Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England Read online

  Eleanor de Montfort

  A Rebel Countess in Medieval England

  Louise J. Wilkinson

  Continuum International Publishing Group

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  © Louise J. Wilkinson, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers.

  First published 2012

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-4411-8219-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

  Contents

  Figures

  Preface

  Abbreviations

  1 Childhood

  2 The Marshal Marriage

  3 The Chaste Widow

  4 The Countess as Lord

  5 The Montfort Marriage

  6 Family, Faction and Politics

  7 Reform, Revolution and War

  8 1265

  9 After Evesham

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Figure 1 Eleanor de Montfort’s Family

  Figure 2 The Children of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke (d. 1219)

  Figure 3 Eleanor’s Principal Marshal Manors in England. The castles of Kenilworth and Odiham which Eleanor received as gifts from Henry III are also shown.

  Preface

  In his magisterial study King Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947), F. M. Powicke celebrated Eleanor de Montfort as ‘the most vigorous and passionate of the daughters of King John and Isabella of Angoulême, a greater force in affairs than her sisters the queen of Scots and the [Holy Roman] empress’.1 Yet the life of this remarkable woman has long been overshadowed by the controversial career of her second husband, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and his death and mutilation at the battle of Evesham in August 1265. Earl Simon was one of the leading figures in a baronial movement to reform the government of the realm that emerged during the latter part of King Henry III’s reign and reduced the king to a mere cipher at the hands of his opponents. As one of the key architects of what is now regarded by many historians as England’s first political revolution and the man who effectively held the king captive for fifteen months after Henry’s defeat at the battle of Lewes in May 1264, Earl Simon’s life has, quite understandably, attracted the interest of a whole host of modern scholars. The most recent biography, that by John Maddicott (1994), offers a fascinating insight into Earl Simon’s political career in England and France, the financial insecurities that he faced in supporting his growing family throughout the 1240s and 1250s, and the strength of his religious beliefs. Yet, there has been no new, detailed biography of Eleanor, his wife, since that which M. A. E. Green published in her six-volume work, Lives of the Princesses of England from the Norman Conquest in the mid-nineteenth century.2

  Admittedly, a surviving account roll from Eleanor’s household for 1265, the year of Evesham, has awakened the interest of a number of scholars. A printed edition of this roll in the original Latin was published by T. H. Turner in Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1841), and I am now preparing a separate English translation of Eleanor’s roll for publication by the Pipe Roll Society with a view to making this remarkable source accessible to as wide an audience as possible. William H. Blaauw devoted a chapter of his seminal work The Barons’ War including the Battles of Lewes and Evesham (first published 1844, second edition with additions by Charles H. Pearson 1871) to ‘Eleanor de Montfort and her sons’. Blaauw used the roll to discuss the provisioning of Eleanor’s household during this critical period in the Montfort family’s fortunes, the countess’s itinerary, the garrisoning of the castles at which she stayed, the visitors to whom she offered hospitality and the Montfortian allies with whom she corresponded. It was, however, Margaret Labarge, who, having examined Earl Simon and Countess Eleanor’s ‘personal quarrels’ with Henry III for a University of Oxford B.Litt thesis in 1939, made the most extensive study of the roll to date. Her analysis of Eleanor’s household roll formed the basis for a study of thirteenth-century baronial lifestyles, first published in 1965 as A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century and reprinted in 2003 as Mistress, Maids and Men: Baronial Life in the Thirteenth Century. Although Labarge readily acknowledged the impact of the civil war on the household, observing that ‘Even the sober items of … [Eleanor’s] account show how much political initiative … [this noblewoman] displayed’,3 her work was primarily concerned with the practicalities of running a great household, focusing on the domestic concerns of the countess as its lady and the internal organization of her establishment. It therefore included chapters on ‘The Castle as a Home’, ‘The Lady of the House’, ‘The Daily Fare’, ‘The Spice Account’, ‘Wine and Beer’, ‘Cooking and Serving of Meals’, ‘Cloths and Clothes’, ‘Travel and Transport’ and ‘The Amusements of a Baronial Household’. By comparison, relatively little was said about Eleanor’s political career and her personal role in the Barons’ War of 1263–5. A valuable step towards remedying this omission was made in 2010, when, in a piece that readily acknowledged its debt to Labarge, the Japanese scholar Keizo Asaji devoted a chapter of The Angevin Empire and the Community of the Realm in England to a fresh appraisal of Eleanor’s account roll, with a view to examining ‘the importance of the baronial household against the background of thirteenth-century English political society’.4 Somewhat intriguingly, Asaji compared Eleanor’s role in gathering and disseminating information for her husband and sons to that of a modern ‘relay station’.5 More recently, in an article published in the Journal of Medieval History in 2011, Lars Kjær analysed the use made of food, drink and hospitality in the countess’s account, creating a persuasive case for treating them as ‘ritualised’ forms of ‘communication’ that were intended to bolster Eleanor’s and the Montfortians’ standing in the localities in which she resided in 1265.6 This biography also makes use of Eleanor’s household roll in a way that is grounded, first and foremost, in examining Eleanor’s political activities and in considering the extensive networks of family and friends that she nurtured and maintained at this critical period in English history.

