For Queen and Country

The Eleanor Crosses are among the outstanding monuments of the Middle Ages. They represent one of the most developed of our ancient funeral routes,  and embody a wide range of architectural style and innovation. They also carry a weight of symbolism drawn from the mythic aspirations of a mediaeval dynasty. John Billingsley shares with NE this draft of a planned publication on this fascinating aspect of English history, with illustrations from Philip Rushworth. 

 

Please note that this work is © text and photos John Billingsley 2024 and artwork © Philip Rushworth.

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Foreword

    When I was a child, growing up in London, I remember being told, very sketchily, of the Eleanor Crosses. Some standing crosses were identified to me as Eleanor crosses; as we habitually went west of London on our holidays, I now realise that none of these except Charing Cross were Eleanor Crosses, and even the modern Charing Cross, being a rebuild, can be challenged. Nonetheless, the memorial crosses erected to mark the passage of Queen Eleanor’s body, and the related mythologisation of the love between Eleanor and her king, Edward I, have exerted a powerful imaginative influence over England, by which monumental crosses, if not actually influenced by the Eleanor memorials, are imagined to be.

When the antiquarian circles in which I move began to talk of ‘death roads’ and funeral routes as spiritual routes through the landscape, adding a magical dimension to local geography, I recalled the Eleanor Crosses and the route that the dead queen took from Lincoln to Westminster, and resolved to investigate further. I have been glad to refresh and deepen my slight acquaintance with Eleanor Crosses, and to at last become familiar with the remarkable monuments that remain, especially the extraordinary example at Geddington.

I am not a specialist in mediaeval history, and I am indebted to the many scholars whose works I have consulted and depended upon in my quest to learn more about the crosses and the characters in their drama. They are listed in my bibliography and endnotes. I am also indebted to the British Library at Kings Cross for access to much of this material, and to Christine Rhone for lending me her flat for a winter of study.

It is to none of these scholars, however, that I owe the particular hypothesis I advance here, so any errors or misunderstandings must be laid squarely at my own door.

Acknowledgment is also due to Calderdale Libraries for providing  material I missed at the British Library, and to Neil Mortimer of 3rd Stone for publishing a preliminary version of my hypothesis [Issue 39, Winter 2000. https://mega.nz/file/fIBSWAgQ#kkCZdCOZ0xKaJ-zpv26Ryf22H8gVN0l2fdERt13L86g.

The final and deep thanks should go to Philip Rushworth, who worked with me and on his own initiative to provide the excellent illustrations of crosses and other features of this tale. Without his artwork, this production would have been inestimably poorer. Thanks also to the equally estimable Davina Ware for her evocative images.

John Billingsley, Hebden Bridge, February 2, 2005

Afterword, June 2024: Research stalled on this project around the above date, inevitably because sometimes life gets in the way. Never say never, perhaps, but as I might not be able to return to this project, it seems a shame to let the work done so far, both mine and Phil Rushworth’s, to be lost. The following is a partially updated version of the original drafts.

 

Introduction: Corpseways as ritual routes

Recently, increasing attention has been paid to the concept of death roads or corpseways as marking significant passages through the landscape. Much discussion has focussed on whether such routes should be seen as a special kind of highway – one which should be interpreted in symbolic or magical terms in addition to any practical uses that may coincide.

The most commonly encountered corpseway is a customary route taken by funerals towards the parish church. At one time, most, if not all, parishes had recognised routes over which the dead were borne to their final resting place; place-names such as Coffin Lane once marked such routes until frailer sensibilities, perhaps with a view to property values, had them renamed. Now, few are extant, but a number can be located on old maps. These corpseways linked the extremities of the parish with its centre; the dead were returned to the mother church for their last stage in life. The paths were like spokes in a wheel of life and death; they were ritual routes, sanctified by the presence of death and its accompanying necessities. At the same time, they held the parish together, reaffirming its centre and its extent. Such was the status of a corpseway that folk belief once held that a path along which a coffin had been borne to burial became a public right-of-way, subject to laws other than private property. [For more on local corpseways, see John Billingsley, Journeys of the Soul, NE 2023 https://northernearth.co.uk/books/]

Cr. Davina Ware

One view is then to see such routes as spirit tracks or pathways of the soul, part of a set of rites of passage accompanying death, mourning and the posthumous fate of the human soul. This associates funeral routes with the matrix of customs and beliefs that comprise a community’s sense of the wider world in which they live, and of the ties that hold that community together.

But such routes, in having a ritual function passively, by being necessary routes for a necessary event, can also attract an active ritual function in the way that they hallow a passage through the landscape and set it aside for a special function that elevates that path above its surroundings. By implication, it also hallows the destination, and any stopping points along the way, as the sanctifying factor – the corpse – occupies that point for longer than elsewhere and confers a greater intensity of the ensouling substance at that point.

In these ritual terms, a special funeral route should be seen in terms that go beyond the pragmatic aim of conveying an individual to their burial place. When a special route is devised and ceremonially travelled for a particular individual – usually someone of high religious or political status – then this role is emphasised. There is not simply a burial function to be exercised; other functions that are relevant include making the funeral accessible to the maximum number of mourners who might want to attend, a display of pomp and ceremony appropriate both to the individual and the State or organisation hosting the funeral and establishing a connection between the venues of service and burial. At the same time, such a display legitimises or incorporates the role of that individual within the consciousness of the State; which in turn reaffirms the State. Modern demonstrations of the ceremonial performance of the final rites of passage would be the State funerals of Sir Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales.

It is in this simultaneously sanctifying and legitimising role, I shall argue, that we should see what is possibly the most celebrated corpse route in English history – the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor, wife of King Edward I, from Lincolnshire to London in December 1290. Along the way, twelve elaborate crosses were erected in towns and villages where the queen’s bier and its grieving royal entourage rested for the night. Three of these still survive in some form. As simultaneous vehicles of grief and sublime artistic expression, the Eleanor Crosses were in their own way England’s equivalent of the Taj Mahal.

Popular attention tends to see the crosses as little more than extravagant monuments to a king’s grief; this assumption plays up to a highly romantic image of a mediaeval love story that has evidently appealed to public tastes of the past seven centuries, with a little bit of massage from State as well as academic historians. However, Edward I and his relationship with his beloved queen deserve a more complicated appraisal, and this research suggests a framework in which this exceptional corpse route might be seen in its contemporary esoteric terms.

 

The Royal Couple

   The marriage between the future Edward I of England (1239-1307) and Eleanor of Castile (1241-1290) is portrayed as one of mediaeval England’s great romances, and there is no reason to think that it was not so.  In an age of marriages arranged for purposes of political expediency, it certainly seems to have been a fortunate union for the two of them.

Eleanor of Castile was the daughter of Ferdinand III of Castile and his second wife Joanna; her half-brother, Alfonso X, was in dispute with Henry III of England over continental domains in Henry’s possession. Marriage with the young scion of the English royal family defused the tension and was, given the feeling that grew up between Edward and Eleanor, a literal case of making love, not war.

When Edward travelled to Burgos in northern Spain for their wedding ceremony in 1254, he was 15 years old; his bride was 12 or 13. They were not to live together until the 1260s, however; in the interim, Eleanor continued her studies with her family at home in northern Spain, while Edward played his requisite part in the civil wars raging in England at the time. It was then that he acquired the military skills necessary for his time and indeed for his later position as monarch of a contested land. Strangely, it appears that Eleanor’s learning did not extend to English, of which she spoke little.

The love between Eleanor and the future Edward I is legendary; usually this is a phrase by which we may be excused a certain cynicism, but in their case the reputation for mutual affection seems deserved. However, one popular story describing the extent of Eleanor’s love can be taken with salt to taste; it is told in the caption to a 1718 print of the Eleanor Cross at Waltham in Essex:

“In memory of Queen Eleanor, the beloved wife of that glorious monarch, who accompanied him to the Holy Land, where her Royal Husband being stabbed with a poisoned Dagger by a Saraycen, and the rank wound judged incurable by his Physicians, she, full of Love, Care, and Affection, adventured her own life to save his, by sucking out the substance of the poison, that the wounds being closed and citracised, he became perfectly healed” [Rimmer:52-3].

This episode occurred at Acre in 1270, while the couple were on Crusade together, but this version of events can be traced to an Italian chronicler of the fourteenth century, whence William Camden took it for his Britannia in 1605 . A more reliable report suggests that an excessive display of concern caused the doctors to order Eleanor to be removed from the bedside while they performed surgery on the infected arm [Parsons 1991:42].

The Eleanor legend would also seem to have been nourished by the chronicles instituted at St Albans Abbey in 1307, after Edward’s death, in which Eleanor is – posthumously – highly praised [Parsons 1995:216]. By no means a stay-at-home wife, she regularly accompanied Edward on his journeys – though such vacations tended to involve an army as well, on various military campaigns from the Holy Land to Wales. The cordiality of their relations is indicated by the varied birthplaces of their children; Joan of Acre was born at that town in 1272, and the future Edward II at Caernarvon in 1284. Certainly their marriage amounted to more than political opportunism – fourteen or more children were born to the couple, though few survived to adulthood. During the 1270s, Eleanor bore children at average intervals of fifteen months.

The affection between the couple was perhaps a saving grace for Edward, perhaps even a balance against his more ruthless inclinations. Without Eleanor, the over-riding impression of Edward’s reign would be of political manipulation, militarism and a finance-hungry State – in one opinion, “the sincerity of [Edward’s] devotion to his wife was perhaps the most favourable trait in his character” [Vallance:94].

Eleanor

Opinions,  inevitably, were mixed about Eleanor herself; her unwillingness to use the English language contributed to a public sense of her as a rather distant foreigner, with foreign customs and preferences, in their midst. It is unlikely that she caught peoples’ hearts as much in her lifetime as she did after her death. Though seen as compassionate on some issues – it is said that she was attentive to complaints raised by the people of St Albans against the Abbot in 1275 [Parsons, 1995:64-67,217] – she also acquired a contemporary reputation for acquisitiveness, especially of manors; a doggerel rhyme attributed to William of Guisborough claimed

 “The king desires to get our gold, the queen our manors fair to hold” 

[Parsons, 1995:2].

Her tenants also complained of over-taxation, but this was a trait of her husband as well, who needed to support his extensive military adventures; Eleanor’s high taxes perhaps derived from her husband’s expenditures. Nonetheless, after Eleanor’s death, a number of law suits were filed to recover property from her estate. It is apparent that “contemporaries did not regard her as the paragon of queenly excellence praised by many later writers” [Parsons, 1995:218-9, 205].

Eleanor was also accused of excessive dealings with Jews, who were experiencing particularly harsh anti-semitism in thirteenth-century England. This came to a head in Edward’s reign. The king’s need for funds had raised the tallage of the Jews – tallage was a traditional feudal extortion or tax that reflected the ambivalence of the position they held as financiers to Christian states opposed in principle to usury. This taxation had considerably reduced the value of their financial activities, and at the same time anti-semitism was growing stronger. Jews were accused of coin-clipping and even of crucifying a Christian boy in Northampton on Good Friday, 1277 – for this unlikely charge, fifty Jews of the town were dragged behind horses and hanged. In 1290, on the royal journey that was to be Eleanor’s last, Edward bowed to Church pressure. The Jews were over-taxed and not as affluent as they had been; as the victims of a managed anti-semitism, their presence was prima facie instigation to riots and other public disorders. The Jews offered dwindling benefits, and public opinion favoured harsh discrimination; so Edward expelled the Jews from England, taking care to seize their remaining assets for good measure. Judgments of Eleanor’s financial dealings must be seen in this context.

