Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Elizabeth gave birth on or before 10 September. Like all medieval noblewomen, she would have been tended by an experienced midwife and her ladies, who would have drawn the curtains and burned herbs to create a soothing, dark environment. Prayers would have been chanted to request the saints’ aid for a safe delivery, but medieval medicine could offer little in the way of solutions to major obstetric dangers, or pain management. When the time for delivery came, Elizabeth would have sat upright on a birthing chair rather than lying in the large bed she had brought from Scotland, though she would have moved to the bed to rest afterwards while the baby was bathed and swaddled, and – in the case of noble children – given to a wet nurse to suckle.

  Elizabeth remained at Knaresborough until 11 October, when she had recovered sufficiently to be entertained by the king’s minstrel Robert and fifteen of his fellow musicians, following her purification mass, a ceremonial re-entry to society after childbirth, in which thanks were given for her survival. Her father sent her six bream from the King’s Pool in York to aid the celebration. But all had not gone well, as the muted response of the king to the messenger who brought him the news offers sad testimony. Elizabeth gave birth to a boy, christened Humphrey, after his father and the three earlier generations of Earls of Hereford who preceded him. The family name, however, could not protect Humphrey, who died soon after birth. On 15 October, four grooms collected the body of the infant, and started a slow journey south to Fulham, where on the thirtieth a lead worker was commissioned to cast a tiny coffin. He was buried at Westminster Abbey on 8 November, in the chapel of St John the Baptist and only a few feet from the ambulatory passage which took pilgrims past the shrine of Edward the Confessor and the delicate effigy commemorating the child’s great-grandfather, Henry III. One hundred and twenty candles (made of 524 pounds of wax) surrounded the funeral bier, while Masses were said for the infant’s soul by the canons at Westminster and the Dominican friars of London, and the bell-ringer William and his companions rang the bells.15

  Late that autumn or early in the next year, another tragedy struck: one-year-old Margaret, Elizabeth’s first-born child, died at Windsor. The little girl’s death itself is unrecorded in surviving sources – an indication of the harrowing frequency of infant mortality; instead, Margaret’s name merely ceases to appear in the household accounts of the royal nursery at Windsor, only entering the historical record again attached to the tomb she shared at Westminster with her brother Humphrey. From the records, it was as though the baby simply disappeared. Given the period’s astonishingly high mortality rates for infants and young children, modern commentators have often portrayed the death of children like Humphrey and Margaret as less traumatic for medieval parents than we might expect. Certainly, noble and royal children frequently lived separately from their parents, nurtured by wet nurses so their mothers might rapidly become pregnant again, and Margaret was no different. Living at Windsor with her royal uncles while her parents were in Scotland and Knaresborough, she may not have known her parents. Yet first-hand accounts of grieving mothers and fathers depict the enormously damaging emotional toll of losing a child, even in royal households. The chronicler Matthew Paris recorded that, after the death of three-year-old Princess Katherine in May 1257, her mother, Eleanor of Provence, ‘was so overcome with grief that it brought on a disease, which was thought to be incurable, as she could obtain no relief either from medical skill or human consolation.’ By the end of the month, the little girl’s father, Henry III, was suffering badly from tertian fever, brought on ‘by the accumulation of sorrows.’ There is no reason to believe that Elizabeth and Humphrey did not suffer similarly with the deaths of their children.16

  Though the youngest of Eleanor of Castile’s many daughters, Elizabeth was the first to experience the pain of losing a child, an agony which her mother had known well. The Castilian queen had given birth to at least fifteen children over a period of twenty-five years or more, but nine of them died during her life – despite the advantages she enjoyed of a superior diet, access to physicians, and a relatively clean living environment. Though shocking to the modern reader, Eleanor of Castile’s familiarity with infant mortality reflected the prevalence of death among young children in families of all social classes across Europe. Her experience, bleak as it seems to us, was not rare, even among royal women: Queen Marguerite’s only sister gave birth to two children who died early before succumbing at a young age herself, possibly through complications surrounding a failed third pregnancy. In contrast, what was unusual – remarkable, even – was the accomplishment of the English princesses in providing such a large group of grandchildren for Eleanor of Castile. All eight of Joanna’s children, from the baby Edward to Gilbert, who was aged twelve in the spring of 1304, flourished in health – and extraordinarily, they would all live into adulthood. Eleanora’s son and daughter, both safely out of the most dangerous years of early childhood, remained in good health in Bar even after the death of their father Henri, while on Crusade in 1302, placed them in the guardianship of a council of elders and, ultimately, their grandfather, the English king. Both would live into middle age, and beyond. Margaret’s sole offspring, three-year-old Jan, and the handful of illegitimate half-siblings who shared his name, all prospered in youth and into adulthood, despite the odds being stacked against any babies born before the advent of modern medicine.17

  A small, grey marble tomb set into a recess in the north wall of the chapel was identified by the antiquary William Camden in 1600 as belonging to Elizabeth’s young children. The chest and delicately carved, trefoil canopy which surmounts it were exceedingly expensive to make, outstripping in their cost the funerary monuments of all but the richest lords at the beginning of the fourteenth century. This was a grave memorial designed to guarantee that the children would not be forgotten, its grandeur and expense offering vivid testimony, if it were needed, to the suffering of Elizabeth and Humphrey after the deaths of their young children.18

