Daughters of Chivalry

by Kelcey Wilson-Lee

  Like Eleanora, Joanna would have learned much about land management during the years of her marriage to Gilbert. As joint landholder she was legally required to agree significant actions such as buying, selling, and giving away properties and had even more reason and opportunity than her sister to understand how the immense and widely dispersed estates of the Clare family might be managed most profitably. However, as much as she had learned while her husband was alive, the prospect of being in sole command of such a vast landed interest after his death must have been daunting. Yet, whatever personal stress, anxiety, and grief may have accompanied Gilbert’s passing, for a woman of Joanna’s independent nature, the prospect of widowhood may have appealed. As a widow, the countess was freed from the control of her father or husband for the first time in her life – becoming a legally autonomous person and lord in her own right. While it was true that, in the heavily patriarchal society of medieval England, even widowed women were forbidden from holding royal office or sitting on the royal council, Joanna was now able to sue and to be sued, to conduct business in her own name with her tenants and peers, to pay her debts and claim those owed to her, and to appoint those servants she favoured to oversee the management of her properties. As a tenant-in-chief who held her land directly from the king, Joanna was also obliged to perform the customary feudal service, or military aid, when it was demanded; and though she would not personally be required to command men-at-arms in battle, she would need to gather and provision them, and to appoint a commander in her stead.

  The enhanced legal status of widows like Joanna meant they were also able to exercise public authority in a more direct way than previously. The power wielded by as-yet unmarried or married women normally stemmed from their ability to influence a father or husband, but widows were free to act on their own decisions, and in their own names. Furthermore, aristocratic widows – particularly those who managed large landholdings, including heiresses and rare women like Joanna who had jointly held their husband’s estates – were able to declare their interests publicly, without fear of the remonstrations they might have faced during their husbands’ lives, that they were appropriating his rightful role as head of the household. Alongside these privileges, widowhood often brought considerable difficulties: for widows of the middle or lower classes, poverty was a significant concern; for those among the aristocracy, there were constant legal challenges to claiming dower, and anxiety and ill-feeling was not uncommon when a widow sued or was sued by her children or stepchildren. As a princess and joint landholder of Gilbert’s estates, and with an heir who was still only four years old, Joanna was fortunate to escape the most difficult and fraught aspects of widowhood. A long life was open to her in which she would no longer have to face the dangers of childbirth, and might enjoy influence at court, the respect that came from living chastely, and astonishing wealth. In Glamorgan, where she retained special privileges as a lord of the March of Wales, Joanna could live as a queen in her own right – the ultimate decision-maker, a commanding patron, a woman unconstrained by the patriarchal system because she was above it.4

  She could not, however, avoid the cultural impression strongly prevalent in medieval Europe that widows were emotionally unstable and incapable of managing a military force. The popular twelfth-century romance Yvain, or the Knight with the Lion featured a young widow who one moment was moaning, grieving, beating her breast, and threatening suicide over the death of her husband, and the next plotting to marry his murderer. Her counsellors’ advice was unanimous: ‘no woman wants to bear a shield and use a lance, so she would be much better for a marriage with some worthy lord, nor could there be a greater need. Advise her to be wed with speed . . .’ Without husbands to sexually satisfy and control them, widows were also thought to be prone to lascivious behaviour that might scandalize their families. Even with full legal autonomy and economic independence, widows were subject to an underlying fear of unchecked female sexuality, as well as a persistent misogyny that questioned whether a woman really could fulfil the role normally occupied by a man. The young, beautiful, or those with vast resources of wealth that might tempt fortune hunters, were discouraged from following the path of pious celibacy, which was almost as highly prized as monastic virginity, since it carried the risk of encountering lechery, or even abduction and coerced marriage. Attempts had been made in the early history of Christianity to discourage priests from performing second marriages. But within feudal society, where power passed through generations of legitimate heirs, second marriages were often necessary to avoid the upheaval of failed dynastic lines. By the thirteenth century, women like Joanna – who was at least young and rich, though no record survives to attest to her beauty – were often positively encouraged to remarry, to avoid sin and provide a masculine protector. If her remarriage necessarily resulted in the dower estate falling back into male decision-making and control (which was assumed to be superior), this was thought to be no bad thing.5

