Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England

by Louise J. Wilkinson

  In common with her older siblings, Eleanor possessed her own separate household from early infancy, staffed by attendants who looked after her everyday needs. Such arrangements were not unique to John’s children, but arose partially from the exalted status of the ruling dynasty and partially from necessity – the disruptive, itinerant lifestyle of the royal court was not necessarily one suited to the emotional and physical wellbeing of young children, especially in an age when children were particularly vulnerable to disease.61 Payments to meet all manner of expenses for the maintenance of Eleanor and her household staff feature regularly in the records of the bishopric of Winchester for the years 1217–21 and reveal tantalizing details about Eleanor’s early upbringing and its material comforts. The bishop’s officials accounted for the expenses – in cash and goods – of Eleanor, who was styled initially as the ‘king’s daughter’ and later as the ‘king’s sister’, her nurses and other members of her domestic establishment.62 Accounts (the Winchester pipe roll) for 1217–18, for example, record expenses incurred on Eleanor’s behalf by those who cared for her for items that included candles, cloth, oil, robes and soap for washing.63 When, during the following year, Eleanor and her household resided on the bishop’s manor of Taunton in Wiltshire for twenty-six weeks and three days, the bishop’s officials accounted for purchases of cloth for clothing, grain, oil and writs, and for oblations.64

  As Eleanor’s brothers, Henry III and Richard, grew older, they were placed in the care of knights such as Philip d’Aubigny, the keeper of the Channel Islands under John, who looked after the young king and instructed him in riding, hunting and the use of weapons.65 They were also assigned tutors like Roger of Acaster, who was appointed to serve the younger Richard between 1217 and 1223, and who presumably educated them in letters and manners.66 The king and his brother probably received instruction in the seven liberal arts, the cornerstones of a learned – or Latin – education in the Middle Ages. These were grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, known as the trivium or the three arts of language, along with geometry, music, astronomy and arithmetic, the quadrivium or the four arts of number. Knowledge of Latin on the part of Henry and Richard is indicated by the metrical grammar commissioned from Master Henry of Avranches for them.67 After all, their father, like their paternal grandfather before him, had been extremely well educated, and possessed an extensive personal library of French and Latin texts.68 As an adult, Henry III owned texts in Latin (mainly liturgical works), as well as romance tales in French.69 His wife, Eleanor of Provence, purchased romances based upon Arthurian legends and classical figures, and probably possessed a range of religious texts to assist in her daily devotions; a vernacular history of the Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, was dedicated to her.70

  The education that Henry and Richard received reflected their status, the public roles they were expected to assume in adulthood and their gender. The education of girls, like Eleanor and her sisters, in royal and aristocratic circles differed markedly from that of their brothers, reflecting medieval Christian and scientific teaching on feminine intellectual, physical and psychological inferiority.71 Their upbringings prepared them for marriage or for admission to the cloister. It usually fell to royal mothers, albeit in a supervisory capacity, to induct their daughters into the rituals, ceremonies, gift-giving and conspicuous consumption associated with queenship and diplomacy, as well as seeing to it that they acquired courtly manners and practical skills in household management.72 It was also under maternal supervision that they received religious instruction, presumably from household chaplains. The Life that Agnes of Harcourt, abbess of Longchamp, wrote of Eleanor’s cousin and contemporary, Isabella (1225–70), the sister of King Louis IX of France, recalled the parental concern of Isabella’s mother, Queen Blanche, and her close involvement in her daughter’s affairs.73 Although Isabella was destined to become the founder of Longchamp, near Paris, and lived out her life in a residence within its grounds, the close cultural and royal familial ties between England and France at this time mean that the descriptions within her Life of her qualities, upbringing and education resonate with the occasional glimpses of Eleanor and her sisters within English sources. Isabella of France was commended for her grace, beauty, lineage and the nobility of her morals. As a woman who dedicated her adult life to spiritual works, the French princess was also praised in her childhood for her innocence, patience, piety, chastity and mercy.74 When Queen Blanche saw to it that her daughter was dressed in richly ornamented clothes appropriate to her position, Isabella expressed her personal preference for more humble, religious attire.75 While other girls of her rank attended entertainments at the French court, Isabella studied divine scripture in her chamber, learning her letters and how to work in silk in order to make vestments for the church.76 Much of Isabella’s day was spent in prayer or studying holy works, such as the Bible and saints’ lives. According to her biographer, she also ‘understood Latin very well’, so well, in fact, that ‘when her chaplains had written her letters for her … in Latin, and … would bring them to her, she would amend them when there were any wrong words’.77 Isabella was evidently schooled in writing as well as reading Latin, two skills which were not necessarily taught together in the Middle Ages.78

