Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  In the midst of these preparations – with the carpenters’ hammering outside only dulled by the great thickness of the abbey walls – Joanna of Bar married John de Warenne before an altar spread with glittering cloths-of-gold. Minstrels hired by the king entertained the bridal party, which included the bride’s aunts and cousins, as well as the king and queen. For Joanna of Acre, the ceremony must have sparked memories of her own wedding to Gilbert de Clare in the same place sixteen years earlier. But, while the countess had been eighteen on her first marriage, her niece was only ten or eleven – so far beneath the age of canonical consent that consummation may not have taken place immediately after the wedding. Certainly, on the second night of her married life, the bride slept back in the royal household, with her aunts and her cousins. In the years ahead, as she negotiated a difficult marriage, Joanna of Bar would spend much of her time living primarily with her mother’s sisters – most particularly with her aunt Elizabeth – and it seems that this initial period together was one of intense bonding between the women.

  On the night of 21 May, the eve of Pentecost, Joanna of Bar’s new husband was among the companions of her uncle Prince Edward as the mass ceremony of knighthood – so heavily ritualized as to be almost a sacrament – began. According to an early-fourteenth-century description of the ceremony, presumptive knights-to-be ritually bathed in rose water on the eve of their knighthood, the bath symbolizing a new baptism and the rose water serving as a link to the purity of the Virgin Mary. They dressed simply and spent the night in silent, prayerful vigil in church, hearing Mass the following morning. In late May 1306, a large contingent of the hundreds of young squires would have knelt huddled under the circular dome of Temple Church, visions of crusading glory doubtless filling their heads, but Prince Edward and his closest friends remained at Westminster Abbey. He stayed close to the spot where his father had been crowned, near the shrine of their great forebear and namesake, Edward the Confessor, and among the gilded effigies of his mother and kingly grandfather. Also surrounding him were the memorials to the siblings he had never known – all those princes who would have had his place in the line of kings if only they had lived – and to his sister Eleanora, who must have seemed almost like a mother to him during their years together at Langley in the 1280s. The prince’s brothers-in-law, Ralph de Monthermer and Humphrey de Bohun, were most likely present for at least part of the vigil, and Humphrey’s attention could hardly have failed to be drawn towards the grave of his own son and eldest daughter, so recently interred in the chapel of St Thomas just to the north of the high altar. Yet the evening was not all solemn contemplation: according to one chronicle, the monks struggled to sing the overnight offices, unable to hear each other’s chants over the noisy chatter of the prince and his company.11

  The following morning, the prince walked across the broad court that separated the abbey from the royal palace. Inside the palace chapel – overlooked by brilliantly colourful murals showing scenes from the Old Testament, and knights and kings kneeling before the Madonna and Child – he heard Mass. By tradition, he would have been given the collée, a light ritual blow, taken vows of fidelity to his lord and father, and promised to protect the weak and faithful, praying that God might bless his knighthood. As Prince Edward stood, his father, the king, girded him with the sword belt that represented his new status. Humphrey de Bohun, the husband of his closest sister, was chosen to stand beside the prince as a sponsor and fasten one of the new knight’s golden spurs. After his formal vesting, Sir Edward – now armed with his sword and wearing spurs of gold – walked with his companions back across the court to the abbey and there he stood in the place of the king, personally girding with the belt of knighthood all the young noblemen who had come to share his day, although his closest friend Piers Gaveston was denied the honour of participating (and was instead knighted a few days later). Inside the great church, the clamour of trumpets and the excitement of the crowd were so great that enormous warhorses, the great beasts used for battle, were required to clear a path for Prince Edward to make his way to the high altar.

