by Lisa Hilton
Returning through Rome, Orvieto — where they met Pope Gregory X — Lombardy and Milan, Edward and Eleanor reached Savoy. Here they stayed at the castle of St Georges d’Esperande in the Isére with Edward’s great-uncle Philip, ruler since 1268. By July they were in Paris, where Edward performed homage for his French holdings to the new king, Philip III, and in August 1274 they finally arrived back in England after an absence of four years. It was a sad homecoming. Edward was deeply affected by his father’s death — he had rather callously remarked to Charles of Anjou that he mourned less for his son John than for Henry, as sons could be replaced. There was also a quarrel with Edmund about precedence rights at the coronation, which took place on 19 August. Edmund was so offended by the rebuttal of his claim to carry the Curtana, the ceremonial sword, that he stayed away. At least, Edward wrote to his uncle Charles, he felt a greater closeness to his mother since losing his father.
Eleanor had given birth to another son, named for her brother Alfonso, in 1273. Her three eldest children had died, but four were living at her coronation (Henry would be lost shortly afterwards). She would go on to have six more: Margaret in 1275, Berengaria (1276), an unnamed child who died in infancy in 1278, Mary (1279), Elizabeth (1282) and Edward (1284). Another baby whose name is not recorded had died in 1271, and there may have been a further daughter, born soon after Eleanor’s marriage, whom some sources name as Blanche. Eleanor’s fertility attests to a consistent sexual relationship with Edward, which confirms the closeness of their relationship. A family tradition was the ‘kidnapping’ of the King in his bed by seven of Eleanor’s ladies on Easter Monday morning. Sexual intercourse was forbidden during the period of Lenten abstinence, and Edward had to pay a fine of two pounds to his captors before he was released to indulge himself with the Queen. But if she was fortunate in her marriage Eleanor was very unlucky with her children, even in an age of high infant mortality. Eleanor, the second Joan, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth survived to adulthood, but of the boys only Edward reached his majority.
In the past, one of the commonplace assumptions about medieval childhood was that parents were less attached to their offspring because the prospect of losing them was so great, and though as a generalisation this was manifestly untrue, Eleanor does seem to have had a cooler relationship with her children than several of her predecessors. Six-year-old Henry died at Guildford in 1274 while the King and Queen were in London, no great distance away, yet there is no evidence that they visited him. Great hope was held out for Alfonso, who survived until he was ten, but there is no mention in the household accounts of a Mass for his death in 1284, or of anniversary Masses for his lost brothers and sisters. The quarrel with her motherin-law about Mary’s early enclosure at Amesbury demonstrates that Eleanor was not indifferent to her children’s welfare, but what little evidence there is presents a broad picture of a dutiful rather than a loving mother.
Early matrimony was one area where Eleanor did show exceptional concern. As has been noted, she lobbied with Eleanor of Provence to postpone the marriage of her eldest daughter, Eleanor, and Joan of Acre, who became the wife of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and Elizabeth, who married Count John of Holland, did so at the relatively late ages of eighteen and fifteen respectively (Elizabeth remained at court for a further nine months after her wedding). Eleanor’s children were brought up with all the privileges of their rank, yet their father and mother were thoroughly occupied elsewhere, which is entirely typical of the period, if not an especially sympathetic approach to child-rearing. Some evidence of parental interest is shown in the miniature castles and siege engines ordered for Alfonso and Edward, and the King indulged the girls in the matter of dresses, carriages and jewels, but the Queen’s emotional priority was very much the King.
