While reading Leopold G. Wickham Legg’s account of the Coronation Banquet in his English Coronation Records, I was struck by the following passage:
On the King’s left hand there are also three tables. At the first sit the “Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine,” the King’s officers…[1]
I immediately wondered why the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine had their titles placed in scare quotes. My curiosity piqued, I did a bit of digging and stumbled upon something rather strange: they weren’t actual dukes at all. Today, we’re going to look at why a pair of fake French dukes attended British coronations for hundreds of years.
English monarchs claimed the French throne from the 14th century onward. When Charles IV of France died in 1328, he had no direct male heir. The English king, Edward III, was Charles’ nephew through Charles’ sister, Isabella. French law didn’t allow women to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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