  Joanna, Elizabeth, Mary, and Marguerite were most likely not present at the knighting ceremony itself. Even in romance stories, the ceremony that created a knight was an exclusively male ritual: though the princess Rimenhild, the heroine of King Horn, arranges for her lover to receive a knighthood, she is forbidden from witnessing the ceremony itself. Women were, however, participants at the feasts which followed knighthood ceremonies, and the queen, her stepdaughters and step-granddaughters were all present for the celebration that followed. After many hours of watching swords girded and spurs affixed, and of listening to triumphal fanfares, the guests made their way into the great hall while eighty minstrels entered to serenade the company. The climax of the feast was a display so theatrical it seems lifted from fiction: before the assembled guests, two live swans were presented to the king, who stood and vowed solemnly to bring down Robert Bruce and after that only to draw a sword on Crusade. After these words, the prince and then all the new knights stood and each vowed to the majestic white birds that they would bring Scotland to heel. The pledging of oaths at a feast is a frequent scene in the stories of the Round Table at Camelot. The swans – after which the event is remembered as the Feast of the Swans – gestured toward another popular romance that interwove aristocratic lineage and the glory of the Crusades: The Swan Knight, whose eponymous and courtly hero was purportedly an ancestor of the first Christian King of Jerusalem. As ever, King Edward was a master at deploying chiv-alric cultural themes to draw parallels between his court and romanticized visions of history. With his son’s knighting feast, he also sought to pass his own ambition for a renewed Crusade down to the next generation of noble warriors. Contemporary chroniclers were quick to draw parallels between the Feast of the Swans and the court of Britain’s most perfect Christian king, Arthur: the chronicler Peter Langtoft asserted that nothing so splendid had been seen in Britain since Arthur’s own coronation at Caerleon. For Edward’s daughters, who had grown up participating in their father’s chivalric showpieces and often showed themselves adept at deploying theatricality for their own ends, this was nothing new. As royal women, they likely sat centrally within the Hall, and they may even have participated in the performance.12

  In the days that followed, additional noble weddings took place at Westminster, including that of Joanna’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Eleanor de Clare, and more knights were girded by the prince. But war in Scotland still beckoned, and by the end of May the king and his men had were heading north once again. As his armies travelled under the nominal command of his son, the king’s progress was slowed to a frustrating pace by illness – his decline was increasingly apparent, and unavoidable. The need for his daughters and wife to plan for a future without him was growing by the day. By August, the queen’s position was secured: at the end of that month, with his progress towards Carlisle grinding to a halt at the northern tip of the Pennines, Edward granted Margaret’s young sons lands and rents worth ten thousand marks each year and her infant daughter, Eleanor, a dowry of ten thousand marks with a further five thousand set aside to build a trousseau worthy of an English princess.13

  As the summer progressed, the three princesses left court: Joanna returned to her estates, while Mary headed north-east. She travelled in a litter and was accompanied by a train of minstrels to provide her entertainment as she embarked on a lengthy pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Bury St Edmunds and Walsingham, where she offered alms and prayers of thanks on behalf of her stepmother for the safe delivery of baby Eleanor. Elizabeth travelled north to Scotland, to Lochmaben Castle in Annandale, formally granted to her and Humphrey in April that year, but only captured by her husband from forces still loyal to Robert Bruce on 11 July. She arrived at the castle, which was perched on top of a motte, on a promontory that jutted beautifully out into a serene, arrow-shaped lake renowned for its fisheries, at its most glorious season. It was a time of calm for Elizabeth, but the clo
uds were gathering on the horizon.14

  XVII

  Death Returns

  1307

  CLARE, NORTHAMPTON

  The old king never made it to Scotland for the summer campaign in 1306. And despite some successes, in the absence of the king, the army nominally commanded by Prince Edward failed to draw out and defeat Robert Bruce. By October, Edward had made it as far as Lanercost Priory in Cumbria, but he languished there all through the winter and into the following year, restrained by aching legs and a bad neck, suffering from dysentery, and unable to travel even the short distance to Carlisle, where Parliament had been summoned for January. His doctors sought cures and emoluments – potion-like cordials, and sugared lozenges made of gemstones and other rare and expensive ingredients that had been ground to powder, including amber, pearls, musk, jacinth, coral, gold and silver, rose water imported from Damascus, and pomegranate wine – but Edward was not fit enough to travel until 4 March 1307. In the intervening time his men realized that the king’s days were numbered, and his command began to waver: in October, his son-in-law Humphrey de Bohun departed Scotland, without authorized leave, in the company of several young members of Prince Edward’s household, including Piers Gaveston. To add insult to injury, the knights were reported to be intent on displaying their martial skills in a tournament, despite the king’s prohibition on their participation in such activities during wartime, when he most required his men to be fit and healthy. Edward was furious at this act of desertion and immediately ordered the men to be arrested and all their lands, goods, and chattels confiscated by the Crown. This act not only cast Elizabeth’s husband as an outlaw, but also stripped her of the estate she held jointly with him. Late in 1306, therefore, Elizabeth experienced the acute anxiety familiar to her sister Joanna when their father had seized her estates after her secret marriage to Ralph Monthermer. Luckily for Elizabeth, Marguerite was soon able to convince her husband to forgive the men and restore their estates. Within three weeks of this reprieve, Humphrey was once again proving his loyalty in the field, this time around Ayr on the west coast, leading a contingent of men against Scottish forces loyal to Robert Bruce. In this campaign, Humphrey was joined by Joanna’s husband Ralph, recently elevated to the Earldom of Atholl. The effort to rout and defeat the Scots did not seem to be going well, since on 11 February the king wrote, clearly frustrated, to chide his sons-in-law for their failure to report progress.1

