Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 A note on naming: for ease of distinguishing between the queen known commonly as Eleanor of Castile and her eldest daughter, I have referred to the latter throughout as Eleanora, although the mother and daughter’s names were, of course, identical – in Latin, Alianora; in French, Alianore. Similarly, in order to distinguish between the identically named Low Country husbands of Margaret and Elizabeth (Johannes in Latin, Jan in Dutch), I have referred to them throughout as Jan of Brabant and Johan of Holland.
I. CORONATION
1 For Wykes’ description of the festivities surrounding Edward and Eleanor’s coronation, see his chronicle in Annales Monastici, ed. H.R. Luard, iv (Kraus reprint, Wiesbaden, 1965), p. 259.
2 The extraordinary supply operation carried out to provide for the coronation feast can be glimpsed in the Calendar of Close Rolls, 1272–79, pp. 68–71.
3 Another contemporary account of the coronation, including the observation about the Cheapside conduit, can be found in Croniques de London: depuis l’an 44 Hen. III jusqu’à l’an 17 Edw. III, ed. G.J. Aungier (London, 1844), p. 13.
4 A list of those in attendance at the coronation is provided in Nicholas Trivet’s Annales sex regum Angliae, qui a comitibus Andegavensibus originem traxerunt, 1136–1307, ed. Thomas Hog (London, 1845), p. 292. The account of hundreds of horses being released during the festivities is discussed by H.G. Richardson in his ‘The Coronation of Edward I’, Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research, xv (1937–8), pp. 94–9.
5 A description of Guildford Castle, its layout, and principal features, can be found in The History of the King’s Works, gen. ed. H.M. Colvin (London, 1963–75), ii: The Middle Ages, ed. R. Allen Brown, H.M. Colvin, A.J. Taylor, pp. 950–5. The wonderful survival of the Wardrobe Book for the children’s household allows their lives during this period to be reconstructed fairly easily, including favourite treats. It was edited by Hilda Johnstone as ‘Wardrobe and Household of Henry, son of Edward I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vii (1922–3), pp. 384–420. The original account rolls can still be found in the National Archives under E 101/350/18.
6 Among English ducal families between 1330 and 1479, some thirty-six per cent of boys and twenty-nine per cent of girls died before the age of five: Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1992), p. 35. The quotation attributed to a young Henry III appears in Fœdera, conventiones, litteræ et cujuscunque generis Acta Publica, ed. Thomas Rymer; (repr. London, 1816), ed. Adam Clarke, Frederic Holbrooke, John Caley (4 vols), i, p. 155.
7 See the notices of John’s birth and death in the Annals of Winchester, within Annales Monastici, ed. Luard, ii (Kraus reprint, Nendeln, 1971), pp. 104, 111. Although the births of his elder sisters and his brother Henry were not included, those of sisters born in 1275 and 1277 were recorded by the annalist; their father’s coronation in 1274 may have been a factor in this shift, as the birth of a child of the current king (regardless of gender) may have been considered noteworthy. For Edward’s gifts to messengers bearing news of his grandchildren see Calendar of Close Rolls, 1288–96, pp. 169–70, and M.A.E. Green, Lives of the Princesses, from the Norman Conquest (London, 1850–7) 6 vols, iii, p. 42.
II. BETROTHAL
1 The King’s Wardrobe Book containing an accounting of the necessary expenses for his household in the sixth year of his reign, from 20 November 1277–19 November 1278, is preserved as British Library Additional MS 36762.
2 For a full discussion on the diplomatic marriages of princesses in medieval England, including the roles played by their queenly mothers, see John Carmi Parsons, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Marriage, Power: Some Plantagenet Evidence, 1150–1500’, in Medieval Queenship, ed. John Carmi Parsons (Stroud, 1994), pp. 63–78. Henry III’s 1254 statement on the importance of diplomatic marriage is preserved in Fœdera, i, p. 209.
3 The agreed terms of Margaret’s marriage to Jan of Brabant can be found in Fœdera, i, pp. 550–4.
4 Edward’s regular annual income totalled around 27,000 pounds throughout his reign, which was normally sufficient to supply his household and the general administration of England. This, however, needed to be supplemented to fund his many foreign wars, most frequently by Italian lenders. On his death, King Edward had significant debts to his name, the resolution of which burdened his son’s reign. See Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (London, 2008), p. xvi.
