He was noted to be "a man with many reprehensible, even scandalous, habits" by Orderic Vitalis, who particularly objected to his many women and his influential footwear, claiming he popularized the pigaches that eventually became the poulaine, the medieval long-toed shoe.

It is the English form of the same Germanic masculine given name latinized as Fulco in contemporary accounts and written Foulques in modern French.

Philologists have made numerous and varied suggestions, most but not all negative, including "the Quarreler", "the Rude", "the Sullen", "the Surly", and "the Heroic".

Fulk, born in 1043,[1] was the younger son of Geoffrey II, Count of Gâtinais (sometimes known as Aubri), and Ermengarde of Anjou.

[6] Substantial territory was lost to Angevin control due to the difficulties resulting from Geoffrey's poor rule and the brothers' warring.

[7] Much of Fulk's rule was devoted to regaining control over this territory and to a complex struggle with Normandy for influence in Maine and Brittany.

[22] Amid his other denunciations of Fulk, the English historian Orderic Vitalis blamed him for the invention of pigaches,[23] the pointy-toed "scorpion-tail" shoes, which became fashionable in France and England around this time and later developed into the unwieldy elongated poulaines.

Supposedly Fulk began wearing narrow shoes with lengthened toes as a way of hiding his unsightly bunions from his 5th wife Bertrade[24][25][10] before she abandoned him in favor of the king.

(The fashion historian Ruth Wilcox offers that it may have been a simple adaptation of the Normans' sabatons, which they had extended to a point and turned down in the late 11th century to better hold their stirrups during battle.