  Even if we make allowance for the hagiographical nature of Agnes’s work, with its heightened emphasis on Isabella’s religiosity, contemporary English chroniclers made similar claims about the characters and attributes of Henry III’s sisters. Although their comments are indicative of the shared social conventions of the French and English courts, they are also revealing of the manner in which the behaviour and outward countenances of the English king’s sisters conformed to contemporary expectations. During the viewing of the bride that preceded Isabella of England’s marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, this young English bride left the imperial ambassadors impressed by her ‘virgin modesty’ and her ‘royal dress and manners’.79 In a similar vein, Eleanor’s ‘beauty’ and royal descent were said, by the St Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris, to have played an important role in attracting her second husband, Simon de Montfort, in 1238.80 Religious instruction – and instruction in the arts of literacy – also loomed large in both Isabella’s and Eleanor’s upbringings. In the queen mother’s absence overseas, the English royal sisters received their educations at the hands of the magistrae or ‘governesses’ who resided in their households. The younger Isabella’s governess was Margaret Biset, a noblewoman whose family possessed a long history of service to the English crown.81 Margaret, who subsequently entered the household of Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, was pious and literate in Latin as well as the French of Henry III’s court. She successfully foiled an assassination attempt on the king one night in 1238 when the court was in residence at Woodstock, having stayed awake to read her Psalter.82 Another similarly experienced woman, Cecily of Sandford, whom the St Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris, described as ‘of noble blood, but with nobler manners’, served as Eleanor’s governess.83 Cecily was the wife and later widow of William de Gorham, a knight who held lands near St Albans in Hertfordshire.84 Cecily was also, in Paris’s eyes at least, clearly a woman of exceptional qualities – ‘exceedingly learned, and courteous, and eloquent’ – and after leaving Eleanor’s service, she was governess to Joan, the wife of Henry III’s half-brother, William de Valence.85 The reputation for learning and the noble background and character of Cecily of Sandford indicate that a great deal of thought, as well as practical considerations, lay behind her initial appointment as Eleanor’s mistress. This was probably just as well. Eleanor’s education at Cecily’s hands made a significant impact upon her subsequent life and piety. The influence Cecily exerted over the younger woman’s spirituality was seen a few years after the death of Eleanor’s first husband, William Marshal junior (d. 1231), when Cecily and her charge took a vow of chastity and perpetual widowhood in the presence of Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury.86