In contrast to these complaints, her “tact and exceeding amiability” were reckoned to have been a factor in Edward’s Welsh settlement. It is apparent that Edward himself sought her advice as well as her companionship, whether at court or on his expeditions to the Holy Land, Wales and Scotland, and the partnership must have been as pragmatic as it was affectionate. Whatever her faults may have been, Eleanor was obviously a clever, intellectual, energetic and loyal queen, a fitting foil to a husband seeking to both to enlarge and unify his kingdom. Some of the complaints against her may have simply been xenophobic, inevitable clashes of ambition, or even a jealous reaction to a clever and powerful woman.

 

Edward

Reputation and reality do not always coincide, and Edward has had as rough a ride as any in the new brutality of post-Imperial history. Traditionally seen as a strong monarch who finally restored England’s pride after a shaky thirteenth century – he succeeded in 1272 after the difficult reigns of John and Henry III – there were many, particularly in Wales and Scotland, who had cause to hate him.

One of those was the Scots rebel William Wallace, who became the first noble to suffer Edward’s novel punishment of hanging, drawing and quartering, introduced in 1284 [Cooper & Sullivan:234]. English historians have praised Edward’s abilities and achievements in legislation and constitutional matters, but again this has to be set against a widespread reputation for deviousness in political, legal and military dealings; some people may have found his legal initiatives distinctly not to their advantage.

Edward’s reputation for insincerity was largely built in the Civil Wars between Henry III and his barons, led by Simon de Montfort. The young prince changed sides twice and broke sworn promises; but in the end he routed the rebel forces and took charge of reprisals on his father’s behalf, confiscating assets and fining rebels heavily.

The apparent contrasts come together in a more realistic image closer to what might be expected of the ruler of a contentious kingdom – tough, pragmatic, relatively just, manipulative, forceful, aggressive and aggrandising; as a monarch in a highly competitive environment, it would be fairer to judge him on similar terms to politicians or financial magnates today.

To underpin his political strategies, Edward paid much attention to the composition of his armies, maintaining a force of paid and contracted soldiers on a scale not to be seen again until the seventeenth century. Military spending was massive; his outlay on castles in North Wales came to nearly £100,000, estimated as equivalent in modern terms to a fleet of nuclear submarines [Brown, Colvin & Taylor: 228]

Whatever ethical standards we might prefer today, the effect of Edward’s reign was to bring a period of much-needed if only relative stability to England, achieving a centrality for the State that it had not seen before. By the time of his death in 1307, a nominal union comprised England, Wales and Scotland that still today influences attitudes and politics in Britain.

Edward succeeded to the throne in 1272; he was on Crusade at the time, but made no hurry to return. Proceeding at his own pace back to England, he shrewdly established contacts with other European monarchs along the way, and observed their varying patterns of rulership; his observations were to influence his subsequent royal decisions. When he finally arrived in his kingdom, in August 1274, he set about reforming corruption among local officers and strengthening central government by placing limits on private power. He needed to trust the heart of his kingdom.

Edward’s designs on his neighbouring territories of Wales and Scotland, which were to heavily colour his reign, were partly fuelled by his need to impose more central control and stability in his realm.

In 1267 Llewelyn ab Gruffydd obtained the allegiance of Welsh lords and was proclaimed Prince of Wales. In 1277, he refused to do homage to Edward, precipitating a military rebuke that slashed Llewelyn’s power base. The settlement was however relatively mild, and in 1282 Llewelyn’s forces rose again – but once more to defeat. Llewelyn himself was killed in this action, and the Statute of Wales of 1284 transferred Wales to England’s dominion. Though the majority of Welsh law and custom were retained, political power switched to London, and to emphasise the point the grand state-of-the-art castles of North Wales were built to assert and maintain an English hold on what had shown itself to be a potentially insurrectionary territory. It is ironic that today these English castles are owned and maintained by Cadw, the Welsh heritage agency!

Edward’s agenda of unification, which some may see more as maximising and centralising the power of the English crown, naturally included Scotland. An attempt at a diplomatic union was made by betrothing his son, the future Edward II, to Margaret of Norway, heir to the Scottish throne, when they were both children. This scheme, alas, came to nought when Margaret died in Orkney on her way to Scotland. This event was tragic not just for Margaret and Edward, but for Scotland’s future; Margaret’s death created a succession problem in which England’s King Edward appointed himself arbitrator. Through his offices, John Balliol came to the throne, but however legitimate his claim, it became apparent that Edward regarded him as a puppet king [Barker:167ff] and the English crown as the de facto arbiter of Scottish politics.

Resentment at Edward’s arrogance led to the Scots making a treaty with Philip of France in 1295, at a time when France was at war with England; a clearly provocative move that was echoed by another rising in Wales. Edward swiftly sorted out the Welsh rebels, then turned his attention to the Scots, leading a successful three-week expedition in 1296. It was following this campaign, to stamp his claim to Scotland’s fate, that Edward removed the Stone of Destiny from Scone Abbey to Westminster, and all the royal regalia and records from Edinburgh castle; the records were searched for precedent justifying Edward’s acquisition of Scottish sovereignty, but the regalia were never seen again [Barker:170]. John Balliol thus became the last Scottish king to be crowned on the Stone of Destiny until the Stuarts came to Westminster.

Edward’s abrogation of Scottish sovereignty set the pattern for centuries of resentment against the English, the echoes of which persist in modern Britain; and in the shorter term it led to the rebellions of William Wallace and his successor, Robert Bruce. Indeed, it was on the way to a final campaign against Bruce’s Scots that the 68-year-old Edward I died on July 7, 1307, at Burgh-on-Sands.

Edward’s last wishes, according to legend and ballad, were for his heart to be removed and taken to the Holy Land, and his body to be boiled till the flesh separated from the bones. Edward required of his son, Edward II, that “he would have the flesh buried, and the bones preserved; and every time the Scots should rebel against him, he would summon his people, and carry with him the bones of his father; for he believed most firmly, that as long as his bones should be carried against the Scots, those Scots would never be victorious”. Edward was evidently a believer in the power of relics, but it seems that his wishes were ignored. His death on campaign was even kept secret for some time; he was eventually buried in Westminster Abbey on October 27 and his bones were never borne against another army [Prestwich:557-8; Parsons, 1995:279].

Edward’s epithets – as well as Edward Longshanks, on account of his height – included ‘The Hammer of the Scots’ and ‘The Flower of Chivalry’. He also became known for leading something of a charmed life. When he was young, and playing chess, he suddenly got up and left the game, without any apparent reason – seconds later, a large stone fell from the vaulted ceiling right where he had been sitting. In Paris, a lightning bolt just missed him while he was sitting with Eleanor, and struck dead two lady attendants behind them. At the siege of Stirling Castle, a crossbow bolt fired from the walls impaled itself on his saddle between his legs, missing the king by inches. At Winchelsea, he was uninjured when his horse took a leap over the town wall. A contemporary commentator marvelled at his luck – “not once, but a hundred times, weapons directed at him fell to his right and to his left, never harming him but frequently wounding those around him”[Longford:102; Timbs & Gunn 2:293]. Could such luck have fostered in Edward a sense of destiny and divine favour?

   The Great Seal of Edward I

 The Passing of Eleanor

    Edward was a frequent traveller, whether for war or to maintain the awareness of his active kingship within his subjects, particularly those most likely to be rebellious. As we have noted, the stability of the State was an over-riding priority of his reign.

However, royal travels in those days, though lavish, were not perhaps what we would recognise as luxury travel, and it was on one such royal procession that the queen died, bringing to an end what had been a successful royal partnership. Despite being unwell for much of 1290, Eleanor accompanied her husband on a journey northwards, and on November 20th, while staying at the royal Sherwood hunting lodge at Clipston in Nottinghamshire, her illness took a turn for the worse.

It is said that the fateful downturn in the queen’s health occurred while she was resting beneath the Parliament Oak, a venerable tree, also known as the Tree of Judgement, which stood on high ground on the Derbyshire border. Both names were acquired from its being a venue for earlier royal council gatherings. It is said that King John consulted his courtiers here after receiving news of an uprising in Wales; in 1290, with the news of Eleanor’s illness, it witnessed another emergency parliament, at which the decision was taken for the royal party to go to Richard de Weston’s manor house at Harby in Lincolnshire, in order to better work towards the Queen’s recovery. It was at Harby that she died on November 28th, 1290.

Edward immediately observed three days of mourning, during which time he apparently abstained from the work of government; in contrast to the daily testing of royal writs from November 20th to 28th, none were issued between the 29th and December 1st. For a month after the funeral procession and final service, Edward observed mourning at Bons Hommes at Ashridge, and contemporary accounts tell of his dark and sombre mood of grief [Priestland:35]. Edward himself wrote after Eleanor’s death:

“my harp is turned to mourning, in life I loved her dearly, nor can I cease to love her in death” [Earle, 1975, p.79].

Edward went further than this in commemorating his wife. Each Tuesday for a year after her death, he undertook to distribute alms to any pauper who approached him. In January 1292 he arranged that every Monday a service would be held at Westminster Abbey, followed by a mass the next day; while the eve and day of St Andrew the Apostle – November 29 and 30, a day after the actual date of her death – were chosen for an annual service of remembrance. On this occasion, one hundred candles were burned, masses were read, bells were rung, chants took place hourly and a penny dole was given to seven score paupers in exchange for a prayer for the queen’s soul [Parsons 1995:214-5]

 

The Funeral Procession

At some point Edward decided to make his wife’s sombre return to London a full State occasion, at which point it became more than an expression of grief and took on political meaning. The Queen’s funeral route to London was to be hallowed with a set of crosses wherever her body stayed overnight. His inspiration for this plan is likely to have been a series of crosses, known as montjoie, throughout France. They were erected by Philip III to mark the progress of Louis IX’s body as it was returned to the resting place of French monarchs, the church of St-Denis in what is today a suburb of Paris, in 1271.

Eleanor’s place of death, the small village of Harby, was not marked down for a cross, perhaps because it was not on a main highway, and her memorial here was probably a chantry chapel ordained in 1294 with a priest whose duties were to pray for the late Queen at a stipend of 100 shillings a year [Priestland:8]. Today a plaque and a statue remember the Queen in the Victorian church of All Saints, which is partly built on the site of the manor where Eleanor died.

The distance between Harby and London, on the route taken, was around 160 miles, a considerable journey in winter on the roads of the time. A daily distance averaging 13.5 miles – though the first stage, from Lincoln to Grantham was 23 miles – would seem a reasonable pace. The standard highways were deviated from as circumstances decreed; for the party to be housed in warmth and safety at night, stops were made at principal religious houses en route, such as Delapre and St Albans Abbeys.