5 The details of Joanna’s planned match with Hartman can be found in Fœdera, i, pp. 536, 545, 548, 554–7, 559, 563, 568.
6 John Carmi Parsons found a similar pattern of age at marriage and childbirth even among a broader study that also included English noblewomen: ‘Mothers, Daughters,’ pp. 65–7.
7 While visiting Bordeaux in early 1287, Eleanor bestowed a series of golden cloths to the local Dominican priory; these were presented to the high altar and to the tomb in the church of a daughter of the queen, the anniversary of whose death was celebrated in late May. No records indicate that Eleanor miscarried a pregnancy or had a still birth at this date, and nor do any of the queen’s other children disappear from the historical record at this time. Eleanor’s only previous visits to Bordeaux during May were to travel to England for the first time in 1255 or to return from Crusade in 1274. One of the three royal babies born on Crusade was a daughter who died at Acre in 1271, while the other two were healthy and still alive long after 1274. Either the king and queen brought back the body of their daughter who had died three years previously at Acre, and decided to bury her at Bordeaux rather than waiting to lay her to rest alongside her siblings at Westminster, or she bore a premature daughter in May 1255 who died immediately or shortly after birth. See entries from the Book of the Treasurer in Records of the Wardrobe and Household, 1285–6, ed. Benjamin F. Byerly and Catherine Ridder Byerly, 2 vols (London, 1977–86), ii, nos 1618–9.
8 The full text of Eleanora’s letter can be found in Fœdera, i, p. 614.
9 That letter in 1290 appointed the same Anthony Bek to contract a marriage between the prince and Margaret, daughter of Eric, King of Norway, and the rightful Queen of Scotland: Fœdera, i, p. 737. The English hoped the proposed marriage would make Prince Edward the King of Scotland, effectively uniting England and Scotland when he succeeded his father, but Margaret died – reportedly of seasickness – just off the Orkney Islands, while travelling from Norway to Scotland a few months after the marriage was agreed.
10 On educating women in case they need to govern, and for the Barberino quotation, see Rowena Archer, ‘“How ladies . . . who live on their manors ought to manage their households and estates”: Women as Landholders and Administrators in the Later Middle Ages’, Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c.1200–1500, ed. P.J.P. Goldberg (Stroud, 1992), pp. 149–181 (151).
11 The king’s letter directing his embassy to negotiate Eleanora’s marriage, and the instruction for Italian bankers from Lucca and Piacenza to loan eight hundred pounds to the negotiators, de Vescy and Bek, repayable by the king, with two hundred further marks borrowed from an English merchant for the same purpose, are summarised in Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1281–92, pp. 10–11. The terms agreed for Eleanora’s match are given in full in Fœdera, i, pp. 613–5.
12 For the letter declaring the shared objections of Eleanor of Castile and Eleanor of Provence to Eleanora’s immediate transfer to the Aragonese court, see Fœdera, i, p. 593.
13 The chronicler Bartholomew of Norwich records that Prince Hartman was ‘walking incautiously over the ice’ when it gave way, but this seems to have been misinformation. For reference to the shipwreck in which he died, see British Library Cotton Nero C. v. fol. 204; Green, Lives of the Princesses of England, ii, p. 323. Hartman’s brother Rudolf (who would ultimately succeed as Rudolf II), may already have been pledged informally to his eventual wife, the daughter of his father’s greatest rival, Ottokar II of Bohemia, and therefore been unavailable to marry Joanna.
III. FAMILY
1 Years later, Joanna received a letter from Suger, one of the earliest Bishops of Cadiz, whom she may have known in Ponthieu, requesting her intercession on behalf of two Spaniards: see National Archives Special Collections 1/30/3. Edeline’s husband, Philippe, joined Eleanor of Castile’s household after the death of her mother, Jeanne de Dammartin. The couple remained in England within the royal household until Joanna’s marriage in 1290: John Carmi Parsons, The Court and Household of Eleanor of Castile in 1290: An Edition of British Library Additional Manuscript 35294 with Introduction and Notes (Toronto, 1977), pp. 38–9. For Edward’s letter instructing his servants to bring Joanna to England, see Fœdera, i, p. 559.
2 For Elizabeth’s birth at Rhuddlan, see Green, Lives of the Princesses, iii, pp. 2–3. Joanna’s solitary visit back to Rhuddlan the following year is described in ibid, ii, p. 324.