  Joanna would no doubt have known of, and possibly met, the formidable Marcher dowager and heiress Maud de Braose, whose Welsh tenants fought alongside Gilbert’s men from Glamorgan during the king’s Welsh wars. Maud was staunchly loyal to Edward, having herself devised the plan for his daring escape from enemy hands during the civil war of the 1260s, but her particular focus on supporting his efforts against the Welsh princes may have been influenced by her own father’s execution on the orders of Llewelyn the Great. After the death of Maud’s husband in 1282, she began to play a role remarkably similar to that of a male baron, with all the responsibilities that came with the position. Her men fought for the king, she fed his armies from her markets, she provided him with counsel and advisors, and she maintained his peace in her lands.6

  In the early days of Joanna’s widowhood, the model provided by Maud and other women like her – to hold her lands, perform the service that was due, conduct business, and maintain control of her own children – may have appealed to her. But if she hoped to succeed as Maud had, she would need to forge a place for herself in a social environment that restricted female autonomy; success would not be easy. Joanna found court assembled at Bury St Edmunds around 18 January, and immediately sought an audience with her father. Her first piece of business was to negotiate the debts that Gilbert had owed to him; still outstanding were the ten thousand marks he had been fined for contempt in 1282, after he had ignored Edward’s direct order to cease his private war with the Earl of Hereford over the March lands in and around the castle at Morlais. Whether out of filial concern and pity, or from practical reasoning that the sum, which amounted roughly to the total annual income of the Clare estate, was unlikely to be repaid, the executors of Gilbert’s will were relieved of the fine ‘at the instance of Joanna’. The earl’s remaining debts amounted to roughly nine hundred pounds, and the executors were asked to secure these.7

  Two days later at Bury St Edmunds, within the palatial precincts of the ancient abbey named for the martyred king of the East Angles, the countess knelt before her father. Placing her hands between his to show that she was subjecting herself to his protection, she spoke the words that bound her – as lord of the Clare estates – to her father. She would be his vassal, and he would become her feudal overlord: ‘I do to you homage for the tenement that I hold of you, and faith to you will bear of earthly worship, and faith to you shall bear against all folk.’ The pledge was very similar to that promised by a male vassal, with two exceptions. The first was that men began their vow with the words ‘I become your man . . .’ (the origin of the word homage was literally that the vassal became the ‘homme’, or ‘man’, of the lord), but it was considered inappropriate for a woman to give this pledge to any man other than her husband. Secondly, women paying homage were not obliged to bear faith ‘of life and member’, the words that implied an obligation to risk one’s own life to the lord through military service. After she had spoken the pledge, Edward leaned forward and kissed his daughter, as he kissed all his tenants-in-chief who came to perfor
m homage before receiving their lands. Joanna then stood and, placing her hand on a copy of the Gospels, said, ‘Hear this my lord: I will bear faith to you of goods, chattels and earthly worship, so help me God and these holy Gospels of God’.8

  The king and his daughter were accustomed to the solemn performance of public spectacle, and it seems likely that the ceremony was carried out with all the gravity that custom demanded. The strangeness of kneeling before her father and reciting a formal oath of allegiance must have underlined for Joanna the fact that her life would henceforth be different, given her sole command of her children and her vast estate. However, it was not particularly unusual for a women to be kneeling before the king. A century earlier, according to the great twelfth-century legal scholar Ranulf de Glanvill, women’s inability to serve militarily precluded them from performing homage; his Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of England, written in the 1180s, stated that landholding women could receive the homage of men, but could not perform it. By the second half of the thirteenth century, practicality had overtaken the law and women – mostly, widows like Joanna – were performing homage fairly regularly, even for estates held in return for military service.9

