Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  The party, including Mary, then travelled on to Winchester, where they were joined by Margaret’s fiancé Jan for a tournament in celebration of the two forthcoming royal weddings. The following morning, amid the row between Joanna and her parents over her number of pages, the family visited the cathedral, where they made offerings at several shrines before crowds. Later in the day, the tournament took place in a field just outside the city; competitors included both bridegrooms-to-be – Jan, whose expenses for the event were paid for by King Edward, and Gilbert, who paid his own way – as well as other young noblemen including John of Brittany, Eleanora’s childhood companion at Guildford and Langley. The event culminated in a feast, during which the king unveiled the enormous round table, eighteen feet in diameter, that still hangs today on the wall of Winchester Castle’s great hall. No detailed record of the feast survives, though it is likely to have included a set piece of Arthurian-inspired drama acted out around the round table by the noblemen at the feast – a Brabaçon verse chronicle of loosely fictionalized, romantic episodes from King Edward’s life includes a description of Edward hosting a wedding feast around a round table, and ends with the king’s exhortation to the wedding guests to conduct their lives according to the chivalric model of Arthur’s court. Since the occasion was in celebration of their forthcoming weddings, we can expect that Joanna and Gilbert, and Margaret and Jan, presided over the festivities, and that they were perhaps among the twenty-odd people seated at the round table itself. For the brides-to-be and their elder sister Eleanora, the tournament at Winchester may have seemed especially sumptuous, but for Mary – only one year away from taking her final vow of poverty – the stark difference between court and her daily life of contemplation and prayer at Amesbury would have been hugely amplified during these festivities. It is hard not to wonder whether she jealously eyed her sisters or wondered why her destiny had not included being the focal point around which lavish international feasts might convene.4

  The king heartily embraced the opportunity provided by his daughters’ weddings to promote once again his association with King Arthur. He could not have chosen a better backdrop than Winchester Castle: it was a perfect place in which to unveil a real-life round table and to conjure the spirit of chivalric romance. Since Geoffrey of Monmouth, Winchester had been associated with the stories of King Arthur, and during Edward’s reign it was believed that the king had held court in the city. In reality, the castle was built after the Norman Conquest, and was heavily refurbished and extended by Edward’s father, Henry III, who had been born there. It was he who had built the great hall, one of the most beautiful surviving examples of the age: more than one hundred feet long, the hall remains well-lit, with large windows, gracefully divided by two rows of dark stone columns that are speckled with tiny fossilized shells that were quarried at the Isle of Purbeck in nearby Dorset. The interior was whitewashed, and a large mural at each end would have drawn in the viewer’s attention. Above the king’s high table was a depiction of the Wheel of Fortune, recalling the fickle nature of worldly glory, and at the other end a mappa mundi showed the known world, with England in the far west (at the bottom) and the Garden of Eden in the far east (at the top). On the occasion of Edward’s round table tournament, four long cloths-of-gold were purchased to drape along the lower wall below the murals, which would have shimmered in the candlelight after sunset. For the teenage princesses about to be married, the tournament and feast may have been the first time they were at the centre of their father’s myth-making, and the first sign that their roles within the royal family would be elevated by marriage, when they would no longer just be the king’s children but also links to important political and diplomatic connections.

  The feast at Winchester must have been an exceptionally lavish event, given the tens of thousands of gallons of wine that were consumed during the day and evening. The next day, the royal family began making their way back to Westminster, where Joanna was to be married the following week. Amid all the complex final negotiations surrounding the succession and the preparations for the lavish tournament, there had not been sufficient time to assemble the usual elaborate bridal trousseau for Joanna. Her parents had seven new dresses made to accompany her to her new home, as well as twenty-five pairs of soft leather shoes (footwear seems never to have lasted for long on the muddy pathways and cold stone floors of medieval England, and dozens of new pairs were being constantly purchased for the royal family), and fifteen pairs of gloves, but no new wedding gown. Instead, the bride and her two eldest sisters had fashionable quintises, or silk super-tunics that were designed to be worn over a close-fitting gown, reworked for the occasion.

  Though she was denied a new gown to wear at the wedding, Joanna was at least gifted extraordinary jewels that would have outshone her sisters on the occasion. While in Paris, Adam, the queen’s goldsmith, had procured a golden headdress set with rubies and emeralds, and a matching solid-gold zone encrusted with dozens more precious gems. Joanna’s youngest sister Elizabeth was not left out; her mother gave the seven-year-old girl a small crown of her own to wear on the day.

