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 heir to the throne and at the curious tale of how he gained his unforgettable name.
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Edward of Woodstock was born on 15 June 1330 and was the eldest son of King Edward III of England
and his wife, Philippa of Hainault (I found numerous pronunciations for that one online by
the way, so I hope I’ve chosen the correct one). The Woodstock referred to the place of his 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 custos Angliae (meaning guardian
of England) when the King went abroad and he was travelling with him on military campaigns when
he was barely a teenager. He began his life as a solider at the age of 16 when his father knighted
him in Normandy and fought soon after at the Battle of Crecy, where he was nearly killed or
at the very least captured by French forces. He would go on to fight for and sometimes alongside
his father in many other battles during his lifetime, most notably in Aquitaine in 1355
and at the Battle of Poitiers 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 Aquitaine given to
Edward as a sovereign state, over which he would be Prince and in 1361 he married his cousin,
Joan, 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 now modern-day France to manage Aquitaine in 1363
where Edward made himself unpopular through the levying of high taxes, his extravagant expenditure
and his generally highhanded manner. During this time, he and Joan 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 da Trastamara, half-brother and usurper of Edward’s sometime ally,
Pedro the Cruel. In fact it was supposedly as an acknowledgement 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 Crown 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 bouts of ill health and criticism from
his father and the English magnates regarding his management of Aquitaine, Edward went on campaign
again in 1369, seizing the city of Limoges 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 Aquitaine to his father in 1372.
On 8 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-Tudor period. In 1545, Roger Ascham whose name you might recognise because he was a tutor
to the future Elizabeth I, as well as Lady Jane Grey, published a book called Toxophilis in which
he discussed the aforementioned Battle of Crecy. Within this discussion he said ‘Such lyke battel
also fought ye noble black prince Edwarde’. Another contemporary Tudor writer also used
this nickname for the long-dead Prince of Wales. In his book, De rebus Britannicis Collectanea,
John Leland called Edward ‘Edwardi Principis cog: Nigri’, 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 Blake Prince’.
This work was published posthumously and Leland died in 1552 so his use of the term
cannot postdate 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 ‘Edwarde Prince of
Wales and eldest sonne of king Edwarde the third commonly called the black prince’.
It remained a popular epithet for Edward as the early modern period progressed. Raphael
Holinshed wrote in his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, published in 1577 that
the Prince ‘was commonly named when hee came to rype yeares, Prynce Edwarde, and alſo ſurnamed
the blacke Prince’, though he stopped short of explaining when this sobriquet 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 ſonne to King Edwarde,
commonlye called the blacke 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 men’,
a reference to the Roman god of War, Mars and an allusion to Edward’s famed military prowess.
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 ground play’d a tragedy, Making defeat on the full power of France’.
In Act 2, scene 4 comes the line ‘When Cressy battle fatally was struck and
all our princes captiv’d by the hand of that black name, 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 Orrery published two plays under the title Two
new tragedies The Black Prince, and Tryphon, 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. Orrery could just assume that his audience would know who the Black Prince was.
You may have noted that I said that the 1545 Ascham reference was the earliest confirmed
allusion to the name. The reason I hedged my bets in that way is that I did come across
two unconfirmed references to the term ‘the Black Prince’ which supposedly dated 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 organised and published by William
Prynne 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:
Sundry Nobles are named to examine the Revenues arising of the Subsidy of Wooll,
and to examine all the Revenues of the Realm, viz. the old Maletolt of Woolls.
the revenues of Priors Aliens, and all other receits of the King whatsoever.
To examine what Fees the Nobles and Officers received in the beginning of
E.3. [that’s Edward III] what Annuities were granted by E.3. or the black Prince his son.
As you can tell when you see this reference in context, what we actually have here is
Cotton’s summary of the rather boring financial record he was reading though
in the Tower and not a transcript. There’s no reason to think that the original Ricardian
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 realised this is what was happening and in 1688
Joshua Barnes wrote a book in which he said that that ‘in the records of 2 Ric[hard]. 2 n. 12 he
is called the Black Prince’. This reference is to the parliamentary records that Cotton
summarised 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
rolls. Furthermore, when I looked at said Parliamentary Rolls, I saw no such reference.
The second reference to the use of the term during the 1300s also comes from Barnes,
who wrote elsewhere in his book that the French began to call Edward ‘Le Neoir,
or the Black Prince’ after the Battle of Crecy in 1346. His source for this information, the French
chronicler, Jean Froissart, 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 Froissart are dead end sources when it comes to backdating 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 Ascham 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 Ascham, Leland and especially 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 colour of Edward’s armour, 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 Terrour of his Arms’. Again, he suggested that this story
came from Jean Froissart, and it was picked up and repeated in 1824 by Sir Samuel Meyrick,
yet there does not appear to be any such comment in Froissart’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 basis of the sitter’s dark clothing,
even though what he’s wearing isn’t really armour. We also see the black armour myth perpetuated in
this 1888 picture of Edward at Crecy, 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
armour, as does a page on the website of the Royal Collection Trust in the UK, but again I can’t
emphasise enough that there isn’t any indication in the original sources that this is true.
Sir Samuel Meyrick wrote that there was no evidence that the Prince had worn black armour,
but that he might have worn a black surcoat and carried a black shield whilst competing
in tournaments so that ‘it might have been from the covering of his armour that he was so called’.
The second theory is that the name refers to Edward’s conduct whilst campaigning
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 sobriquet. 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 in Henry V which read ‘When Cressy battle fatally was
struck and all our princes captiv’d 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 Weever, whilst considering Edward’s funerary monument, said ‘Let me view the sumptuous
monument still remaining of Edward surnamed the blacke Prince (so by-named not of his colour,
but of his dreaded acts in battell)’. In 1642 fellow English writer, Thomas Fuller, provided a
barely reworded version of Weever’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 Dreadfull Deeds in War’
that Edward acquired the surname ‘le neoir’ from the French. Again he gave Froissart 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 Meyrick
then repeated this story, also giving the pseudo-Froissart 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.
Weever 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 Boleyn 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, Weever and Fuller did not feel the need to dispel any myth
about the colour of the Prince’s armour, 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 Crecy and was nearly killed himself and though there were reports of massacres at the siege of
Limoges in 1369, these stories are disputed. He was unpopular in Aquitaine, 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.
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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.