Both duty and inclination meant Eleanor was often away from her children as she accompanied Edward on his travels. Indeed, with the exception of his military campaigns and her lyings-in, they were rarely separated. Royal excursions were no more comfortable than they had been in Eleanor of Aquitaine’s time, and Eleanor, who was almost permanently pregnant, was beset by overturning carts, lost baggage and accidents such as the fire that nearly killed the royal couple at Hope Castle in 1283. She was renowned for her Castilian addiction to comfort, which might be better figured as an objection to freezing. Where the Queen went, glazed windows and lead roofs quickly followed. She stayed loyal to her carpets, buying seven in 1278, paying five pounds to the carpet-maker John de Winton in 1286 and ordering 26s 8d-worth of painted cloths from Cologne in 1290. Eleanor tried to make her lodgings cheerful with colourful candles, Venetian glass, ivory mirrors and brightly painted walls, and she shared a southern love of scented gardens with Eleanor of Provence. Food was another connection to her native culture. Most eccentrically, the Queen ate lots of fresh fruit: English pears, apples and quinces and exotic pomegranates, figs, raisins and dates. Her cooks used olive oil and citrus fruit, and cheeses were ordered from Brie and Champagne. It is tempting to suggest, though impossible to prove, that the distinctly Arabic flavour that characterised grand English cookery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may have been influenced by Eleanor’s household, as she had grown up with the flavours of Moorish cuisine. Keeping up standards in the travelling circus of the court, she ate from silver or gold plate using knives with gold and jasper handles.
Like her motherin-law, Eleanor loved gardens. Just as she was true to the flavours of her childhood, she may also have tried to recreate the sophisticated, Islamic-influenced gardens she had known in Castile. At Westminster, a system of pipes from the Thames filled the Queen’s pond, surrounded by a lawn set with vines and roses, while a herb garden wafted scents through the window of her chapel. At Langley, which she bought in 1275, Eleanor employed Aragonese gardeners to create wells, perhaps for fountains. Her partiality to fragrant blossom and fruit led her to send for French apple cuttings to be spliced by her vine-tender, the aptly named James Frangipane.
Eleanor and Edward had several interests in common. Both were keen hunters, though Eleanor preferred hounds, keeping her own pack, while Edward’s passion was falconry. The King’s hawks had a marvellous mews in London, with a garden and a bath fed by a fountain. For Eleanor, there was an aviary with nightingales and Sicilian parrots. They were also avid chess players, and Edward, certainly, played for money. A gift to Eleanor of jasper and crystal chessmen was eventually inherited by her daughter-in-law Isabella of France. Eleanor’s brother Alfonso was an enthusiast who commissioned a chess manual; Eleanor borrowed one from Cerne Abbey and became competent enough to manage ‘Four Kings’, the four-player version of the game.
Eleanor’s queenship was not a political one, and this may have been in part a reaction to Eleanor of Provence’s talent for interfering. However, as a product of the ‘aggressively literary’ court of Castile,3 one area in which she did make her mark was the creation and dissemination of books. Henry III’s interests had inclined more to architecture than literature, and his son was no great reader. The only evidence of his literary patronage is the commission of Rustichello de Pisa’s Meliadus, the source for which was a book of Arthurian legends Edward lent the writer while passing through Sicily on crusade. Eleanor sent the Meliadus to her brother Alfonso, and thus the book in turn influenced Tristan de Leonis, the first Arthurian romance written in Castilian. Alfonso followed his father in his love of vernacular literature and he and Eleanor exchanged books, including a French translation from the Arabic of The Ladder of Mohammed (the subject suggests that Eleanor, with her Moorish-influenced childhood, took a more sophisticated view of ‘infidels’ than did her husband).
Books were a matter for the women of the family, and Eleanor of Castile and Eleanor of Provence were associated in two valuable texts which connected them with the traditions of English queenship. La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, a history of Edward the Confessor, was dedicated to Eleanor of Provence in recognition of Henry III’s rebuilding of the Confessor’s foundati
on of Westminster Abbey. The text is based on Aelred’s twelfth-century Vita Sancti Edwardi, itself based on Osbert of Clare’s Vita Beati Eadwardi Regis Anglorum, which is derived from a late eleventh-century Vita Aedwardi Regis dedicated to the Confessor’s Queen, Edith. The first text thus envisions a line of female patronage fulfilled by the version made for Eleanor of Provence in the thirteenth century. The dedication of the Estoire is another symbol of the special protection the Confessor afforded to the King and Queen, represented also in the coronation Mass, in which the wine was drunk from the saint’s chalice. Eleanor of Castile is shown on the first page of the 1270 Douce Apocalypse, an illustrated treatment of the Revelation of St John, next to her husband, for whom it was made. Eleanor’s centrality to the production of Douce and the dedication of the Estoire to her motherin-law link them both to the holy queens of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and, in their didactic purpose, illustrate the special relationship between patron queens and pious education.
