Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (4 page)

There was, admittedly, nothing unusual in placing children from high-status families in other households for part of their upbringing. This practice accorded well with contemporary English and European expectations that, by the age of seven or sometimes earlier, the boys of the high nobility be removed from their nurseries in order to enter another lord’s household for their education in courtly manners and knightly skills.
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In the troubled political climate of 1216–17, however, the personal influence that the queen potentially wielded over Eleanor’s brothers might well have been regarded with alarm by the men to whom her late husband had assigned the task of safeguarding the throne for his dynasty.
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The regency council’s suspicions about Isabella and Isabella’s own sense of political isolation in England were apparently confirmed in 1220 by the queen dowager’s subsequent decision to remain in Poitou, and take the place of her daughter, Joan, as Hugh (X) de Lusignan’s bride.
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UPBRINGING

The queen dowager’s return to Angoulême in 1217 and her continued absence from England meant that she was not a significant physical presence in the upbringings of Eleanor and her older sister, Isabella. These two daughters, like their older brothers, were placed, instead, in the guardianship of the crown’s most loyal servant, Peter des Roches, or in that of men closely allied to him.
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By June 1220, if not earlier, Isabella was in the custody of Philip Mark, who escorted her to York during the negotiations for the marriage of her sister, Joan, to Alexander II, King of Scots.
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As the youngest child, Eleanor was placed under the overall supervision of Henry III’s protector, des Roches, while Richard remained in de Maulay’s care at Corfe.
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It is curious, bearing in mind their closeness in age, that Isabella and Eleanor were not raised in one another’s company. One possible explanation for this arrangement is that it reflected contemporary concerns about the royal children’s safety: if they were all placed in the hands of the same guardian, they might have been more vulnerable to attack from external foes, or more vulnerable to the political machinations of des Roches. There might well have been an underlying fear that a single guardian might marry off all the children to further his own political agenda.
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Similar concerns were certainly evident by June 1221, when Peter de Maulay fell from grace, following rumours of his alleged involvement in a plot to deliver Eleanor of Brittany, the king’s cousin and captive then in de Maulay’s care, to the French king.
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Much later in Henry III’s reign, in February 1234, the English episcopate expressed their fears about des Roches’s control of the king’s sister (which sister is not specified), fears that might have taken root much earlier.
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In common with her older siblings, Eleanor possessed her own separate household from early infancy, staffed by attendants who looked after her everyday needs. Such arrangements were not unique to John’s children, but arose partially from the exalted status of the ruling dynasty and partially from necessity – the disruptive, itinerant lifestyle of the royal court was not necessarily one suited to the emotional and physical wellbeing of young children, especially in an age when children were particularly vulnerable to disease.
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Payments to meet all manner of expenses for the maintenance of Eleanor and her household staff feature regularly in the records of the bishopric of Winchester for the years 1217–21 and reveal tantalizing details about Eleanor’s early upbringing and its material comforts. The bishop’s officials accounted for the expenses – in cash and goods – of Eleanor, who was styled initially as the ‘king’s daughter’ and later as the ‘king’s sister’, her nurses and other members of her domestic establishment.
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Accounts (the Winchester pipe roll) for 1217–18, for example, record expenses incurred on Eleanor’s behalf by those who cared for her for items that included candles, cloth, oil, robes and soap for washing.
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When, during the following year, Eleanor and her household resided on the bishop’s manor of Taunton in Wiltshire for twenty-six weeks and three days, the bishop’s officials accounted for purchases of cloth for clothing, grain, oil and writs, and for oblations.
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As Eleanor’s brothers, Henry III and Richard, grew older, they were placed in the care of knights such as Philip d’Aubigny, the keeper of the Channel Islands under John, who looked after the young king and instructed him in riding, hunting and the use of weapons.
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They were also assigned tutors like Roger of Acaster, who was appointed to serve the younger Richard between 1217 and 1223, and who presumably educated them in letters and manners.
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The king and his brother probably received instruction in the seven liberal arts, the cornerstones of a learned – or Latin – education in the Middle Ages. These were grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, known as the
trivium
or the three arts of language, along with geometry, music, astronomy and arithmetic, the
quadrivium
or the four arts of number. Knowledge of Latin on the part of Henry and Richard is indicated by the metrical grammar commissioned from Master Henry of Avranches for them.
