As has been previously discussed, there is often a hidden meaning both when it comes to understanding why we use the words we use as well as where those words originated. Aside from common words, what about proper words? In many cases, country names, much like other words, have evolved over time to explain changing conditions, language, or demographics. For example, let us first look at France. Sure, we may all know the French baguette, Napoleon, and the Eiffel Tower, but in terms of a name, why exactly is France called France?
For the majority of antiquity, the area of what would become modern France was called Gaul, which is what the Greeks still call it, but what changed that were the people who lived there. With the collapsing borders of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, Gaul, which, for over 400 years, had been home to Romans and ethnic Celts, began to be inundated with “barbarian” German tribes, such as the Burgundians (for whom the name of the French region of Burgundy exists), the Franks, and the Visigoths. Soon, these roving bands of barbarians, began settling and establishing as well as solidifying their own kingdoms, with the Frankish kingdom in northern France and the Visigothic kingdom in southern France and Iberia.
Seeking to determine the fate of Gaul, the kingdoms fought one another in the Battle of Vouillé in the spring of 507 AD. Emerging victorious, the Franks were able to extend their territory to include all of Gaul. Having sway over such a large individual area, what was formerly Gaul now began to be known as Francia (as opposed to Gothia, if the Visigoths would’ve been victorious), which was a Latinized version of “Land of the Franks.” Since, after Vouillé, no one emerged to challenge the dominion of the Franks, the name has existed even to today, and most modern iterations relating to the geographic country of France involve a nod to this reference: in Spanish and Italian, France is still known as Francia, whereas, in countries with a Germanic-derived language, such as Germany, France is referred to as Frankreich, or “Realm of the Franks.”
In writing, as mentioned before, the term Francia came from Latin of the late 5th and early 6th century AD; however, the first references in English to France or anything being French don’t occur until the beginning of the 11th century (at the earliest). The first mention of anything or anyone being “French” in English comes during the reign of the King Ethelred the Unready, where it is written in the Old English of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1003 that, “Honourable was Exeter, broken through that French peasant Hugon.” For the first mention of “France” itself, this comes from a well-known Middle English song/poem from around 1250 which was called The Genesis and the Exodus: 2 lines from the poem state that (in Modern English), “These Frankish men in the speech of France call it ‘one day natural.’”
