Feudal Names
The royalty, nobility, and gentry of Europe traditionally have many names, including phrases for the lands that they own. The French developed the method of putting the term by which the person is referred in small capital letters. It is this habit which transferred to names of the Far East, as seen below. An example is that of Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch Gilbert du Motier, who is known as the Marquis de Lafayette. Notice that he possessed the lands both of Motier and Lafayette. Another example is Don Quixote de la Mancha, who is never referred to in literature by the phrase used as the title of the musical comedy, Man of La Mancha.
The bare place name was used formerly to refer to the person who owned it, rather than the land itself (the word "Gloucester" in "What will Gloucester do?" meant the Duke of Gloucester). As a development, the bare name of a ship in the Royal Navy meant its captain (e.g., "Cressy didn't learn from Aboukir") while the name with an article referred to the ship (e.g., "The Cressy is foundering").
Read more about this topic: Personal Name
Famous quotes containing the words feudal and/or names:
“There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“The world is a puzzling place today. All these banks sending us credit cards, with our names on them. Well, we didn’t order any credit cards! We don’t spend what we don’t have. So we just cut them in half and throw them out, just as soon as we open them in the mail. Imagine a bank sending credit cards to two ladies over a hundred years old! What are those folks thinking?”
—Sarah Louise Delany (b. 1889)