  This present work is, then, the first detailed account of Countess Eleanor’s life for more than 150 years. It fills an important gap within the existing literature and serves as a timely companion volume to other biographical works on medieval women, such as Margaret Howell’s splendid study, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (1998). This book draws on the wealth of information from chronicles, letters, charters, public records, household accounts and the remains of the Montfort family archives to reconstruct the narrative of Eleanor’s life. In doing so, it provides an intimate portrait not only of Eleanor as a wife, mother and politician, but also of her changing relationships with her eldest brother, King Henry III, and with her nephew the Lord Edward, the future King Edward I, before, during and after the period of baronial reform and rebellion in England (1258–67). This biography also sheds significant new light on
the countess’s experiences as a young bride during her marriage to her first husband, William Marshal junior, Earl of Pembroke, and as a widow after his untimely death in 1231. In particular, it challenges the motives traditionally ascribed by historians to her decision to take a vow of perpetual chastity during her first period of widowhood, arguing that Eleanor’s actions need to be considered against the political background of the settlement of England in the aftermath of the rebellion by her brother-in-law, Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, in 1233–4.

  If Eleanor’s close kinship with the English king and her subsequent remarriage to a court favourite, and later reformer and rebel, Simon de Montfort, make her an exceptional woman in many respects, then her career still raises wider questions about the nature of, and potential for, women’s political agency in this period. As the sister of King Henry III, an aunt of the Lord Edward and the wife of Earl Simon, Eleanor straddled the bloody conflict between Henry III and the barons who wished to reform his government in the 1250s and 1260s. Yet she remained resolutely wedded to the cause of her second husband, sharing his political ambitions, energy and fiery nature. She stood firm in her opposition to the English crown during the mid 1260s and defended Dover Castle for the Montfortian cause during the summer of 1265 as her family’s enemies closed in around her.

  I first encountered Eleanor as a doctoral student in the late 1990s, when I researched the life and political allegiances of another prominent thirteenth-century lady, Margaret de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln and Pembroke (d. 1266), who corresponded with Eleanor in 1265. It was not until 2006, when heavily pregnant with my first daughter, that I began to undertake more extensive research into Eleanor herself, and the idea for a biography gradually began to evolve from two papers that I wrote on Eleanor’s political involvement in the Barons’ War for the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds in 2006 and for a conference at The National Archives (UK) at Kew in 2007. In developing, researching and writing this study, I have, therefore, incurred a number of long-standing personal debts. Dr Adrian Jobson, Dr Liz Oakley-Brown, Dr Michael Ray and Dr Jennifer Ward have all kindly given me the benefit of their particular areas of expertise and have all read parts of this work. Any errors that remain are my own. I have also benefitted from the encouragement and friendship of Professor David Carpenter, Professor Michael Clanchy, Dr David Crook and Dr Paul Dryburgh at various stages of this project. Chapters 7 and 8 of this book are based upon earlier papers that I gave at Leeds, Kew, Oxford and Canterbury between 2006 and 2008; the people who attended these events made numerous valuable suggestions that I have tried to incorporate. The record copying department at the Bibliothèque nationale de France has been extremely helpful in providing me with images of MS Clairambault 1188 (the remains of the Montfort family’s archive) and MS Clairambault 1021 (the Montfort confraternity letters from St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire), while the staff at the British Library furnished me with a copy of Eleanor de Montfort’s household roll (BL, MS Add. 8877). My thanks go to the staff of the reading rooms at the British Library, the Hampshire Record Office and The National Archives, who have provided valuable assistance during the course of my research. My colleagues and students at Canterbury Christ Church University have offered friendship and encouragement throughout the whole process. I am also particularly grateful to Michael Greenwood and all the staff at Continuum for their enduring patience and guidance. My greatest debt, though, is to my husband, Lee, for his love and support, and to our daughters, Emma and Katie, who were both born during the years when this book was first conceived.