3 Joanna’s father Edward had been the first royal child to maintain an independent household from a young age, and the king clearly felt the experience was useful in preparing him for adult life; as soon as he became king, he established a household for his then-heir Prince Henry, and the unfortunate boy’s younger sisters also benefitted from early opportunities to learn about the effective management of households: Johnstone, ‘Household of Henry’, p. 384.
4 Joanna’s household is listed in Byerly and Byerly, Wardrobe and Household, i, no. 1714.
5 For the households of Eleanora and Margaret, see ibid, nos 1713, 1715; ii, no. 1948. Cecily de Cleware was granted the wood from six oaks in Windsor Forest, as a token of thanks from the king for acting as nurse to Margaret in June 1276: Calendar of Close Rolls, 1272–79, p. 296; for her service as Eleanora’s nurse, see Johnstone, ‘Household of Henry’, pp. 389–90. A relative of Cecily’s, John de Cleware, was serving as a valet in Eleanora’s court in Bar as late as 1296, demonstrating the strength of Eleanora’s loyalty to her early friends: Book of Prests of the King’s Wardrobe for 1294–5, ed. E.B. Fryde (Oxford, 1962), p. 63.
6 For the association between Caernarfon, British Rome, and Constantine, see, for example, the Annals of Waverley, which conflated the Western Roman Emperor and general in command of British forces, Magnus Maximus, and his Welsh wife Elen, with the Emperor Constantius Cholrus (father of Constantine the Great), who died at York in 306, and his Byzantine wife, St Helena, discoverer of the True Cross. A Roman sarcophagus discovered at Caernarfon in 1283 was assumed on strength of local legend to belong to Maximus, though he, in fact, died in Italy. Annales Monastici, ed. Luard, ii, pp. 129–412. See ‘The Dream of Maxen Wledig’ in Mabinogion Tales, trans. Charlotte Guest, ed. Owen Edwards (Llanerch, 1991), pp. 64–76, especially pp. 65–7.
7 For the capture of the reputed crown of King Arthur and Alphonso’s subsequent deposit of Welsh regalia at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, see Annales Monastici, ed. Luard, ii, 401; Matthew of Westminster, Flores Historiarum, ed. H.R. Luard (Kraus reprint, Nendeln, 1965) iii, p. 61 and n.
8 Sixteenth-century Welsh clergyman David Powel, in his The historie of Cambria, now called Wales . . ., trans. H. Lloyd (London, 1584), describes an apocryphal episode in which the Welsh lords declare they will only ever accept as their prince one born in Wales who speaks no English. King Edward secures their unwitting acceptance of his own heir when he produces the baby boy, born at Caernarfon and unable to speak anything at all: pp. 376–7.
9 Annales Monastici, ed. Luard, ii, 401.
10 The argument in this paragraph is indebted to John Carmi Parsons who has examined the role of an itinerant lifestyle in offering Edward and Eleanor opportunities for performing their public role at sites across the country. He has determined that the queen’s participation in the pageantry associated with royal entries into towns was perhaps as important as that of the king. See Parsons, Court and Household, p. 8; John Carmi Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (London, 1995), pp. 32–3.
11 Collette Bowie has suggested that rates of literacy among Anglo-Norman noblewomen may even have been higher than those of their husbands and brothers, who spent large portions of their time learning the arts of warfare: The Daughters of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Turnhout, 2014), p. 60.
12 For the Siete Partidas, including their prescriptions related to female education, see Madaline W. Nichols, ‘Las Siete Partidas’, California Law Review, vol. 20.3 (1932), pp. 260–85 (268). Sara Cockerill discusses Alfonso’s views on the education of princesses and its likely impact on Eleanor in her Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen (Stroud, 2014), pp. 56–7. A contemporary treatise on the education of nobles in France, Vincent of Beauvais’ De Eruditione Filiorum Nobiliorum, gives over its final ten chapters to the education of noble daughters, suggesting a curriculum including reading and writing as well as religious study, manners, and sewing skills: ed. A. Steiner (Cambridge, MA, 1938), pp. 172–219. A surviving copy of the Life of St Edward the Confessor dates from 1255 and may be Eleanor’s own copy: Cambridge University Library Ee.3.59. See also Girart d’Amiens, Der roman von Escanor, von Gerard von Amiens, ed. Henri Victor Michelant (Tübingen, 1886).
