From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 18478
Date: 2003-02-06
----- Original Message -----
From: <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: [tied] Latin versus *Proto-Romance
> May I answer your question with a question: Why should a king with
> the status of Charlemagne be named as a lower freeman? Possible
> answer: because the Carolingians were usurpers. He might have been of
> another class, or ethnos. You assume 'freemen' were one class. Not
> necessarily so.
If you are a usurper, you don't deliberately give your son a name that tells the world "I'm an usurper". The names Charles and Pepin simply ran in the family and I don't think any particular meaning was associated with them by Charlemagne's time. The Carolingians were a family of ambitious landowners, some of whom had become bishops and generals well before they decided to put an end to the Merovingian fiction. Charles the Hammer was not a king yet, but the position of a royal majordomo was the very opposite of churldom. Besides, Charles is a monothematic name, thus possibly an abreviation of something once longer, or an informal pet-name of some sort. If you need a comparable example, the first known rulers of Mercia had funny-sounding names like Pybba, Penda, Peada ... and yes, Ceorl.
Piotr