Eleanor of Castile

Eleanor of Castile is one of the most interesting English queens of the Middle Ages, not so much for the events of her life, which are difficult to recover, but because of the magnificent series of monuments that were built to celebrate her memory – the so-called Eleanor Crosses.

Eleanor died on 28 November 1290 at Harby in Nottinghamshire. From there her body was carried first to nearby Lincoln, and then south to Westminster. This journey took twelve days, and, at each place that her cortege rested for the night, an elaborate stone memorial, originally surmounted by a devotional cross, was later erected. Remarkably, three of these monuments survive, at Geddington and Hardingstone (both in Northamptonshire) and at Waltham (Hertfordshire). The one that stands outside Charing Cross station is a modern replica. Eleanor was also commemorated with three separate tombs – one in Lincoln Cathedral for her viscera, another in Blackfriars, London, for her heart, and a third for her body in Westminster Abbey. Only the last survives, but it too is a work of striking sophistication, surmounted by a gilt-bronze effigy that shows the queen with her hair worn down and her eyes wide open.

The instigator of this unparalleled display was Eleanor’s husband, King Edward I (1239-1307). Edward was arguably England’s greatest medieval monarch – not only, as his tomb at Westminster proclaims, ‘the Hammer of the Scots’, but also the conqueror of Wales, a reformer, a legislator and a builder of mighty castles. It is no surprise that the king who held the biggest parliaments and led the largest armies of the English Middle Ages should also be responsible for what has been called ‘the most magnificent funerary display ever accorded an English monarch’.

Eleanor and Edward had married 36 years earlier, in 1254, when he was 15 and she was not quite 13 years old, and since that time they had been virtually inseparable. Edward, in addition to visiting every corner of Britain, had also travelled to France, Spain, Italy, Sicily, North Africa and the Holy Land, and in each case Eleanor had travelled with him. Another testament to their closeness is the fact that Eleanor bore Edward at least 15 (possibly 16) children, and (unusually) there is no credible evidence of infidelity on either part.

Because they were so rarely apart, and because he was such a masterful monarch, her personality is rather obscure (medieval queens who opposed their husbands tended to attract more comment). From Eleanor’s financial accounts we can see that she enjoyed the typical aristocratic pastimes of her age – romance literature, chess and hunting. More unusual was her taste for exotic fruits and water gardens, doubtless acquired during her youth in Spain and not entirely forgotten.
What little contemporary comment we do have about Eleanor is far from positive. ‘A Spaniard by birth’, wrote the annalist at Dunstable Priory, ‘she acquired many fine manors’. He was referring to Eleanor’s practice of snapping up property from those who found themselves financially embarrassed. The queen arguably needed more land to support her status, but the way she and her ministers went about obtaining it were both ruthless and underhand. Moreover, Eleanor often targeted manors whose owners were indebted to Jewish moneylenders (Leeds Castle in Kent was acquired in this way) which, in a profoundly anti-Semitic age, served to compound her notoriety. ‘There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England,‘ wrote the archbishop of Canterbury in 1286.

Thus at the time of her death Eleanor was deeply unpopular across the country, and hence the need on Edward’s part to repair the damage. The purpose of the crosses was to encourage those who saw them to pray for Eleanor’s soul. To this end they were a great success. As the memory of the real Eleanor faded, later generations looked at the crosses and assumed that she must have been an outstandingly good queen. From the sixteenth century this idea was bolstered by an unreliable, romantic legend that Eleanor, during her stay in the Holy Land, had selflessly sucked the poison from a wound that Edward had suffered at the hands of Muslim assassin. In the nineteenth century Eleanor was written up as an example of the Victorian ideal – pious, faithful, modest and devoted. Only the more painstaking researches of the recent years have exposed the darker and less becoming side of her character.

Yet for all her apparent faults, we can say one thing in Eleanor’s favour, which is that her husband clearly adored her. Despite the doubts of some historians, we can be confident that the primary cause of the crosses was profound grief of the king at the lost of his most constant companion. A few weeks after her death, Edward wrote a letter to the abbot of Cluny in France, requesting prayers for the wife ‘whom in life we dearly cherished, and whom in death we cannot cease to love’.