  A NOTE ON MONEY

  In the thirteenth century, £1 was equivalent to 20 shillings, and 1 shilling was made up of 12 pence. A mark was a unit of account worth 13s. 4d.

  Abbreviations

  Ann. mon. Annales monastici, ed. H. R. Luard (1864–9). London: Longman, Rolls Series, 5 vols.

  BL British Library.

  BnFr Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  Cal. Docs. Ireland Calendar of Documents relating to Ireland, 1171–1307, ed. H. S. Sweetman (1875–86). London: Longman, 5 vols.

  CChR Calendar of the Charter Rolls (1916–). London: HMSO.

  CClR Calendar of the Close Rolls (1892–). London: HMSO.

  CFR Calendar of the Fine Rolls of the Reign of Henry III (2007–2011), available online at http://www.frh3.org.uk/home.html.

  Chronica majora Matthaei Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani, chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard (1872–83). London: Longman, Rolls Series, 7 vols.

  CIM Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, Volume I, 1219–1307 (1916). London: HMSO.

  CLR Calendar of the Liberate Rolls (1916–). London: HMSO.

  CPR Calendar of the Patent Rolls (1906–). London: HMSO.

  CR Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III (1902–75). London: HMSO, 13 vols.

  CRR Curia Regis Rolls of the Reigns of Richard I, John and Henry III (1922–). London: HMSO.

  DBM Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1267, ed. R. F. Treharne and I. J. Sanders (1973). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  Diplomatic Documents Diplomatic Documents, Volume I, 1101–1272, ed. P. Chaplais (1964). London: HMSO.

  EHR The English Historical Review.

  Flores historiarum Flores historiarum, ed. H. R. Luard (1890). London: Longman, Rolls Series, 3 vols.

  Foedera Foedera, conventiones, litterae et cujuscunque generis acta publica, ed. T. Rymer (searchable text edition, 2006). Burlington, Ontario: TannerRitchie.

  GEC G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, ed. V. Gibbs et al. (1910–59). n.p.

  Historia anglorum Matthae Parisiensis, monachi Sancti Albani, historia anglorum, ed. F. Madden (1872–83). London: Longman, Rolls Series, 3 vols.

  HRO Hampshire Record Office.

  Manners Manners and Household Expenses of England in the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed. T. H. Turner (1841). London: Roxburghe Club.

  Monasticon anglicanum W. Dugdale, Monasticon anglicanum, eds R. Dodsworth, J. Stevens, J. Caley, H. Ellis, B. Bandinel and R. C. Taylor (1817–30). London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 6 vols in 8.

  ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–11, available online at http://www.oxforddnb.com.

  Pipe Roll 16 John The Great Roll of the Pipe for the Sixteenth Year of the Reign of King John, ed. P. M. Barnes (1962). London: The Pipe Roll Society, new series, vol. 35.

  PR Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III (1901–3). London: HMSO, 2 vols.

  PRO Public Record Office.

  RLCl Rotuli litterarum clausarum in Turri Londoniensi asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (1833–4). London: Record Commission.

  RLP Rotuli litterarum patentium in Turri Londoniensi asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (1835). London: Record Commission.

