Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (10 page)

If Eleanor’s rights were a thorn in Richard’s side, the failure of the king and her brother-in-law to agree her dower allocation placed the countess in an increasingly difficult and, no doubt, stressful situation. Although some care was evidently taken on the crown’s part to ensure that Eleanor’s English manors were stocked with the oxen and ploughs necessary to sustain them in continuous cultivation,
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not all the properties were in good repair, hence Eleanor’s concern to renovate the mill at Newbury. This added burden of maintenance at a time when Eleanor possessed a limited pool of revenue-generating properties exposed her to financial hardship; she seems to have suffered from a lack of ready cash with which to meet her own expenses. By the winter months of 1231, if not earlier, Eleanor had turned to Jewish moneylenders as a source of personal finance. In doing so, Eleanor’s experiences reflected those of other noble and gentle women who ‘were most frequently drawn into credit relationships’ with the Jews in their widowhoods, either through inheriting their husbands’ debts or by contracting new bonds themselves.
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On 15 November 1231, Henry III gave permission, ‘at the instance of Eleanor, Countess of Pembroke, his sister’, for three Jews – Deusaye, son of Isaac of Winchester, Bonevie of Bristol and Lynn of Bristol – to stay at the countess’s manor of Newbury until 2 February 1232.
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Bonevie was either still at Newbury or paying another visit there in April 1232, when, again at Eleanor’s request, the king allowed him to extend his stay until Pentecost.
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Perhaps Eleanor entered into, or contemplated entering into, a short-term mortgage of this manor while she awaited her dower. Henry III, for his part, was not unsympathetic towards his youngest sister’s plight. On 7 January 1232, he ordered the knights and free men of Eleanor’s manors of Luton, Sutton, Kemsing and Brabourne to pay her a ‘reasonable aid’ to discharge her debts.
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The problem was that a measure such as this offered, at best, a short-term solution to Eleanor’s financial problems. The much-needed long-term solution – the assignment of Eleanor’s full amount of Marshal dower – still remained to be addressed.

If, as the spring of 1232 gave way to summer, Eleanor hoped to receive her final dower allocation, she continued to be disappointed. In Eleanor’s case, the forty-day limit for dower assignments imposed by Magna Carta was simply unworkable. It was not until June 1232 that there was any significant headway. At the beginning of the month, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, prevailed upon the king to undertake what Nicholas Vincent has termed ‘a root and branch overhaul of royal finances’.
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As part of this, the king yet again attempted to settle the matter of Eleanor’s dower. On 8 June, the king informed Richard de Burgh, the justiciar of Ireland, that Richard Marshal had appeared before him at Worcester. There, in the presence of the king’s magnates, Richard agreed to surrender to Eleanor, the king’s ‘beloved sister’, her Irish dower. The new earl of Pembroke nominated nine properties, including the castle and vill of Kildare, and promised to hand over further lands to Eleanor should these fall short of the full value of her entitlement.
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Attentive to his sister’s interests, Henry then dispatched six officials to inspect Eleanor’s new lands and report their findings back to the English court.
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It might finally have seemed to Eleanor that her widow’s share of the Marshal estates in Ireland was at last within her grasp. This was not to be.