 

 

The following information was kindly sent to me by Sara Cockerill, who is writing a biography of Eleanor:

 

Edward’s arrangements for Eleanor’s commemoration were very touching indeed.  He endowed chantries at (inter alia) Harby and also at her pet project of Leeds Castle; and for a year after her death he made a special distribution of alms every Tuesday (28 November 1290 was a Tuesday) to as many as might approach him. Meanwhile Westminster Abbey had to hold a special service with nine lessons every Monday and a special mass with tolling of bells and a distribution of alms to 140 poor men every Tuesday. Eleanor’s tomb was to be surrounded by thirty large candles at all times.  All were to be lit on great feasts, and two were to be kept burning at all times. The commemorations on the anniversary (involving 100 twelve pound candles which could burn throughout the vigil plus a procession with forty nine candles to mark her age) were so intensive that the clergy involved were reportedly left physically exhausted by the effort.  Nor was Edward running any risks about the Abbey getting it right – the letter patent expressly stipulates that it had to be read out in full in chapter once a year to ensure proper observance of all its requirements, and the abbot, prior and convent had to bind all their goods to performance of their obligations.



 

The Feast of St Edmund, 1296

In 1296 Edward I was at war with France, trying to recover his duchy of Gascony, which the French king Philip IV had snatched two years earlier. The English expedition was led by Edward's brother, Edmund of Lancater. It was not going well...

'The second force sent to the duchy had fared no better than the first. By the autumn of 1295, when Edward had twisted enough aristocratic arms to elicit the necessary enthusiasm, the main expedition was already a year behind schedule – and even then it had not left on time. Edmund of Lancaster, the king’s appointed captain, had fallen ill, and had not recovered until after Christmas. It was not until January 1296 that the much-delayed fleet had finally set sail. Once arrived in Gascony, their luck had not improved. The French, having been left unmolested for so long, were found to be well entrenched. English attempts to retake Bordeaux, and even the smaller towns along the Garonne, came to nothing. Eventually, as his money had started to run out, Lancaster had been forced to abandon his efforts and had retired to Bayonne. There he had once again fallen sick, and died on 5 June. Henry de Lacy, the ultra-loyal earl of Lincoln, had taken command of the demoralized English forces.

News of his brother’s death had reached Edward while he was still in Scotland, just days after he had received John Balliol’s resignation. Orders had been sent out immediately for masses to be said for Edmund’s soul. The king spoke of his devastation, and enjoined his churchmen to pray for ‘our dearest and only brother, who was always devoted and faithful to us, and to the affairs of our realm, and in whom valour and many gifts of grace shone forth’. It was almost certainly with Edmund’s eternal salvation in mind that Edward had summoned his next English parliament to meet, not around the feast of St Edward (13 October), as was usual, but one month later, around the feast of St Edmund (20 November). For the same reason, the venue was not to be Westminster, but Bury St Edmunds, where his brother’s saintly namesake was interred. The local chronicler confirms that, when the king arrived in the town in November, he and his great men solemnly kept St Edmund’s feast.'

A Great and Terrible King, pp. 291-2

Always read the label

My ebook, Kings and Castles, is a collection of essays and articles. It is described on Amazon as a 'collection of essays and articles'. If you don't realize this before you invest your £1.99 (or $3.32), you may be disappointed:

'I give it a "3" rating because it obviously wasn't written as a consecutive book but rather is a compilation of related articles.'

'Unfortunately this book is just a collection of magazine articles put into a book... I read about a dozen pages and then gave up when I realised what it was comprised of. In all honesty it's a bit of a cheat as a book (and shouldn't even be called one) and I wouldn't have bought it if I'd known...'

'Morris starts off clearly writing a book that is about castles, but finishes with a book which is all about the life and times of Edward I. Any student writing a paper knows that the conclusion of a work must bear some reason to its opening or thesis. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Kings and Castles. Overall the book is well researched and educational, but misses its mark by staying to far off from its purported subject matter. I deducted three stars.. one for redundant over-repetition of information, and two for titular misinformation.'

