Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Once again, the heir to the throne of England was a tiny baby boy, and the second-in-line was his eldest sister Eleanora, now fifteen years old and awaiting her father’s release to travel to Aragon and finalize her marriage.

  IV

  Vows

  1285–6

  AMESBURY

  On the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, in August 1285, Mary of Woodstock, the fourth surviving daughter of the king, knelt before the high altar of the spacious priory church at Amesbury. Surrounded by her parents, her sisters, and thirteen other noble young women, the princess pledged herself to a very different life from that of the chivalric court, and one which placed an emphasis on poverty – a word that her parents and siblings would never be asked to embrace – obedience, and perpetual chastity. Mary was to become a nun; so too were the thirteen companions chosen to share her day and her future.1

  The young princess played her part in the ceremony well, though her young age – she was only six – might suggest that she did not fully understand the life to which she was signing up, especially given the ostentatious nature that would characterize her as an adult. Her mother, however, understood all too well and was strongly opposed to her daughter’s veiling at such an early age. Just as she had campaigned that Eleanora should not be sent off at twelve to get married in Spain, so too she lobbied her husband that their second-youngest daughter, who was still being raised in the royal nursery alongside Elizabeth and Prince Edward, not be asked to give up what she could not yet comprehend: a future husband, children of her own, the freedom to move about in the world – the very things that gave the queen’s own life purpose. She was also unconvinced as to the reason Mary was being given up to the nuns. Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Provence, now that her life at the apex of power was nearly over, sought to comfort her soul by retiring in exceptional piety. The queen’s doubts were well known and, in an effort to assuage them, someone (probably the dowager queen) had arranged for the abbess of the convent’s motherhouse to write directly to the queen. In her letter, the abbess appealed both to Eleanor’s maternal and her royal instincts, addressing her as ‘dearest mother in Christ’ and ‘most excellent mother’, while praising the ‘great honour’ that would come to the king by placing his daughter in the convent. She concluded by pointing out that the queen’s child would be extremely well placed to pray for the souls of her family – a not unimportant consideration in a culture where the prayers of the living were thought to be the soul’s speediest route to heaven. The letter did little to convince the queen, and a chronicle later dedicated to Princess Mary recorded that her mother assented to her veiling ‘with difficulty’. But the king sided with his mother, and the plans for enclosing little Mary at Amesbury went ahead.2

  Mary’s grandmother had been a widow for more than a dozen years and was now in her seventh decade. The 1270s had been a particularly difficult time for her and, after losing her husband in 1272, she devoted herself to the care of her grandchildren. Two years later, when Henry died, she was so grief-stricken that she established a Franciscan priory at Guildford in his honour, where she hoped to find peace. But within six months there were more deaths in the family. Her second son’s wife, the young heiress Aveline de Forz, died in childbirth, along with her twin infants, and her own two daughters (Margaret, Queen of Scotland, and Beatrice, who would have become Countess of Brittany) followed Henry and Aveline to early graves. The chronicler Thomas Wykes wrote that the dowager queen was only comforted in her grief at losing her daughters by the presence of her surviving grandchildren. By the early 1280s, however, she had decided to retire from public life and live out her days as a nun. The English royal family had long patronized the Benedictine abbey of nuns at Fontevrault in Anjou, part of the ancestral English royal lands for the past century; it was an abbey that no less a person than the great Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II, had retired to in her own final years.3