  Nor did King Edward’s mood improve once he had arrived at Carlisle. Late in February at Lanercost, in a scene recorded by the chronicler Walter of Guisborough, Prince Edward, newly enriched through possession of the great Duchy of Aquitaine, approached his father, desiring to grant the County of Ponthieu (which he had inherited from his mother on her death in 1290) to Piers Gaveston. The king’s rage was enough to overcome his lingering weakness: he lunged at his son, ripping out handfuls of his hair, and shouting,

  You base-born whoreson, do you want to give away lands now, you who never gained any? As the Lord lives, if it were not for fear of breaking up the kingdom, you should never enjoy your inheritance.

  As he contemplated his own end, King Edward could not have made his feelings clearer about the son whom custom dictated would succeed him. With the damning words ringing in his ears, the prince was chased from his father’s presence, and Gaveston was banished to Gascony, paid off with an annuity of one hundred marks from the Crown – a paltry sum compared to the county his friend had wished to bestow on him.2

  Far to the south of the battlefields around Ayr and secluded from the drama enveloping the king’s son, spring arrived at the gardens of Clare Castle. With her eldest daughter now married, Joanna seems to have turned her mind to securing matches for her heir Gilbert and his two Clare sisters, who remained unmarried. A double wedding was planned for the following year between Joanna’s children and the son and daughter of the Earl of Ulster in Ireland, siblings to Robert Bruce’s imprisoned wife, Elizabeth. The eldest Monthermer daughter, Mary, was also married during that year to Duncan, the young Earl of Fife, whose elder sister still languished in the cage outside Berwick for having crowned King Robert. Her sister Joanna de Monthermer likely resided at Amesbury by this date, where she would eventually become a nun. Ralph’s boys, Thomas and Edward, were aged five and two, and still young enough to remain within their mother’s household. Whether or not the young children were with her in April 1307 is unrecorded, when, without warning or expectation, Joanna died suddenly on the twenty-third of the month. The cause of her death is unknown; she was only thirty-five, no indications of long-term illness are apparent from family letters or charters, and nor were medicines purchased on her behalf during her stay at court during the previous summer. In January of that year, she had sent a minstrel in her employment to Wetheral Priory in Cumbria, to entertain her brother’s household during the long wait for their father’s health to improve sufficiently for Parliament to commence. Near the end of March, she and Ralph were engaged in the business of searching through their estate records and finding where ancient rights might allow them to leverage more money. Then, suddenly, she was dead. She possibly succumbed to a rapid fever or fell from a horse, but her easy fertility coupled with the regularity of her many pregnancies (with a new child arriving every two or three years) suggests rather that Joanna might have been carrying her ninth child and had died from complications following a premature labour or miscarriage.3

