Yes, the English seem to venerate powerful women. Last summer, I was showing my Mexican friend round London and, explaining the statue of Boadicea at the end of Westminster Bridge, remarked “we English love our queens”.

Get well soon, Hodge.

Blessed are the cheese makers. :-)

Thank you! by the way…

I am spending it working as a cheesemonger.

‘Lady’ is also a catch-all title for more specific statuses (‘duchess’, for example), where it would be roughly equivalent to ‘Sir’ (which could imply ‘viscount’, ‘count’, ‘duke’ etc, without any internal indication of what it means exactly).

As far as primogeniture is concerned, I will be addressing this very issue in later weeks! Curiously, it is France, which operated the Salic law throughout the time it had a monarchy, that gender is most important (‘No woman shall succeed in Salic land’), to the extent that a man tracing his claim through umpteen fathers and grandfathers could be booted off the throne by a single generational line running through a great-grandmother.

England’s history seems remarkably untroubled by such issues: while men get the throne first, their sisters are perfectly entitled to rule: witness Matilda, Mary I & II, Elizabeth I & II, Anne and Victoria. In fact, where these issues are concerned, England seems to rather venerate powerful women.

And as for the father / mother / legitimacy issue, another thing I had to cut out of ‘infant’ was just such an explanation for why medieval literature (in particular) is so full of uncle-nephew relationships. Your sister’s son was a safer bet than your wife’s. Thus Roland and Ganelon, but also, in inverted form, Arthur and Mordred, and the various Shakespeare uncles.

Am writing through flu. Probably very incoherent / simply restating many just-made points.

My lords, ladies and gentlemen…

This seems to assume that “lady” covers both women of noble birth and commoners. Could this have something to do with a lower status accorded to women? (Read: even women of noble birth are scarcely elevated above the common folk?) A lower status for noblewomen (than noblemen) seems implied by the institution of male primogeniture. Yet everyone knows which lady bore the young lord… who truly knows which lord or knave fathered him? Female primogeniture would make more sense, but would sit ill with the patriarchy.