Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Throughout the ensuing winter, news of the king’s forces fighting in the north of Wales, with many of the principal Marcher lords leading armies across the region against the insurgency, filtered back to Joanna. She knew the place names well from her childhood travels along the north Welsh coast. In early 1295, her father was besieged at Conwy Castle and had to be relieved by a naval rescue, but by spring the tide had turned against the rebellion and, after a decisive English victory early in March, the king’s forces rapidly recaptured Anglesey. In the south the following month, Gilbert initiated a fresh expedition; Joanna would have been assured to learn that he had soon recaptured Cardiff, but despite this, he was unable to consolidate his victory against Morgan. When the king’s forces finally arrived in the south, however, the rebels put up no resistance, and Morgan submitted himself directly to the king, reiterating that his grievances were only against Gilbert. The earl demanded the punishment of the rebels, but to his fury the king received the insurgents into the royal peace, pardoning Morgan and eventually employing him on commissions. Most gallingly, the king once again confiscated the province from his son-in-law, instead placing it under the control of a custodian appointed from among his men. For the second time in three years, Joanna faced the prospect of her income being halved overnight, as the prosperous sheep farms of Glamorgan, the salmon fisheries of Usk, and the rights to Cardiff, the largest town in the March, were withdrawn from her joint lordship with Gilbert. The gesture was a victory for the king in his struggle to rein in the traditional autonomy of the Marcher lords. But for his daughter and son-in-law, stripped of the lands where they had played king and queen, the blow must have been exceptionally bitter.5

  These moves emboldened the old enemies of Gilbert, and there are signs he may have lost the will to keep fighting. In May, he signed over the rights associated with several churches he held in Glamorgan to his long-time adversary, the Bishop of Llandaff, and he swapped some other churches in the March for ones in Lincoln. At court in Westminster that August, a heavily pregnant Joanna was compelled by her victorious father to confirm Gilbert’s charters. That summer must have been difficult for the countess – she had gained safety in England, but lost much of the autonomy to which she had grown accustomed. The words she spoke to her father on being forced to surrender parts of the estate that she had hoped to pass to her son are not recorded but, given her temperament, Joanna is unlikely to have held her tongue. She departed from court shortly after her interview, and probably headed for the Clare estate at Tewkesbury, to await the birth of her third daughter (whom she would name Elizabeth, for her youngest sister). Then, in October, the king relented and issued a charter restoring Glamorgan to the control of Gilbert and Joanna; in it, he made clear that he had not sought to deprive his daughter or grandson of their inheritance, but rather to demonstrate his ultimate authority over her husband, even in the lawless land of the March. The king’s charter implied that Joanna played an active role in winning back her estate. But for Gilbert, it seems that the trauma of the rebellion and the confiscation of his lands had shattered his will.6

  Despite the vast age difference between her and her husband, Joanna’s decision to reside with Gilbert deep inside the March of Wales and in Ireland rather than in Clare, Suffolk, or their Gloucester estates, as well as her many pregnancies that occurred in quick succession, suggests a connection between the two beyond the legal one. It may be that her fiery and unflinching personality was well matched by the strident and bold earl. Certainly the choices she would make in the coming years suggest that she was anything but cowed by the confiscation and subsequent restoration of her estate by her father, or the ruinous effect that her father’s actions had on her husband.

  The king could not rest long after his subjugation of the Welsh rebels and his disobedient Marcher lord son-in-law. Just as Edward had been determined to demonstrate his authority throughout Wales and Scotland, the King of France was resolved to express his own control over the English-held province of Gascony. Tensions between the nations had been building throughout the early 1290s – there were regular violent skirmishes between English and Norman sailors, and in 1294 the French succeeded in tricking Edward into effectively surrendering Gascony and forfeiting his lordship. Though he was desperate to reclaim the province, the king had been preoccupied in Wales and was only able to send a small troop under inexperienced command, which gave the French king time to strengthen his position. By early 1296, France had forged an alliance of mutual protection with the ruling council of Scotland – the beginning of the so-called Auld Alliance – which fanned the flames between England and Scotland. Edward ordered his war-weary men north, and just after Easter they took Berwick-on-Tweed, sacking the Scottish border town and mercilessly slaughtering its inhabitants. The campaign was a rapid success: within five months, the castles at Dunbar, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling had submitted to Edward, and the country was effectively conquered. He could now return to planning, none too soon, his campaign against the French in Gascony: the French had begun raiding English coastal towns – Winchelsea was attacked; at Dover, an elderly and infirm monk, left behind by his fleeing brothers, was killed when he refused to disclose where the church treasures were hidden – and the people were growing increasingly anxious. The intervening years, during which Edward had been prohibited from engaging with France directly, had also offered opportunities for the French king to win over the German and Low Country rulers with whom Edward had made pacts. By the time the English were in a position to mount another continental campaign, Edward’s northern alliances were breaking apart.

