Eleanor de Montfort: A Rebel Countess in Medieval England (22 page)

There might also have been other more personal reasons for transferring the Lord Edward, Henry of Almain and Richard of Cornwall into his wife’s care. Simon needed to ensure that his most important captives, the men at the core of the royalist party who were closely related to Henry by blood, were held by someone who had the interests of the Montforts and of the baronial reformers at heart, and by someone whom the earl could implicitly trust. His wife was the ideal candidate. It is not inconceivable that news had reached Eleanor’s ears about the treatment meted out by her eldest son and others to the royal captives and hostages. In spite of the grievances between Eleanor, her husband and the king, the countess might well have wished to ameliorate the discomfort of her captive kin, perhaps regarding it as her Christian duty to do so, and repay their past kindnesses to her. This might explain Earl Simon’s decision to transfer into her care her other brother, Richard of Cornwall, the previous holder of Wallingford.
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After all, by virtue of her position as a wife and hostess, not to mention her status as the king’s sister, she was ideally placed to provide for her husband’s reluctant ‘guests’. It is possible that Eleanor requested or suggested that one or more of her kinsmen be placed in her charge.
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Admittedly, the captives’ time at Wallingford was short lived. By the end of July, the Lord Edward and Henry of Alamain had been transferred to Kenilworth Castle.
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Although the royal hostages were moved around during the summer and autumn 1264 – Henry of Almain, for instance, undertook a brief diplomatic mission to France in September before returning to captivity at Dover – Edward, Henry and Richard were all at Wallingford again later that year.
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They were there in November when an attempt was made by the Lord Edward’s followers to free him from Montfortian custody. As a direct result of this, the Earl of Leicester determined to move all three men to the greater security afforded by Kenilworth Castle. According to the chronicler Robert of Gloucester, Countess Eleanor might well have accompanied the captives there.
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Mindful of her obligations to reward those persons loyal to her family, Eleanor’s activities in 1264–5 extended beyond the care of royal hostages and captives. Her husband’s military success did much to resolve the couple’s financial woes. The matter of Eleanor’s Marshal dower looked like it might be resolved. On 18 November 1264, some of the Montfort’s closest political allies and supporters, namely Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, Henry of Sandwich, Bishop of London, Hugh Despenser, the justiciar, and Peter de Montfort, were appointed to a commission to investigate the case of Eleanor’s Irish and Welsh Marshal dower, which had, so it was claimed, long been detained from her by the king. The commissioners were empowered to assign Eleanor her dower and ensure that she received due reparation for her losses.
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The countess also secured profitable royal grants of properties and rights for men and women in her service. In December 1264, John of Havering, a yeoman of the countess, who was either the son or another relation of Richard of Havering, was awarded the wardships and marriages of the heirs and lands of Richard of Arden.
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On 13 June 1265, royal letters issued at Hereford recorded that the services and customs of Christiana of Odiham, an unfree tenant of the Countess of Leicester, had been valued at 14s. 4d. a year, and that henceforth Christiana and her heirs were to be quit of all customs and services and were to pay an annual rent instead. The scribe who drew up the letters carefully noted that this grant had been made with the assent of both the Earl and Countess of Leicester in special recognition of Christiana’s long service to Eleanor.
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As an experienced political operator, one cannot help but suspect that Eleanor also endorsed Simon’s efforts to enrich their sons through grants of lands and offices across southern England. In the aftermath of Lewes, Earl Simon’s role as leader of the baronial party allowed him to place his sons and his closest supporters in the key offices of royal government, and to profit from the estates confiscated from their defeated royalist opponents, including those of Richard of Cornwall.
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Some of the Montforts’ tactics were more than a little dubious in their execution. Their second son, Simon junior, resorted to a series of underhand measures to seize the Sussex lands of William de Briouze, a royalist who had attacked Simon junior’s estate at Sedgwick.
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Simon junior’s stratagem involved a substantial claim for damages against Briouze in a court packed with Simon junior’s sympathizers, including his older brother, Henry. Until Briouze paid up, the younger Simon retained custody of both Briouze’s lands and his young son and heir, also named William.
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A year later, Simon junior’s mother was in charge of her son’s hostage, providing for his maintenance and making payments to his groom and to Isabella his nurse.
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Since Simon junior was unmarried, it was perhaps only fitting that his mother should care for young William. Even so, Eleanor’s involvement raises the possibility of an element of complicity in her son’s plans. Eleanor might also not have been entirely in the dark about the matrimonial ambitions Simon junior harboured towards Isabella de Forz, Countess of Devon and lady of the Isle of Wight. It is solely down to the chance survival of Eleanor’s household accounts for 1265, which are discussed in the next chapter, that we know that she exchanged letters with Isabella, a wealthy young widow with baronial sympathies, throughout the spring of 1265 and entertained her at Odiham in April.
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Earl Simon sold the royal rights to Isabella’s remarriage to Simon junior during the summer of 1265 and, in a later lawsuit, Isabella claimed that she had been the victim of an attempted abduction by Simon junior, which forced her to seek refuge in Wales.
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If Isabella’s later claim can be trusted, one wonders whether Eleanor once again had a hand in encouraging her son.

