Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Her penchant for gambling and her unrepentant taste for luxury marked Mary out even among the other mostly aristocratic nuns with whom she lived, yet her position as daughter of the king preserved her not only from penury in times of debt but also from censure. Moreover, while Mary, as a nun, may have seemed too fond of luxury, she was firmly within the prescribed behaviours for female members of the royal family, who were positively encouraged to model conspicuous consumption. In addition to the intricately embroidered gowns speckled with silver buttons, and the heavily jewelled headdresses and girdles that added lustre and further embellishment to their dress, the royal sisters were taught to furnish their lives in a manner that advertised the wealth, prestige, and sophistication of their dynasty.

  Their parents had not held back. Eleanor of Castile had possessed exceptionally cosmopolitan tastes, that were variously drawn from the courts of Castile where she grew up and Ponthieu in northern France, the home of her mother, but she also understood the expectation that her surroundings should reflect her own status as queen. Thus, she imported silks from Tripoli and Damascus, furs and feathers from France, glass vessels from the workshops of Venice, and caskets from Limoges. Her mirrors were backed with silver, her combs were carved from ivory. Her chambers featured glazed windows and were invariably painted in rich colours, often in a deep green, and cushioned with pillows, linens, velvet covers, and ‘pictured cloths’, figural tapestries bought from Cologne. The chronicler Matthew Paris described the queen’s use of fabric coverings for walls and floor as displaying ‘excessive pride’, reporting that her rooms were ‘hung with palls of silk and tapestry, like a temple’. Their father, who reportedly eschewed elaborate dress in favour of simple tunics, nevertheless spent lavishly on the tournaments, feasts, and weddings that were designed to promote his largesse and the perception of his wealth. He patronized many sweeping architectural and decorative programmes, including the extraordinarily detailed cycle of narrative paintings at Westminster Palace, which depicted stories of heroic warriors and kings of the Old Testament, that were completed under his instruction late in the thirteenth century. At court, table settings gleamed over fine linens, with plates, chalices, and pitchers made of gold and silver and etched with the intertwined heraldic arms of Castile and England, and knives and forks with handles vibrantly coloured in delicate enamelwork. Just as rich as the vessels in which they were served were the foods themselves: there were casks of olive oil, lemons, and oranges imported from Spain; wheels of delicate cheese received as special gifts from relatives in Brie; dates and pomegranates, figs and raisins, and cherries, apples, and pears from across England and Europe. Eleanor of Castile had equally high tastes in other consumables, including books – her own scriptorium turned out treatises on religion and war, while the queen purchased more refined illuminated works from specialist artisans.8

  Mary, like her mother and grandmother (whose own substantial collection of manuscripts, including those focusing on stories from Arthur’s court at Camelot, may have been passed to Mary after her death), demonstrated a decidedly secular interest in books. Her own commission, a chronicle of her father’s reign by the Dominican friar Nicholas Trivet, shows that she possessed a significant interest in the world of politics and war. Family histories formed an important part of literature in the chivalric age – their stories linked real knights and kings directly to the fabled heroes whose songs were sung by the travelling minstrels. In commissioning this chronicle, Mary was promoting the prestige of her father’s lineage, and by extension, her own.9

  As a nun, Mary would never enjoy the status that provided her countess and duchess sisters with opportunities for influence, but she could nevertheless project her royal connections through the luxurious appointment of her rooms, which she filled with costly imported goods and foods, specially commissioned literary works, music and games. What may appear as unbecoming flamboyance in a religious woman can therefore rather be understood as the princess-nun deploying her income to reaffirm her position and affiliation as a member of the royal family. Her ostentatious travelling entourage, over-stuffed interiors, mirth-making, and extraordinary consumption of fuel and food in her chamber – so utterly ill-seeming in a religious woman – forcefully demonstrated her economic power and connection. Mary needed those around her to remember she was a princess, perhaps even more than her sisters did – she, after all, was without a wealthy husband to provide a secondary opportunity for accessing power and influence. Hers came only through her connection to court and her birth family, and she understood that her role required her to be surrounded by the trappings of worldly honour.