  Late in 1296, Margaret and Eleanora – and the virtually indissoluble alliances they represented with the Duchy of Brabant and the County of Bar – were a lifeline to Edward, as he sought to retain control of his continental empire. Elizabeth’s planned match with the heir to the County of Holland had been threatened in 1295 when the count, Floris V, frustrated by Edward’s failure to back his own (weak) claim to the throne of Scotland and also by the closure of English wool ports in Holland that threatened the wealth of the province, abandoned the English alliance and instead sided with France. Despite this shift, Johan was not immediately returned from England, and when Floris was kidnapped and killed the following year by a group of nobles seeking to restore the wool trade, Edward capitalized on his guardianship of Johan to propel Holland back into the alliance, and plans for Elizabeth’s marriage to him were pushed rapidly forward. While in Anglesey in the spring of 1295, Jan of Brabant had promised to bring two thousand knights to fight for his father-in-law in the war against France, opening up a northern front that would draw the French king’s knights away from Gascony. Bolstered by this promise, Edward pledged Brabant forty thousand pounds to fund the effort. His son-in-law, the Count of Bar, also enlisted with great fervour, his personal ambitions being well aligned with those of England; Eleanora undoubtedly offered constant reminders to her husband of the vow he had made to fight with England.7

  Following the tragic conclusion of their wedding festivities two years earlier, Eleanora and Henri had settled comfortably into their union. Aged twenty-five, Eleanora gave birth to a healthy son, and a daughter followed; both children were named in honour of Eleanora’s family: the boy was Edward, the girl Joanna. The royal wardrobe books record frequent payments to messengers sent between Bar and England, suggesting that regular correspondence was maintained between the countess, her husband, and her father. Eleanora, the most political of King Edward’s children, was well matched with a husband who enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to join the broad network of princes who were aligning against the expansionist ambitions of France (which now included Henri’s own greatest rival, the Countess of Champagne, Queen Jeanne of France). The way that Henri seemingly modelled himself on his father-in-law suggests the influence of his wife, although she cannot have been without her own anxieties as the time for action approached. Unlike during Joanna’s experience of rebellion, for Eleanora and her children
there was no route for escape, nowhere to flee – Bar was landlocked and surrounded by powerful neighbouring lords, any of whom might seek to capitalize on the departure of the count and his family. While Henri gathered an army of a thousand mounted men, whose expenses were promised by England – ready to prove his worth and improve his position, like a hero from the romances that Eleanora had grown up reading – his wife prepared herself to undertake the management of Bar and the safeguarding of her household and her children, including her son Edward, who was still third-in-line to the throne of England.8

  Writing a century later, the celebrated author Christine de Pisan commented that, since it is the responsibility of a nobleman to travel often, bearing arms at war:

  . . . his lady and companion stays behind, and she must take his place. Although there may be enough bailiffs, provosts, administrators and governors, there has to be someone in charge of them all, and therefore it is proper that she should take on this responsibility. She should conduct herself with such skill that she may be feared as well as loved.

  This was the situation in which Eleanora found herself in the summer of 1297, when her husband went to war for her father. Daunting as it must have seemed, she would, at least, have been well-prepared for this eventuality: the scale of administration within her household was so great, and minor lords like Henri were away from home so frequently, that in practice their wives often shared the burden of management responsibilities. After four years in Bar, the twenty-nine-year-old countess had become knowledgeable about local law and customs, had learned which officials and servants were most capable and trustworthy, and understood the income and expenditure needed to maintain the security of her household. Eleanora, who long ago had practised to be a queen, now acted as chatelaine in her dower castle at the heart of her county, her young son and infant daughter close at hand. Though she was far from her family, she had her own abilities to guide her, along with those of Henri’s councillors and his friends who were too old to join the fight.9

  In May 1297, Henri and his men departed and headed west into Champagne. A French chronicle records that the Count of Bar commanded a ‘great multitude of armed men’ as they entered the countryside, attacking and burning villages as they travelled westwards. The news that initially filtered home to Eleanora must have been reassuring – the troops seemed to be progressing, unmolested by any large French forces. But suddenly, word arrived of villages within Bar itself being devastated: the Constable of France, avoiding Henri’s army in open battle, had instead sent a contingent of men to invade the count’s home territory, which was left unprotected while its knights were fighting in Champagne. ‘By force and by fire [the French forces] devastated the land of the Count of Bar’. Eleanora knew what was expected of her in this situation – like all medieval noblewomen left in charge of an estate, she was responsible for overseeing its defence. Christine de Pisan wrote (in a phrase that poetically foreshadows Elizabeth I’s famous speech on the eve of the Spanish Armada, three hundred years later) that in such circumstances a lady

  ought to have the heart of a man, that is, she ought to know how to use weapons and be familiar with everything that pertains to them, so that she may be ready to command her men if need arises. She should know how to launch an attack or to defend against one, if the situation calls for it.