  The ceremony and negotiations relating to Gilbert’s debts bound King Edward and his second-eldest daughter in a way that was unique within their family – the relationship between a feudal lord and his vassal was focused on the latter’s loyalty and service, and Joanna, the king’s least compliant daughter, was now doubly bound to honour the wishes of her father. But she was also now one of the pillars that supported his kingdom, given that she was among the largest landholders, and a Marcher lord. One of the first requirements her father made of her was that she promise not to remarry without his approval. This was, of course, a limitation on her freedom as a widow to do what she wanted, but more significantly, it was a way for the king to maintain control over which men gained access to the economic and military might that accompanied her estates. Male vassals were not required to make the same promise because their new wives posed little threat to the king, though they might prove a considerable nuisance to their husband’s heirs if they lived too long. At a widow’s remarriage, however, her husband would gain control of her lands, her money, and her fighting men. In the case of Joanna, now one of the foremost lords of his realm and a significant force within the March of Wales, the king naturally wanted a veto over which of his subjects or foreign peers might become so empowered.

  With the ceremony and negotiations around Gilbert’s debts complete, Edward issued declarations to his chief administrators to restore to ‘Joanna, the king’s daughter, late the wife of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford’ all the lands she had held jointly with Gilbert from the king, ‘as the king has taken her homage therefor’. A sense of the scale of Joanna’s holdings in England can be gleaned from the fact that the order was sent to men governing estates in twenty-five counties – from Somerset in the south-west to York in the north-east, from Worcestershire in the western Midlands to Kent along the Channel coast. Other orders were sent to Ireland, and a week later Joanna appointed her own administrator to oversee her estates there. The census that recorded the full Clare domain at Gilbert’s death provides further tantalizing details about Joanna’s landholdings. The Amesbury agreement ensured that almost all of Gilbert’s estate passed to Joanna intact, with the exception of the dower lands like Thaxted in Essex, that had been assigned to Gilbert’s first wife, Alice de Lusignan, who was still alive. But these were insignificant in comparison to the dozens of manors, farms, meadows, rents, and tolls that came into Joanna’s sole lordship. She held towns such as Tewkesbury and Cardiff, markets in Great Bardfield and Bletchingley, fairs in Sodbury and Little Walsingham, and fisheries in the Severn, Medway, and Wye rivers. She held a watermill near the confluence of rivers at Yalding and a windmill at Hersham, a pottery at Hanley and smithies at Rothwell, a warren near Gazeley, a dovecot at Boverton, a ferry near Usk, and the toll paid by ships sailing from Wells on the Norfolk coast. She held countless hunting parks, chases, and woods, and the castles at Tonbridge, Clare, Caerphilly, Neath, and Caerleon. In Little Haywode in Glamorgan, she held a forest ‘where there is a nest of sparrow-hawks’, a species of small hunting bird that was favoured by aristocratic women. The estate Joanna now controlled was widespread and extraordinarily diverse, and these lands, properties, and rights were to yield her a formidable income. The demesne, or home farm, that provided the foodstuffs and raw goods needed to cater for her household was managed directly, but the bulk of the land was let out for rents in cash and in kind. Some rents came in the form of rare and imported commodities: from Camberwell in Surrey, she was owed one pound of cumin at Christmas time, from Crimplesham in Norfolk a pound of pepper and pair of gloves, and from Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, a pair of gold spurs. Other rents were provided in local produce: throughout Essex, lands were held for payment in eggs and grain, capons, lambs, and pigs. When its annual income was next accounted, early in the fourteenth century, the estate was worth in excess of six thousand pounds a year.10