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After all, their father, like their paternal grandfather before him, had been extremely well educated, and possessed an extensive personal library of French and Latin texts.
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As an adult, Henry III owned texts in Latin (mainly liturgical works), as well as romance tales in French.
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His wife, Eleanor of Provence, purchased romances based upon Arthurian legends and classical figures, and probably possessed a range of religious texts to assist in her daily devotions; a vernacular history of the Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, was dedicated to her.
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The education that Henry and Richard received reflected their status, the public roles they were expected to assume in adulthood and their gender. The education of girls, like Eleanor and her sisters, in royal and aristocratic circles differed markedly from that of their brothers, reflecting medieval Christian and scientific teaching on feminine intellectual, physical and psychological inferiority.
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Their upbringings prepared them for marriage or for admission to the cloister. It usually fell to royal mothers, albeit in a supervisory capacity, to induct their daughters into the rituals, ceremonies, gift-giving and conspicuous consumption associated with queenship and diplomacy, as well as seeing to it that they acquired courtly manners and practical skills in household management.
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It was also under maternal supervision that they received religious instruction, presumably from household chaplains. The
Life
that Agnes of Harcourt, abbess of Longchamp, wrote of Eleanor’s cousin and contemporary, Isabella (1225–70), the sister of King Louis IX of France, recalled the parental concern of Isabella’s mother, Queen Blanche, and her close involvement in her daughter’s affairs.
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Although Isabella was destined to become the founder of Longchamp, near Paris, and lived out her life in a residence within its grounds, the close cultural and royal familial ties between England and France at this time mean that the descriptions within her
Life
of her qualities, upbringing and education resonate with the occasional glimpses of Eleanor and her sisters within English sources. Isabella of France was commended for her grace, beauty, lineage and the nobility of her morals. As a woman who dedicated her adult life to spiritual works, the French princess was also praised in her childhood for her innocence, patience, piety, chastity and mercy.
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When Queen Blanche saw to it that her daughter was dressed in richly ornamented clothes appropriate to her position, Isabella expressed her personal preference for more humble, religious attire.
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While other girls of her rank attended entertainments at the French court, Isabella studied divine scripture in her chamber, learning her letters and how to work in silk in order to make vestments for the church.
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Much of Isabella’s day was spent in prayer or studying holy works, such as the Bible and saints’ lives. According to her biographer, she also ‘understood Latin very well’, so well, in fact, that ‘when her chaplains had written her letters for her … in Latin, and … would bring them to her, she would amend them when there were any wrong words’.
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Isabella was evidently schooled in writing as well as reading Latin, two skills which were not necessarily taught together in the Middle Ages.
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Even if we make allowance for the hagiographical nature of Agnes’s work, with its heightened emphasis on Isabella’s religiosity, contemporary English chroniclers made similar claims about the characters and attributes of Henry III’s sisters. Although their comments are indicative of the shared social conventions of the French and English courts, they are also revealing of the manner in which the behaviour and outward countenances of the English king’s sisters conformed to contemporary expectations. During the viewing of the bride that preceded Isabella of England’s marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, this young English bride left the imperial ambassadors impressed by her ‘virgin modesty’ and her ‘royal dress and manners’.
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In a similar vein, Eleanor’s ‘beauty’ and royal descent were said, by the St Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris, to have played an important role in attracting her second husband, Simon de Montfort, in 1238.
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Religious instruction – and instruction in the arts of literacy – also loomed large in both Isabella’s and Eleanor’s upbringings. In the queen mother’s absence overseas, the English royal sisters received their educations at the hands of the
magistrae
or ‘governesses’ who resided in their households. The younger Isabella’s governess was Margaret Biset, a noblewoman whose family possessed a long history of service to the English crown.
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Margaret, who subsequently entered the household of Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Provence, was pious and literate in Latin as well as the French of Henry III’s court. She successfully foiled an assassination attempt on the king one night in 1238 when the court was in residence at Woodstock, having stayed awake to read her Psalter.
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Another similarly experienced woman, Cecily of Sandford, whom the St Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris, described as ‘of noble blood, but with nobler manners’, served as Eleanor’s governess.