  XV

  Opulence

  1305

  LUDGERSHALL, WESTMINSTER

  Late in the summer of 1305, the king’s youngest children, Thomas and Edmund, escaped the heat of their nursery quarters at Windsor for the cool shade of the parklands of Ludgershall Castle, near Andover in Wiltshire. The fortified manor house was an ideal summer retreat, compact and yet recently modernized, and equipped with separate chambers for the king, queen, and royal children, each with fireplaces and privy chambers catering to the comfort of their occupants. Visible from the windows of the royal apartments was an enclosed park to the north, too small to house deer but probably used for rabbit hunting and the staging of lesser tournaments. Ludgershall may also have been selected for its close proximity to the usual home of their sister Mary, who was the young princes’ guardian during their summer sojourn. Fourteen years after her grandmother’s death, the king’s fourth daughter was still described as a ‘nun of Fontevrault, dwelling at Amesbury’, hinting that the decades-old plan that she would eventually join her cousin Eleanor of Brittany at the mother church of their religious order had not yet been forgotten. Mary’s reason for remaining at Amesbury, fifteen years after her cousin had first travelled to Fontevrault, is not known, but as late as 1305, her father’s grants included the explicit prerequisite that she continue to reside within his realm – she seemingly did not wish to lose the privileges she enjoyed living within her father’s kingdom.1

  Foremost among the exceptional freedoms granted to Mary as a nun, was the ability to visit her family. In the years since Edmund’s birth, Mary had remained close to Marguerite, and she increasingly took on the role of educating the young members of her extended family – Joanna’s many daughters, by both Gilbert and Ralph, spent significant amounts of time at Amesbury under the tutelage of their aunt. Aged twenty-six, Mary could have been forgiven for preferring to spend her time among the excitement of court rather than deep in the countryside, charged with the care of two little boys, aged five and four. But, having never l
earned to live within her income, she was not in a position to resist a request made by her father or stepmother – four months earlier she had been saved once again by a loan from her father in order to pay off extremely heavy debts. A letter survives in which Edward ordered his men to pay Mary the sum of two hundred pounds, ‘as speedily as possible, as she is indebted to diverse men’ – this was an immense loan, which the king can have had little faith he would see repaid. He also forgave his daughter rents she owed to him in May of that year, knowing they could not be paid.2

  This was not the first time that Mary’s debts had spiralled so wildly out of control (including the time her father had to pay off the goldsmith of London who had been thrown into debtors’ prison). What is clear though, is that her constant debts were not due to any meagreness in her income. From her first entrance into the priory, when she was assigned a generous annual income of one hundred pounds, her allowance had risen twice: it doubled on the death of her grandmother in 1291, to ensure she might maintain her comfort without recourse to the dowager queen’s income; and was enlarged again in 1302, when that allowance was replaced with a portfolio of estates spread across Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and the Isle of Wight worth more than 266 pounds each year. By 1305, in addition to the funds received from her manors, she was given sixty oaks each year from her father’s forests, which were transported to Amesbury for the hearth in her chamber. She was also a recipient of royal wardships, taking in the income from estates held by major landowners who had died while their heirs were still children. The following year, the king granted her more lands to supplement her daily needs, and when a competing claim to the lands emerged, he made up the difference from the royal coffers, ‘as the king wills that his daughter shall not be prejudiced in any way.’3

  As a nun, the requirements on Mary’s income should have been limited, since her vow of poverty was intended to prevent copious expenditure. While her sisters favoured sumptuous gold-embroidered silk gowns, embellished with silver buttons, and headdresses festooned with large pearls, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds, Mary – like all nuns in the Benedictine order – was meant to wear the plain black robe that marked her out as a religious woman. Frequent exhortations by bishops throughout the later medieval period (often blaming the independent incomes that increasingly accompanied noble nuns like Mary into their convents) suggest, however, that nuns regularly eschewed the simplicity of their prescribed dress, instead wearing gowns crafted of the same fine silks that clothed their secular sisters. The bishops also lamented the propensity of nuns to wear jewels that were deemed inappropriate to their status. As well as the sapphire ring presented to Mary by her father when she took her vows, she is known to have worn golden clasps, and her indebtedness to goldsmiths indicates the purchase of additional jewels for her use. Nor was personal adornment the only inappropriate expense for which the bishops blamed aristocratic nuns; they were also chastised for keeping pampered lapdogs, which seem to have been often brought into chapel, where they interrupted services, and even hunting hounds. Mary was therefore well positioned, should she desire, to participate in many of the noble activities that entertained her sisters. Whether or not she pursued the hunt with vigour, she was certainly a patron of travelling minstrels, who sang songs of romance and epic heroism far removed from the devotional chanting that marked the hours at Amesbury. Churchmen’s chastisements against the conduct of aristocratic nuns also included complaints about the frequent appearance of these musicians, their concern not only exercised by the impropriety of popular song but also by the way their music encouraged the nuns to dance, a physical expression that was felt to be dangerously close to sin. Mary also spent money on literature, commissioning a chronicle of her father’s reign from the Dominican friar Nicholas Trivet, whom she may have first met through contacts associated with her mother.4