  The death of the king’s most obstinate and audacious daughter was shocking. Her father, far to the north at Carlisle, learned of it only nine days later, on 1 May. The king, forced to face his own impending mortality, was clearly shaken by the loss of his eldest living child, who had seemed in her prime. That day, he wrote to the Chancellor, Bishop of London Ralph Baldock, to demand that ‘as Joanna, our dear daughter . . . was commanded to go to God,’ Bishop Ralph should require all priests within the realm, including archbishops and bishops, abbots and priors, as well as those at cathedral chapters, colleges, universities, and Dominican and Franciscan friaries to perform funeral rites and solemn Masses, and offer private prayers for Joanna’s soul. On the next day, and the two that followed, he travelled into Carlisle and listened as the friars of the Franciscan house sang Masses for her soul. Unappeased, and perhaps especially anxious, given how Joanna’s strident independence of thought was misaligned with conventional female virtues, on the sixth he wrote to all bishops, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the abbots of Westminster, Waltham, St Albans, St Augustine’s Canterbury, and Evesham, requesting further prayers:

  Since it is considered a pious and worthwhile task to pray for the dead, that they may be freed more easily from sin, and God has called Joanna our dearest daughter to himself from this life, which news I deliver with a bitter heart; we pray that you will encourage all priests and religious persons and subjects within your cities and dioceses to commend her soul to God through the chanting of masses and other pious works.

  Frustratingly for a man of action, issuing demands that priests pray for the soul of his child was all the king could do.4

  In his infirmity, despite his evident grief, Edward could not travel south to Clare to lead the funerary rites for his child. Nor was her husband, Ralph – the man for whose love Joanna had risked everything – able to attend his wife’s funeral. He may not even have learned of her death until later that month since, soon after the news arrived in the north, Ralph’s army was defeated by Robert Bruce, and he and his companions were forced to retreat to Ayr Castle, where they were besieged, until the king’s forces arrived to chase off the Scots. Instead of her father or her beloved husband, therefore, Joanna’s brother Prince Edward was chosen to represent the family at her funeral. Given her staunch defence of her youngest sibling during his quarrels with their father, she would likely have approved the choice, but the prince’s participation was mostly a practical decision. He was already far to the south on 5 May, escorting Gaveston to his ship at Dover, lavishing him to the end with expen
sive presents such as silk tunics and tapestries, when he would have learned of his sister’s death and his expected role in her burial. In the days after bidding farewell to his friend, the prince oversaw the transfer of his sister’s body from her castle, across the River Stour and to the Chapel of St Vincent in the nearby priory of Clare, which she had established. According to a chronicle written at Little Dunmow Priory, only twenty miles south of Clare, Prince Edward was attended at Joanna’s funeral by ‘all the magnates of England’, but this must surely be an exaggeration, since most of the kingdom’s great men were at that time attending the king at Carlisle or engaged in battle even further north. Elizabeth’s castle at Pleshey was only twenty-six miles away from Clare, but though she felt Joanna’s death keenly enough to commit the anniversary to her calendar, she was at Lochmaben in Scotland, and heavily pregnant. Her brother therefore travelled alone after the funeral to his favourite home at Langley, which he had first shared with his sisters; he spent several days there, no doubt full of emotion after the loss of his friend to exile and his sibling and strident defender to death.5

  Other than committing her body to burial at Clare Priory, nothing is known of Joanna’s wishes in death; no will has survived to record which of her dresses or jewels she might have bequeathed to sisters or daughters, or which special friends were picked out to receive furnishings or books. No letter remains to attest how her sisters reacted on hearing the news, although Mary soon afterward left Amesbury once again, seeking the company of her stepmother at Northampton. Because she was a great lord, however, the business of dividing Joanna’s estate is attested in the historical record in documents, and these demonstrate a clear distinction between the grief her father experienced at his child’s death and the reality of managing the transfer of a large estate. Nowhere is this distinction more apparent than in the king’s first action after Joanna’s lands had been taken into the Crown’s possession. After more than a decade of constant warfare, Edward struggled to keep his armies replenished with fresh recruits, and the vacancy of the Earldom of Gloucester – unfilled after Joanna’s death because of the minority of her son Gilbert – presented an opportunity not to be dismissed. The king directed his sheriffs to select five hundred men from her Glamorgan estates and to send them to Carlisle ‘ready to set forth against the Scots, the king being in want of men to pursue Robert Bruce and his accomplices’. Without emotion, he resupplied his army by forcibly drafting the most able-bodied labourers from his daughter’s Marcher dominion, at a time when none could stop him.6