8

1265

‘the conflict of Evesham’
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In April 1267, Henry III wrote to the sheriff of Northamptonshire, ordering him to restore the lands confiscated from William de St Philibert, a former rebel, during the recent disturbances within the realm. These disturbances, the letter recalled, had drawn to a partial close after the battle of Evesham in 1265 with an ‘ordinance and form of peace’ made at Dover Castle between the Lord Edward, the king’s eldest son, and Eleanor de Montfort, Countess of Leicester, widow of his fallen opponent Earl Simon.
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This fairly innocuous phrasing concealed the full horror for the Montfort family and their supporters of the disastrous events of that year. If the Montforts’ fortunes had been riding high after their success at Lewes in 1264, the summer of 1265 was nothing short of disastrous for Eleanor, Earl Simon and their children. Within the space of less than three months, between late May and the beginning of August, Eleanor witnessed Earl Simon’s hold on government slip away, following the Lord Edward’s dramatic escape from Montfortian custody at Hereford, his rapprochement with Gilbert de Clare, the new Earl of Gloucester, and the rapid collapse of the Montfortian regime in the Welsh Marches.
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The resurgence in royalist fortunes culminated in a pitched battle at Evesham on 4 August 1265, where many Montfortians were slain, including Eleanor’s husband and her eldest son.
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In December 1264, Eleanor presided over her husband’s splendid Christmas court at Kenilworth; by December 1265 she was a widow in exile in France.
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An invaluable insight into Eleanor’s role in 1265 and her response to her family’s changing political fortunes is provided by a large fragment of her household accounts for this year (British Library, Additional MS 8877), the only household roll of Eleanor’s or Simon’s that has survived down to the present day. Eleanor’s household roll was preserved until the early nineteenth century in the archives of the Dominican nunnery of Montargis in France that she entered in widowhood. It is an important source not only in terms of its chronological coverage, but also by virtue of the fact that it is one of the earliest surviving private household accounts from England and it was produced for a woman.
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The thirteen extant membranes, carefully compiled by Eleanor’s clerks Christopher and Eudes, and possibly another, illuminate the functioning of the Montforts’ domestic establishment at a critical stage in the Barons’ War. They itemize the day-to-day expenses of the countess’s household from 19 February to 29 August 1265 on the face, detailing Eleanor’s place of residence, the names of visitors she received and the household’s provisioning, including the numbers of horses for whom fodder and hay had to be found. Lists of wages and other miscellaneous expenses, including messenger accounts covering the period up to 1 October, appear on the dorse. This chapter offers a fresh appraisal of these accounts and the light that they shed on Eleanor’s activities in 1265.