  After paying her homage, Joanna remained with her father as he travelled north, stopping in the royal forest at Thetford to join a hunt. As she travelled with the court, spending time with her father, Joanna had plenty of time to work her usual persuasive magic, lobbying him for further financial indulgences. As was his way with his daughters, Edward softened easily, instructing his tax collectors in writing to delay taking up the new taxes due on the Clare estates until after Easter ‘as the king wishes to show special favour . . . at the instance of his daughter Joanna.’ A few days later, court arrived at Walsingham, home to a great shrine to the Virgin Mary, and among the most important holy sites in England, where the king could pray in humble preparation for the battles to come.11

  In this village, mention of Joanna’s children appears in the records for the first time since the death of her husband – they had by now been assigned to the guardianship of their mother. Though they were officially within her protection, however, the countess seems to have had concerns about her ability to guarantee the children’s safety within the lawless land of the March, and conveyed these thoughts to her father. Sensitive to his daughter’s anxieties, and also perhaps hopeful that if young Gilbert grew up within an English court setting he might mature into a more compliant magnate than if his formative years were spent in the comparative wilds of Glamorgan, ‘at the pleasure of the king and of her’, he assigned his grandchildren a residence within England. Bristol seemed to offer the best choice – safely within the realm of England and subject to its laws and the king’s influence, it was also immediately adjacent to Joanna’s Gloucestershire and Welsh estates, thereby enabling visits to and from their mother. It was also home to one of the finest royal castles in the country, with plenty of room to house a noble nursery.12

  Accordingly, the king wrote to his constable at Bristol Castle, issuing instructions to prepare for the arrival of the royal grandchildren – Gilbert, Eleanor, Margaret, and Elizabeth – along with the guardians and attendants that would be chosen by their mother. The constable was to prepare the ‘king’s houses’, freestanding structures within the inner courtyard that were enclosed by the castle’s curtain wall and protected by a moat fed by the nearby Frome and Avon rivers, as well as a tall keep. Inside the keep itself was another royal grandchild, for whom the constable prepared a much less comfortable home: Owain ap Dafydd, the younger son of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, the last of the Welsh princely line, had been imprisoned by the English king at Bristol since his father’s defeat a decade earlier, when he was only seven years old. He was around twenty when the young Clares came to live at Bristol Castle, but the Welsh prince would not have met his English counterparts. Owain lived closely guarded within the keep, and in years to come would have to suffer the indignity of sleeping in a cage to prevent his escape and a new uprising in Wales. If Joanna’s young son ever learned of Bristol Castle’s other royal inmate, he would have
recognized in Owain’s life enough parallels to make him nervous.13

  After departing from Walsingham, the king and his men travelled on to the coast and boarded ships heading north for Newcastle, where Edward had summoned his earls, barons, and knights to gather, before marching on Scotland. His daughter, her first tasks as a widow concluded and needing to attend to her estate and assign guardians for her children in Bristol, headed to the south-west. Despite the fears that meant she did not want her children living in the chaotic and unpredictable land of the March, she herself returned to Glamorgan, moving between Caerphilly and the other castles in that region. Joanna’s wilful personality may have relished the freedom of life as a rich widow in a land where her word was law. But the same wealth and power that promised independence made her an irresistible prize; her father might soon discover another ally in need of a wife, and with her vast estates to act as dowry, Joanna could be married off rapidly and cheaply. She would have to make the most of her independence while she had it.

  XI

  Acquiescence and Insubordination

  1297

  IPSWICH, GOODRICH CASTLE

  Margaret, Elizabeth, and their companions had been sailing for days, when they exchanged their ship for a barge at Harwich, to transport them up the River Orwell. They were heading for Ipswich near the Suffolk coast; it was the end of December, when sitting still on the water for hours would have allowed the damp to seep through their fur mantles and the layers of silk and linen tunics that wrapped their bodies. But floating up the river was probably still more comfortable than bumping along the winter roads in wagons laden with furniture and trunks full of clothing, serving dishes, chapel fittings, and kitchen equipment. Despite the cold, the days ahead promised excitement, roaring fires, and glittering feasts.