Cnut and the Waves

On this day in 1035 King Cnut died. Here's what I wrote about him in The Norman Conquest:

Whatever Cnut died of, it wasn’t old age. Contemporaries were agreed that he had been very young at the time of his conquest of England in 1016, which has led modern historians to place his date of birth at some point in the last decade of the first millennium. Thus when the king died in the autumn of 1035, he was probably around forty years old (a thirteenth-century Scandinavian source says he was thirty-seven). According to William of Jumièges, he had been seriously ill for some time, and this statement finds some support in a charter that Cnut gave to the monks of Sherborne Abbey in Dorset in 1035, asking for their daily prayers to help him gain the heavenly kingdom. It was at Shaftesbury, just fifteen miles from Sherborne, that the king had died on 12 November.

Given his Viking ancestry, and the bloodshed that had accompanied his conquest, Cnut’s anxiety to enter heaven rather than Valhalla may strike some as surprising. But in fact the Danish royal house had been converted two generations earlier, and Cnut himself had been baptized as a child (his baptismal name was Lambert). Indeed, the point of the famous story about the king and the waves, as originally told*, was not to illustrate his stupidity, but rather to prove what a good Christian he had been. ‘Let all the world know’, says a damp Cnut, having conspicuously failed to stop the tide from rising, ‘that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and sea obey eternal laws.'

Cnut had in fact been famous for such acts of ostentatious piety. Having conquered England and dispatched his opponents in the traditional Viking manner, the king had sought to convince his remaining subjects that his rule was legitimate, and this meant, above all, demonstrating that it was approved by God. In 1027, for example, Cnut had gone on pilgrimage to Rome. He had also attempted to salve the wounds inflicted in the course of the Danish takeover – for example, by having the bones of Ælfhelm, the murdered archbishop of Canterbury, moved from St Paul’s Cathedral in London to a new shrine at Canterbury; by causing a church to be built on the site of the battlefield where his opponent, Edmund Ironside, had been defeated; and by visiting Edmund’s tomb at Glastonbury, where he honoured the late king’s memory by presenting a cloak embroidered with pictures of peacocks. The giving of such valuable objects was also typical, and helped Cnut secure a good reputation at home and abroad. ‘When we saw the present you sent us,’ wrote the bishop of Chartres, responding to the king’s gift of some beautifully decorated books, ‘we were amazed at your knowledge as well as your faith . . . you, whom we had heard to be a pagan prince, we now know to be not only a Christian, but also a most generous donor to God’s servants.’

There was nothing incongruous, therefore, when Cnut was eventually laid to rest in Winchester, in the cathedral known as the Old Minster, alongside the bones of St Swithin and several earlier kings of England and Wessex.

* The earliest version of this story to come down to us was written a century later, by the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon (who is on occasion quite inventive):

'When he was at the height of his ascendancy, he ordered his chair to be placed on the sea-shore as the tide was coming in. Then he said to the rising tide, 'You are subject to me, as the land on which I am sitting is mine, and no one has resisted my overlordship with impunity. I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master.' But the sea came up as usual, and disrespectfully drenched the king's feet and shins. So jumping back, the king cried, 'Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and sea obey eternal laws'.

Henry of Huntingdon, The History of the English People, 1000-1154, ed. D. Greenway (OUP, 2002), pp. 17-18.



Framlingham Castle and the Bigods

If you want to imagine yourself in the guise of a medieval warrior – and, let’s face it, who doesn’t – there are few better places to visit than Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Approach as if to attack, and you are confronted with one of the most impressive and impregnable-looking fortresses in England: a mighty ring of stone walls, thirteen metres high, surrounded by a broad, deep ditch. Twelve surviving towers stand taller still, and are amply supplied with arrow-loops. Make no mistake about it: this is a fantastically tough old building, designed in expectation of trouble.