  As Mary’s sisters became increasingly established within their own households, they each demonstrated the same understanding of the way that conspicuous luxury reflected positively on their status as leading noblewomen. Early in the fourteenth century, Clare Castle in Suffolk, one of Joanna’s principal residences in England, boasted fabulous luxuries, including a swannery, an embroidery studio, and a goldsmith’s workshop, as well as an aviary and a lion house where exotic beasts were kept – recalling the camel that lived at Langley during Joanna’s adolescence. The castle itself was surrounded by fountained gardens criss-crossed with flint paths, a nod to her mother’s passion for the gardens of her Castilian youth. Joanna was also a patron of building works at Clare Priory, a house of Augustinian friars to the immediate south-west, across the River Stour from the castle. The priory had been established in the middle of the thirteenth century by the father of her first husband, and by 1305 Joanna seems to have determined that it would be her final resting place. Indeed, it may have been to secure burial rights within that church that Joanna made her benefaction to the friars, as she does not otherwise appear to have been concerned with religious patronage, and nor does anything about her personality suggest that she was more than conventionally pious. In supporting Clare Priory and opting to be buried there, Joanna chose to forever associate her memory with the Clare family, whose vast estates granted her the independence she cherished; it is, moreover, clear from her rejection of a burial alongside Gilbert at the Clare mausoleum at Tewkesbury that it was her independence, rather than any lingering emotional connection to her first husband, that was foremost in her mind.10

  Across the sea in Brabant, Margaret – who was often distanced from her husband at court, as he indulged in very public love affairs – began crafting her own memorial. Her ambitions could not be contained within a church: instead, harking back to her father’s works in Wales, she built a castle on a magnificent scale. The castle at Tervuren replaced an earlier royal hunting lodge on a site traditionally associated with St Hubert, patron saint of hunters, deep in the Sonian Forest, east of Brussels. It was demolished in the eighteenth century, but an early-seventeenth-century landscape painting that may be considered a portrait of the castle (albeit set in an idealized landscape) after a later renovation survives. Looking beyond the steep gables and many-windowed façades that were added in the seventeenth century, Margaret’s castle – with its many turrets and large great hall – can be glimpsed rising out of the surrounding mere, with a view of the nearby ducal church of St John the Evangelist (retaining the Romanesque tower it has since lost) in the background. The painting also contains a view of the wide, flat path which Margaret directed should encircle the castle and lake, and which quickly became a favourite place for Jan to stroll with his counsellors and hunting companions. Though surrounded by water, the low walls at Tervuren indicate that the castle was never intended for defensive purposes; rather its aim seems to have been to please Duke Jan, and Margaret may have hoped it might lure him away from his mistresses. In building on such a scale, Margaret also knew she was demonstrating her ducal family’s wealth and sophistication to the courtiers and ambassadors who visited.11

  Back in England, Elizabeth also promoted cultural refinement. Like her mother and the elegant lady who appears painted in the lower margins of the Alphonso Psalter, she hunted with dogs, including a whi
te greyhound that was of such beauty that her brother, Prince Edward, wrote to his ‘beautiful sister’ in 1304 to ask if he could borrow the dog to mate it with a grey bitch in his kennel. She presumably accommodated his request, since she was herself so frequently the recipient of gifts from her brother; nor was she shy about asking him for favours in return. Prince Edward was a consummate lover of music, to the extent that he once sent a musician in his household to Shrewsbury Abbey near the Welsh border, armed with a letter of introduction and the instruction to remain there until he had learned to play the crwth, a stringed, partly bowed instrument resembling a primitive hybrid of guitar and violin. Elizabeth wrote to the prince, asking him to send his choirmaster to her at Pleshey Castle for a time, so that he might teach the children of her chapel to sing in polyphony, or multiple parts. The request sounds simple enough, but Elizabeth’s desire to import fashionable new music into her own home was itself a gesture at demonstrating her connection to court. Polyphonic singing, with its blended harmonies, opportunities for showing off virtuosic voices, and even occasional dissonance, was utterly distinct from the traditional religious chanting that still dominated church services throughout England in the early fourteenth century. Many prelates considered the application of multiple parts to sacred songs inappropriately frivolous and likely to distract from the meaning of the words; within twenty years, the Pope had forbidden polyphonic music during liturgical services. Elizabeth’s efforts to introduce polyphony into her own chapel shows that she had retained a genuine interest in music from the minstrels who had entertained the children at Langley. But in bringing the latest musical trends to rural Essex – especially when imported through the person of the prince’s own choirmaster – she was also demonstrating the metropolitan refinement of the Bohun family, as well as reinforcing local recognition of her own royalty. It was a connection that would have been further emphasized by the fur-lined mantles and the hoods emblazoned with the royal arms that her father purchased several times each year for his daughter and her chief personal attendants, turning Elizabeth’s household into an extended royal household. Like all Edward’s daughters, Elizabeth never forgot the lesson she had learned from her parents – that displays of luxury could serve to enhance a reputation and maintain the influence that came with it.12

