Authors: Lisa Hilton
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,
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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 foundation 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 mother-in-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’.
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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 mother-in-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’
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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’.
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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.
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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 mother-in-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.
In this light, Edward’s burial and commemoration of his wife may be read as something of a public-relations campaign. Eleanor died aged forty-nine at Harby, in Nottinghamshire, en route to Lincoln, on 28 November 1290. She was suffering from marsh fever, or quartain, which she had contracted on her last visit to Gascony with Edward in 1287. Her body, stuffed with barley, bound, then embalmed in linen, travelled in twelve solemn stages to Westminster. Her heart was buried with that of her son Alfonso at the Dominican church in London, while her viscera were splendidly entombed at Lincoln. Her body lay at Westminster, but though her tomb there is impressive, it is the crosses Edward erected to mark the stages of her final journey that were most influential in creating her eventual reputation. Two others were put up after 1291 in memory of Edward’s sister Beatrice and his mother, but stylistically, Eleanor’s represent a complete innovation: nothing like them had been seen before in England. Inspired by the
montjoie
crosses built for the funeral of Louis IX, they share a three-tiered structure with a closed first storey, an open second storey and a spire, originally surmounted with a cross. Within the open section, Eleanor’s statue gazes out calmly, her hair loose as she had worn it at her coronation, her right hand holding a sceptre. She is aloof, yet not haughty, her countenance gracious, her sceptre invoking the intercession of Mary, Queen of Heaven as well as her earthly power. In addition to her three tombs, the presence of the Eleanor crosses throughout England replaced in local memory the nasty remnants of her reputation with an image of authoritative feminine spirituality and benevolence.
Commemorative arrangements for Eleanor were exhaustively elaborate, and exhausting for the weary chaplains to carry out. On the anniversary of her death, the office was sung on the hour for twenty-four hours, while less than six months after her funeral the archbishop of York proudly reported to the King that over 47,000 Masses had already been said for
her. Positive associations were encouraged by indulgences, as at York in 1290, where forty days’ exemption from penance was given to anyone who said the Pater Noster and Ave Maria for the Queen, a measure repeated at Lincoln in 1291. At Westminster, according to the rules Edward set out in a statute of 1292, Eleanor’s tomb was to be surrounded by thirty candles, two of them constantly burning and all thirty on feast days. Monday, the day of her death, was marked with high Mass and the tolling of bells, and after Mass on Tuesday 140 paupers were each to receive a silver penny, reciting the Pater Noster, the Credo and the Ave Maria for the Queen’s soul before and afterwards. Edward personally founded three chantries for Eleanor and services were held for her at St Albans, Bath and Coventry. Licences and land grants to support foundations for the Queen’s soul continued until well into the reign of her son Edward II.