The grand entourage included Edward himself, the Chancellor, Eleanor’s household, her chaplain and a number of other individuals of State importance; it was, as Parsons describes it, “a State progress of unprecedented splendour”. The chaplain rode near the queen’s bier, with a cross held on his saddle; as a mourner and second in importance to the deceased, Edward rode some way behind [Parsons, 1995:59].

 

The Crosses

The Eleanor crosses, contrary to popular belief, do not necessarily mark the spots where Eleanor’s body actually lay on her route to London, but were erected at significant locations near her overnight resting places, which naturally enough tended to be convenient religious houses. However, it seems quite likely that the Queen’s bier would have rested at the actual spot where the cross was later erected, even if only for a short time, for ritual purposes; at Dunstable, for instance, the bier halted while the place for the cross was consecrated, but it is probable that the queen’s remains would have accompanied the funeral entourage and moved on to the nearby Priory overnight.

Each cross was of a different final design, but all probably shared a common feature of a spire with diminishing storeys, the middle stage holding statues of the late Queen. The lowest stage displayed the coats of arms of England, Castile and Leon (Eleanor’s family) and Ponthieu (Eleanor’s mother’s arms) [Vallance:24-5].

Other writers [e.g. Coldstream, Priestland, Smith, Vallance] have published details taken from contemporary accounts regarding the cost of the crosses and the materials and craftsmen involved, and I do not propose to repeat those here as they are not of central relevance to the present work.

 

Lincoln

From Harby, where she had passed away, Eleanor’s body was taken to St Catherine’s Priory at Lincoln. There her body was eviscerated, embalmed, stuffed with barley and wrapped in linen in preparation for the long journey to London [Parsons, 1995:59]. Eleanor’s viscera, or bowels, the most perishable parts of the body, were placed in a special tomb in St Mary’s Chapel at Lincoln Cathedral.

The Priory stood near the junction of two ancient roads, Ermine Street and the Fosse Way, south of the city. St Catherine’s Hotel today stands on part of the site of the Priory, which was the start of Eleanor’s hallowed route to Westminster. The mourners set off on December 4th, and the first cross was located opposite the priory on Swine’s Green (SK 971 694) (The present placename of Cross o’Cliff Hill refers to a boundary, not the Eleanor, cross).

Both the cross and Eleanor’s tomb in the cathedral were destroyed in the English revolution of the seventeenth century, although the tomb was replicated in 1890 from a 1641 drawing [Priestland:10-11; Vallance:96].

 

Grantham, Lincolnshire

The first stage of the Queen’s final journey took the cavalcade to Grantham later that day, but it is not known where the bier rested. The cross fell, like most, to Parliamentarian depredation in the 1640s, but some of its masonry was recovered by town aldermen in 1646 and deposited in the parish church. William Stukeley believed the cross stood on St Peter’s Hill, known in his time as Peter-church Hill. Today the likely site is occupied by a statue of Sir Isaac Newton (SK 915 356) [Priestland:11-12].

 

Stamford, Lincolnshire

Another twenty miles took them to Stamford. “In the hill before ye come into the towne” wrote Richard Symonds in 1645, “stands a large lofty crosse built by Edward III [sic], in memery of Elianor his queene, whose corps rested there coming from the North”; another commentator, Richard Butcher, also described the site the following year – “about twelvescore from the town gate, which is called Clement-gate”. Unfortunately, Butcher’s reference did not specify the unit of measurement he was using; it has frequently been assumed to be yards, which would place the old cross, which had disappeared by 1659, in Scotgate, near the road fork (TF 0245 0726). However, another contemporary unit, say, the rod (a.k.a. pole or perch, 5.5 yards) would give a distance nearer half a mile from Clement-gate on the Casterton road (TF 0191 0758). Neither accord exactly with Symonds’ location, but the Casterton road site, on the brow of a hill, fits the description better. William Stukeley, vicar of All Saints in Stamford in 1745, dug into a ‘tumulus’ half a mile from Scotgate, at a locale still known locally at the time as Queen’s Cross; he declared that this was the site of the old cross (TF 029 071) and from it took home a fragment of carved stone pinnacle that accords well with the decoration of other Eleanor crosses. A 1738 drawing of Stamford Castle and the St Peter’s Hill area shows a restored Eleanor Cross, possibly a post-1745 addition [Smith:301-11].

Eleanor’s body was probably accommodated at Blackfriars, SE of the town.

 

Geddington, Northamptonshire

The slender cross at Geddington, rising to a height of around 40ft, is one of the three remaining Eleanor Crosses. It stands at the junction of three roads (SP 895 830), above the well in the centre of the village, which is reputed never to run dry. There was a royal hunting lodge there, at which parliaments were held [Rimmer:46-47]; it stood near St Mary Magdalene Church (now recalled by Hall Close, situated on part of the lodge’s site).

The monument is impressive in its central location and geometric variety, but gives an odd aesthetic effect. Quite clearly an experimental work of its time, it consists of a hexagonal stepped base leading to a triangular column. Another triangular storey features three statues, around 6ft tall, of the queen in a distinctive pose, half-veiled with head bowed, that differs from other surviving representations of her and gives rise to a local designation as the ‘weeping queen’. A final third storey terminates in pinnacles and decorated finials. Even the weathered remains of today create a moving atmosphere.

 

The cross was at the centre of village life both geographically and recreationally, as squirrel-baiting took place there annually, either on Easter Monday or Geddington Feast in July. Captured squirrels released in the street would naturally attempt escape up the cross, hiding in the recesses of the stonework, and equally naturally locals would encourage them to leave by throwing stones at them. Interestingly, squirrel hunting was a tradition normally associated with St Andrews Day, November 30, which was the date chosen for Eleanor’s anniversary memorials [Cooper & Sullivan:322]

The cross also survived the revolutionary period, unlike most of its contemporaries, and was repaired in 1800 and 1890 [Galloway:22; Priestland:13-15; Vallance:98].

 

Hardingstone, Northamptonshire

Delapre Abbey, south of Northampton, offered the travellers hospitality on the night of December 9th, after a journey of nineteen miles; the County Records Office now stands on the site. The cross was erected on the London Road opposite the abbey gates, and can still be seen today, although its design has been altered in subsequent restorations (SP 754 582). The three-storey monument is much more stolid than Geddington, designed octagonally around a square central shaft. Each face of the square third storey was cardinally aligned. The four statues of the Queen, about 6ft tall, are similarly stockier than the Geddington ones and echo the pose on Eleanor’s seal – flowing hair and circlet, with her left arm raised across her breast. A particularity of this cross is an open book carved on four of the eight sides of the lowest stage.

Restorations in 1713 added Queen Anne’s coat of arms, a tablet commemorating military triumphs of her reign, sundials on the four cardinal faces and a finial cross in Maltese style at the top of the monument. The Maltese cross was replaced in 1840 with a broken piece of the shaft [Priestland:16-20; Vallance:98].

 

Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire

From Hardingstone, the stages between stops became shorter; this stage was only twelve miles. These shorter stages may have been due to a variety of reasons – such as bad weather, greater crowds along the route, or perhaps deliberate delay to allow co-ordination of the preparations for when the procession reached London [Parsons, 1995:279].

Stony Stratford stands at the point where Watling Street crosses the River Ouse (SP 785 406), and the cross was built soon after the crossing-place, at the lower end of High Street; a house now bears a commemorative plaque over an archway. Like other crosses, only a stump survived the Parliament forces [Priestland:20-21].

 

Woburn, Bedfordshire

The next site for a cross was at Woburn (SP 949 332), where the entourage probably stayed at the Cistercian Abbey there. There is a problem, however, in that scanty endowments had brought about the closure of the abbey long before, in 1234. The abbey was, however, revived at the end of the century – perhaps as a result of royal patronage ensuing from its hospitality to the queen [Rimmer:51]. The cross was located off Watling Street, and hence off the main highway, and was another of the set fated to disappear in the seventeenth century. The most likely location is thought to be the market place, at the junction of five roads [Priestland:21].

 

Dunstable, Bedfordshire

Dunstable Priory

Nigel Pennick cites the major crossroads at Dunstable as a contender for the ‘omphalos’ or sacred centre of England; from there, streets led away in the cardinal directions. Dunstable was founded by Henry I in 1110, as a royal borough holding certain privileges in taxation and sanctuary rights normally held only by ecclesiastical institutions. The town grew up with these privileges around the Augustinian foundation there, and one writer believed that “Dunstable was held in special regard by King Edward I as the omphalos of his kingdom – the origin point of the Royal Roads” [Pennick, 1979:50-51].

The crossroads had already long been in existence, as a crossing point of the Icknield Way and Watling Street, both Roman if not earlier roads. The element ‘staple’ in Dunstable may relate to the post set up at the junction, and that is where Eleanor’s cross was erected (TL 018 218). Nearby were St Peter’s Priory (St Peter’s Church today incorporates part of its site and structure) and the old palace of Kingsbury which Henry had built for himself in c.1130 [Trubshaw:11-13].

Queen Eleanor seems to have had a personal association with the Priory; she made offerings to it for her children’s health during her absence on Crusade with her husband and visited it after her Coronation. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that her body should have rested there “in the middle of the market place until the king’s chancellor and the nobles who were then present designated a fitting place, in the presence of our Prior who sprinkled holy water, at which place there was later erected at the King’s expense a cross of marvellous size” [Dunstable Chronicle, q. in Parsons, 1995:60; Priestland:21-2].

 

St Albans, Hertfordshire

The great abbey of St Albans next hosted the royal company, escorting them from the town gates to the queen’s resting place before the high altar, where services took place throughout the night. The cross itself was set up in the market place near the present site of the Clock Tower (TL 147 072), but once again Parliament declared it an unwelcome relic in 1643. What was left of the cross was cleared away in 1702.

In 1907, the town staged an Eleanor pageant, re-enacting the procession on its way through the town. Frank Salisbury painted a large picture of this event, entitled ‘The Passing of Queen Eleanor’, which was on display in the abbey church until 1973, when thieves cut the canvas from the frame. It has never been heard of since. Postcards of it are however still on sale in the Abbey [Priestland: 23-24].

 

Waltham, Essex

 

The placename Waltham Cross relates not to the Eleanor memorial but to the legend describing how the site of Waltham Abbey was divined by oxen bearing a cross unearthed by workmen at Montacute in Somerset. It was between St Albans and Waltham, where the body rested at the old abbey, that Edward appears to have left the procession and proceeded to London.

We can be sure of the location of the cross, since it is one of the lucky survivors, making it through revolution in the seventeenth century, relocation at the end of the eighteenth century and poor restoration in 1833. Neighbouring buildings may have been a key to its survival, as they had impinged on the monument to such an extent that the roof of the Falcon Inn actually leaned against one of the three statues of Eleanor! Perhaps this is a reason why the cross survived Parliamentarian desecration, despite an attack on Waltham Abbey. More restorations, this time more sympathetic, were carried out in 1885 and 1950-53. Today the cross has its own space at last, at a junction on the Old North Road (TL 361 004).

The cross is hexagonal in plan, with the three statues now replaced by replicas dating from the post-war restoration; the original sculptures are slightly larger than life and are housed in the V & A Museum [Priestland:24-27; Vallance:101-2; Winters].

