Peter Stewart wrote:
You may be tired of the point (so why engage in further discussion of it?)
but my effort is to prevent other people from being bamboozled into thinking
that your persistence lends some respectability to a mistaken idea, and
adopting a piece of nonsense into their own databases.
A laudable aim, though I think people are able to form their own
judgements.
The rest of your post is just repetition of the points made before (and
with the same failure to acknowledge anything said in response to
them), so I will just refer you back to my previous responses to the
same points.
I will mention one thing, though. You have previously referred to a
late convergence between the names Alienor and Helena/Elena, apparently
in the belief that the two names were quite distinct until the end of
the middle ages, and that Alienor's modern form Eleanor did not
appear until then. This would be wrong. Eleanor of Aquitaine herself
was always Alienor in her own charters and seals, and spellings in Al-
can be found right up to the end of the medieval period, but forms like
Elianor, Elyenor also appear from an early date - certainly they are
common in the early 1300s, immediately after the name had been
popularised by Eleanor of Castille. You can even find occasional
explicit evidence that Eleanor and Helen were regarded as
interchangeable; for example, in this 1308 fine (as calendared on A2A)
John Trymanel's wife is called both Eleanor and Helen:
Berkeley Castle Muniments, Ref: BCM/D/5/92/5.
John de Segrave; and John Trymanel and Eleanor his wife. One month
after Michaelmas, 2 Edw. II [27 Oct. 1308]
Final concord concerning the manor of Westhatch; John and Helen have
acknowledged the right of John, and have quitclaimed to him; he has
given them £100.
This may not have been a solely English phenomenon, either - consider
this excerpt from a Norman version of the well-known story of Eleanor
of Aquitaine disrobing in front of her Aquitanian nobles to disprove
king Louis' allegation that she had the body of a beast (from a MS in
the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal in Paris, 3516, fol. 314r - it is
undated, but stops in the middle of describing the Third Crusade, and
is certainly no later than the 13th century):
'En cel tans avint que li rois Loeys enhai sa fame la roine Alyenor
....
.... Quant laisie ot li rois Loeys le roine Elienor, il prist feme la
fille le roi d'Espaigne, dont il ot ij filles. Et apres morut la
dame. Et li rois reprist a feme la seror as ij contes, a qui il avoit
donees se ij filles de la roine Elyenor.'
That is hardly proof that Alienor is the same name as Elena/Helena, of
course, but it does rather point to Eleanor's subjects in her Duchy
of Normandy having believed Alienor to be a form of Helen.
That they might have been more conscious of the origin of her name than
her Occitan subjects is not entirely surprising. Helen was not a
popular saint in the south of France - her cult was a northern one,
centered on the counties of Champagne, Flanders and Brabant, and
especially on the cathedral cities of Troyes, Rheims and Auxerre. Not
only was St Helena, mother of Constantine, venerated there, so also
were various lesser saints also called Helen, including St Alena (alias
Elena) of Forest and the intriguingly named St Elenaria of St-Riquier.
(I owe these references to Dr Graham Jones of St John's College,
Oxford, who has made a study of the various cults of St Helen, and is
about to bring out a book on saint's cults and church dedications).
It is just possible that the derivation of Alienor from Helena was a
northern French invention rather than the original baptismal intention
of her father or sponsors, but it must be a better bet than a
derivation in Adenordis or Adamardis, which have obvious linguistic
difficulties. I don't think the idea that it was the consequence of
her childish attempt to pronounce either of those names, à la
Lillibet, is worth considering.
Matt Tompkins