Poland would surely not have thanked anyone who reminded him of his moniker ‘the Elbow-High’.

The Physical (Specific)

Here the nickname refers to one particular physical attribute or abnormality. A royal bouffant or aristocratic coiffure has often proved a rich quarry for the nicknaming fraternity, with many soubriquets, such as ‘William Rufus’, ‘Sven Forkbeard’ and ‘Boleslav the Curly’ commenting on the colour, style or quality of a person’s hair. Lack of hair, similarly, has not gone unmentioned, even when, as with ‘Charles the Bald’, its suitability is a matter of debate. ‘Haakon the Broad-Shouldered’ and ‘Antigonus the One-Eyed’ also fall into a category that singles out history’s leaders not by their deeds but by their deportment or deficiency.

The Moral

This is perhaps the most slippery of categories. Chroniclers sometimes conferred nicknames upon people not with cold, rational even-handedness but out of politically motivated whimsy. We therefore find the utterly repellent John II of France known to history as ‘the Good’ and the rather charming William I of Sicily wholly unjustly labelled as ‘the Bad’. The French, moreover, enjoyed the habit of nicknaming some of their monarchs sarcastically. Louis XV, for instance, was not ‘Well-Beloved’ at all, but universally considered a knave.