      

 

Westcheap, London

From Waltham, the procession moved towards London; on the way they were met by Edward and his court and escorted into the city, where the queen’s body was taken to Holy Trinity Church, Aldgate. From there it went on next day to Greyfriars and St Paul’s for the night. After several masses there, in the morning the body was taken to the Dominican house at Blackfriars.

These establishments were close together, and the route between them encircled the spot where the cross was raised – at the west end of Cheapside, opposite what is now Wood Street (TQ 301 803), on the corner of which stood the now-vanished old St Peter’s Church. Edward’s own funeral procession in 1307 was to follow the same route from Waltham, where the body lay for fifteen weeks while preparations were made.

Lavish in expenditure and design, the cross soon achieved a prominent place in London life, becoming a recreational and mercantile focus. Some impetus towards this was undoubtedly given by the official celebrations at the birth of the future Edward III in 1312, when a pavilion containing a tun of wine was set up by the cross for passers-by to drink the new Prince’s health [Vallance:102].

Dilapidation necessitated repairs and restoration in 1441 and 1484-6. Gilding was also applied for state visits in 1522 and 1544 and similar improvements for the coronation processions of Anne Boleyn, Edward VI and Queen Mary. During this time it also acquired religious statuary, including the Resurrection and the Virgin Mary; these were eventually to prove its literal downfall. It began to attract criticism as a highway obstruction and a Papist remnant and on Midsummer’s Night, 1581, was attacked; when the vandals were disturbed, the statue of Mary, already minus her arms and the holy child, was found to have been bound with ropes ready to be pulled down.

 

Repairs at the end of the sixteenth century provided a water fountain under the damaged resurrection image; the fountain depicted the goddess Diana, with Thames water spouting from her breasts. Within a few years, however, the Mary and child statue was restored (and vandalised again within a fortnight), but in 1600 the cross was rebuilt.  At one stage, presumably aimed at defusing anti-Catholic feeling against the monument, a pyramid replaced the finial cross on top of the monument [Priestland:28-30; Vallance:105-6; Kent:88-9].

 

 

 

 

The coup de grace to the embattled cross came in 1643, when a Puritan troop ceremonially pulled down the cross, enjoying popular support in the act; it appears to have been seen as a symbolic demonstration of the triumph of Protestant values in England, though today we might consider its fate an outcome of fundamentalist zeal. It should also be remembered, though, that the Eleanor crosses did not just offend Protestant values, but also, as a royal memorial, republican values as well, and were thus double targets for the iconoclasts of the seventeenth century.

 

Charing, London

The twelfth and final cross of Eleanor’s corpseway through England was at Charing, where the grandest of all was raised where the Queen’s body was exposed for public view [Parsons, 1995:279].

Like that at Cheapside, Charing Cross (TQ 301 806) was restored in the sixteenth century, losing its Gothic character, and was yet another to fall victim, in 1647, to Parliamentary idealism. The present Charing Cross in the station forecourt is a reconstruction of 1863, designed by the architect E. M. Barry and the sculptor Thomas Earp, from drawings of  the original. That first cross stood 200 yards away, where the statue of King Charles I now stands, at the junction of Whitehall with Trafalgar Square. From Charing, the Queen’s bier proceeded to Westminster Abbey for interment.

Rimmer suggests the cross was responsible for the placename Charing, deriving from ‘chere reine’, or ‘beloved queen’; attractive though this derivation is, the Priestlands point out that the locality was known as Cyring in Saxon times, and a smithy was recorded at Charing in 1260 [Priestland:34; Rimmer:55; Vallance:108; Kent:81].

 

The Three Tombs

Twelve crosses commemorated Eleanor, and three tombs held her remains; her viscera lay at Lincoln, her heart at London’s Blackfriars Friary and her body in Westminster Abbey. Multiple burials were popular in the royal families of the time, and this should not be seen as an unusual practice.

Although the Lincoln tomb was destroyed in the seventeenth century, a drawing survives from that period which shows that it was very similar, if not identical, to that at Westminster, described below. It stood near the shrine of St Hugh. This proximity to a popular pilgrimage figure was repeated in the location of her tomb at Westmister.

On December 16th, before moving on to its final resting place, Queen Eleanor’s body lay overnight at Blackfriars, an establishment with which she had enjoyed a particularly close association. She had been instrumental in its foundation and had had the heart of her son Alfonso entombed there in 1284. Eleanor’s heart was also to remain in the Friary, in accordance with her own expressed wishes, in a casket supported by a golden angel [Priestland:31]. The deposition did not take place, however, until December 19, after the interment of her body at Westminster Abbey. The heart tomb was lost in 1550, when the priory became a church and its religious assets sold off [Parsons 1995:208].

The next day, December 17, 1290, the final ceremony of Eleanor’s interment was performed at Westminster Abbey. The body was buried with Eleanor’s royal sceptre, vestments and crown; a cross was marked in dust on her forehead and breast, and also placed with her were a wax candle and some writings – probably an indulgence. She was placed in the chapel built by Henry III in honour of the canonised King Edward the Confessor. Edward’s shrine stood at the centre; Henry III was already buried to one side; Eleanor was placed at Henry’s feet.

   Edward the Confessor’s shrine

   

By 1292 the life-size lost-wax bronze cast of Eleanor, by the goldsmith William Torel, was placed on top of her tomb and remains to this day. It is an impressively calm sculpture that seems incongruous lying on its back, as it has somehow caught her in the middle of a slight gesture more appropriate to a standing person – her left hand on her clothing across her chest, and her right poised to hold something, perhaps a sceptre, or perhaps in a gesture whose meaning we can only guess. A hint of a smile adds to her mysterious repose. John Parsons describes it as “not that of a recognisably dead person but of a crowned woman standing erect, simply robed, and with hair unbound as prescribed for a queen’s coronation. The hands are not folded in prayer but are deployed in gestures of power, the right positioned to carry a lost sceptre, the left toying with the mantle’s cord” [Parsons 1995:207].

A similar posture was chosen for most of the cross sculptures; although the Eleanor sculptures are impressive, the design was rather conventional in tone, and her pose borrowed from standard depictions of the Virgin and Child [Stone:142-5].

Division of the body after death was, as already noted, not uncommon, and separate burial of the heart and viscera became an established practice by the end of the thirteenth century, even though the Roman Church disapproved of the practice of mutilating the dead. With monarchs frequently dying at a distance from their homelands, however, disembowelment was not only prudent, but allowed incidental ceremonial advantages.

The French royal house of Capet, whose ritualistic style of monarchy appears to have had a strong influence on the thinking of both Henry III and Edward I, was given to tripartite burials in the latter half of the thirteenth century and there were precedents in Eleanor’s Castilian homeland [Hallam 1982; Hallam 1991:16]. Previous English kings had also followed this practice: Henry I’s body lay in Reading Abbey, while his entrails were entombed in Rouen, France; Richard I’s heart was at Rouen, while his viscera were in Chaluz and his body at Fontevraut; and John stayed in England, with his viscera at Croxton and his body at Worcester [Parsons 1995:206]. The division of a royal body, especially of those individuals of extraordinary influence, made possible statements of favour to certain regions, individuals or religious houses, and also increased pilgrimage and thus economic potential for the recipients; it also extended the arm of royal patronage in a form of posthumous benediction.

 

Architecture and Image

In 1270, Louis IX of France set off on Crusade. Among those travelling with him was Edward, and it was surely on this trip that Edward acquired the initial inspiration for Eleanor’s funeral procession and crosses. Louis (later St Louis) died of plague in Tunis in 1271, but Edward was not to return from the Holy Land until 1272, when he set off home to take the throne.

On his way back through France, Edward would have seen the memorial crosses, or montjoie, erected to mark the passage of Louis’ remains back to Paris. In preparation for the long journey, Louis’ body was eviscerated and boiled down to the skeleton. His brother, Charles of Anjou, applied for the heart, but Louis’ son and heir, Philip III, refused; Charles received instead Louis’ entrails, for a royal burial at Monreale in Sicily. The rest of the late king’s body journeyed in state back through France.

Under the reasoning that the legitimacy and support of the monarchy were influenced and could be manipulated by the quality of its visual impact on the people, the cortege route back to Paris was marked through France with montjoie (none of which now remain); significantly, the route passed through territories which Louis IX had only acquired in his lifetime. His body was interred in the abbey church of St-Denis, which Louis had had rebuilt as an ancestral shrine to his Carolingian-Capetian line, placing his predecessors’ tombs in the crossing of the reconstructed church; a clear statement of intent to make it a royal shrine [Hallam 1982:372]. It was also given a historicising capacity,  not only in the policy of its retrospective assemblage of tombs, but also in being commissioned to produce an official state history, the Grande Chroniques de France; the two policies are to be seen as a concerted attempt at constructing an official State history [Binski: 93]. Not just the crosses, but the whole matrix of ideas about the legitimacy and sacred status of the monarchy which were embodied in the French practice were to emerge in Edward’s own interpretation across the Channel.

An extra layer of meaning was added by Louis’ saintly reputation, that led to his speedy canonisation just six years after his death. As he meandered slowly back to England to take up his realm, Edward must have mused on the hallowed route of the montjoie,  the sacred royal mausoleum at St-Denis, and the fact that England already had its own royal saint, Edward the Confessor, and thanks largely to Edward’s father, Henry III, the makings of a powerful royal cult centre at Westminster.

The variety of architectural design which Edward had witnessed on his Crusade and the sacralised funeral route through France provided Edward with the architectural schema for his memorials to his queen. The polygonal and triangular ground-plans in great part derive from Islamic design via France; the influence is clear in the surviving crosses at Hardingstone and Geddington, which exhibit “a remarkable superimposition of interrelated geometric forms in the ground plan and cross sections of the successive layers of each monument, exotic forms which have no precedents within the European Gothic tradition”. The crosses were the first structures in England to employ the ogee curve and they raised English architecture and design to a par with anywhere in Europe – “their significance in English architectural history was out of all proportion to their size” [Gentleman:13,60,62-3; Brown, Colvin & Taylor:485; Coldstream] and decorated arches, gables, pinnacles, parapets and other features became key elements in English building.

The Eleanor crosses cannot be seen merely as lavish expressions of royal grief, as they clearly also played a role in a grander political strategy. Edward’s desire, influenced by the symbolism employed across the Channel, was to enhance royal prestige and presence. Eleanor’s death, however keenly felt, was a pretext; primarily, the monuments are more a tribute to Edward’s interpretation of monarchy than to his wife.

Apart from being architectural as well as geographical landmarks, the crosses were also significant in that they were the first series of commemorative monuments in England (earlier monumental crosses, such as one at Merton in Surrey built by Henry III in honour of William of Warenne, earl of Surrey, were single memorials) and the first to mark a royal procession through the land as a de facto sacred route.

 

Public Image

Eleanor’s public image was also gracefully manipulated by her statues on both crosses and tombs. The graceful poses depicted on her statuary, harking back to traditional depictions of the maternal Virgin, soften her image considerably, a ruse that was no doubt assisted by the romantic appeal of Edward’s grief. They were images designed to foster greater affection among English people.