  Mary may, therefore, have run up considerable – and to the modern reader, unexpected – expenses on clothes and jewellery, as well as on the patronage of musicians and writers. The bulk of her remaining income was concentrated on supplying her chamber with the richest foods, wines, furnishings, and entertainment available, and in travelling in a style to rival the king. Her bed – almost always the most costly and intricate item of furniture within a medieval chamber – was purchased at the king’s expense in 1305. It was hung with heavy woven tapestries and covered in fine linen sheets topped with heavy velvets, which – together with the constant glow of fire from her hearth – would have kept her warm in the cold of winter on the Salisbury Plain. This opulent bed, and the green benches cushioned with down feathers that lined three walls within her chamber, set Mary’s rooms apart from the simpler dwellings of the other Amesbury nuns, and provided a luxuriously comfortable alternative meeting place to the prioress’s chamber or chapter house. In Mary’s chamber, visiting magnates and bishops could be entertained, and senior nuns – themselves mostly from aristocratic families and likely accustomed to modern comforts – could gather to make decisions on behalf of the priory. It was with a deep appreciation of the princess’s potential for influencing the outside world that her cousin, Eleanor of Brittany, now Abbess of Fontevrault, declared Mary her deputy in inspecting the other houses of the order within England – at Nuneaton in Warwickshire, and the small priory at Westwood in Worcestershire – and bestowed upon her the power to discipline and correct any behaviours that were deemed unsuitable.5

  By all accounts, Mary’s quarters at Amesbury were impressive, and she evidently considered entertaining a serious means of building and maintaining her influence, providing a forum where petitioners could appeal to the princess for her intercession. The private dining table within her chamber at the priory required more than one hundred ells – or 125 yards – of linens to make napkins and tablecloths for dozens of guests, and she had her own pond stocked with two thousand fish for making pies, soups, and sauces which were prepared away from the priory’s main kitchens. Guests at her table also sampled more exotic delicacies, such as the sixteen giant Atlantic wolffish (capable of growing over four feet long and each weighing thirty pounds or more) which were sent as a gift to Mary from the king. When she travelled on pilgrimage or to visit her family, her expenses normally fell to her father, and her profligacy can be glimpsed in the surviving royal wardrobe entries. Over one twenty-nine-day period during a pilgrimage to the great shrines at Bury St Edmunds and Walsingham, her household expenditure – on beer and wine, fish (clearly a favourite food) and venison, oats and hay for her large stable of horses, and on paying the wages of the many ladies, clerks, and messengers in her regular employment – totalled almost forty-nine pounds, more than the annual income required by a knight. Nor was even this amount sufficient: no fewer than three times during the pilgrimage, Mary sent her men to the king to borrow twenty additional pounds. This level of expenditure is scarcely believable for the household of a single woman, and especially one who was pledged to poverty.6

  Even when visiting court – which, by 1305, normally accounted for at least one extended period each year, during which she renewed her acquaintance with her siblings and stepmother – Mary was not content to promote the virtues of asceticism and poverty that were usually associated with the monastic vocation. While the household of her sister Elizabeth, one of the foremost ladies of England in her capacity as Countess of Hereford, used up to thirty horses when it travelled to Scotland and back, Mary’s required no fewer than twenty-four (for riding by the nun and her entourage, and to pull carts carrying baggage), merely to travel between Amesbury and Westminster, each animal being attended by its own groom, whose wages would be supplied by the king. And it was almost certainly during one of her extended stays at court that Mary developed one of her most expensive habits of all.

  The vice of gambling, which was most commonly undertaken with dice but also with chess, was fairly conventional among the noble class – Mary’s brother, Prince Edward, lost about thirty-two pounds in 1302 while betting against other young noblemen, and wa
s not considered to have a gambling problem. Her parents had favoured chess, a game very commonly played in Eleanor’s childhood home of Castile. Mary’s mother evidently retained a strong affection for the game into adulthood: she is known to have borrowed a treatise on tactics so that it could be copied by her scribes, and she received an exceptionally fine set of pieces carved from jasper and rock crystal as a gift from her husband. At least during the early years of his reign, Edward also gambled at chess, losing small sums before either improving his game or learning to play only for the pride of winning. Mary preferred to gamble with dice, playing a variety of popular games from the simple raffle, in which players took turns rolling three dice, with the highest matching pair or sets of three winning, to the more complicated hazard, which has evolved, in a simplified form, as craps, still played today. When it came to gambling, the difference between Mary and her parents or brother, apart from the incompatibility of betting with her religious vocation, was that her income was comparatively limited. Her predilection for dice games nevertheless remained strong throughout her life. On one occasion while travelling (her expenses therefore recorded within the king’s wardrobe accounts), she lost all the cash she had playing dice, but – in a gesture familiar to many who have gambled – she was so determined to make back her loss, she borrowed from her companions, money which was inevitably also lost.7