THE ROAD TO REBELLION

The political situation in England during the summer of 1232 was complicated by a dramatic coup at the very heart of Henrician government. Hubert de Burgh, the justiciar and leading architect of Eleanor’s first marriage, and an early opponent of Richard Marshal’s succession in 1231, fell from power.
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Between August and November 1232, through the connivance of des Roches and others who were dissatisfied with de Burgh’s regime, including Richard Marshal, the justiciar was stripped of lands and offices.
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Among the more outlandish charges levelled against Hubert was the improbable accusation that he had murdered Eleanor’s late husband, William Marshal junior, using poison.
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Against the background of this coup, Richard Marshal – Eleanor’s opponent – emerged, as Vincent has noted, as ‘the most active figure at court’, a situation that Eleanor might well have regarded with growing anxiety.
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If Eleanor entertained any hope that Marshal’s close proximity to Henry might encourage the new earl to regard her claims more favourably, she was sorely mistaken, as Earl Richard continued to block her interests. In fact, as the events of the final months of 1232 and opening months of 1233 unfolded, Richard Marshal’s own resentment continued to simmer – against the crown over Eleanor’s dower and against the crown over the king’s handling of patronage when disposing of de Burgh’s former lands and offices. Even now, Richard remained reluctant to surrender any of his Welsh and Irish estates to the king’s youngest sister, so keen was he to preserve the integrity of his inheritance. Richard’s reluctance might explain why, as early as 29 July 1232, when the king was at Woodstock, Richard had decided to offer the young dowager countess a cash sum of £400 per annum in lieu of her dower in Pembrokeshire and Ireland.
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Eleanor, apparently at her brother’s prompting, initially accepted this sum, driven perhaps by desperation at the length of time that had elapsed since William junior’s death and by a desire to alleviate her financial difficulties.

It is, of course, perfectly possible that both the king and his youngest sister believed, perhaps on the basis of the Irish lands recently nominated by Richard Marshal, that £400 represented a fair deal. After all, Eleanor had already received a temporary dower allocation in England, which was presumably now made permanent, as well as those ten and a half English manors earmarked for her upkeep in 1229. A cash sum would save her from the trouble of managing her dower in south Wales and Ireland remotely as an absentee landlady,
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and thereby provide her with a guaranteed source of income. Henry III and Eleanor’s naivety on this matter would later return to haunt them.
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Richard Marshal, for his part, either experienced a shortage of ready cash with which to pay Eleanor £400 or perhaps hoped to use this arrangement as a bargaining counter in his subsequent relationship with the crown. The £400 sum was payable in two instalments at the New Temple in London: the first £200 was to be paid within a month of Michaelmas and the remaining £200 within a month of Easter.
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In order to ensure that Eleanor would not be left out of pocket should Richard prove unable or just plain reluctant to pay, the threat of distraint (compulsory seizure) was placed upon Richard’s English lands.
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Yet even this safety clause proved inadequate to guarantee Marshal’s loyalty. As he grew increasingly disillusioned with Henry III’s court and resentful at the pre-eminence of Peter des Roches and his Poitevin allies, Pembroke’s willingness to pay waned. Indeed, Pembroke’s resentment against the crown threatened to boil over at the beginning of February 1233, when his kinsman Gilbert Basset was deprived of the Wiltshire manor of Upavon in favour of Peter de Maulay, the long-standing associate of Peter des Roches.
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Marshal withdrew from Henry III’s court, whence he initially travelled to Wales, and then on to Ireland.
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By the summer, Eleanor’s brother-in-law had allied himself firmly with a group of disaffected barons against the crown.
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Eleanor, as the king’s sister, bore at least part of the brunt of Marshal’s antagonism towards the English crown. On 6 June 1233, the king felt compelled to inform the sheriff of Gloucestershire that the earl had failed to meet his payments to Eleanor. The sheriff was ordered to seize Pembroke’s goods in the county, so that Eleanor might thereby recover £150 in arrears.
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This was followed on 30 June by further letters addressed to the sheriffs of Berkshire, Sussex, Gloucestershire (again) and Worcestershire that instructed them to furnish Eleanor with money from the earl’s demesne properties to satisfy Marshal’s debts.
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Eleanor’s agreement with Richard had not been worth the parchment upon which it was written, after all: Richard had defaulted upon the entire payment for the first year.

