Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Margaret most likely did not make a strenuous effort to learn Dutch, at least not while she remained in England. The example of her mother, fluent in the Castilian of her brother’s court and also in the French of her own mother’s province of Ponthieu, shows that consorts of ruling men need not necessarily learn to speak the language used by the majority of the population. In Eleanor’s case, her Ponthevin French would have served perfectly when she arrived at the English court, which was still dominated in the middle of the thirteenth century by the Anglo-Norman dialect that William the Conqueror had brought over two centuries earlier. More than two decades after she arrived, Eleanor either still did not speak English or did not feel confident at using it: when the townspeople of St Albans sought her intercession in a disagreement with the local abbot in 1275, they aimed to complain directly to the queen and chased down her carriage (despite the best efforts of the abbot to steer it away from the crowd); they gained an audience with her, but their chosen (native English) spokeswoman was unable to make their case – instead, the petitioners were forced to make a written appeal in French. Margaret’s husband had been living at the English court since the age of ten, and would undoubtedly have achieved full fluency in Anglo-Norman, which explains why language had not been a barrier in her relationship with him.15

  Beyond her relationship with her husband, however, Margaret was strongly incentivized to learn Dutch. Brabant was a province at the centre of several linguistic traditions, with French and even a dialect of German spoken in parts, but Dutch was the predominant tongue throughout the province. Linguistic variation, moreover, could lead to the formation of political factions. Early in her own marriage, Margaret’s mother had proved her usefulness as a diplomatic bride, by obtaining favourable trading conditions in England for merchants from her home country. If Margaret hoped to emulate her mother, she would need to navigate the language-based factions in Brabant by speaking directly to magnates from each language group, and respond to their attempts to make connections through her. The role of duchess-princess promised Margaret extraordinary opportunities to act as intercessor between Brabant and England, particularly in matters pertaining to trade and international politics, but she could easily fall victim to factionalism if she was unable to navigate the politics at court in Brussels.

  On a more personal level, Margaret may have been reluctant to give up her household and the relationships she had developed with long-standing servants and companions. The king’s wardrobe accounts demonstrate a startling stability in the membership of the households of his daughters: in 1295, Margaret was still being served by a number of the same people who had been in her household a decade earlier. These men and women had been part of Margaret’s life since her childhood – they were with her during the years her parents were in Gascony, they travelled with her when she moved between her father and her brother, and they remained part of her household, or ‘family’, when her other sisters moved away. But Margaret’s retinue in Brabant would necessarily consist of local servants and aristocrats, so her own household would be disbanded. Nor could she keep forever her English ladies – women like Alice de Neutembre, Margaret’s ‘damsel’, who was sufficiently important to her in June 1294 that she begged her father to assign Alice lands to supplement her income. Even if, as a contemporary Brabaçon romance suggests, many aristocratic youths may have been familiar with French by this date, Margaret would need to start afresh in building relationships at court in Brussels. When she finally did travel to Brabant in 1297, only two ladies were in the large train of English noblemen who accompanied the young duchess, and at least one of them was recalled to England within six months of leaving. For someone like Margaret, who had spent her life surrounded by the same faces each day, the sudden feeling of being alone and not knowing whom to trust must have been incredibly intimidating.16

  The undeniable impression remains that Margaret avoided joining Jan in Brabant for as long as she possibly could. For his part, Jan does not seem to have minded that his wife stayed away – heavy pressure from her husband’s court would have been hard for the duchess to resist. Rather than any dramatic refusal to travel, the records simply suggest that no one – neither the duchess nor her father or estranged husband – did anything to disturb the status quo, in which she remained attached to her father’s household. Whatever other reasons may have kept the young couple apart, they clearly were not desperate to be together; in all likelihood, they were not so lucky as her parents had been in finding true companionship within their dynastic marriage. A lack of connection is not surprising among couples whose unions were founded on international diplomacy, trade, and family aggrandizement. It is difficult to say whether young women like Margaret felt disappointed or aggrieved in the knowledge that they would never experience the passion and romance of the stories so richly embroidered throughout chivalric society. Most members of the medieval elite, men and women, would not have expected to find romantic love within their marriages – but Margaret’s perspective would certainly have been affected by her own parents’ exceptionally close relationship.

  She may also have felt acutely the limitations on female power in medieval society, particularly when a woman was married. In a world in which the chief public role of royal women was the performance of intercession, her ability to sway her husband’s judgment in favour of those she wished to promote was paramount. Margaret would only have autonomy over any estate in Brabant if Jan predeceased her, when she would gain access to her dower lands; as long as Jan lived, it would be Margaret’s ability to influence his behaviour that would determine her political and cultural contributions. By contrast, in England, surrounded by her long-serving household and with the assurance provided by her role as daughter of the king, Margaret was in a position to make things happen on her own: grants made to those in her service during the years after her marriage while she remained in England (‘at the instance of the king’s daughter Margaret, consort of Jan of Brabant’ or ‘for his service to Margaret, Duchess of Brabant, the king’s daughter’) show that she was able to exercise power at her father’s court. She was also able to win privileges for Brabaçon merchants trading in England, just as her mother had done for the merchants of Castile after her own marriage. By 1295, she had known Jan for nearly a decade. If after that, and five years of marriage, she either still did not feel close to him or worried that their relationship would not allow her a power base that would guarantee the same degree of comfort, freedoms, and influence she enjoyed as a daughter of the king, Margaret may have resisted giving up her position in England. Her reality was a far cry from the ‘humble and obscure’ position that Tristan warned Isolde not to cling to, and she appears to have been reluctant to trade it for an uncertain future in Brabant.17