  But Fontevrault was far away, and by the late thirteenth century the English king no longer ruled Anjou; instead of Fontevrault itself, therefore, Eleanor chose an English convent under its rule, the priory at Amesbury, in the rolling hills of Wiltshire. Today Amesbury is best known as the town closest to the ancient pagan site of Stonehenge, known until modern times as the Giant’s Circle. The circle, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth and the medieval chroniclers who succeeded him, was formed by the legendary wizard Merlin, who used magic to transport its stones, constructing a lasting monument to those Britons who fell fighting the Saxon invaders. (This Arthurian explanation for Stonehenge may be why Amesbury was later believed to be the convent to which Queen Guinevere retired after Arthur’s death.) The priory at Amesbury was also ancient; formally founded in the tenth century but probably on the site of an earlier monastery, it was established by the Anglo-Saxon queen Ælfthryth (mother of the famously ‘Unready’, or poorly advised, Æthelred) and remained a rather undistinguished Benedictine house of nuns for two centuries, before being dissolved and refounded in the twelfth century by Henry II as a daughter house of Fontevrault. Now under royal patronage, the next century saw significant expansion in the wealth and size of the priory. By the late thirteenth century, Amesbury was a bustling, prosperous community of more than seventy mostly aristocratic nuns, with two dozen resident men serving as priests or lay brethren who performed Mass, acted as confessors, and provided financial administration for the priory. They lived under the rule of a prioress and a prior, who governed the women and men respectively. In addition to the household domestics who served the community, labourers looked after the two hundred oxen, two dozen horses, and over four thousand sheep that between them provided meat, transportation, and income (from wool) to the priory. Amesbury had also acquired a reputation as a monastery fitting for English royal women: among its recent royal patrons was Eleanor of Brittany, the unfortunate countess who spent her life forcibly enclosed at royal castles throughout the country by King John and Henry III. On her death, not having anything else, she bestowed her body to the convent.4

  As the dowager queen prepared to take the veil and devote the rest of her life to God at Amesbury, she begged Edward to assign two of her granddaughters to keep her company. She was probably the first to make the argument, later echoed by the Abbess of Fontevrault in her letter to Eleanor of Castile, that she and the children would pray together each day for the souls of the royal family and for the glory of England. It was an argument that Edward – caught as he was between the wishes of his mother and his wife – found compelling; time and again, the king would demonstrate the belief that his daughters had roles to play in the dynasty’s larger ambitions, and having a nun in the family could prove useful. Princess Mary – the eldest not already pledged in marriage – and her cousin Eleanor of Brittany therefore entered the convent in the company of other aristocratic daughters, to provide companionship for their grandmother.5

  Mary’s veiling was unique among princesses in the later medieval period – most kings did not have such a surplus of daughters that they could easily afford to throw away the opportunity for a diplomatic marriage. But Edward had five daughters, including Mary’s three elder siblings, all of whom were betrothed yet unmarried, and her little sister Elizabeth, who was just three and remained unmatched. It had been over a hundred years since a member of the royal family had become a nun. In the middle of the eleventh century, Cecily, the eldest daughter of William the Conqueror, had joined a community of nuns established by her father at Caen in Normandy, and was much admired for her piety. And in 1160, Mary, the daughter of King Stephen, was serving as Abbess of Romsey when she was ‘abducted’ (almost certainly she willingly eloped) by a Low Countries nobleman and, her vow of perpetual chastity notwithstanding, much to the shock and horror of Christendom, married him. Their union caused such a scandal that their County of Boulogne was placed under papal interdict, whereby no one living within its borders could receive the vital sacraments of baptism, marriage, or the last rites, which essentially left the so
uls of every man, woman, and child in the county in moral peril. Despite giving birth to two daughters, Mary could never escape the stigma associated with her marriage, and eventually returned to live in a convent, repenting the abandonment of her religious vows and pledging once again to live a chaste life. If, a century later, young Mary of Woodstock knew of these unfortunate tales, she must have hoped that hers would be a more successful monastic career.

