Prince of Wales soil and speaking no other language"). William Camden wrote in his 1607 work "Britannia" that originally the title "Prince of Wales" was not conferred automatically upon the eldest living son of the King of England because Edward II (who had been the first English Prince of Wales) neglected to invest his eldest son, the future Edward III, with that title. It was Edward III who revived the practice of naming the eldest son Prince of Wales, which was then maintained by his successors: Nevertheless, according to conventional wisdom, since 1301 the Prince of Wales has usually been the eldest living
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