Weis" "Ancestral Roots. . ." (53:27).
Two points about ORABILE's rather unusual name deserve notice in passing. The name occurs in French chansons de geste, both as a man's name and as the name of a queen of Arabia, and the fact that NESS chose to give it to his daughter is a reminder that French culture in the form of popular literature was penetrating into Scotland in the first half of the twelfth century. As Professor Graeme Ritchie has demonstrated so amply, the Normans were not merely warrior-knights and they were interested in more than legal concepts such as the knight's fee.
The later history of the name is equally interesting. It descended from Orabile to her granddaughter, who was the daughter of SAHER DE QUINCY IV, first earl of Winchester. This Orabile II married Richard de Harcourt and passed the name on to her own granddaughter, the daughter of Alice la Zouche. The first Orabile is apparently the first known holder of the name, which does not occur regularly in England or Scotland until the thirteenth century. It seems likely that she had at least a share, through her marriage into the Quincy family, in popularizing the name and in transferring it from a Scoto-Norman context to an English context: a significant if minor by-product of the international links of one Anglo-Scottish family. The name ultimately became Arabella and in this form remained popular in Scotland.