  Even as Margaret delayed her departure from England, the time was fast approaching for her youngest sister, Elizabeth, to follow in the duchess’s footsteps. She had been betrothed as long as she could remember, the daughter who, through her marriage, would secure the alliance her father had previously attempted to make with Holland when he betrothed Prince Alphonso to the daughter of Floris V. Elizabeth’s match shared remarkable parallels with that of Margaret: her fiancé Johan of Holland, another Dutch-speaking boy, was an exact contemporary of her brother Edward and slightly her junior, and after their betrothal was agreed, he was sent over to England to be raised alongside his future bride in the hope that this would bind the cloth-making heartland of Holland to wool-exporting England. Johan arrived in England soon after Elizabeth’s parents had returned from Gascony and lived with a small household of his own between court and the children’s establishment that travelled in summer and spent the winter months at Langley. For Elizabeth, his visits would have felt little different from the constant stream of high-born visitors who frequented the household she shared with her brother Edward – young knights, distant cousins, and the children of great lords all stopped by the miniature court on their way somewhere, hoping to eat well for a couple o
f days at the king’s expense and to strengthen their relationship with the future sovereign, Prince Edward.

  Elizabeth’s adolescence differed from those of her elder sisters in ways that seem to have had a lasting influence on her as an adult. Her mother’s death meant she lacked a strong female figure to model herself on. The passionate devotion that she showed to her female companions as an adult suggests that her early life was devoid of familial warmth and rather lonely, with her brother the only constant, and he increasingly separated from her as the pair grew up. As well as missing out a close relationship with their mother, the youngest royal children were also deprived of her tuition. Elizabeth was most likely taught to read by Sir Guy Ferre, magister, or tutor, to Prince Edward, but there is no evidence that she attained skills in writing as her sister Eleanora had, and nor is it clear whether the children had regular access to many books. Sir Guy also taught the children to ride – a herald’s celebratory poem written in 1300 praises the young prince who ‘managed his steed wonderfully well’, and his sister will have had plenty of opportunities to achieve this same proficiency. As young adults, Elizabeth and Prince Edward also shared a love of polyphonic music, suggesting that this fashionable art form newly radiating outward from the churches of Paris may have featured in their upbringing. Little else, however, is known about Elizabeth’s formal education. In the year before her marriage, she seems to have spent a great deal of time with Margaret, who probably sought to help Elizabeth develop her courtly skills and prepare for life as a consort in the Low Countries. However, these visits could not replace what she had lost when her mother died; now that she was approaching the age of marriage, this loss must have been felt especially acutely.18

  IX

  Ladies of War

  1294–7

  CAERPHILLY, BAR

  The Countess of Gloucester’s chamber on the upper floor of her castle at Caerphilly had two windows: one, large and glazed, outlined by delicately shaped stonework, looked down over the castle’s busy inner courtyard; the other was smaller and round and looked south, out over the great mere that provided the fortress’s principal protection, past the small village, and to the hills beyond. In October 1294, Joanna’s view was filled with flames, and the sound of daily life that reverberated within the castle walls was pierced with screams; rebellion had erupted across Wales, and the insurgents had come to attack the Clare stronghold, deep in the heart of Glamorgan.

  Just weeks before, as the harvest approached, men had been on the move in enormous numbers, heading south and east to Portsmouth, under the order of the king. They were expected there by the end of September, to support King Edward in his effort to relieve the English-held lands in Gascony, which had been invaded by the French the previous spring. But before the vast army of thousands of men and more than fifteen hundred horses could set sail, terrible news arrived from Caernarfon, where the king’s men were still at work completing his fortress. The castle had been captured, and its constable had been killed. With the defensive might of the king’s prized stronghold in the hands of an occupying enemy, rebels were proclaiming loyalty to Madog ap Llewellyn (a distant cousin of the last native prince defeated a decade before by Edward), who now claimed the Welsh principality. The smouldering embers of Welsh independence that remained after Edward’s initial conquest had been fanned by a heavy and unpopular tax levied by the English king, as well as by his demand that Welshmen fight for England in Gascony. Within a month, four of Edward’s other Welsh castles had been overcome, and those still under the king’s control were garrisoned with scores of knights and archers. The provisions intended for the Gascony campaign were instead sent to Worcester, from where the king and his principal magnates were assembling to quash the rebellion.1

