Edward the Black Prince Langham, archbishop of Canterbury. According to Jean Froissart the contract of marriage (the engagement) was entered into without the knowledge of the king. The prince and his wife resided at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. On 19 July 1362 his father, Edward III granted the Black Prince all his dominions in Aquitaine and Gascony, to be held as a principality by liege homage on payment of an ounce of gold each year, together with the title of Prince of Aquitaine and Gascony. During the rest of the year he was occupied in preparing for his departure to his new principality, and after
Edward the Black Prince possible that this is where the title had its origins. The French soldier Philippe de Mézières refers to Edward as the greatest of the "black boars" – those aggressors who had done so much to disrupt relations within Christendom. Other French writers made similar associations, and Peter Hoskins reports that an oral tradition of "L'Homme Noir", who had passed by with an army, survived in southern France until recent years. In Shakespeare's "Henry V", the King of France alludes to "that black name, Edward, Black Prince of Wales". John Speed reported in 1611 that the Black Prince was so named