Anjou’s broom-badge nickname belatedly labeled England’s kings
The Plantagenets began as counts of Anjou and held England’s throne from Henry II’s 1154 accession until Richard III fell in 1485. Only late in the Wars of the Roses did Richard of York adopt Plantegenest—Geoffrey of Anjou’s twelfth-century nickname—as a surname for propaganda.
The family came out of the French county of Anjou, and the first three of its English kings, Henry II, Richard I and John, ruled so much of France that historians often call them the Angevins, French for of Anjou. In the twelfth century angevin was also the name of the king's continental coinage, worth the same as sterling. John lost Anjou and most of the French lands, which shifted the realm's centre of gravity to England. Kate Norgate coined the phrase Angevin Empire in 1887, but there was no contemporary name for the whole, and each territory kept its own laws. A 1986 meeting of historians rejected the idea of an Angevin state and suggested Plantagenet area instead, though the older label persists.
Under this dynasty the English crown changed character, partly by accident. Kings short of money and soldiers had to accept limits such as Magna Carta, and the monarch acquired defined duties to the realm backed by an elaborate justice system. By the end of Edward III's reign in 1377 the court had adopted Middle English, the everyday language, for government, which is why one national biography treats Edward as the first culturally English Plantagenet.
The fifteenth century went badly: defeat in France, frequent revolts, and nobles with private armies defying Henry VI. After Richard II was deposed in 1399, the cadet houses of Lancaster and York ruled in turn, and their rivalry became the Wars of the Roses. Richard III's death at Bosworth in 1485 ended both the dynasty and, conventionally, the English Middle Ages. Henry VII, a Lancastrian through his mother, married Elizabeth of York five months later and founded the Tudors.
The surname itself is a late invention. Richard, 3rd Duke of York, took Plantagenet in the fifteenth century from Plantegenest, a nickname of his forebear Geoffrey of Anjou, possibly after the yellow-flowered broom, genista in medieval Latin. It stressed his direct male descent from Geoffrey. The Tudors liked applying it to all Geoffrey's heirs, and historians adopted it broadly only in the late seventeenth century.
Source: House of Plantagenet