  On the morning of the wedding, on 30 April 1290, the princess-bride and her sisters donned their gowns and jewels and walked across the yard from the Palace of Westminster to the great abbey church. The bride’s attendants at the private ceremony included her parents, her sisters and little brother, and many of the royal wards with whom she had been raised. It was intimate in scale for a royal wedding, but it was still the first royal marriage to take place inside the vast Gothic abbey since it had been rebuilt by her grandfather. Once inside, Joanna and Gilbert prostrated themselves before the altar at which her parents had been crowned sixteen years before. Mass was performed by the king’s chaplain and when the wedding ring was lifted from the missal book, Joanna spoke the simple words, ‘I take you to be my husband’, that bound her to Gilbert, body and soul. The chaplain then blessed the couple with prayers reiterating their newfound partnership, the husband’s duty to protect, and the wife’s obligation to be loveable, wise, and faithful. He left out, however, a clause comparing the indissolubility of marriage to the covenant between Christ and the Church, given that this was excluded from second marriage ceremonies.5

  When they emerged from the church, the earl and his new countess walked with their guests to a temporary hall that had been constructed within the palace grounds. The walls were lined with cloths covering the hall’s skeletal construction, and the decorations would have included painted shields and heraldic banners displaying the red chevrons and gold of the House of Clare, intertwined with red and gold royal arms. Inside, a feast was laid out on trestle tables covered in fine linens. The festivities must have been merry: among several minstrels recorded entertaining at the event was Poveret, minstrel to the Marshal of Champagne. Wine clearly flowed freely since, at some point during the feast, the Sheriff of London, a prosperous cloth merchant named Fulk St Edmund, fell into a table and did such damage that it required subsequent repair.6

  If, ten days before, Joanna had worried about her perceived status in comparison to her sisters’, she was now a countess and joint landholder of one of the largest estates in England – and, what is more, she held a tighter grip on the Clare lands than her husband, since they would descend to her children, whether or not they were his. Now that she was married and fully of age, Joanna was freed from her parents’ commands as well as from the influence of her long-serving governess, Lady Edeline. In the days immediately following her wedding, however, she was still acting as a royal daughter, offering gifts to poor widows, along with her sisters Eleanora and Margaret, and receiving wedding presents from her parents, including a new carriage drawn by five horses. The king and queen clearly expected their second daughter to remain within their orbit for at least a short while, anticipating that she would stay at court until Margaret’s wedding, planned for July. But only a week into married life, Joanna and her husband abruptly left court with their household of nearly two hund
red servants and retainers, and travelled to the Clare family estates in Glamorgan. Their departure was probably the result of a dispute between the king and Gilbert, who through his lordship of Glamorgan claimed an income from the vacant bishopric of Llandaff, north of Cardiff. As a Welsh Marcher lord, Gilbert claimed greater autonomy over his Glamorgan estate than over his English lands, with the right to build castles and wage wars, appoint sheriffs and preside over courts, and to establish boroughs, markets, and forests. Within Glamorgan, he was almost a king – his predecessor had in 1247 been referred to as ‘dominus et quasi rex’, and Gilbert was even more king-like: when Edward visited Glamorgan after defeating the Welsh princes in 1284, Gilbert escorted him throughout the province like an equal. He felt his claim to the income from Llandaff was legitimate within the traditions of the March, but after his defeat of the Welsh princes in the north of the country, Edward had begun trying to rein in the autonomy of the Marcher lords further south and resisted Gilbert’s claim. When Gilbert and his new wife left London, the king and queen were furious, but they were also newly powerless to compel their now-married daughter to remain at court. Their only way to punish Joanna was to impound and reclaim the small trousseau that had been prepared for her – they instead gifted the seven new gowns to Margaret and a zone of pearls to Eleanora, along with a note explaining that the gowns had been reclaimed in punishment because Joanna had left court before Margaret’s wedding. Weeks later, they would hear the news that their new son-in-law had launched a raid into Brecon against a rival Marcher lord, in strict defiance of the king’s orders.7

  Joanna had been given to Gilbert by her father in an effort to rein in the tempestuous earl, and her body came to symbolize, in a very literal sense, the link between the two men. It is clear that, in the time leading up to her marriage, she was used for the purposes of both her father and her husband-to-be. Gilbert sought Joanna’s hand because it represented his own elevation in status – through her he would achieve even greater proximity to royal authority and the power and influence that came with it; Edward agreed to the marriage in the hope of taming Gilbert. Neither would have thought to wonder what the teenager who was the focus of their negotiations wanted. At first glance, the eighteen-year-old princess seems like little more than a pawn for her father to marry her off however he chose. But that is to mistake the role of the bride, who was required not just to acquiesce to her father’s wishes, but to be an active participant in the ceremony, appearing before the crowds as the incarnation of regal poise and publicly proclaiming her desire to forge a union. Dynastic marriage undoubtedly included an element of exchange (although the normal custom of matching husband and wife who were roughly the same age meant that boys were as frequently the objects of this exchange as girls), but it did not necessarily disempower its female participants.

