Talk:Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou

What does his nickname mean?

There is no explanation as to what plantagenet means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.208.242.8 (talk) 14:59, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

• Apparently it refers to the habit of wearing a sprig of yellow flowers in his hat-the name of the flower being called in old french 'genet' and the term 'plantage' meaning 'root' or 'shoot'-hence 'Plantagenet'-which means a shoot/root of genet. I think the term 'genet' is actually the french name for the flowering plant English Broom. Here is a reference : http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tqpeiffer/Documents/Surnames/MMPS/Plantagenet/Plantagenet%20MMPS%20Surname%20page.html
  • I've just noticed that the article actually explains it anyway-strangely I missed it when I read it the first time trying to find an answer to this very question! :-)--Godfinger (talk) 12:13, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Move to Geoffrey, Duke of Normandy?

Shouldnt this article really be called Geoffrey, Duke of Normandy? Duke is a higher title than Count? The Quill (talk) 12:14, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

No, it should not! And why did you ask when you unilaterally moved it anyway? Str1977 ^(talk) 21:57, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Date of his birth

In the 2000 publication The Plantagenet Chronicles, they give 1128 not 1129 as the year of Geoffrey's birth. Is there any way to verify which is correct? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.178.25.55 (talk) 16:45, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

supplementation

Geoffry was two times ´King of Jerusalem´ (before his son and behind) - He is THE primogenitor of Europe. He was a HERO. There is existing a wonderfull drawing of him! (without name) For this famous detection, I want the title ´SIR´ from the Queen. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.128.208.56 (talk) 16:06, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Heraldry

Pastoureau is making a quibble about the quality of the sourcing that is well understood but not considered noteworthy - by his criteria, we can't say that Harold II was king of England, because there is no surviving evidence of that from his lifetime. His position represents one voice, flying in the face of consensus (or perhaps just being hypercritical to make a point), not a new consensus. Agricolae (talk) 21:57, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

• I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to hold you to a strict standard on this one. I don’t know if Pastoureau is “quibbling” or not. I do know he is a respected authority who says that this (former) consensus (“for a long time heraldists believed…”) is now gone. That his perspective on all this is “not considered noteworthy” is your own opinion. That his “one voice” is “flying in the face of consensus” and that his position is “not a new consensus” may even be true, but I doubt it & it would need to be sourced reliably. (You have inserted one reference, over 30 years old & 15 years older than the Pastoureau.) I’m going with the most recent reliable source, which happens to be one which says that the old understanding no longer holds. If you can find more recent (post-1997) reliable sources explicitly to the contrary, I will be forced to concede. Until then, good luck…. Valerius Tygart (talk) 14:45, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

What strict standard? Where is your source saying there is a new consensus? One book does not equal a new consensus. If you want to mention one scholar's quibble with an existing consensus, that's fine, we can find a way to do this (in fact, I incorporated some of his criticisms into my revised version, just without mentioning his name), but it is not a question of whichever is the most recent book is the only opinion worth mentioning. Also, please see WP:BRD. You were bold, I reverted. The solution now is not to simply keep putting it back in. Oh, and by the way, I didn't say his opinion is not considered noteworthy. I said his quibbles with the sourcing have not been considered noteworthy. What? Do you think everyone else who studied the question didn't notice that his funerary enamel wasn't made until after his death? It's not like they thought his funerary enamel was made during his lifetime and it has since been re-dated. They knew that his funerary enamel was made after his death - after all, it is a funerary enamel - and yet they continued to accept these as Geoffrey's arms without making a big deal over it. Do you think they were completely ignorant of when the chronicle was written? Same thing. Most of what we 'know' about the early-medieval era is based on chronicles written or at least surviving in manuscripts written well after the events in question. Again, they failed to highlight this, not out of ignorance that only Pastoureau has illuminated, but because that is the nature of the beast. Finally, I don't see your edit being a helpful addition to an article. In terms of describing Geoffrey, either he had the first known coat of arms, which is noteworthy, or he didn't, which is completely unnoteworthy since there are billions of people who did not have the first coat of arms. If there really is a new consensus that Geoffrey has no such status (something I dispute) then it isn't even worth mentioning - we don't make a habit of detailing all of the historiographic errors of the past in our biographies. (And a technical note, you really should log in every time - your repeated switching among your login and various IPs borders on sock-puppetry.) Agricolae (talk) 16:20, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh, and for references, these, subsequent to 1997, cover the range from scholarly to popular:

• Paola Rapelli (2011) Symbols of Power in Art, p. 182, speaking of Geoffrey, "He owned the first shield that can be defined as the heraldic type (with a coat of arms)."
• Jim Bradbury (2004) The Routledge Companion to Medieval Warfare, p. 273, "John of Marmoutier recorded that Henry I gave arms to his son-in-law Geoffrey of Anjou in 1128. This is often discredited as written later but may be confirmed by the enamel of Geoffrey at Le Mans, showing armorials with lioncels. That the arms borne by Geoffrey were lioncels suggests possible evidence for the early use of what became the English royal arms." (so he points out the quibble over the date of the chronicle, and then explicitly dismissed its relevance)
• Christopher Harper-Bill, Nicholas Vincent (2007), Henry II: New Interpretations, p. 373, "The leunculi aurei or picti leones in clipeo of Geoffrey Plantagenet are well attested in the Angevin chronicles . . . and on the enamelled plaque on his tomb in Le Mans."
• John Gage (1999), Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, "The enamelled effigy of Geoffrey Plantaganet of Anjou at Le Mans, of about 1151, may include one of the first authentic representations of a coat of arms, since the device of golden lions on blue had been noticed at his investiture as a knight in 1123 or 1127 and it re-appeared as the arms of his grandson at the end of the century."
• Caroline Allen and Edward Wessex (1999) Edward Wessex's crown and country: a personal guide to royal London, p. 80, "The first known coat of arms was that of Geoffrey of Anjou in 1127."
• Judith Kidd, Linda Richards (2002), Power and the People 1066-1485, p. 121, "In 1127, Count Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou had several lions on his shield"
• Christopher Gravett, David Nicolle (2007) The Normans: Warrior Knights and Their Castles, p. 28, "The first certain reference to undoubted Norman heraldry was in 1127, when Henry I knighted his son-in-law Geoffrey of Anjou and gave him the badge of gold lions on a blue ground."
• Constance Brittain Bouchard (2009) Knights: In History and Legend, p. 124, "The tomb-plate of Geoffrey Plantagenet (1113-51), Count of Anjou and father of King Henry II of England, is the oldest known colored representation of a shield of arms."
• Nigel Saul (2005), A companion to medieval England, 1066-1485, p. 131, "Across the Channel, the first evidence of the adoption of hereditary armorial devices comes from roughly the same time. At Le Mans there remains the famous enamelled plate said to have been over the tomb of Geoffrey, count of Anjou . . ."

If those are not enough, I can probably find more. Agricolae (talk) 17:03, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

I’m not sure why you want to suppress a genuine disagreement among experts, in favor of an outdated consensus, but a couple of your sources provide useful information that could be (& now have been) incorporated into the article. (Some of the popular sources & guidebooks I would dismiss as just parroting older material, but the Gage & Bradbury seem helpful. Note that Bradbury states that “this is often discredited” -- not *was* but *is*. Sounds like an ongoing controversy to me.) BTW, can you provide the page number for Gage? I especially think Pastoureau’s statement that “So Geoffrey Plantagenet probably never bore arms” is especially significant here. Please stop taking it out.

As to your scold about my “sockpuppetry”, I won’t even dignify it with a response. Valerius Tygart (talk) 13:00, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Recent edits

I removed the word "teenager" and a potted bio of William Longespée, 3rd Earl of Salisbury from the "Early Heraldry" section. It was reverted with this edit summary: "well the entire term "Dark Ages" is a pejorative and outdated misnomer based on old lack of info of the period, anyway don't push POV".

This seems to make no sense whatsoever. I only used the expression "Dark Ages" in my edit summary, and regardless of what one calls the period, the word "teenager" conveys an impression of a social status between child and adult which only emerged in the 1920s. It is not remotely sensible to use it about a 12th century nobleman.

I also don't see how I'm "pushing a POV" when I remove some detail which is in my view unnecessary. The point of the section is that Geoffrey Plantagenet's badge was used by his descendants, not to tell the reader all about those descendants. Pinkbeast (talk) 14:28, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

Genetic testing

I'm not going to just revert this out without discussion now it's cited, but I think the recent edit re the paternity of his descendants is pretty pointless. There were illegitimate children in the Middle Ages - this is about as notable as the news that the Sun rises in the East. Furthermore, the connection of this result to Geoffrey Plantagenet seems tenuous at best, since the cite initially places the break somewhere after Edward III (not that this should be taken as endorsement of putting this on any later Plantagenet's page) and then says actually we don't even know that.

I would say it certainly doesn't belong in the lead, but I don't want to imply it belongs anywhere else in the article. The result that Richard III's corpse was actually Richard III's corpse was interesting; that some illegitimate children occur between 1133 and the present day would be meaningless trivia apart from the convention that trivia is typically in some way surprising. Pinkbeast (talk) 17:54, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

Well, I am going to revert it. Looking at the original press release, [1] the problem immediately become apparent - someone came to them claiming "I descend from Geoffrey Plantagenet." They tested him and he didn't match either Richard III or the Beauforts. One interpretation certainly is that there was further infidelity in the royal line, but the truth of the matter is that the problem lies elsewhere. I recognize the name of the claimant, and he is not any part of the 'official male-line descendants' (is there such a thing?). He belongs to a branch of an Irish Warenne family that can't legitimately trace back to within centuries of the the Plantagenet-related Warenne family. They just decided that was where they fit in. There were Warenne families that descended from Geoffrey's illegitimate son Hamelin, who married a Warenne and took her name, but there were also Warenne families that trace to that wife's male line, the 'first house of Warenne' if you will, and then there are Warennes like the family from Whitchurch and Ightfield that appear to trace all the way to Domesday without ever connecting to either the Plantagenet Warennes or the 'first house' (they are speculated to have been related back in Normandy, but may instead have just come from the same place). Of course the pedigree forgers are going to pick the royal line to connect to. To claim this as a case of false-paternity, you need a pedigree that is fully documented, generation by generation, which does not exist for the Irish family, just a completely unsupported claim. Rather than false-paternity, this is highly likely to be a case of false-genealogy. Anyhow, along the lines of what Pinkbeast is saying, since nobody is suggesting that the break must have happened by Geoffrey himself being cuckolded, the fact that somewhere in the pedigree this happened at least once is completely irrelevant. (and if you test three people and they don't match, that doesn't add up to four male lines. Agricolae (talk) 19:17, 5 July 2017 (UTC)

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