  Mary’s entry into Amesbury was also exceptional in other respects: young women were meant to be sixteen before they took vows, and normally only entered convents as novices a year or two before this. Although some authorities argued that girls could be professed at twelve (the same age they were deemed mature enough to be married), the entry and veiling of children much younger than this age was rare, and seems only to have occurred among the highest aristocracy. Given that she was only six, Mary could not have expected to be professed as a full nun, and it was a further six years before she made her formal vows in 1291, when she had reached the age of twelve. In addition, in contrast to most nuns, Mary did not pay the usual dowry, or entry fee, on joining Amesbury; rather, the princess represented potential future windfalls, such as when, in 1289, ‘for the love which the king bears to his daughter’, her father waived, forever, the annual allowance for the nearby manor of Melksham due from the convent to the Exchequer, saving the priory in excess of twenty-seven pounds each year. This amount represented pure profit for Amesbury, as the princess was also provided with a generous annual allowance of one hundred pounds to cover the upkeep of her private chamber, to be paid in two instalments each year, throughout her life. Her income was more than double that needed to provide two full knightly households, but in this case its sole purpose was to furnish Mary’s chamber (in which she dined, read, and possibly slept) and to procure special foodstuffs for her table. As a nun, her clothing was expected to be simple, unlike the extravagant furs, jewels, and other fineries worn by her worldly sisters. Mary was also granted an annual provision of wood (forty oaks, taken from royal forests near Amesbury) to burn in her chamber fireplace, as well as twenty tuns of wine from the Bordeaux claret merchants which docked at the nearest port of Southampton. In accepting the six-year-old princess into their official membership, the financial and social position of Amesbury Priory was significantly strengthened, which undoubtedly eased any anxieties the community felt about the propriety and wisdom of veiling a nun so young.6

  Throughout the autumn of 1285, Mary and her noble companions settled into their new lives in the priory. As students and novices, the girls spent their days in a kind of convent school, learning to read and to recite the psalms and the responses to verses they would need to know for their roles in a monastic community. The heart of the convent, long since worn to ruin, consisted of a cloister lined with stone seats, where the community could gather during clement weather. A large dining hall, or frater; a communal dormitory two hundred feet long, where most of the nuns slept; a chapter house that served as the community’s official meeting room; a large kitchen; and a hall all came off the square cloisters. Beyond were separate buildings that included the buttery, pantry, and the prioress’s lodgings, as well as a number of other discrete suites, one of which was set aside to accommodate the Abbess of Fontevrault or her representative, and another of which was likely the suite of rooms that Eleanor of Provence began building in the early 1280s to house herself and her granddaughters in appropriate style. Further out from the central spaces inhabited by the nuns and novices were lodgings for the male clerics resident at Amesbury, an infirmary, a hay barn, and stables, all enclosed by a gatehouse and set within a park that included herb and vegetable gardens, orchards, and fishponds nestled in bends along the River Avon at the southern edge of Salisbury Plain.7

  The princess’s day-to-day routine may have shifted slowly into the normal daily pattern of a novice: a steady but demanding schedule of communal prayer and private reading punctuated by three meals and eight hours of sleep. The primacy of the Divine Offices in monastic life – matins and lauds spoken in the middle of the night, followed by prime, tierce, sext, none, vespers, and compline throughout the day – almost certainly mean that Mary was learning to participate in these ceremonies immediately or soon after arriving at Amesbury, quickly deploying the knowledge she gained to sing hymns and recite key passages of scripture from memory. The diminutive six-year-old must have appeared desperately out of place as she stood in the nuns’ choir stalls among the mostly adult community. She would have gone to confession frequently, received communion at least once a month, and listened to sermons extolling the virtues of purity and humility at Mass in the priory’s church twice each day. It was a rigorous routine for a young child, and she must especially have struggled with the broken sleep patterns required to fulfil her duty as a bride of Christ.

  Every waking moment of Mary’s day would have been dominated by communal prayer or quiet reflection – silence was observed for much of the day, and no time was set aside for play. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that she did not manage to find a way to have fun with the other noble novices or the secular children boarding within the convent. At Christmas time, she may have been entertained by minstrels or musicians – they were ostensibly forbidden within convents, but were so frequently lamented by church authorities that their presence must have been common – or perhaps even performed the part of Girl Abbess, a customary game in which, during the Feast of St Nicholas, the patron saint of children, the youngest novice or nun would lead the community in dancing and revelry. Mary’s diversions from the strict daily observations and practices would more usually have included tuition in reading, most likely initially with psalters and over time with broader devotional material, such as collections of saints’ lives borrowed from the priory library or from fellow nuns. She would also have had access to chivalric romances borrowed from fellow nuns or from her grandmother’s collection, tales that would have resonated with her own experiences at court. Even after her installation at Amesbury, Mary continued to preside alongside her family members at special events; for example, soon after she entered the priory in the autumn of 1285, she attended the Winchester tournament where her father, concerned that the number of knights was falling precipitously and desperate to preserve his fighting force, compelled forty-four wealthy men to become knights.