  It was under Cecily of San
dford’s guidance and that of others like her, as well as household chaplains and priests, that Eleanor presumably received instruction in the Bible and other religious works. Eleanor’s formative years also coincided with the arrival of a new religious movement in England – the Mendicant Orders of friars. The arrival in 1221 of the Dominicans or Black Friars, the followers of St Dominic of Castile, was followed in 1224 by that of the Franciscans or Grey Friars, the followers of St Francis of Assisi. Both groups quickly attracted royal, noble and local patronage, and established houses in Oxford and numerous other English towns.87 As an adult, the Oxford Franciscan friar Adam Marsh, an intimate of Henry III’s court, directed Eleanor’s attention to biblical passages which he clearly expected her to know.88 The texts of eight letters that Marsh wrote to Eleanor between the late 1240s and early 1250s have been preserved down to the present day.89 Two letters in particular are littered with allusions or references to biblical passages from the book of Genesis (2:18), the gospel of St John (6:37), the Wisdom books (Job 5:2 and Wisd. 11:24, 27), St Paul’s Epistles to the Philippians (4:7), the Corinthians (2 Cor. 1:3) and Timothy (1 Tim. 2:9–10), and the writings of St Peter (1 Pet. 3:1–4).90 Both letters, significantly, addressed Eleanor’s conduct and exhorted her to follow long-established Christian models of acceptable feminine behaviour, models with which Eleanor would have been familiar since childhood. Although seven years younger than her second husband, Eleanor was of a sufficiently forthright, passionate and strong disposition to incur Marsh’s criticism for her failure to act as an obedient, passive and submissive wife in line with biblical teaching. The first letter, for example, counselled Eleanor on her relationship with her husband and offered advice on how to modify her character and temperament in accordance with the church’s ideals of wifely obedience, humility, passivity, restraint and subjection. Marsh criticized her, in a highly provocative way, for departing from her Christian duty towards her second husband and, by implication, for failing to show due care and attention to his commands and wishes. The friar rebuked Eleanor in no uncertain terms for her tendency to resort too quickly to anger (‘Anger killeth the foolish’) and cautioned her on the damaging effect that this might have upon those nearest and dearest to her.91 Yet it was not just Eleanor’s temper that earned Marsh’s disapproval. In addition to criticizing Eleanor’s personal failings, the friar also extended to her the universal ecclesiastical censure of dress and vanities. Marsh rebuked the king’s youngest sister, at length, for the excessive extravagance of her clothing. Women, he counselled, ought to adopt modest and sober apparel, rather than elaborate hairstyles, costly jewels and luxurious robes (‘women also [should be] in decent apparel, adorning themselves with modesty and sobriety, not with plaited hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly attire; but as it becometh women, professing godliness with good works’).92 Eleanor ought to abandon outward displays of vanity, extravagance and ‘wanton style’.93 Marsh’s comments are indicative of an enjoyment of finery on Eleanor’s part as an adult and, more importantly, perhaps, of an awareness of how the outward trappings of wealth might serve as visual reminders of her regal status to those around her. In the second letter, Marsh warned Eleanor of ‘an increasing number of unpleasant and vexatious reports of improprieties that are soiling your reputation not a little’.94 He went on to urge and even ‘admonish’ her to mend her ways,

  to multiply your good deeds for the future and both to make a zealous effort to make your conscience clear before the Most High [God], and to repair your reputation with men, showing yourself in every way, in matters that affect your husband and children, your household and in general those closest to you, ever watchful, reasonable, and peaceable, following the example of praiseworthy matrons.95

  Eleanor’s correspondence with Marsh, who acknowledged and thanked her for her missives, in the late 1240s and early 1250s raises the question of the level of Eleanor’s literacy.96 The existence of Marsh’s letters, which were written in Latin rather than in the French vernacular, certainly suggests that Eleanor possessed at least a competent reading knowledge – or level of comprehension – of this language. It is also possible, although difficult to prove, that, like Isabella of France, Eleanor did not leave the composition of her letters to Marsh solely in the hands of her clerks, but checked their contents in person. On one occasion at least, Marsh thanked the countess ‘for remembering to tell me in your letter to my poor self, so carefully written’ some heartening news concerning her family.97 When Eleanor became a mother later in life, she was certainly aware of her maternal responsibility to oversee the religious and literary instruction of her only surviving daughter and namesake, Eleanor.98 The fragment of the adult Eleanor’s household roll that survives for the year 1265 records the purchase in February that year of twenty dozen sheets of parchment in London by Brother G. Boyon in order to make a portable breviary for the countess’s daughter.99 The parchment was then carried to Oxford, where the breviary was written and the text completed by the spring.100 The breviary, which usually took the form of a small, thick volume or series of volumes, was a type of devotional work popular with priests, monks, nuns and the laity alike in the Middle Ages, due to its size. Breviaries usually contained material including hymns, Psalms, prayers for the religious offices from Matins to Compline, and, indeed, often the Psalter in its entirety.101 In commissioning such a work for her daughter and in appointing a male religious to oversee its execution, Countess Eleanor took a guiding hand in her daughter’s spiritual guidance and counsel, and perhaps recognized the opportunity to instil her own religious values and views on morality into her offspring.