  In the summer of 1297, the situation in Bar called for Eleanora to rise to the defence of her county; for the sake of her husband, and to secure both her own dower estate and the inheritance of her heirs, she needed to protect Bar vigorously.10

  She hastily dispatched messengers to recall Henri and his men, and sought the support of their allies, including her father. Close at hand, Henri’s army turned and chased off the invaders, but the count was disheartened: his efforts in Champagne had achieved nothing more than the ruin of a handful of villages in both counties, and the loss of a number of lives. Though Eleanora had tried to enlist reinforcements, their allies could do little to help draw off the French forces: the Count of Flanders was locked in his own stand-off with the French at their southern border, and only a small English advance force, fighting far to the south-west, had reached the continent. Her father was still in England, making the final preparations for the launch of the fleet that would carry his main force. In response to entreaties from Bar, he wrote a letter on 4 June to the king of the Germans, begging him to come to the aid of Henri ‘who has done more than our other allies in those parts . . . against our common enemy’, but the German king was under intense pressure from the French-allied forces of the Duke of Austria and could not help.11

  Throughout the summer, fighting across the border with France intensified; in the middle of June the French invaded Flanders with a large army, settling into a siege around the city of Lille and torching the countryside. When news of the siege reached Bar, Henri once again set out, travelling north to join his ally and fight the French. Back in Bar, once more the chatelaine, Eleanora learned that her husband had been captured in a skirmish with a French raiding party outside the village of Comines, near Lille on the river Lys. The king of England’s ‘dear son’, who had had the temerity to invade the French queen’s own province of Champagne, had been imprisoned by his greatest foe. When the messenger arrived in Bar with the news, Eleanora was unable to break down in fear or distress – she was now responsible for overseeing the estate, acting as an informal regent, and defending the province and her children to the best of her ability, with a diminished military force, but also for securing Henri’s release. It was readily apparent to Eleanora that her husband’s liberty, if he could be ransomed, would be dearly bought.12

  X

  Unconstrained

  1295–6

  BURY ST EDMUNDS

  In the autumn of 1295, after their estates in Glamorgan had been returned to them, Gilbert and Joanna travelled back to Wales to pick up the pieces of their Welsh life. They had scarcely had time to settle into anything like a normal routine when, one month later, the earl was recalled to Westminster for a session of parliament. The Welsh rebellion had been expensive, and with Scotland on the cusp of war, the king needed approval for new taxes to refill the royal coffers. Gilbert travelled north-east out of Glamorgan, through his lordships of Newport, and Caerleon and Usk, and into Monmouthshire. He stayed overnight at Monmouth Castle, the newly refurbished and heavily fortified western residence of the king’s brother, Edmund Crouchback and it was there, on 7 December, that he died suddenly of an unrecorded cause. His widow was twenty-three, mother to four small children, and now sole lord of one of the largest estates in the kingdom.1

  The chronicles, which uniformly record his death, do not mention if Joanna was with her husband when he died, or if she had remained in Glamorgan when he was called to Westminster. Throughout their marriage, she normally travelled by his side, but it is possible that she had chosen that December to remain within their March estate, having had her fill of court and her family during the stressful summer of rebellion. After his death, she travelled to Monmouth to oversee the transfer of Gilbert’s body to Tewkesbury, a distance of just over thirty miles. There, three days before Christmas, Joanna wrapped herself in a heavy cloak and made her way down the hill from the manor house south of the town towards the abbey church long patronized by Gilbert’s ancestors. Inside the church, she heard Mass for the soul of her husband and watched as Gilbert’s pall-draped coffin was lowered into the ground to the left of his father’s and covered with heavy paving stones. No monument marks the site of his burial among the immense Romanesque piers that dominate Tewkesbury Abbey, but Gilbert was interred with his ancestors in the choir in front of the high altar – the most prestigious burial site within the church.2

  After the funeral, Joanna spent a solemn Christmas at either Tewkesbury or another nearby Clare estate but, following the feast of Epiphany on 6 January, travelled to her father’s court, which was then at Bury St Edmunds and heading slowly north to the Norfolk coast. News of Gilbert’s death had reached cour
t on 14 December, and the king had directed his men to take the Clare lands into their custody. This was common practice on the death of a lord who held lands directly from the king; the estate would be held and valued, and any outstanding royal debts would be taken, before it was released to the rightful heir following the performance of homage. Joanna’s first priority after seeing her husband buried was to secure her estate so that it would provide her a suitable income, and to acquire the guardianship of her children, who were now legally orphaned. (Widowed mothers did not immediately gain control over their children because of concerns that the children’s welfare might be endangered if she remarried, by a stepfather who wished his own children to inherit their mother’s wealth.) By the terms that Gilbert had agreed at Amesbury in the weeks before his wedding to Joanna, all his lands were held jointly by her, which meant that, on his death, they all passed to her for the term of her life, before devolving to her heirs. Joanna’s son and heir might have been embittered at being deprived of his entire inheritance until his mother’s death, but on his father’s death, little Gilbert was a decade and a half away from maturity. In the meantime, the young widow was assured of an economic power that few among even the greatest lords could boast.3