  Amesbury was home to a community of monks – men like the Brother Richard who looked after the princess’s finances – as well as a variety of servants of both genders. Male and female visitors were also in frequent attendance, including Mary’s parents and siblings, who spent a week at Amesbury in early 1286. The king and queen were at the time travelling back towards London from Exeter, where they had spent Christmas with Eleanora, Joanna, and Margaret. The princesses had been on pilgrimage together, first to Glastonbury and then westward via minor shrines – practising the public piety expected of royal women – before joining their parents. They arrived at Amesbury en route from the village of Dinton in Cranborne Chase, Dorset, to Upavon near the North Wessex Downs, resplendent in newly embellished gowns of vibrant silks and linen, embroidered with gold and sprinkled with ornaments, including the six dozen silver buttons that Eleanora’s personal tailor had sewn onto her dresses in the weeks leading up to the holiday. These sumptuous robes would have contrasted sharply with the simple black gown intended to be worn by a nun like Mary, but the declarations against nuns wearing brightly coloured, silken or bejewelled clothing and ornaments, which were repeated throughout the later Middle Ages, suggest that luxurious, worldly clothing made at least occasional appearances within the cloister, and it is easy to imagine the young novice’s gaze lingering longingly on the forbidden beautiful dresses of her elder sisters. Eleanora had fallen ill on the way back from Exeter, and her servants were sent to procure lemons, spices, almonds, figs, and raisins and bring them to Amesbury – perhaps her mother felt the bright flavours of her youth in Spain might help to rally her daughter’s spirits. The rest of the famil
y feasted with Mary, spending over thirty pounds during a single week, a significant increase on their usual weekly expenses.8

  Mary seemed to be struggling to adjust to life at Amesbury – she was terribly homesick and spent much of the spring of 1286 ensconced within the bosom of her family, away from the priory to which she was pledged. This was unusual. Nuns of the Fontevrault Order were meant to be strictly enclosed – unable in normal circumstances to venture outside the walls of their convent, and explicitly forbidden from spending excessive periods away from the monastic precinct or dining in the company of secular men and women. At the time that Mary joined Amesbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury was engaged in a decades-long battle to enforce the rules of enclosure, particularly for nuns. He issued a set of rules, including the instruction that:

  For the purpose of obtaining a surer witness to chastity, we ordain that nuns shall not leave the precincts of the monastery, save for necessary business which cannot be performed by other persons. Hence we condemn for ever, by these present letters those sojourns which were wont to be made in the houses of friends, for the sake of pleasure and of escaping from discipline.

  Without doubt, Mary’s position secured her a much greater freedom of movement throughout her life than most nuns would have enjoyed; favouritism was officially prohibited, but none dared to challenge the king or queen on the propriety of their child visiting her family. Therefore, in March she visited court at Winchester and, later that month, her father and Eleanora were back at Amesbury once more, where Eleanora purchased a new horse she named Rougement, after the castle in Exeter where they had spent Christmas. In May, Mary left the enclosure of the priory once again to travel with the whole royal family to Dover, where they welcomed home her grandmother Eleanor of Provence, who had returned from a tour of continental relatives as she prepared for her own veiling ceremony. Mary remained at court for nearly a month, probably both to become better acquainted with the dowager queen whose principal companion she would soon become, and to say goodbye to her parents, as they prepared to travel to Gascony to mediate between rival kings for the throne of Sicily. Before they departed, the queen arranged for Mary to have an additional fifty marks each year to supplement her income, most likely to reassure herself that her daughter would be well provided for while she and Edward were far away.9