The multiplication of the images is another interesting feature; in effect, Eleanor’s statues look out in all directions, and this may have been intended to symbolise the influence, if not the power, of the monarchy over all of England – an aim to which Edward was dedicated – or perhaps to symbolically bestow the blessing of the King’s affection outwards to his land and subjects, via the medium of his beloved Queen. The Mary-like poses themselves expressed her posthumous influence as caring and benevolent.

The statues are also placed at the vertical centre of the crosses, midway between earth, represented by the base, and heaven, represented by the spire and cross. Eleanor’s role as mediator – with the land, with the people and with God – is emphasised in this placement, which also, as we shall see below, plays a part in the wider complex of ideas expressed by Edward’s development of Westminster Abbey.

The legitimacy and support of power is influenced by its degree and style of visibility to a subject people, and so much more so where that visibility is prestigious or memorable. The Eleanor crosses paid lavish homage to a wife, a lover, a companion and an adviser; and they also extended her role in the English State beyond her death, by using image and location to enhance her spiritual puissance.

The crosses mark Eleanor’s presence in spirit; the mundane corpseway becomes a spirit road through England, not just for Eleanor’s bier, but also for the spiritual legitimacy of the Crown.

 

Westminster Abbey

 Westminster Abbey West Front

Eleanor’s death was a change of state in more ways than one. Edward’s memorials to his wife blurred the distinction between private grief and state expediency, and between the secular and the sacred. Eleanor, evidently an active queen during her lifetime, continued to play a political role after her death, through the monuments that commemorated her and affected the judgment of later generations.

Eleanor’s public image was also gracefully manipulated by the statues. Though she was not apparently especially well loved by the people in general, the graceful poses depicted on her statuary, harking back to the traditional depictions of the maternal Virgin, soften her image considerably, a ruse that was no doubt assisted by the romantic appeal of Edward’s grief and by subsequent chroniclers.

A key element in the posthumous role of Eleanor is Westminster Abbey. The abbey was founded by Edward the Confessor as his own final resting place and was dedicated at midwinter 1065 – just in time, as he died on January 5 following. The place was known as Thorney Island, and was already host to a seventh-century church, dedicated to St Peter. Before that, a Roman temple dedicated to Apollo may have stood there; it was a crossing point of the Thames, used by the Roman Watling Street, which followed an even earlier route. Pennick has suggested that there may have been a shrine to Thor on Thorney Island, and even a rather unlikely tradition of a stone circle on the island was cited by E.O.Gordon. Tothill Street, aligned on the present Abbey, and Tothill Fields, a part of which now stand in Westminster School grounds, indicate an ancient mound in the vicinity, perhaps at Regency Place, as late as 1746 [Devereux: 103].

   Thorney Isle in 1550s (after Wyngarde)

The site was therefore of some significance even before the great abbey was raised [Rowse:47] and was to become England’s premier religious house, granted exceptional privileges – it was exempt from the jurisdicton of the See of London, and no other priest, even the Archbishop of Canterbury, can officiate there without express permission [Barker:38]. Among its powerful relics were was a girdle dropped by the Virgin Mary (used to ease childbirth), some of Mary Magdalene’s hair, a phial of Holy Blood given to Henry III by the Knights Templar and Hospitallers (which was carried to the cathedral with great ritual solemnity by the fasting King himself), and a stone believed to show the footprint of the ascending Christ [Kent:715].

The relative frequency of St Peter placenames (Grantham, Stamford, Dunstable, Westcheap and Westminster) in relation to the crosses should be noted; Peter was invoked also in the dedication of Westminster Abbey, the eventual destination of the Eleanor route, and its predecessor church. St Peter “represents the public and formal manifestations of institutional power” and the conferral of that power. This was esoterically affirmed in England by a vision of the Bishop of Winchester, in which he saw Edward, later to be king and finally canonised as the Confessor, blessed and consecrated by the saint himself, who then anointed Edward as king. Peter also, in the vision, dedicated Westminster Abbey, in so doing displacing Bishop Mellitus of London, who would normally have been responsible for all consecrations in his diocese, and securing the Abbey as a separate institution of particular reference to the English body politic [Binski: 66].

The abbey as we see it now, however, is largely the foundation of Henry III, who rebuilt it in the middle of the 13th century. He had the Confessor’s shrine, a popular pilgrimage destination, removed in 1269 to the east end of the new abbey, and placed centrally in a chapel on a raised level behind the High Altar. In the preceding year, he had had the Cosmati Pavement installed in the Sanctuary, within which the first, secret and mysterious, part of coronation rites takes place; the design of interlinked circles and squares, cardinally aligned, with an inscription, points to a geomantic meaning, connecting the cosmic and the mundane and symbolising the godhead’s alchemical creation of the world. During coronation, monarchs moved from one circle to another, esoterically aligning themselves with the four quarters of their kingdom. Henry also chose his own tomb location, on the north side of the chapel. The foundations were thus in place for an English royal shrine, and Edward I continued the process.

Edward commissioned a tomb effigy for his father, Henry III, at the same time as he commissioned Eleanor’s, and from the same craftsman, William Torel. In due course the Confessor’s shrine was encircled by royal tombs, with the Coronation Chair and the High Altar to the west – from the north-west of the shrine to the south-west, they were Edward I, Henry III, Queen Eleanor of Castile, Henry V, Queen Philippa of Hainault, Edward III and a double tomb containing Richard II and his queen, Anne of Bohemia.

The attention paid to the tomb is indicative of Edward’s use of Eleanor’s death to raise the profile of his monarchy, even to exalt it. Torel’s life-size effigy was not just the largest cast work in England, it was also among the finest works of art in Europe, and it conformed to a sacred tradition – it “inextricably mingles the sacred and the secular; the effigy could be interchangeable with a statue of the Virgin Mary” and “showed that a consort as well as king could associate monarchy with sacred authority” [Parsons 1995:207,213]. Important notes of association were sounded around her tomb. Floor tiles  – now vanished, but thought to have possibly depicted the late queen between St Edmund and St Thomas a Becket – surrounded her tomb; and the tomb itself was placed in close proximity to the shrine of the greatest religious figure of the English state, St Edward the Confessor. These locations speak not of sanctifying the queen herself (or the other figures that were to be interred in the chapel, whose lives would all too clearly have fallen short of such a mark), but of sanctity conferred by association.

Edward’s burial of his wife in Westminster Cathedral confirmed a process whereby Westminster became the sacred focus of the English crown, hosting both coronations and burials. In addition to the influence from the French royal shrine of St-Denis, Queen Eleanor herself may have had some influence in this development; a century before, the Castilian royal house itself had founded the Las Huelgas nunnery to be their venue for royal burials and coronations.

The inclusion of Dunstable in the Eleanor route may also represent a significant development of the Westminster role. If this town really was considered in some way to be a mystical centre, or omphalos, up to and including the thirteenth century, then its incorporation into the royal corpseway, combined with Edward’s development of Westminster Abbey as a shrine for a royal cult, may express a symbolic or ritual shift of those omphalos functions to Westminster.

The key figure in this restatement of an exalted monarchy was the canonised Confessor, patron saint of England at the time and already a focus of pilgrimage, lying in his shrine with later monarchs slowly gathering around him. What was conferred in God’s name at coronation returned to God at death in the near company of Edward the Confessor; and this rite of passage was then succeeded by another coronation. Westminster was set on its way to becoming a centre for the sacred renewal and continuity of sovereignty, a ritual role it has not altogether lost today. As a repository for the memory if not the remains of so many of England’s monarchs, nobles, State figures, bards and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, it is effectively  the national shrine of England. Eleanor’s posture in her effigy, hair unbound as if for coronation, and probably once holding a sceptre, underlined this theme.

At the time, however, Edward was not looking only to posterity, but in the shorter term to reinforce Plantagenet claims to the throne. Succession issues were becoming increasingly contested in mediaeval Europe, and the civil wars of his father’s reign hint at growing secular pressures on rulership. There was also, as we have noted with reference to St Louis and his development of St-Denis as a royal mausoleum, a contemporary tendency to exalt monarchies to cult status [Hallam 1982]. Henry III had initiated this in England by his reconstruction plans for Westminster Abbey; though unfinished at his death, the process of establishing the Abbey as a cultic centre had begun and was continued by his son. The development of Westminster as the fount and repository of sacred legitimacy stabilised the religious and ritualistic role of the monarchy, while confirming the Plantagenet claim to it. For the time, it strengthened not only the sacred nature of monarchy, but also its hereditary succession.

In some ways Westminster went a stage further than St-Denis, in its association not simply with ancestral legitimacy, but with ongoing government and royal presence, as represented by the adjacent palace. The symbolic was allied with the real; the esoteric and profane centres were a step apart (a similar contiguity can be seen at the Tynwald at St John’s, Isle of Man). The birth, life and death, as well as the coronations, of the ruling royal house were thus gathered together in this one small area.

If Westminster became the centre of the Plantagenet cult of sacred kingship, then the route of Eleanor’s funeral procession was its horizontal axis, by which the power of the centre – and hence the State, represented by the monarchy – could flow outwards to the land and its people. At each cross, the emanations from the centre were symbolically distributed. The almost life-sized statues of Eleanor were placed vertically and horizontally at the centre of each cross, standing on the central storey of the monument with their backs to the centre shaft. They mediated between the base, i.e. the land, and heaven, represented by the pinnacle cross. Eleanor’s statues represented the English monarchy translating their exalted position between God and the land outwards to their people. As they looked out over the land, the link with the centre at Westminster was made and passed on at each of the twelve consecrated sites.

 

The Politics of Esoteric Conquest

Was Edward merely aping and adapting the applied esotericism of his continental peers, or was he able to understand the more esoteric principles of rulership and apply them to his own circumstances? It is one thing to make one’s home church a royal shrine and repository of sovereignty, and to hallow the route of a queen’s soul towards that centre; but are there other ways than force of arms by which a military ruler might assert power in their own subjects, and to subjugate and demoralise conquered nations? In this respect, it is worth looking at other events of Edward’s reign, particularly relating to his conduct of Welsh and Scottish business.

 

Wales

Following the death of Llewelyn ab Grufydd and the collapse of the second Welsh rebellion, Edward took determined steps to disestablish the Welsh national entity and sever it from its traditional roots, hoping thereby to remove a thorny destabilising influence on his western flank. He put his ideas to work after Llewelyn’s fateful second rising in 1282.

The Cistercian Abbey of Aberconwy was the premier religious house of the northern Welsh princes – at least, it was until Edward arrived at Conway with his army in 1283. Although Henry II of England had issued a routine charter in 1189, Aberconwy’s effective foundation dated from a charter issued by Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Llywelyn the Great, at the end of the twelfth century, allowing it freedom from secular authority, the right to toll-free passage in Llywelyn’s lands and other privileges. This established Aberconwy as the primary monastery in North Wales, and the subsequent burials of six Welsh princes of Llywelyn’s line identified it, like Westminster for England, as Wales’ royal sacred centre and repository of its sovereignty. Unsurprisingly, the Abbey also became associated with Welsh political causes of the thirteenth century [Hays:46-9].