13 Kim Philips discusses how elite young medieval English women not yet able to read by themselves were nevertheless normally part of ‘textual communities’, in which groups within a household would gather, listen to a text read aloud, and then discuss its moral and didactic teachings. See her Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, c. 1270–c. 1540 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 71–3. For the quotations from The Parlement of the Three Ages, see ed. M. Offord (London, 1967), lines 249–54.
14 See Eleanor’s purchase of books of hours for reading practice in John Carmi Parsons, ‘Of Queens, Courts, and Books: Reflections on the Literary Patronage of Thirteenth-Century Plantagenet Queens’, in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCash (Athens, GA, 1996), pp. 175–201 (179).
15 See for Peter’s purchase of writing tablets for Eleanora, Byerly and Byerly, Wardrobe and Household, i, no. 403. In 1291, Adam the queen’s goldsmith purchased further ‘tabliaus a liure’ for Eleanora: Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, p. 56. On the role of the queen in educating her daughters and promoting a literary upbringing, see Parsons, ‘Of Queens, Courts, and Books’.
16 For the purchase of silks for Margaret’s use, see Byerly and Byerly, Wardrobe and Household, passim; Green, Lives of the Princesses, ii, p. 365. For payments associated with the children hunting while their parents were abroad, see Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, p. 55; Byerly and Byerly, Wardrobe and Household, ii, Roll of the Expenses of the King’s Children, which is National Archives, E 101/352/8. For Elizabeth’s interest in polyphony, see her 1305 letter to her brother Prince Edward, in which she asked him to send a clerk from Windsor Castle to instruct the children of her own chapel choir in the new French art of choral polyphony: Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 1304–1305, ed. H. Johnstone (Cambridge, 1931), p. 133.
17 The manuscript commissioned for Alphonso’s marriage survives within the collection of the British Library as Additional MS 24686. It has been fully digitized and is able to be viewed online on the British Library’s website. For Archbishop John Peckham’s letter of condolence to Edward on Alphonso’s death, see Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Johannis Peckham (Kraus reprint, Nendeln, 1965), iii, p. 819.
IV. VOWS
1 For a description of the priory church at Amesbury, see A History of Wiltshire, ed. R.B. Pugh and Elizabeth Crittall (London, 1957–2011), iii, p. 256. For an account of Mary’s veiling, see William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: a history of the abbies and other monasteries . . ., new edn (Farnborough, 1970), ii, p. 334. The Worcester annalist does not record the names of the thirteen ‘noble young daughters’ who, he recorded, joined the Amesbury community alongside Mary: Annales Monastici, ed. Luard, iv, p. 491.
2 The letter from the abbess of Fontevrault to Eleanor is printed in Fœdera, i, p. 651. The Norman-French version of Nicholas Trivet’s chronicle, which began with Genesis and continued down to t
he reign of Edward I, was dedicated to Mary and contains several sections relating to the life of the princess and her family; a separate (probably later) version was completed in Latin and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both have survived in multiple copies: see British Library Arundel MS 56, especially f. 75; Trivet, Annales.
3 For Eleanor of Provence’s grief on losing her daughters, see Annales Monastici, ed. Luard, iv, p. 262.
4 The community of Amesbury was recorded during a visitation by John, sacrist of Fontevrault, in 1256. By 1318, it had grown to include 117 nuns: History of Wiltshire, iii, pp. 246, 249.
5 Seven other young aristocratic women were pledged to Amesbury at the same time as Eleanor of Brittany: BL Arundel MS 56, f. 75.
6 On the ages at which nuns could be professed, see Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275–1535 (Cambridge, 1922), pp. 26–7; Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540 (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 45n. They detail how the fourteenth-century Bishop of Winchester William of Wykeham told the nuns of Romsey Abbey during a visitation that they could profess novitiates aged twelve and older, but also that the daughters of Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, seem to have joined houses at earlier ages. For the date of Mary’s final vows, see John Carmi Parsons, ‘The Year of Eleanor of Castile’s Birth and Her Children by Edward I’, Mediaeval Studies 46 (1984), pp. 245–65 (p. 264). For the dowries associated with the entrance of nuns to convents, see Oliva, The Convent, p. 48, who notes that the fee for male entrants was standardized throughout the late-medieval period at five pounds, likely comparable to entry fees for females. For the charter granting Melksham to Amesbury Priory, see Calendar of Close Rolls, 1288–96, p. 25. For the oaks and wines granted to Mary, see Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1281–92, p. 190.
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