Eleanor of Castile was concerned with literacy and education on a personal scale as well as a symbolic one. She bought writing tablets for her daughters to practise on and sponsored the production of her own texts. Her unique contribution was her scriptorium, an innovation she introduced which did not survive her. Eleanor’s artist, Godfrey, and her clerk of the scriptorium, Roger, bought the vellum, ink, quills, colours, gold leaf and glue needed to create the Queen’s books, and her accounts show that they travelled as part of Eleanor’s household, even venturing as far as Aquitaine in 1286. Roger and Godfrey were permanent staff, but other artisans were hired for specific commissions. Richard du Marche, for example, made a psalter for Eleanor in 1289. Her interest in vernacular literature connects Eleanor with a tradition of women’s patronage in which her predecessors had participated, and with one of the more positive aspects of ‘foreign’ queenship, whereby ‘migratory brides could act as unique and powerful conduits for cultural exchange’.4
Sadly, none of the fruits of Eleanor’s scriptorium have survived, but other books known to have been associated with her are a history of military kings, produced for her at Acre by a royal clerk, Mr Richard, and a redaction by Archbishop Pecham of ‘De Celesti Hierarchid’, the primate’s only vernacular work of theology. Though her own interests were more varied and cosmopolitan, she encouraged Edward’s enthusiasm for all things Arthurian, accompanying him in 1278 to the ‘tomb’ of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury, which had been luring the tourist trade since 1190. Edward has, however, been over-identified with Arthur. While he was not slow to profit from comparisons with the mythical king, he was less obsessed with them than his grandson Edward III. Eleanor may have benefited from her motherin-law’s penchant for French romance. The Dowager Queen, whose chambers were still adorned with scenes from Geste d’Antioc, was a collector of French books, some of which she could have exchanged with her daughter-in-law. Multilingual and multicultural, Eleanor of Castile was truly extraordinary in that her scriptorium was the only personal institution of its type known to have existed in northern Europe at the time. She was a highly active participant in the cultural change, ‘at once gradual and revolutionary’5 that women’s patronage was bringing about in literature.
As a religious patron, Eleanor’s activities were equally impressive, making her ‘the most active royal foundress since the twelfth century’.6 She especially favoured the Dominican order, which admitted the Queen and her children to the benefits of their charity at Oxford in 1280, and from whose friars the children’s tutors were chosen. She founded Dominican priories at Chichester and London and contributed to the foundations of Rhuddlan, Salisbury and Northampton. She also donated gold for statues of two saints particularly venerated by her husband, St George and the Confessor, and made gifts of vestments from her chapel to Bath and Lichfield cathedrals. The chaotic lifestyle of the travelling court is illustrated by her successful application for a dispensation for a portable altar in 1278. The Queen’s intellectual bent encouraged the private devotions advocated by the Dominicans, such as the saying of the rosary and the use of books of hours, and there is none of the evangelical immediacy of a Matilda of Scotland in Eleanor’s piety She preferred her charity to be dispensed by her priests and almoners rather than in person.
This picture of Eleanor as a respected wife and capable mother, surrounded by beautiful things and quietly cultivating her intellect and her gardens, suggests a serene, benign lady graciously fulfilling her duties. It appears, though, that Eleanor of Castile was really rather a horrible woman. She had a notoriously vile temper and in her relations with those with whom she did business, she seems to have been regarded as a ‘grasping harpy’, vengeful and vindictive. Edward may have actively sheltered his wife from any political controversy, but his insistence on her prerogative was something Eleanor knew she could twist to her own advantage, and she made sure that others knew it, too. Archbishop Pecham wrote letters of warning to the nuns of Hedingham and the church of Crondall, advising that they had better accept the Queen’s nominations for positions, or risk her wrath. The prior of Deerhurst was obliged to sack a newly appointed chaplain and replace him with Eleanor’s man on the advice of the bishop of Worcester, who had received threatening letters from her. She threatened to prosecute the bishop himself over a debt of 350 marks which he claimed he had never owed her. The advice given by the chancellor, who had experience of Eleanor’s rages, was that he should pay up and shut up.