To say that this is a veritable and venerable fortress, however, is to tell only a small part of its story. Inside those giant walls, the only structure that stands today is a seventeenth-century poorhouse. Now home to the local museum, it’s a building well worth visiting in its own right, with a harrowing history that recently reduced the normally flinty Jeremy Paxman to tears. Medievalists, meanwhile, lament the fact that it was ever built at all, for its stones were salvaged from the castle’s original interior. As a result, the casual observer now has a highly distorted view of Framlingham; one which reinforces the traditional misapprehension that castles were all about fighting, battlements and boiling oil. The reality was, of course, very different.

Framlingham was established by the Bigods, a family who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and quickly established themselves as the most powerful barons in East Anglia – a position officially acknowledged in the middle of the twelfth century when they were invested as earls of Norfolk. A cursory glance at the history of these men suggest that they liked nothing better than a scrap with England’s kings. Earl Hugh Bigod (d. 1177), for instance, unsuccessfully challenged Henry II, with the result that the original Framlingham Castle, a conventional earth-and-timber structure, was torn down by royal command in 1174. The present castle was built by Hugh’s son and successor, Roger (d. 1221), to proclaim that the Bigods were back in business – and ready to challenge King John, who laid siege to the castle in 1216. But in actual fact, the Bigods, like most medieval magnates, almost always worked in partnership with the Crown. Framlingham was hardly ever used as a fortress (even the so-called ‘siege’ of 1216 lasted less than 48 hours). It was, on the contrary, a place where power was expressed in a very different way – through benign local lordship, conspicuous consumption and luxurious living.

Ironically, a fantastic snapshot of ordinary, everyday life at Framlingham has been preserved because of the desperate, extraordinary decision taken by the last of the Bigod line. In 1297, at the end of a long but fairly unremarkable career, Earl Roger IV led a movement of popular resistance against the indomitable Edward I, whose government was widely deemed to have become unjust and oppressive. Although he met with considerable success, the earl was bankrupted by this stand, and so ended up having to cut a deal with the king. In return for an annuity for the rest of his life, Roger agreed to make Edward his heir. Accordingly, when the earl died a few years later, his vast estate in England, Wales and Ireland – Framlingham Castle included – passed to the Crown. And so too did all his estate accounts, some 650 neatly written rolls of parchment, which survive to this day in the National Archives at Kew. It is these documents which permit a unique glimpse into the earl’s private affairs, and a window through which we can look at life inside Framlingham Castle.

Roger himself was only occasionally in residence. Medieval magnates, like modern rock stars, were forever on tour. Nevertheless, in the earl’s absence, the castle did not stand idle. It was from here that his officials oversaw the workings of the entire Bigod administration in East Anglia, and it was to here that money generated on other manors was sent to be kept in the treasury. Framlingham was also an agricultural centre in its own right: the account rolls reveal all manner of produce being farmed, ranging from the expected (dairy, poultry, sheep and cattle) to the surprising (regular wages and robes were given to the earl’s vintner for tending his vineyards). Periodically there were visits from members of the earl’s own household: his knights came to hunt venison or to track falcons in the adjacent park; his accountants to check every bushel and barrel, even as they themselves consumed large quantities of fancy foodstuffs.

When the earl himself was due to arrive, the administration went into overdrive. Roger typically travelled with around fifty people in tow, and the castle had to be brought rapidly up to speed to cater for this entourage. Produce and provender poured in from the outlying manors. Deer were driven from the park, beer was brewed and bread baked. At Easter 1286 it was even necessary to bring in extra crockery from Tattingstone, some twenty miles away. Equally as important, the buildings in the castle had to be cleaned, repaired and, where necessary, rebuilt. The full extent of the castle’s vanished interior stands revealed in the rolls. We read of service buildings, such as the saucery, larder and kitchen, and accommodation, including the chambers of the earl, his steward, his knights and his servants.

The most important building of all was the castle’s hall. It was here that the earl and his household were wined, dined and entertained. Originally located on the eastern side of the courtyard, the hall was moved to face west when the castle was rebuilt around the year 1200, and this move reflects a corresponding shift in the Bigods’ domestic priorities. To the west of the castle, the ground falls away until it reaches a great lake or mere. This itself was a man-made feature, a piece of medieval landscaping. Of course, it could have helped to defend the castle, but its primary purpose was to provide dramatic effect. From afar, the castle’s appearance is greatly enhanced by its own reflection. From within, the views to the west are spectacular, which explains the relocation of the hall. The mere also provides the backdrop to the so-called Lower Court, a levelled area directly below the hall, almost certainly created as a private enclosure for the earl and his family. Whether in the hall or the garden, the Bigods and their guests could watch the sun setting across the water as they dined and relaxed.