THE MONTFORT HOUSEHOLD IN 1265

Eleanor’s household roll indicates that she spent most of 1265, apart from a brief visit in March,
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separated from her husband, Earl Simon, who was preoccupied with the Hilary parliament and with later developments in the Welsh Marches. In the meantime, the Countess of Leicester presided over her own domestic establishment, which had 207 people present on average, including household officers, servants, guests and poor, and which was, in common with other great households of her day, a peripatetic institution.
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For much of February, Eleanor stayed at Wallingford Castle, then in Montfortian hands, before moving later in the month to Odiham Castle via Reading in Berkshire at a relatively leisurely pace of fifteen miles a day.
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The countess remained there throughout the spring until news of the Lord Edward’s escape uprooted the household again.
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In view of Eleanor’s attendance behind the scenes at earlier councils and parliaments in the reign, it is curious that she did not accompany the earl to the Hilary parliament. This was the longest of all the reforming parliaments and sat from 20 January until the middle of March 1265, discussing, amongst other weighty matters, the arrangements for the relaxation of the Lord Edward’s custody.
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Now that the aggrandizement of her husband and sons had alleviated her family’s financial predicament, perhaps Eleanor felt that there was little to be gained by accompanying her husband there in person.

Another far more compelling explanation for Eleanor’s absence from these proceedings is that she was already fulfilling an important role for her family at Wallingford and Odiham. Eleanor’s residence at these castles during these months might arguably, as her later entertainment Isabella de Forz, an important local landowner,
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suggests, have helped to strengthen her husband’s political position in the south. Odiham, after all, was located in the heart of southern England. Eleanor’s presence there made sound strategic sense within the context of her sons’ recently acquired lands and offices. It meant that she resided, geographically, at the centre of a recently formed Montfortian network of influence, which stretched, if at times somewhat shakily, across southern England. In the south east, her eldest son, Henry, was constable of the royal castle of Dover and warden of the Cinque Ports.
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Simon junior, Eleanor’s second son, was constable of Portchester Castle in Hampshire,
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and active in Surrey and Sussex.
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Meanwhile, in the south west, Eleanor’s fourth son, Guy, enjoyed custody of Richard of Cornwall’s lands in Devon and Cornwall,
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while her third son, Amaury, who was forging a career in the church, had been awarded the rectory of St Wendron (Cornwall), one of the wealthiest benefices in this region and formerly in Richard’s gift.
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In the midst of this Montfortian sea, and in Earl Simon’s absence, there was no one better placed than Eleanor as a wife and mother to act as an intermediary and communication point for her family.

Eleanor’s household accounts confirm that she maintained contact, via letters and messengers, throughout the spring with her husband, who, on one occasion, thoughtfully sent her a gift of porpoise for her table.
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Furthermore, Eleanor’s absence from proceedings at Westminster might not necessarily have inhibited her talents as an intermediary; her accounts reveal that the countess sent letters to the Lord Edward on 25 February.
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Earl Simon’s first action when the Hilary parliament dispersed was to set out immediately for his wife’s residence at Odiham, where he arrived on 19 March for a family conference.
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His arrival was preceded, two days earlier, by that of the Lord Edward and one of Richard of Cornwall’s sons, escorted by the Montforts’ eldest son, Henry.
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Another son, Guy, had reached Odiham on 13 March.
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Something of the scale of this conference and the hospitality that Eleanor was expected to provide emerges from her household roll. The number of horses in Eleanor’s stable, all of whom were provided with hay from the castle stores, rose from 44 to 172 with the arrival of Henry and her nephews, and from 172 to 334 with the coming of the earl.
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On the same day (17 March) that the Lord Edward arrived, the enlarged household consumed no fewer than 1,000 herrings, and the countess felt compelled to purchase no fewer than 1,000 dishes, presumably for the use of her newly arrived guests and their entourages.
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It was clearly no small undertaking to house and feed the retinues of the visiting nobles.