  Royal Letters Royal and Other Historical Letters illustrative of the Reign of Henry III, ed. W. W. Shirley (1862–6). London: Longman, Rolls Series, 2 vols.

  SCLA Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive.

  TNA The National Archives.

  Treaty Rolls Treaty Rolls, Volume I, 1234–1325 (1955). London: HMSO.

  Wendover The Flowers of History by Roger of Wendover, ed. H. G. Hewlett (1886–9). London: Longman, Rolls Series, 3 vols.

  1

  Childhood

  ‘descended from a race of kings’1

  In 1917, a French scholar, Max Prinet, published a detailed description of a tomb housed within the church of the Abbey Royal of St-Antoine-des-Champs, a medieval nunnery on the outskirts of Paris. The tomb, which depicted a woman wearing a religious habit, was heavily decorated with armorial bearings typical of those employed in the thirteenth century. It bore no inscription that immediately identified its owner, but an analysis of its heraldic devices suggested that this was none other than the funerary monument constructed to house the heart of Eleanor (d. 1275), Countess of Leicester, the daughter of King John of England and the widow of William Marshal (d. 1231), Earl of Pembroke,
and Simon de Montfort (d. 1265), Earl of Leicester. The arms depicted on the tomb included two emperors, those of the Holy Roman and Latin Empires, four kings, those of England, France, Sicily, and Castile-León, and those of the Montfort family, which an earlier French heraldist, Claude-François Ménestrier, had identified with Eleanor’s sons by her second marriage. This evidence, coupled with that from an ancient inventory of the abbey’s goods referring to a cloth placed ‘on the heart of the countess of Leicester’ on feast days and at Lent, confirmed that Eleanor’s heart was probably housed within this tomb or that, at the very least, there had later emerged a strong local tradition that this was so.2

  Whether or not this monument contained the heart of the youngest daughter of King John of England, Eleanor was certainly a remarkable woman who could claim close kinship with the most powerful ruling dynasties of Western Europe and the Latin East in the thirteenth century. This point was not lost on her contemporaries. Eleanor’s impeccable connections, and those of her sisters – Joan Queen of Scots and Isabella, the Holy Roman Empress – were detailed in an elaborate genealogy compiled to celebrate the latter’s marriage in 1235 to Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. On their father’s side, these women claimed descent from the kings of England, dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy, and counts of Anjou, Maine and Touraine. Through the marriages of their aunts in the paternal line, they were associated with the kings of Castile and Sicily, the dukes of Saxony and the counts of Toulouse.3 As members of the European political elite, Eleanor’s and her sisters’ lives were, therefore, played out on an international stage. This was, after all, an era in which the language, life and culture of the English royal family and high aristocracy were closely integrated with Europe and especially with France.

  These continental connections were especially important for Eleanor, the only English royal sister not to acquire a crown through marriage. Like her grandmother and namesake, the formidably talented Eleanor (d. 1204), Duchess of Aquitaine, who had been the wife of King Louis VII of France and King Henry II of England in turn, the key events in the younger Eleanor’s life took place on both sides of the English Channel. The political capital invested by the younger Eleanor, her two husbands and, ultimately, her children in her lineage and her natal family ties offers a window onto female agency and the opportunities that existed for medieval noblewomen, primarily through the mediums of marriage, motherhood and lordship, to foster their own interests and those of their closest kin. It was, after all, precisely these ties that located the younger Eleanor at the very heart of the conflict for control of English government that emerged between her brother, King Henry III, and his barons. The years 1258 to 1267 – a period of baronial reform and rebellion – were of tremendous significance in English history. They saw the king reduced to a cipher and a baronial council, led by Eleanor’s second husband, Simon de Montfort, pushing through legal and administrative reforms far more radical and wide ranging than those envisaged in Magna Carta in 1215. This book, therefore, considers the life and career of Eleanor, the youngest daughter of King John, against the turbulent background of thirteenth-century English politics and Anglo-French relations, and considers her transformation from the king’s beloved youngest sister into his bitter political enemy.