  Far to the south, Joanna and Gilbert may have considered the uprising unlikely to spread into their lands – Glamorgan was under the tight grip of Gilbert and his men, and there had been no flickers of insurgence during the decades in which he and his father had consolidated their authority over the Marcher lordship. But the rebellion came, led by Morgan ap Maredudd, the son of a landowner dispossessed by the Clares in the uplands to the north of Glamorgan. And, unlike Madog in the north, who fought in the name of an independent Wales and sought to drive out the English conquerors, Morgan’s grievances were decidedly personal, as he publicly declared himself in opposition to Gilbert rather than to the king. He and his supporters attacked and captured Gilbert’s castle in Morlais, on the border with Brecon. Morgan then moved south, burning the Clare castles of Kenfig and Llangynwyd. Joanna had returned to Caerphilly with Gilbert six months earlier, unaware that a country seemingly ever on the brink of violent war was about to explode once more. But, one autumn day in October 1294, the rebels attacked the castle and the adjacent town; eighty houses were destroyed by fire.2

  In the medieval English imagination, the Welsh Marches were a lawless area – a land in which the king’s laws did not prevail, and where the local Marcher lord had the final say in all matters of law, property, and life. Adding to these anxieties, the March was a borderland in terms of culture, inhabited by Welshmen who spoke a strange language and had bizarre customs. Joanna had, it seems, always been attracted to the frontier, demonstrated by her childhood ventures into the northern part of Wales, her professed zeal for the ill-fated Crusade of 1290, and her enthusiasm in joining the campaign to Ireland. She was in this regard well suited to her married life, much of which was spent in the Marcher estates that she held jointly with Gilbert: in the lordships of Glamorgan, Newport, Caerleon and Usk, which were together worth roughly 2,500 pounds each year, nearly half the total income of the Clare estates. It was a society built around war: in England, military prowess was a chivalric ideal to which noblemen might aspire; in the Welsh Marches, it was a necessity for any lord who wished to maintain control of his lands. The great historian of the Marcher lords, Rees Davies, called them ‘lords of war’, and Joanna’s husband was perhaps the most powerful of all. Like many of their peers in the March, Joanna and Gilbert also held large estates in England, spread over nineteen counties, including Clare in Suffolk and Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. That they spent so much time in the March can probably be attributed to the relative freedom they held within these estates to rule as they pleased, away from Gilbert’s often-fraught relationship with the king. In Glamorgan, the Clare lord was ‘like a king’, and his wife, the English princess, seems to have relished the independence that she had in the province.3

  By the 1290s Glamorgan had twenty-three castles, many of which had been either built or substantially rebuilt by Gilbert or his father during the decades that they secured their authority over their March estates. When the rebellion broke out, Joanna would have been glad for the safety of strongholds like Caerphilly Castle, the most luxuriously appointed of the Clare homes in Glamorgan. The castle had been built rapidly in the later 1260s, at a time when Gilbert was still battling for control of the Glamorgan uplands, and was a physical manifestation of his authority along the frontier. Its structure provided in the 1280s a model for the castles Edward built in the north of Wales to secure his own conquest, and by the time Joanna was living there in the 1290s, the castle functioned as an administrative centre for the whole Clare estate within the March. It was well placed geographically, more or less in the centre of the family’s Welsh lands, which stretched from Monmouth, near the English border, to Neath, adjacent to the Gower Peninsula. The castle’s immense towers, walls, and gates were heavily restored in the twentieth century, and today provide a sense of the power that Gilbert and Joanna held within Glamorgan. The castle was surrounded by two tall stone walls, set with towers on an artificial island that could only be accessed by three separate drawbridges and through colossal gatehouses, each shielded by heavy iron portcullises. Inside these defences, a double-height great hall was warmed by a central fire. At one end of the hall was the service wing, with pantry and buttery, and above it a small chapel; at the other was the suite of spacious private
apartments in which Joanna and Gilbert lived with their children, including fireplaces and a large window framed by delicate tracery, which overlooked the courtyard below.

  Caerphilly Castle was built to project the Clare family’s wealth and power on the surrounding countryside and to impress their peers with its magnificence and modern comforts. It was also a virtually impregnable fortress, designed to withstand the onslaught of an army. Its model was probably Kenilworth Castle, where during the baronial wars of the 1260s, Gilbert had seen first-hand how a lake-like moat called a mere might allow a stronghold to stand firm for six months against continuous attack. The mere at Caerphilly was broad and surrounded the castle on all sides, preventing siege engines like catapults, trebuchets and battering rams from gaining the close proximity necessary to reach the castle walls. Its towers were strong and its bridges could be raised. In 1294, the castle withstood Morgan ap Maredudd’s loosely organized band of rebels, but Gilbert was unable to crush the rebellion outright. The Dunstable chronicle records that the earl, Joanna, and their men were pushed out of Wales, ‘so that he barely escaped alive’. The couple fled to safety in England with their three tiny children: little Gilbert, aged three, Eleanor, who was two, and a second daughter named Margaret for her mother’s second sister, who was about a year old. Joanna was forced to suffer the anxiety and indignity of being forcibly expelled from her estates by violent insurgents. She was twenty-two and pregnant with her fourth child – proof that, at least in one respect, her ageing husband remained vigorous, even as he struggled to regain control of his Welsh lands.4