Conway, by its geographical position, was an excellent opportunity for Edwardian redevelopment, but was already occupied by two groups of buildings, both important to the Welsh dynasty – the abbey with its royal tombs and the princes’ residence, known as the Hall of Llywelyn. Edward’s reconstruction of Conway not only obtained a prime location for a castle and new town, it abolished a powerful political and symbolic centre of the Welsh. The Princes’ Hall was incorporated into the new settlement for English administrative use, while the monastery itself was relocated; the expense and effort of this “was offset politically by the demonstration thereby afforded of the eclipse of the native dynasty and its institutions” [Brown, Colvin & Taylor:337-51].

Preparations were set in motion within hours of the king’s arrival in the town. It seems that relations with the abbey were remarkably reasonable, with Edward treading carefully in the matter of its relocation and privileges: “determined to offend nobody, he refrained from making any arbitrary use of his power, though he could have avoided much red tape by acting more tyranically” [Hays:62]. It could be that Eleanor had a hand in this tactful treatment, which was notably absent in Edward’s Scottish campaigns after her death. The abbey was rebuilt at Maenan, three miles away, and remained loyal to the English crown thereafter [Hays:79]; the English castle was built, symbolically enough, where the Welsh princes had lain.

With the dismissal of the royal buildings at Aberconwy, the Welsh lost their traditional centre of kingship; it had been abrogated by London. Moreover, its site was occupied by an imposing symbol of where power and sovereignty now lay, a castle which was a permanent visual reminder of their loss of royal identity. As spoils of the English victory, Edward took Llewelyn’s royal gold circlet back to Westminster and hung it on the shrine of Edward the Confessor [Rowse:47], but also received significant gifts; as the Register and Chronicle of Aberconwy recalled, “The Welsh surrendered…a small piece of the precious cross of the Lord, called in Cambria the Cross of Neath, with many other famous relics. They gave up, too, the crown of the celebrated Arthur, once King of Britain, and so the glory of Wales and of the Welsh was transferred to the kings and great men of England” [Hays:149]. In the light of this development, it is interesting to note that most Welsh chronicles break off after 1283.

Conway was part of Edward’s ambitious building programme in North Wales. The programme was so intensive, requisitioning artesans from every part of the realm, that it effectively halted architectural work in England [Brown, Colvin & Taylor:407]. Five castles, some of the most sophisticated in Europe, were built in association with fortified towns, holding privileges similar to the bastides Edward had created in France. The Welsh towns were settled with English burgesses and given economic rights in exchange for helping maintain the king’s territory, and were “an integral part of Edward’s plan for the subjection of Wales to English rule” [Brown, Colvin & Taylor:228].

Conway was not the only place where Edward’s plans had a clearly symbolic, even esoteric, intent. The construction of Caernarvon Castle involved a quasi-mythic dimension, derived from a deliberate association with ancient legends.

Caernarvon itself was the site of Roman Segontium, and it is apparent that the Welsh imbued the site with the grandeur of antiquity – a twelfth-century Welshman described the site as “the old city of the Emperor Constantine”, it being supposed that the Roman Emperor Constantine had indeed resided at Segontium for a while. This personage was probably Constantius, who ruled Britain on behalf of Rome in the late third century and died at York. Another mark for British pride was that Constantius was said to have married a British, even Welsh, princess called Helena, but there are problems with this popular assumption. Tradition, as so often, was co-opting favoured pieces of history towards its own ends. There were undoubtedly Britons called Helen or Helena who had achieved high legendary status in Britain, but this Helena was actually born in Turkey and seems likely to have worked in an inn before her rise in status; moreover, Constantius divorced her before he went to Britain. Nevertheless, in legend she became a figure allying British sovereignty with Rome.

Constantius’ son, Constantine, succeeded his father as ruler of Britain, and he is credited with leading an army to the continent to depose an unpopular Emperor, Maxentius. He re-established his mother as Empress and is credited with favouring Christianity throughout the Roman Empire; his mother is credited with finding the True Cross and the nail of the Crucifixion [Ashe: 155-158].

Another assumed descendant of Constantius was Maximus, and it is this figure in whom these strands of Welsh legend come together. Again, legendary claims of British blood are illusory, but he certainly rose to high legionary office in Britain in the fourth century, and was supported by the British legions in the 380s when Maximus was a candidate for imperial succession. His continental campaign nearly succeeded; after success across Europe, his army reached Rome in 388, but Maximus was captured and executed. It was in itself the stuff of a heroic tale, and Welsh legend moved to fill in any shortcomings[Ashe:159-64].

Crucial to Cernarvon’s Edwardian refoundation was one of the tales in the Welsh story cycle, the Mabinogion. ‘The Dream of Macsen Wledig’ (Macsen Wledig was a local rendering of Magnus Maximus, Wledig meaning ‘ruler’), tells how Macsen is already Emperor of Rome; and one day, taking a nap while out hunting, he has a dream – he is taking a journey to a northern land across the sea, and comes to “a great city at the mouth of the river, and in the city a great castle, and great towers of various colours”. He enters, meets a young maiden and her family, they embrace – and he awakes. Pining for the dream vision, he sends out thirteen couriers armed with a description of the place he had seen, and they eventually locate the fortress at the mouth of the River Seint, and the young maid, Elen, sitting with her family. The couriers presented her with an unexpected marriage proposal, but Elen insisted that if he wanted her he must come to get her – which he did. As part of her marriage fee, she required that “the most exalted stronghold should be made for her in Arfon”, and Maximus brought soil from Rome to spread over the site, forging a connection between the land of Imperial Rome and Welsh royal lineage[Jones & Jones: 79-85].

The story goes on, of course, and includes the roads that Elen caused to be made across Britain, and we may even wonder if Elen’s highways may have had some influence on the last royal road of Queen Eleanor. Elen’s highways acquired a quasi-mythical status on their own, and Elen herself absorbed “the mythic lore of a tutelary spirit presiding over the roads”. Perhaps subsumed into her actions was the legacy of Constantius, who laid the foundations of the Welsh highway system during his tenure, and the legendary confusion over his wife Helena. [Ashe: 164] This whole episode shows the ahistoricity as well as the fascination of myth-making. Whether his wife really was British, and what her name was, is unknown. And to Edward I, it was not really important what was true, as much as what was popularly believed to be true – for in that interplay lay a key to inheriting the support of the subject people.

This returns us to Caernarvon. It was here in 1283 that a body was found in the ruins and locally ascribed to be that of that high-ranking Roman, Macsen Wledig, legendarily an Emperor, equally legendarily family to the supposed British princess Helena, a man who came to be counted among Wales’ ancestral heroes – an honorary Briton.

Edward’s plans recognised and built upon this ‘dreamtime’ aura of Caernarvon’s, even embellishing it by embodying and embellishing, both geographically and architecturally, the Welsh legends. It was on the site of the fortress foretold in the dream that Edward built a castle that manifestly evoked both the legendary building of Macsen and also the Emperor Constantine’s own city of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) and fused together different elements of the Welsh legends. Caernarvon is different from Edward’s other castles, in that its design aims beyond military function to a recreation of legendary associations, not only in its site but in its design. Its bands of different-coloured masonry and polygonal towers on the curtain wall have only one known precedent – the Theodosian Wall at Constantinople. Again like Constantinople, Caernarvon even had a Golden Gate, underlining the parallelism between the new Welsh castle and its legendary associations.

The association of the bones found in the old ruins with Maximus, moreover, had overtones of the ritual reburial of the Arthurian bones at Glastonbury; there could be no doubt that Maximus, as well as Arthur, was dead – but Edward ensured continuity by raising the new power centre of the town  almost literally upon his – real or more likely alleged – bones.

Thus, Caernarvon Castle was “conceived and commissioned… as a building which would be at once the memorial and symbol of past greatness, a worthy witness of present victory, and the viceregal centre of a new order… It would seem that the new building was intended from the outset to recall Caernarvon’s legendary past and to exemplify it in the architectural forms of the imperial power with which that past was associated” [i.e. the ramparts were surmounted by the legionary emblem, the eagle] [Brown, Colvin & Taylor:369-71].

But this was not the end of Caernarvon’s enlistment to Edward’s symbolic policy, for in 1284 Eleanor was removed to the part-built castle in time for the birth of her son Edward, the first royal child to be born in Wales since the native princes of Gwynedd, and the first English Prince of Wales. Curiously, however, Edward II, as he was to become, never went back to his birthplace; and even though it was, until the seventeenth century, the administrative centre of North Wales, the town was only once visited by a reigning monarch until the reign of George V; “indeed only with the investiture ceremony of 1911 did Caernarvon Castle begin to play something of the symbolic role in the affairs of the principality that its founder undoubtedly envisaged for it” [Brown, Taylor & Colvin:394].

The castle took 35 years to complete, so that Edward never saw his dream achieve reality. Another unsuccessful rebellion in the mid-1290s indicated that not all the Welsh were dazzled or subjugated by Edward’s psychological warfare, but by and large the English conquest was effective in quieting the country.

In 1316, Edward III helped the symbolism along, whether consciously or not we do not know, by dismantling the old Princes’ Hall at Conway and having it shipped for reconstruction at Caernarvon –  as a storehouse [Brown, Taylor & Colvin:354].

 

Scotland

Edward’s machiavellian interference in Scottish royal affairs caused sufficient resentment for the malcontents to tweak the English king’s tail in 1295, by making an alliance with France, with whom Edward was at war. Edward’s response was typically firm and decisive. First moving to dismiss an opportunistic Welsh rising that hoped to benefit from Scotland’s bold move, Edward then proceeded to impose a crushing defeat on the Scots rebels in 1296. This victory allowed him the opportunity to attack their national identity in a fashion similar to his treatment of Wales – to strike at the heart of the symbols of sovereignty.

For a time, he considered levelling the hill on which Scone Abbey stood; such an act would have been a complete nullification of Scottish royal ceremony, similar to but far more sweeping than the destruction of Aberconway; however, in the end he simply took away as a souvenir of his campaign the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny. This stone, like Arthur’s crown from Wales, was installed at Edward the Confessor’s shrine in Westminster Abbey, symbolically allying the sovereignty of Scotland, like that of Wales, to England’s. This was a classic act of symbolic unification.

The Stone is a block of Old Red Sandstone weighing about 350 lb and credited with the power to confer legitimacy on a ruler; 34 Scottish kings were crowned upon it. Legends associate the stone with Jacob’s Pillow, a rock on which he laid his head and dreamed his vision of angels ascending a ladder to heaven. This stone had afterwards been set up as a stone for offerings; the assumed role of the Stone in conferring sovereignty and territorial claim is attested in God’s words, “the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed” [Genesis 28:11-22] and reaffirmed in church consecration ritual, which cited Jacob’s anointing of the stone at Bethel [Binski: 138]. Its exodus from Egypt associates Biblical legitimation with Celtic tradition, as it travelled as a dowry from a girl called Scotia or Scota, the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh who discovered Moses in the rushes. Some legends allege it was brought directly to Scotland’s Hill of Dunadd (see below) by Scotia, while other tales prefer a longer route in which Scotia married either an Irish prince or a Greek called Gathelus or Gedyl-Glays. The Gathelus version takes the stone first to Spain, where it became a throne, and then in due course, via a descendant, passes the stone on to a similar function in Ireland. There it became the seat of the High Kings of Tara, before being taken to Iona (where it is said to have been used as a pillow on St Columba’s deathbed) by Fergus mac Erc, founder of the Dalriadan kingdom, as their inauguration stone; its translation to Scone Abbey as the royal coronaton throne of the Scots came through Kenneth mac Alpin [Barker:144-5] in around 845 CE.

