From People's King to King of a Country: The Development of the Place Element Modifying the Title Paired in Apposition with a Personal Name Traced in the Peterborough Chronicle

Abstract

A king was typically referred to as people's king in the early period of Old English, whereas today, king of a country is the most commonly used. This study attempts to trace the development of the place element modifying the title paired in apposition with a personal name in the tradition of vernacular English historiography as represented by the Peterborough Chronicle. There existed a strong tendency to specify a smaller land area (city, town, etc.) with the genitive form of the name of the place or with a prepositional phrase involving the place-name and a larger one (kingdom, shire, etc.) with the genitive form of the name of the people living there in Early Old English. In later periods, however, the prepositional phrase was left as the only place element available for either a smaller or larger land area. Various prepositions heading the prepositional phrase became limited during the Old English period to just one in Early Middle English. Thus, the shift from people's king to king of a country was almost complete in Early Middle English. These findings are related to more general patterns of syntactic change in the noun phrase in English to highlight their current relevance.