The agreement reached between Eleanor and Richard Marshal raises the question of Eleanor’s agency and her personal level of involvement in the negotiations over her Irish dower. As a teenage widow under her brother’s protection, it is tempting to dismiss Eleanor, once more, as a mere pawn who was excluded from the process of securing her dower by an older and more experienced brother. Eleanor was effectively packed off to Inkberrow and her other English Marshal manors to await the assignment of her Irish dower. This is certainly a view that found favour with M. A. E. Green, who claimed that ‘This agreement [between Eleanor and Richard Marshal] was made without the knowledge or consent of the countess, although it was sealed with her seal.’
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In Green’s eyes, it was Henry who acted on Eleanor’s behalf and Henry who, in his naivety, ‘allowed himself to be woefully imposed upon’.
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Admittedly, this was a line of argument that Eleanor herself adopted in the 1240s, when she attempted to apportion blame for the inadequacies of the £400 settlement.
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Yet there are signs that by 1232, if not earlier, Eleanor enjoyed a significant degree of leverage over her eldest brother and therefore agency, perhaps, in the negotiations for her Irish dower. The privileged access to the king that Eleanor enjoyed as his sister gradually allowed her to mediate between her brother and third parties who sought privileges from him. On 5 November 1231, for example, Eleanor probably attended the royal court at Marlborough, where the countess – or officials charged with her business – successfully petitioned Henry to grant Mabel de Cantilupe a forge within the Forest of Dean (Gloucestershire).
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Eleanor was also a regular recipient of royal patronage; the English chancery rolls are littered with gifts of venison that the king made to her from the royal forests near her English manors and which bear further witness to her high standing in her brother’s favour, not to mention the king’s brotherly concern that she partake of fare appropriate to her rank. Venison was widely regarded as a high-status and highly valued dish in thirteenth-century England, one which was often eaten on feast days and other special occasions, and one that was procured primarily through hunting within private deer parks and the royal forest. The recipients of royal gifts of venison were either permitted to hunt the deer within a designated royal forest themselves or were supplied by royal officials.
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The gift to Eleanor of five deer from the forest near Havering park in July 1231 was followed by further gifts from the forests of Salcey (Northamptonshire), Chute (Hampshire and Wiltshire), Rockingham (Northamptonshire), Bernwood (Buckinghamshire) and Savernake (Wiltshire). In total, Eleanor had received no fewer than fifty-one deer by late August 1233.
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She thus began to emerge as a figure of note at Henry III’s court.

THE MARSHAL REBELLION, 1233–4

By the end of August 1233, Richard Marshal had entered into open rebellion against the crown, a situation that left Eleanor particularly exposed – financially and politically.
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A truce between the warring parties in September 1233 was ended by the renewal of hostilities. Richard Marshal’s alliance with the native Welsh prince, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, resulted in Henry III’s authorization of the wholesale resumption of his estates at the Westminster Council of October 1233.
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In February 1234, the attacks on the Marshal Irish lordship of Leinster by the king’s justiciar and other loyalist allies forced the Earl of Pembroke to go to the aid of his Irish tenants.
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The fortuitous dismissal of Peter des Roches on a wave of anti-alien sentiment, however, paved the way for a critical political realignment at the heart of Henrician government, a move supported by none other than Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop-Elect of Canterbury. Edmund’s consecration on 2 April 1234 was followed immediately by the Bishop of Winchester’s removal from court and, more dramatically, on 16 April by Richard Marshal’s death from wounds sustained in Ireland.
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In the month immediately preceding Richard’s death and in the weeks and months that followed (May to July 1234), the new archbishop played a leading role in peace negotiations between the king and the rebels, and in orchestrating and effecting a lasting truce with the Welsh.
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Chief among the rebels whom Edmund escorted in person to the king was Gilbert Marshal, Richard’s younger brother and the new heir to the lands in which Eleanor claimed her dower.
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Once Gilbert’s inheritance was restored to him, it was Edmund who was appointed keeper of the Marshal castle of Striguil (Chepstow) during the king’s pleasure.
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These events and the archbishop’s central role in bringing about peace proved to be particularly significant for Eleanor. It was most probably against the political backdrop of negotiations to end the Marshal rebellion and to bring about Gilbert’s succession to the earldom of Pembroke that Eleanor, Richard’s and Gilbert’s sister-in-law, made her vow of perpetual widowhood, a point hitherto neglected in the historiography of the Marshal rebellion and its aftermath.
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The supervisory presence of Edmund at these proceedings reveals that Eleanor’s action was not, as M. A. E. Green believed, the ‘intense and passionate’ act of a young widow ‘in the first transports of her sorrow’, but was perhaps a more measured decision taken by a young widow three or more years after her husband’s death.
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