Such legends not only proffer a link between Celtic and Biblical esoterics, they also ascribe a direct association between the stone and the sacred dimension; they identify it as a magical object and express the intense influence it has held in the legitimation of Scotland’s monarchy and thus by extension with the post-Edward English monarchy. The use of a ‘king stone’ in England was already known, as shown by the Saxon coronation stone at Kingston-upon-Thames, and traditionally represents the alliance of the monarch with the land.

There have been doubts about whether the stone Edward took was the real one; indeed a 1951 report compared the present stone with that pictured on early Scottish seals, and concluded that it must be different [Barker:171]. However, no serious claimant for the real stone has appeared, despite a number of rumours.

In 1306, echoing the disestablishment of Aberconway, Edward even petitioned Rome to be allowed to move Scone Abbey from its site “in the midst of a perverse nation’ as well [Prestwich:509: Binski: 140].

Edward’s grand theft of the Stone was aimed directly at the heart of Scottish sovereignty and precipitately abrogated that sovereignty to Westminster. The notion of ‘corporal possession’ in Scotland, or the transfer of legitimacy from place to place, was represented by the removal of earth from the old to the new site; the Stone’s relocation was manifestly such an act of corporal possession, like the relocation of the abbey at Aberconway and the near-relocation of that at Scone.

The Stone was placed under the Coronation Chair, especially commissioned for the purpose by Edward I, for a role in the future coronations of English kings. In the intervening seven hundred years, it is often claimed, every sovereign of England and the United Kingdom, except Edwards V (who was actually born in the Abbey) and VIII, was crowned on the Stone; its legitimising charisma has been such that it was even removed from the Abbey to Westminster Hall for Oliver Cromwell to be installed as Lord Protector [Rowse:47].

This has, however, been disputed by Binski, who believes the Stone and Chair were exploited as trophies rather than coronation props, though this does not preclude them from some role in coronation ceremonies. Binski’s impression is that the use of the Chair as a coronation seat dates from the Lancastrians, rather than Edward’s Plantagenets,  and that the first unequivocal documentary record of its use in this ceremony was at Henry IV’s enthronement in 1399 [Binski:138].

It is interesting, as an aside, to note that the Stone of Destiny is one of a number of ‘king stones’ used in pre-Christian Britain. A common variant of such stones has a ‘footprint’ in it, in which the monarch at installation has to place his foot to establish the essential link between the ruler and the land that he and his subjects live on. One of Britain’s most celebrated examples is in fact in Scotland, at the Dark Age hill fort of Dunadd in Argyll and Bute. The fort was the inauguration site of the kings of Dalriada, and according to the Scotia legend was the first Scottish resting place of the Stone of Scone [Another footprint associated with Scotia is a rock basin said to be the imprint of her horse’s hoof at nearby Kilmichael Glassary. Grinsell:224]. Another ‘footprint stone’ was among the relics received by Westminster Abbey during the reign of Henry III, Edward’s father; its provenance is unknown, but the print was said to be the mark of Christ’s foot, made when he ascended. On the balance of probabilities, a more local inauguration stone would seem to be a more likely provenance [Kent: 715].

Other than Cromwell’s installation, the only time the Stone was absent from the Abbey was when it was stolen by Scottish nationalists at Christmas 1950; it was eventually handed over to the Abbey of Arbroath and returned to Westminster in time for the coronation of Elizabeth II (whose claimed genealogy stretches back to Fergus mac Erc) in 1953. This may well have been the last coronation to which the Coronation Stone will bear witness; in November 1996, the Stone of Scone was removed from Westminster and returned to Scotland. Not, however, to Scone, or necessarily to a functional future as a king stone, but to sit with the Scottish Crown Jewels, or Honours of Scotland, in a display case in Edinburgh Castle [Naturally, a service was held in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh to celebrate the return of the Stone, and again naturally this occurred on St Andrews day, November 30, 1996. The coincidence with the day decreed by Edward for Eleanor’s memorial masses is curious, but obviously no more than coincidental].

There was relatively little that Edward could do in Scotland to claim precedent and pin his fortunes to legendary history, as he had done in Wales, and the nearest he got to it would seem to have been an attempt to legitimise his actions in Scotland in a letter to Pope Boniface VIII in 1301, claiming that King Arthur had inherited rulership of Scotland through the line of the Trojan, Brutus, the legendary founder of London and indeed Britain, who conferred Scotland on one of his sons, Albanact [Binski: 138-9]. Arthur, so the claim went, had seen fit to install a client king in Scotland – an implied reference to Balliol – who subsequently paid homage to him at Caerleon, and thereby the English monarchy became heirs to a pan-British past.

Interestingly also, Edward established the anniversary memorial of Eleanor’s death, who died on November 28, on the eve and feast of St Andrew, November 30. The diagonal cross of St Andrew had appeared on Scottish standards since possibly as far back as the eighth century, and certainly from the thirteenth; it may be that the celebration of his queen’s memory on that day was also, in the king’s mind, a symbolic ‘act of union’.

The Scotland campaign did not, however, match the success in Wales; perhaps because it was not accompanied by such massive castle-building and financial backing, or because Edward died before he had consolidated his victory, or because there was no equivalent legendary backdrop to legitimise Edward’s claim to sovereignty – or possibly even that Edward could not be advised by Eleanor, as he may well have been in Wales, as to the most effective means to win people’s respect rather than resentment. Instead, he had to fall back on the de facto corporal possession of Scotland’s emblems, in an attempt to re-historicise them. Edward’s epithet, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, does not imply a tactful attitude to the nation he sought  to bring into unity with England and Wales. In both cases, though more so in Scotland’s case, subsequent centuries have reverberated with the effects of Edward’s campaigns.

Nonetheless, his actions in Scotland as well as in Wales were essentially ritual and esoteric in intent, allying a language of symbolism with legend, romance, politics and military might. The intention was to psychologically underscore temporal conquest by removing or undermining the symbols of the sovereign identity of independent peoples and assimilating them into the power structures of the new lords.

Edward was no stranger to military success, and with his massive army could hold power by force; but he knew that if he could weaken a people’s soul by removing their sense of centre, his control would be the more complete and might even persist after his death. To that end, he put a certain distance between himself and his military successes – the appropriation of primary cultural symbols was done not in Edward’s name, nor yet in that of his family, but in that of St Edward the Confessor – the Stone of Scone, the Cross of Neath and Arthur’s circlet were all offered to his shrine [Binski: 105, 135]. In further evidence of Edward’s symbolic quest for sacred sanction, the ruler sanctioned by St Peter himself thus inherited the territories conquered by Edward I. With these sacred relics concentrated in Westminster, and competing venues disestablished, the Abbey became the spiritual centre of Britain – its omphalos.

 

The Monarch with the Mystic Touch

Two other characteristics of King Edward I may also have contributed to this unexpected esoteric side of his otherwise militaristic and authoritarian personality. One was his belief in the royal touch to cure ‘the king’s evil’, scrofula, and the other was his fascination with the Arthurian legends.

 

The King’s Touch

The ability to cure scrofula by royal touch was a divine power apparently ascribed only to the kings of England and France, and only to those whose legitimacy of office was generally accepted by the people. The custom is thought to have originated in France, and the power conferred via the oil used at their coronation. It is uncertain who introduced it to England; some sources say it was Edward the Confessor[Evans:632]. Others suggest it was Henry III, under the influence of France’s Louis IX, whose ritualistic interpretation of monarchy was later to have some influence Edward I. Louis’ version has him introducing the practice on his return from the Crusades in 1254, by which time his candidacy for sainthood was already well advanced. Edward, however, though even he could not have considered himself saintly, showed great enthusiasm for this healing office, and touched the sick more than any other English monarch until the Stuart dynasty – 1,736 in 1289-90, and around 2,000 in 1305-6 [Prestwich:113].

Edward’s readiness to perform the service indicates that he was somewhat taken by the idea that the divine power could work through the royal body, and that it was physically transmissible if the monarch was accepted by the people as legitimate. This indicates his firm belief in sacred kingship. The implications of this conviction impinge upon the design of the Eleanor Crosses; for if the monarch could become a mediator for healing the sick, then might he not also be able to channel divine benevolence into uniting and healing a fractured land? And might not the collected bodies of English royals, gathered around their sainted predecessor in Westminster Abbey, form a powerful nucleus of divine favour?

The custom, firmly rooted in an exalted perception of royal office indicating a special relationship with God, persisted for many centuries, becoming a ceremonial affair under Henry VII. The healing power apparently went, not in a hereditary line, but with a legitimate claim to the throne, and in his Miscellanies, Aubrey noted that English philosophers in the seventeenth-century were puzzled, “for whether our Kings were of the house of York, or Lancaster, it did cure”. The Stuart kings perhaps believed in the divine favour of the monarchy more strongly than any other monarchs after Edward I; Charles II is thought to have delivered the King’s Touch to over 90,000 people, and the Stuart Pretenders, like Bonny Prince Charlie, also claimed to have the power. [The last recorded instance was Queen Anne touching Dr Johnson without effect in 1712. Evans:632]

Scrofula acquired its nickname of ‘the king’s evil’ because of this apparent ability vested in legitimate French and English kings, but there do not seem to be any other illnesses that our monarchs were especially qualified to cure. Legitimacy is the key factor – Christina Hole remarked that England’s West Country supported the Duke of Monmouth’s claim to the throne because whereas his rival, George I, refused to touch people, Monmouth had demonstrated his legitimacy to the crown by curing local people of scrofula [Hole:172]

 

The Once and Future King

Arthurian tales were hugely popular in mediaeval society, especially the aristocracy, on both sides of the Channel, but there is evidence that they were taken as much more than literature. For some, they were effectively mythical, occurring in a timeless and archaic  world replete with magic and divine interventions, codified by symbolic events; at the same time they were redolent with references to contemporary society, and set out codes of behaviour and right practice that were a model for chivalric life. There is evidence that Edward I was one of those who took the tales seriously, as a model for sacred kingship, and as a backdrop against which to fashion some of his Acts. In his dream of unifying Britain, he may even have seen himself as the contemporary representative of Arthur, the archetypal legitimate British king and unifier. This was the ultimate ideal to which Edward surely aspired. His legendary luck may even have seemed like

Any Arthurian enthusiast will sooner or later journey to Glastonbury, and Edward was no exception. In 1278, a year after the defeat of the first Welsh rebellion, Edward and Eleanor went to Glastonbury Abbey to attend the translation of the alleged bones of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere to a grave in front of the High Altar. Although their bodies had originally been discovered in 1191, Edward was the first English king to have paid any attention to the alleged remains of the illustrious royal couple. Though according to Prestwich “no overt connection was made between the exhumation of the most famous British king, and the recent campaign in Wales” [Prestwich:120], other commentators believe that “Edward I, as well as being an Arthurian  enthusiast, still needed to impress the Welsh that Arthur was dead” [Rahtz:44]. In other words, that the popular belief that Arthur would return to save the Britons was without foundation.