If she could make herself personally unpleasant, it was nothing compared to the ‘outcry and gossip’ she provoked in her relentless pursuit of wealth. In 1283, she was rebuked by Archbishop Pecham: ‘For God’s sake, Lady, when you receive land or manor acquired by usury of Jews, take heed that usury is a mortal sin to those who take the usury and those who support it … you must therefore return the things thus acquired to the Christians who have lost them … My Lady, know that I am telling you the lawful truth and if anyone gives you to understand anything else he is a heretic.’
And three years later, the archbishop wrote to Eleanor’s clerk of the wardrobe: ‘A rumour is waxing strong throughout the Kingdom of England and much scandal is thereby generated because it is said that the illustrious Lady Queen of England … is occupying many manors, lands and other possessions of nobles … lands which the Jews extorted with usury under the protection of the royal court.’ This was exactly what Eleanor was doing. The archbishop continued: ‘There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England. Wherefore, as gain of this sort is illicit and damnable, we beg you and firmly command and enjoin you as our clerk that when you see an opportunity you will be pleased humbly to beseech the said Lady on our behalf that she bid her people entirely to abstain from the aforesaid practices …’
A snippet of popular doggerel put the case more succinctly:
The king would like to get our gold,
The queen our manors fair to hold.7
In twenty-five years as Queen, Eleanor of Castile acquired lands worth 2,500 pounds, more than half the value again of her dower assignment as fixed in 1275. Her avarice provoked public outrage as well as the archbishop’s concern for her immortal soul. She attracted claims of eviction and ruthless dispossession — one charge, later proved, was that her men had thrown a household into prison and left the family’s baby abandoned in the road. From her deathbed, Eleanor requested that all the wrongs done in her name be righted and the subsequent evidence from the king’s council that investigated her acquisitions found ample evidence of the oppression, injustice and extortion that pertained on her lands.
What Eleanor was doing might have been ethically unsavoury, but it was perfectly legal; indeed, the responsibility she bore in her own lifetime for the actions of her officials was unfair, since the augmentation of her estates was encouraged and guided by Edward as part of a policy to increase the crown lands after the Angevin losses under King John. When Henry III died, Eleanor could not come into her dower estates as they were already in the possession of her motherin-law
, and prerogatives such as queens-gold, which Eleanor of Provence made over to her, and debts granted by the King were unreliable and inadequate. Edward needed to provide for his queen and he found a way of doing so that allowed her to acquire lands which would then revert to the crown on her death.
Between 1269 and 1275, Edward exploited the relationship between the Jews and the crown to provide a means of channelling Jewish wealth to Eleanor. The receipt of Jewish debt was forbidden except with a royal grant or licence. Jewish families had to pay a tax on a deceased Jew’s possessions at a third of their value and Jews were also liable for tallage, effectively random taxation. When they were unable to pay, they could transfer their debts to be exacted by the receiver, who would also pocket the interest paid by the original debtor. The Statute of Jewry of 1275 outlawed the practice of usury and permitted Jews to enter trade or farming, but the crown retained exclusive control over such exchange of debt. Between this date and 1290, when they were expelled from England, the Jews were Eleanor’s moneybox.
The Queen took advantage of her monopoly principally to fund the purchase of lands, and although, in fairness, the number of ‘Christians’ she dispossessed through Jewish debt was misunderstood by the archbishop, it may certainly be inferred that there was a painful human cost to her hunger for real estate. Edward’s sanction of this policy is evident in the fact that he created it, but it may have been that he was also giving her an occupation which would distract her from meddling in politics. The alacrity with which Eleanor took to business was offensive not only to the Church but to the magnates, too. There was something rather middle-class about her efficiency in grabbing at wealth, and the briskness of her administration had a whiff of the parvenue.