  In key ways, the ritual was not unlike the pledge of homage at the very heart of medieval society by a vassal to his feudal lord, in which service was sworn for the promise of reward and protection. Like the vassal, the bride pledged herself to her lord because she expected to gain from the relationship. Joanna – never shy about expressing her dissatisfaction – professed her desire to be wed to a husband thirty years her senior because she stood to benefit from becoming the wife of one of the most powerful and independent lords in her father’s realm. When she left court before Margaret’s wedding, she was expressing her new freedom. But she also agreed to the marriage because she recognized that whatever helped her father, also helped her. Joanna’s position, like that of her sisters, was special because of her relation to the king, a connection that was key to every advantage she held. The link was so inextricable that any fluctuation in her father’s power would directly impact her own influence. Her fate, in other words, was intimately tied to that of her family – and her interests were bound indissolubly to those of her father and her family.8

  Two months after Joanna was married, she returned to court to collect the trousseau (without the impounded dresses) that her parents had not had time to prepare before her wedding. On 2 July, her father instructed the keeper of the London Exchange to release three hundred marks’ worth of the finest refined silver (imported from Ghent) for vessels and utensils to furnish her table. The silver was melted down and moulded to form the most-prized pieces among a collection of more than one hundred silver dishes and bowls, innumerable spoons and small dishes to hold spices and salt, vessels for wine and water, and a chapel set with a censer and an alms dish made in the shape of a ship. There was also gold: small pitchers to hold Eucharist wine, dozens of gold drinking cups, and a large bowl that alone cost almost nineteen pounds, around half the yearly income of a knightly household. She was given four large canopied beds for herself and her chief servants – enormous wooden-framed pieces that dominated medieval bedchambers and were normally the largest and costliest items of furniture, including not only the frame itself but also heavy feather mattresses, cushions, and layers of velvet and imported silk curtains that enclosed the air to keep occupants warm throughout winter. While the decorations of Joanna’s bedclothes are unrecorded, they would have rivalled the richest of her gowns in their embroidery and the use of gold and silver thread: those which accompanied other English princesses to their marital homes included motifs of fighting dragons, stag hunts, and intertwined heraldic shields. Baskets and chests filled with table and bed linens, cushions, and her new carriage completed her household furnishings. Consumable goods also appear in the list of the king’s gifts to his daughter on her marriage: pantry goods, silk belts with silver embroidery that could be given out as gifts to Joanna’s new household servants and friends, and enough candles to fill a cart. Six carts were required to transport the complete trousseau assembled at the Tower of London to Clerkenwell north of the city, where the bride was in residence with her husband.9

  Meanwhile, back at Westminster, the final preparations were underway for fifteen-year-old Margaret’s marriage to Jan of Brabant, her fiancé since infancy and a fixture at court for five years. In contrast to Joanna’s wedding, the ceremony on 8 July was full of dizzying pageantry designed to showcase the wealth and cosmopolitan finesse of Edward’s court to the groom’s father, the visiting Duke of Brabant, and his entourage. In the days leading up to the ceremony, the queen was in almost constant contact with her goldsmith, who had been charged with gathering the bridal jewels that would accompany Margaret as she began life as the consort of a foreign court. These included a silver nuptial crown for the wedding ceremony itself, another gold crown studded with three hundred emeralds, and a golden chaplet – a circular band worn around the head, covered in rubies and pearls, with the heraldic leopard of England picked out in sapphires. Each time Margaret wore this chaplet in her new duchy, it would explicitly recall to all who saw it her connection, and by extension Jan’s, to the English king. The day before the wedding, the final touches were put in place, as table linens and tapestries to furnish the feast that would follow the ceremony were transported from the Tower of London up the Thames to the palace at Westminster.10

  Eleanora was twenty-one by this point, and no closer to marrying her own fiancé, the King of Aragon, unless his excommunication could be lifted. She might easily have felt aggrieved and wondered when it would finally be her turn as she walked across the yard from the palace to the abbey church, for the second time that year, to watch her younger sister get married. If so, her parents sought to distract her from this sensitivity. For the ceremony, the eldest princess wore a new gown that sparkled with more than six hundred of her favourite silver buttons, the effect of which would have given her dress a dazzling appearance in the bright summer sun. For Eleanora’s only remaining companion, her youngest sister Elizabeth, not yet eight, the event was a taste of her own future; just as Margaret was to become Duchess of Brabant, Elizabeth would one day be countess of nearby Holland. Their paths would in 1290 have felt clearly aligned, and this knowledge must have been at the front of Elizabeth’s mind as she took in the vibra
nt sights and sounds.

  The young bridal couple at the centre of the festivities were intent on developing chivalric reputations, and the glittering spectacle of assembled nobles and entertainers from across Europe must have pleased them very much. Yet they must also have realized that, while the programme officially celebrated their personal union, its truer intent was to cement the diplomatic alliance which their wedding represented. Jan might easily have felt outshone by his celebrated father, who arrived at the head of a delegation of one hundred and forty Low Country noblemen and -women. He was recognized as one of the great chivalric princes of his generation, a gifted warrior and tournament favourite, and newly enriched following his great military triumph two years before at Worringen, one of the decisive battles of the age. Clearly, he was everything his son and heir hoped to emulate, and he did not disappoint at the wedding, arriving dressed in a fashionable cape made of vair (a popular black fur, with rows of regular white triangles pointing downward) over a tunic, which he changed no less than three times throughout the day, presumably in part because he must have been sweating profusely in the July heat.