The definition of a legend is a story told as if it were true, and Edward’s attention to the Glastonbury bones was an act that affirmed the truth of King Arthur and his court, while shrewdly undermining those legends that could destabilise Edward’s kingdom. Indeed, Edward was himself ready to take on the mantle of the quasi-mythical king.

Edward’s preparedness to co-opt legend into the demonstration of his legitimacy was also demonstrated after his defeat of the second Welsh uprising. His scheme for Caernarvon Castle, already discussed, showed a recognition that the Welsh dynasty would be better disestablished by a grand statement associating the Plantagenet throne with the heroic age of British legend.

His predilection for mediaeval hero tales and Arthurian romance was well known to others. After their defeat, the Welsh presented Edward with the crown they believed to have been Arthur’s, an effective act of appeasement to a king with a fondness for the quasi-historical legends. Without the well-publicised relocation of Arthur’s bones at Glastonbury, demonstrating that their old king was indeed dead and buried (twice),  such a gift may never have been made; giving away Arthur’s crown acknowledged the loss of hope that he would return.

The Arthurian associations in Edward’s reign go even further. A dubious French chronicle of Edward’s conquest of Wales ends with Edward’s encounter with King Arthur’s bones in a Welsh cave – perhaps that chronicler thought Glastonbury’s claim to be the king’s resting place was suspect, as indeed some suspected in an age when to possess important relics was to possess pilgrimage marketing power. His version of events, however, still reaffirmed Arthur’s death and the impossibility of his return; he also set up a physical encounter between the two kings on Welsh soil, implying Edward I as Arthur’s apparent heir.

Edward, of course, helped his Arthurian cause along himself. In 1284 and 1302, he held so-called ‘Round Table’ festivities at Nefyn, near Caernarvon, in Wales and Falkirk in Scotland, to celebrate in feast and tournament his victories in those lands, and associate them with Arthurian ideals. Other Arthurian references feature in contemporary chronicles. His son, the future Edward II, who had been born at Caernarvon Castle in 1284, was knighted (along with three hundred others) in 1301 at an grand affair known as the ‘Feast of Swans’; this was said to have expressed Edward’s “passion for Arthur” and was named for its display of a pair of swans adorned with golden nets and gilded reeds.[Longford:101] Indeed, it may have been Edward I who commissioned the famous Round Table still to be seen in Winchester Castle Hall (though the painting on it was done in Henry VIII’s reign).

Though Prestwich considers the Arthurian analogy “probably no more than a conceit he toyed with occasionally”, it is very tempting to see in such symbolic acts an idealist’s dream of himself as the unifier of Britain, in the mould of Arthur or Maximus, a reflection of his country’s greatest hero tales and their noble code of chivalry[Prestwich:120-1]. Edward was known not just as Longshanks, or the Hammer of the Scots, but also as ‘the Flower of Chivalry’, and after his death, the French chronicler, Pierre de Langtoft, wrote an epitaph in which he commended the late king:[Longford:104]

“Of chivalry, after King Arthur, Was King Edward the flower of Christendom”

 

Edward & Eleanor: The wider picture

Edward I today is primarily known as the monarch who created a rational legal code in England, built impressive state-of-the-art castles to underpin his conquest of Wales, and attempted to subject the Scots, in such a way as to earn England a legacy of distrust. He managed a massive military machine and raised high taxes to support it, and at the end of his reign had succeeded in realising, albeit nominally, a unified Britain centralised under the English crown. He had codified law, standardised units of measure such as the inch and the acre[Pennick, 1999:169-70], and carried through a number of other reforming and standardising policies. English historians have praised him; others have been less sure.

As prince to his father, Henry III, Edward had seen an erosion of royal power which at his coronation he vowed to reverse, and a development of royalty’s sacred pretensions that he seemed inclined to further. In his reformation of law and parliament he went a good distance towards establishing the parameters of the rights of monarch and subjects. He also attempted to draw the island of Britain into a single state, centred on the English crown and its national shrine at Westminster; his fortunes in this endeavour, pursued through military might and symbolist guile, were more mixed. His memorial crosses to his queen need to be seen as a mixture of devotion to his wife and devotion to the cause he had set himself – to re-establish the central role of the Crown, and attract to it a sacred aura that would enhance the legitimacy of the English crown.

Eleanor of Castile, outside academe, is now known for little more than her crosses, if that. Eleanor in life was a constant companion of the King, active in their political affairs and evidently a close associate in his political aims. It is fitting, therefore, that even in death she should fulfil a similar role, underpinning and reinforcing the King’s relationship with his country. Eleanor’s crosses became a symbolic royal axis in the Plantagenet realm, so that she continued to assist his attempts at unification; at the same time the mutual devotion of the couple provided an appealing image, as contemporary historians realised, for the population at large, an image that humanised the monarchy and softened the martial character of Edward’s reign.

In fiction and the yarns of storytellers, we can allow our love stories to be simple; but most of us have enough experience of love and relationship to know that it is rarely, if ever, such a black and white issue. An elaborate gravestone put up by a bereaved family is probably, but not necessarily, an expression of love; it also conveys messages of wealth and position, a statement to the outside world. Why then should Eleanor’s crosses have been any different?

The splendour of Eleanor’s posthumous procession and its memorials are unparalleled in English history, and it is needful to ask whether extravagant grief is sufficient explanation for them. Indeed, I have suggested that it is more likely that they form part of a royal strategy designed to strengthen the English ruling house through esoteric symbolism and legendary precedent, as well as sheer military might.

We must wonder if Edward and Eleanor had ever discussed for themselves the kind of sacred funeral route such as that taken by the remains of Louis IX of France, marking its progress by a series of royal montjoies. Given the perilous and long journeys they undertook together, we can probably assume that such a conversation would have arisen at some time, and would probably also have involved others within the court circle; after all, between the rigours of Eleanor’s frequent childbirths and the dangers of battle, the odds on either one of the couple dying away from their home were considerable. However, we can never know if any decision was reached, and if it was, what it might have been; except, perhaps, by the evidence of the Eleanor Crosses and the development of Westminster.

We can be sure that when Eleanor’s death came, it was unexpected. If it had seemed likely that the Queen’s indisposition could be fatal, then surely Edward would not have taken that last journey, in the dank months of late autumn, or he would not have let her accompany him. When he had to cope with her death, as a husband and as a king, did he think on the hoof and come up with the idea of memorialising his wife’s route back to Westminster? Or was he putting into practice an idea they had shared with and for each other – that wherever God chose to take either one of them, then if it was in their realm their funeral route should become a sacred rite of passage on Earth as it was in Heaven. Edward, if given the choice, would perhaps have chosen a different route through his kingdom, but the choice was not his – it was that of a higher power than his own.

In all of Edward’s actions, there is a thread running through, that may be expressed in Binski’s words: “Ritual is itself a repository of memory” [Binski: 126]. The performance of ritual institutes and refreshes that memory, recreates the myth in a timeless moment that sidesteps historical validity. Physical commemoration of that ritual, as in Eleanor’s crosses or Westminster Abbey, provides the axis between ritual/mythic time and historical time.

The route of the Eleanor cortege is like an axis through English heartland; it inscribes a mediaeval royal presence through a land ensouled and sanctified by the ritual procession of the living and the dead monarchs.

 

Appendix: Eleanor Crosses after the Plantagenets

    Not surprisingly, the significance of the Eleanor crosses dwindled after the Plantagenet period, particularly in the religious changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The latter, indeed, saw the wholesale destruction of most of them. By then, though, other monumental crosses had been erected which show clear evidence of architectural inspiration from the Eleanor prototypes.

Interest in the Eleanor Crosses revived in the eighteenth century, as gentlemen developed a fascination with historical monuments and antiquities in general. William Stukeley was one of the principal founding fathers of the antiquarian movement in Britain, and through his incumbency at Stamford was able to locate and excavate the ruins of the Stamford Cross and thus to revive the memory of the Queen’s crosses. Although this was too late for several, it did mean that further destruction was halted.

Eighteenth-century taste, however, was drawn to the romantic interpretation of the crosses as monuments to grief, and hence revived and exaggerated this legendary aspect. This equally appealed to the Victorian sense of romance. Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England, published in the 1840s, was a major contributor to contemporary sentiment and the legend of Eleanor, owing more to the tastes of the time than to historical accuracy. The best that can be said of it is that it drew architects’ interest to these inspirational thirteenth-century structures, and it is fitting that the neo-Gothick of the nineteenth century and later should look to them for their inspiration.

A number of memorial crosses around England, then, are clearly modelled on, and frequently erroneously known as, Eleanor Crosses. These monuments, often far from the route of Eleanor’s final journey, are testimony to the charisma cast around Edward’s queen so many centuries previously, and they unconsciously reinforce the symbolic potential of the old crosses in radiating the glamour of the monarchy outwards to the people of England.

A small selection of such imitative crosses are:

ABINGDON Market Cross. Destroyed 1644. [Vallance:111]

COVENTRY. Built 1541, modelled on Abingdon Market Cross. Statues included Edward I among the monarchs and St Peter among the religious images. In disrepair by 1760, removed 1771. [Vallance:111]

GLOUCESTER. Built c.1320, it stood at the junction of Northgate, Southgate and Westgate and contained statues of various monarchs, including Queen Eleanor. Demolished 1750. [Vallance:109-10]

OXFORD Martyrs’ Memorial, St Giles. Designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, inspired by Hardingstone and Waltham Crosses.

SCARBOROUGH Butter Cross.

TOTTENHAM. High Cross. Sometimes described as an Eleanor Cross, for the route of which it is convenient, it considerably postdated them; an engraving from around 1788 shows the pre-restoration cross to have been extremely plain, more like a ‘dumb steeple’ than an Eleanor Cross; Vallance estimates it as early sixteenth century. [Vallance:111-2]

WESTMINSTER CRIMEAN CROSS, LONDON. Based on Waltham Cross.

WALKDEN, LANCASHIRE. Inscription: ‘A public tribute of affection and respect to the memory of Harriet, widow of Francis, First Earl of Ellesmere. AD 1868’. Erected by public subscription in tribute of her work to improve the condition of the working class. She died on April 17th, 1866, and tenders were invited for a “monument of durable and visible character”. The successful design was by T. Graham Jackson. Originally in centre of Walkden, the monument was removed at official Ministry of Transport insistence in 1968, by which time it had been stranded as an island at the junction of five roads; this removal resulted in the loss of four statues from the lowest tier, representing a collier, craftsman and two factory girls (the collier statue had already been damaged by miners throwing stones at it, as the model had been an unpopular overlooker!). [Norman Darwen, pers.comm.; Monaghan 1993]

WIGAN, LANCASHIRE. The Memorial to the dead of the 1914-18 war outside All Saints Parish Church, Wigan [J.A.Hilton, pers. comm.]. Designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, erected in 1925.

SLEDMERE, N. YORKSHIRE. Based on Waltham cross

QUEENSBURY, W. YORKSHIRE

ILAM, STAFFORDSHIRE

 

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— Westminster Abbey. Annenberg School of Communications /Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988