  For Mary, it is clear that, despite the luxurious chamber and heaving table she cultivated at Amesbury, her most prized indulgence was the freedom of movement afforded to her as daughter of the king. It is even possible that her liberty to move freely may have enabled Mary to indulge in the most forbidden activity of all for a nun: an illicit love affair. In May 1305, Mary’s niece, Joanna of Bar (Eleanora’s daughter), became betrothed to John de Warenne, heir to the great Earldom of Surrey, and when they married the following year in a lavish ceremony, the bridegroom was aged twenty-one and his wife was only ten or eleven. Many years later, John de Warenne claimed his marriage to Joanna of Bar was invalid because he had conducted an affair with her aunt, Mary, prior to the wedding – carnal relations with such a close relative would place John and Joanna’s union firmly within the prohibited degree of consanguinity, and could only have been resolved with an explicit dispensation from the Pope.13

  The acute sexual frustration experienced by nuns was a theme commonly explored in a popular genre known as the chansons des nonnes, or nuns’ songs, one example of which included the lamentation:

  I should be learning about love and turning my mind to its delightful ways; but I have been put in prison . . . In the convent I live in great misery – God! – for I am too young. I feel the sweet pangs beneath my little belt: may God curse the one who made me a nun!

  Other literary nuns, like the nun Dame Peronelle in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, who could not serve as prioress because she once ‘had a child in cherry time’, succumbed to such temptation. Nor were these examples wholly based on fantasy. The bishops’ registers – which contain the court cases of nuns whose sins were exposed – abound with stories of nuns who gave in to the lure of local priests and confessors, or who eloped to live with secular men, in flagrant violation of their vows. Whole convents might even be closed down following widespread scandal; the priest John Bale, for example, called St Radegund’s Priory in Cambridge ‘a community of spiritual harlots’ following its dissolution in the fifteenth century. Amesbury itself had also suffered from scandal: its dissolution in the twelfth century (before its royal refoundation by Henry II) was caused, at least in part, by rumours that its abbess had given birth to three children and that its nuns were notorious fornicators. In Mary’s day there were no such accusations levelled at her priory, and any liaison with John de Warenne would have been much more likely to occur during her frequent and lengthy periods of residence at court, when there would have been more opportunity for the courtly youth and the older princess-nun to fall into sin. Mary’s reckless extravagance and blatant disregard for her vow of poverty may well have been matched by a willingness to ignore her vow of chastity, and it is easy to imagine that a princess so frequently at court might have wished, like the nun in the chanson, to experience – if only fleetingly – love’s ‘delightful ways’, and to indulge its ‘sweet pangs’. Yet John de Warenne sought through several arguments (this claim being just one example) to win a divorce from his unhappy wife. The couple were estranged within only a few short years after their marriage and, given her young age, well before they might have lived as husband and wife in the full sense. To make such a bold claim about a bride of Christ and the daughter of a king – especially if it was untrue – might have been dangerous for the earl, but since John’s divorce from Joanna of Bar was never granted, it seems that little credence was given to his assertion of an affair with Mary.14

