House of Plantagenet

The House of Plantagenet (/plænˈtædʒɪnɪt/ plan-TAJ-in-it) was a royal house which originated in the French county of Anjou. The name Plantagenet is used by modern historians to identify four distinct royal houses: the Angevins, who were also counts of Anjou; the main line of the Plantagenets following the loss of Anjou; and the Houses of Lancaster and York, two of the Plantagenets' cadet branches. The family held the English throne from 1154, with the accession of Henry II, until 1485, when Richard III died in battle.

England was transformed under the Plantagenets, although only partly intentionally. The Plantagenet kings were often forced to negotiate compromises such as Magna Carta, which constrained royal power in return for financial and military support. The king was no longer just the most powerful man in the nation, holding the prerogative of judgement, feudal tribute and warfare, but had defined duties to the realm, underpinned by a sophisticated justice system. By the end of the reign of Edward III, the Plantagenets developed a new identity including adopting the language of the ordinary people—Middle English—as the language of governance. This is one of the reasons that the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography considers Edward III as culturally the first English Plantagenet ruler.

In the 15th century, the Plantagenets were defeated in the Hundred Years' War and beset with social, political and economic problems. Popular revolts were commonplace, triggered by the denial of numerous freedoms. English nobles raised private armies, engaged in private feuds and openly defied Henry VI. The rivalry between the House of Plantagenet's two cadet branches of York and Lancaster brought about the Wars of the Roses, a decades-long fight for the English succession. It culminated in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, when the reign of the Plantagenets and the English Middle Ages both met their end with the death of King Richard III. Henry VII, a Lancastrian, became king of England; five months later he married Elizabeth of York, thus ending the Wars of the Roses and giving rise to the Tudor dynasty. The Tudors worked to centralise English royal power, which allowed them to avoid some of the problems that had plagued the last Plantagenet rulers. The resulting stability allowed for the English Renaissance and the advent of early modern Britain. Every monarch of England, and later the United Kingdom, from Henry VII to present has been a descendant of the Plantagenets.

In the 15th century, near the end of the dynastic line, Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York, adopted Plantagenet as his family name. Plantegenest (or Plante Genest) had been a 12th-century nickname for his ancestor Geoffrey, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy. One of many popular theories suggests the blossom of the common broom, a bright yellow ("gold") flowering plant, called genista in medieval Latin, as the source of the nickname.

It is uncertain why Richard of York chose this specific name, although during the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) it emphasised Richard's status as Geoffrey's patrilineal descendant. The retrospective usage of the name for all of Geoffrey's male-line descendants was popular during the subsequent Tudor dynasty, perhaps encouraged by the further legitimacy it gave to Richard's great-grandson, Henry VIII. It was only in the late 17th century that it passed into common usage among historians.

Angevin is French for "of Anjou". The three Angevin kings were the 12th-century Geoffrey of Anjou's son, Henry II, and grandsons Richard I and John. Noble houses were regularly denominated by a territory or place of birth, eg., House of Normandy, House of Wessex. "Angevin" can also refer to the period of history in which they reigned. Many historians identify the Angevins as a distinct English royal house. "Angevin" is also used in reference to any sovereign or government derived from Anjou. As a noun, it refers to any native of Anjou or an Angevin ruler, and specifically to other counts and dukes of Anjou, including the ancestors of the three kings who formed the English royal house; their cousins, who held the crown of Jerusalem; and to unrelated members of the French royal family who were later granted the titles and formed different dynasties, such as the Capetian House of Anjou and the Valois House of Anjou. Consequently, there is disagreement between those who consider John's son, Henry III, to be the first Plantagenet monarch, and those who do not distinguish between Angevins and Plantagenets and therefore consider the first Plantagenet to be Henry II.

The term "Angevin Empire" was coined by Kate Norgate in 1887. There was no known contemporary collective name for all of the territories under the rule of the Angevin Kings of England. This led to circumlocutions such as "our kingdom and everything subject to our rule whatever it may be" or "the whole of the kingdom which had belonged to his father". The "Empire" portion of "Angevin Empire" has been controversial, especially as these territories were not subject to any unified laws or systems of governance, and each retained its own laws, traditions, and feudal relationships. In 1986, a convention of historians concluded that there had not been an Angevin state, and therefore no "Angevin Empire", but that the term espace Plantagenet (French for "Plantagenet area") was acceptable. Nonetheless, historians have continued to use "Angevin Empire".

The later counts of Anjou, including the Plantagenets, descended from Geoffrey II, Count of Gâtinais, and his wife Ermengarde of Anjou. In 1060, the couple inherited the title via cognatic kinship from an Angevin family that was descended from a noble named Ingelger, whose recorded history dates from 870.