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Cecily was the wife and later widow of William de Gorham, a knight who held lands near St Albans in Hertfordshire.
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Cecily was also, in Paris’s eyes at least, clearly a woman of exceptional qualities – ‘exceedingly learned, and courteous, and eloquent’ – and after leaving Eleanor’s service, she was governess to Joan, the wife of Henry III’s half-brother, William de Valence.
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The reputation for learning and the noble background and character of Cecily of Sandford indicate that a great deal of thought, as well as practical considerations, lay behind her initial appointment as Eleanor’s mistress. This was probably just as well. Eleanor’s education at Cecily’s hands made a significant impact upon her subsequent life and piety. The influence Cecily exerted over the younger woman’s spirituality was seen a few years after the death of Eleanor’s first husband, William Marshal junior (d. 1231), when Cecily and her charge took a vow of chastity and perpetual widowhood in the presence of Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury.
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It was under Cecily of Sandford’s guidance and that of others like her, as well as household chaplains and priests, that Eleanor presumably received instruction in the Bible and other religious works. Eleanor’s formative years also coincided with the arrival of a new religious movement in England – the Mendicant Orders of friars. The arrival in 1221 of the Dominicans or Black Friars, the followers of St Dominic of Castile, was followed in 1224 by that of the Franciscans or Grey Friars, the followers of St Francis of Assisi. Both groups quickly attracted royal, noble and local patronage, and established houses in Oxford and numerous other English towns.
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As an adult, the Oxford Franciscan friar Adam Marsh, an intimate of Henry III’s court, directed Eleanor’s attention to biblical passages which he clearly expected her to know.
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The texts of eight letters that Marsh wrote to Eleanor between the late 1240s and early 1250s have been preserved down to the present day.
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Two letters in particular are littered with allusions or references to biblical passages from the book of Genesis (2:18), the gospel of St John (6:37), the Wisdom books (Job 5:2 and Wisd. 11:24, 27), St Paul’s Epistles to the Philippians (4:7), the Corinthians (2 Cor. 1:3) and Timothy (1 Tim. 2:9–10), and the writings of St Peter (1 Pet. 3:1–4).
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Both letters, significantly, addressed Eleanor’s conduct and exhorted her to follow long-established Christian models of acceptable feminine behaviour, models with which Eleanor would have been familiar since childhood. Although seven years younger than her second husband, Eleanor was of a sufficiently forthright, passionate and strong disposition to incur Marsh’s criticism for her failure to act as an obedient, passive and submissive wife in line with biblical teaching. The first letter, for example, counselled Eleanor on her relationship with her husband and offered advice on how to modify her character and temperament in accordance with the church’s ideals of wifely obedience, humility, passivity, restraint and subjection. Marsh criticized her, in a highly provocative way, for departing from her Christian duty towards her second husband and, by implication, for failing to show due care and attention to his commands and wishes. The friar rebuked Eleanor in no uncertain terms for her tendency to resort too quickly to anger (‘Anger killeth the foolish’) and cautioned her on the damaging effect that this might have upon those nearest and dearest to her.
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Yet it was not just Eleanor’s temper that earned Marsh’s disapproval. In addition to criticizing Eleanor’s personal failings, the friar also extended to her the universal ecclesiastical censure of dress and vanities. Marsh rebuked the king’s youngest sister, at length, for the excessive extravagance of her clothing. Women, he counselled, ought to adopt modest and sober apparel, rather than elaborate hairstyles, costly jewels and luxurious robes (‘women also [should be] in decent apparel, adorning themselves with modesty and sobriety, not with plaited hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly attire; but as it becometh women, professing godliness with good works’).
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Eleanor ought to abandon outward displays of vanity, extravagance and ‘wanton style’.
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Marsh’s comments are indicative of an enjoyment of finery on Eleanor’s part as an adult and, more importantly, perhaps, of an awareness of how the outward trappings of wealth might serve as visual reminders of her regal status to those around her. In the second letter, Marsh warned Eleanor of ‘an increasing number of unpleasant and vexatious reports of improprieties that are soiling your reputation not a little’.
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He went on to urge and even ‘admonish’ her to mend her ways,