  As the autumn of 1305 approached, Mary and the two little princes left their summer lodgings at Ludgershall and travelled to Reading Abbey, where they made offerings before its relics that included the hand of St James the Greater (one of Jesus’s twelve Apostles, and therefore a hand that had literally touched Christ), and at nearby Caversham they visited the holy well of St Anne, the waters of which were thought to possess sacred healing properties. By the time they turned back towards Westminster in November, they had been travelling together for more than two months, and the travel-weary nun could have been forgiven for longing for the peace of her chamber at Amesbury, with its blazing hearth, sumptuous furnishings, and small library, with only liturgical songs or occasional appearances by her Clare nieces to disturb her. But Mary’s travels were far from complete. At Westminster, she was reunited with Marguerite. The women would spend the next several months perambulating together throughout southern and middle England, from their principal abode at Winchester Castle – comfortably refurbished following a fire in 1302 that nearly claimed the lives of Marguerite and Edward – to the lodge at Clipstone and as far north as Doncaster in Yorkshire.

  Early the following year they were joined by Mary’s youngest sister, who had given birth to another boy the previous autumn. While her family was growing again, some of the old challenges remained. After many years of trying, Elizabeth still had not succeeded in claiming the large dower she was due as widow of the Count of Holland. Every spring, faithfully, Gerald de Freney returned to Holland to argue before administrators of the Count of Hainaut (who held Holland after the death of Elizabeth’s first husband). His efforts were often supplemented with separate embassies made by various clerks and yeomen from the countess’s household, which at times also included visits to nearby provinces, including Brabant.15

  Despite these appeals, the eight thousand livres Tournois (roughly two thousand pounds) which had been promised to her as annual income was not released, and Elizabeth could rely only on the Bohun estate she held jointly with Humphrey. Helpfully, her father agreed to forgive a large debt of four thousand pounds that had been owing following the death of Humphrey’s father. In 1306, he further enhanced his daughter’s income by granting the couple the province of Annandale, on the
southern Scottish coast near Carlisle, which was considered forfeited through the rebellion of its Scottish lord. In the same year, Edward also enriched Joanna by granting Ralph the Earldom of Atholl, in the Scottish Highlands, which had been taken into Edward’s control after the capture and execution of its lord, who joined the 1306 rebellion. Despite the wealth of Joanna’s Clare estates, her expenditure was such that the additional income from this land would have been very welcome – only the year before, her father had helped to ease her situation by forgiving 340 pounds’ worth of loans he had advanced her.16

  Near the end of Edward’s reign, the king’s daughters began personally to profit from their father’s war in Scotland. As members of the royal family and noblewomen accustomed to the norms of feudal society, they are unlikely to have questioned the morality of their own income being supplemented by the estates of those conquered by their father.

  XVI

  The Storm Approaches

  1305–6

  WINDSOR, WESTMINSTER

  The year of 1305 was Edward’s thirty-third on the English throne, and though he was sixty-six, the king remained strong in body and will – indeed, his determination to impose his rule over Britain would soon be shown to be as fierce as ever. Even so, his four daughters could not have failed by this time to have begun planning for life after his reign. Principally, this meant looking to secure good relationships with their brother, who at twenty-one had recently been granted large estates to manage, with the assistance of dozens of knights and clerks on the ground in each locality. Edward of Caernarfon was now Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, and Count of Ponthieu, his mother’s province – these extensive lands provided him with a suitable income and also the opportunity to practise governing before the whole of England fell under his command. His role was to keep an eye on income and expenditure, and to use his authority to inspire loyalty and to keep unruly or troublesome lords in check – essential skills for a successful king. Around him, even in peacetime, was a household of two hundred courtiers and servants, including by this time a circle of close friends – many of them former royal wards and other childhood acquaintances – to whom the prince had a strong attachment that was already proving worrisome to some. According to the chronicler Ranulf Higden, Prince Edward preferred the rough labours of the countryside – digging ditches and thatching – and the company of sailors and craftsmen, to the genteel pursuits of the hunt and the tournament. He was uncontrolled in his speech and his behaviour, speaking crudely, lashing out, and prone to overly lavish expenditure. Worst of all for a future king, he failed to exercise his own judgment, instead being easily controlled by the most charismatic of his friends.1