Such was the normal life at Framlingham during its thirteenth-century heyday. It was not a place that the Bigods used to confront their kings, but rather to welcome them. In 1256 Roger’s predecessor threw open his doors to Henry III, and Roger himself played host to Edward I in 1277 (sadly, a year for which no accounts exist). The earl died a peaceful death at Framlingham in 1306 and, under the terms of his agreement with Edward, his dynasty drew to an close. It seems only fitting, on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the family’s eclipse, that we remember their main castle as it really was. Mount the walls at Framlingham and exercise your imagination, but bear in mind that the sight of an advancing army would have been almost as surprising for the Bigods as it would be for us today. Picture instead a ‘landscape of lordship’: men fishing in the mere and felling trees, knights hunting in the park; carpenters and masons, glaziers and gardeners, all seeking to beautify the castle and its surroundings; carts creaking across the drawbridge, laden with building materials, fine foods and bags of money. A peaceful panorama, but a busy one, animated by the news that the earl was riding towards Framlingham, eagerly anticipating the comforts and pleasures to be had within.

From my ebook of collected essays, Kings and Castles.

BBC History Magazine Interview

Here's a short film of me chatting about the Norman Conquest at the recent BBC History Magazine weekend in Malmesbury.

Earliest Description of a Traitor's Fate

On 9 September 1238, King Henry III was staying at his palace of Woodstock in Oxfordshire when there was an attempt on his life. (Our informant is the contemporary chronicler, Matthew Paris). An unnamed man intruded himself into the king’s presence and demanded to be given the realm. Henry, believing the man to be mad, called off his attendants, who had already begun the business of administering a right royal roughing-up. Later that night, however, the intruder came back. Through an unsecured window he crept into the king’s bedchamber and, brandishing a knife, rushed at the royal bed. But the bed, it turned out, was empty. Luckily – or, as Matthew Paris said, ‘by God’s providence’ – Henry was in the queen’s bedroom at the time.

Having made an attempt on the life of the king, the man was guilty of treason, for which the punishment was a horrible death:

'The king ordered him, as guilty of attempting to murder the king's majesty, to be torn limb from limb by horses at Coventry, a terrible example, and lamentable sight to all who dared to plot such crimes. In the first place, he was dragged asunder, then beheaded, and his body divided into three parts; each part was then dragged through one of the principal cities of England, and was afterwards hung on a gibbet used for robbers'. (taken from Matthew Paris's English History, ed. J. A. Giles, 1889, vol. 1, 139)

Treason, of course, came to be viewed in much more flexible terms by Henry's son, Edward I, with the result that similar excruciating punishment was meted out to, amongst others, Dafydd ap Gruffudd, Rhys ap Maredudd, Sir Thomas Turbeville, Sir Simon Fraser and – lest we forget – Sir William Wallace.

Here's another interesting thing. The incident described by Paris proves that, by 9 September 1238, Henry, who was just three weeks short of his 31st birthday, was clearly sleeping with his queen, who was no more than fifteen. Nine months and eight days later, on 17 June 1239, Edward I was born.

Movember

In 1055 the Welsh invaded Hereford and burnt it to the ground. A short time later, in February 1056, the bishop of Hereford, Athelstan, died. In his place, to counter the Welsh threat, a more pugnacious priest was installed. The D verison of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle explains:

'Leofgar, who was Earl Harold's chaplain, was appointed to succeed him: he kept his moustaches long during his priesthood until he became a bishop. He forsook his chrism and his cross and his spiritual weapons, seized his spear and his sword, and thus armed joined the levies against Gruffudd, the Welsh King: and there he was slain with his priests who were with him, together with Ælfnoth the sheriff and many other good men.'

(I put this in the Norman Conquest, but it was cut.)