A female name. French f. of the adj blanc ‘white’. There were several saints Candida, and this name, which seems to have originated in Navarre and Castille, possibly represents a translation of the Latin name. There is, in the same way, some evidence that St Candida was known in England as St Whyte; thus Whitchurch Canonicorum was said to take its name from a chapel dedicated to St Whyte (the fact that this is a false etymology is not relevant here). Similarly Chaucer says of his Duchess Blaunche ‘And grand-daughter faire Whyte she hete’. One of the earliest examples of the name was Blanca of Navarre who married Sancho III of Castille (d. 1156); her namesake and g.d. (d. 1252) married Louis VIII of France and became the mother of St Louis. Her name, in the French form Blanch, became fairly popular in France, and her g.d. Blanch of Artois carried it to England, when she m. Edmund, Earl of Lancaster (d. 1296). Chaucer’s Duchess Blaunche, the wife of John of Gaunt, was a great-granddaughter of Blanch of Artois. The name has never been common in England, but Blaunch occurs in the 15th C, and Lyford 1653 gives Blanch or Blanchia. Charles Lamb, writing about 1808, says ‘Blanche is out of fashion’, and his sister bestowed it on the subject of a Cinquecento painting. They evidently regarded it as old-fashioned and romantic, and with other such names it had a revival of use during the 19th C. The It form Bianca is occasionally used in England.

A Teutonic name, meaning: White.