  The role played by figures like Cecily of Sandford in Countess Eleanor’s upbringing might well have provided an element of stability and emotional support that was perhaps lacking elsewhere in her daily life. Indeed, established in their respective households and, for the most part, in the custody of different guardians, Henry III, his brother and his sisters emerge as remarkably isolated figures in their childhoods. It is, for example, difficult to gauge how often they maintained contact with one another, remembered significant family anniversaries and celebrated the great feasts of the religious calendar. Obvious occasions when they might have been permitted to come together and socially interact with one another were the Christmas courts of Henry III’s minority, which were usually held at Winchester until 1221, under the watchful eyes of Peter des Roches.102 If anything, the shared experiences of their parents’ absence after 1217 might well have heightened the value placed upon sibling relationships, especially among Eleanor’s older siblings. The relationship that Eleanor’s eldest sister, Joan, enjoyed with her brothers is strongly suggestive that this was, in fact, the case. The text of a letter survives that was addressed to Henry III and written in Joan’s name in or around 1220, when she was nine or ten years old and in the household of Hugh (X) de Lusignan. Its purpose was ostensibly to reassure her brother, the king, of Hugh’s continued loyalty, against the immediate political background of Isabella of Angoulême’s impending marriage to him. Having set the king’s mind at rest with regard to her own safety, Joan asked for news of Henry and their brother Richard. Even if allowance is made for the possibility that this letter was written under Hugh’s or Isabella’s guidance, with their interests firmly at heart, its tone was that of a caring younger sister and encouraged Henry to respond as an affectionate older brother.103 After Joan’s marriage to Alexander II, King of Scots, in 1221, she became a regular visitor to the English royal court, especially when it visited York. She also corresponded with Henry, imparting Scottish intelligence about the activities of Hugh de Lacy and his fellow rebels in Ireland in or around 1224.104 In fact, as Jessica Nelson observes, Joan’s preference for the English royal court, and by implication for her natal family, over her husband’s court, company and kin, attracted contemporary comment. Matthew Paris noted, with a critical eye, her refusal to return to Scotland in spite of her husband’s repeated requests for her to do so.105 When Joan died on 4 March 1238,
it was in England, at Havering in Essex, and her deathbed was attended by her brothers. According to the Melrose chronicler, she passed away in their arms, in a moving family deathbed scene.106 She was subsequently buried ‘with great grief and with equal magnificence’ at the abbey of Tarrant Keynes in Dorset, a house in the patronage of Henry III’s wife.107

  The circumstances of Eleanor’s early upbringing and the physical remoteness from her siblings during infancy might help to explain her later ‘independence’ of character, observed by John Maddicott in his biography of Simon de Montfort.108 The chastising tone that Eleanor’s correspondent, Adam Marsh, was prepared to adopt towards her when the need arose indicates Eleanor was prepared to receive and, perhaps, listen to his advice. Indeed, a striking feature of Marsh’s letters is their candid language. From the pen of Marsh, the adult Eleanor emerges as his friend and valued patroness, as well as the determined, forceful, wilful and, at times, quarrelsome wife to Earl Simon, a woman who manipulated and subverted gender expectations, themes that will be explored in this book.

  2

  The Marshal Marriage

  ‘we have no greater treasure than our own marriage and [the marriages] of our sisters’1