Lots of royal children

 If you don't have birth control, you may have lots of children. This shouldn't be a big surprise. Medieval people had various concoctions/devices/rituals that purported to reduce fertility, but none of them worked real well.  On the other hand, a lot of people didn't have children when they wanted them. Women who work extremely hard and are undernourished are less likely to get pregnant.  And there was always the sad fact that half of all children (roughly) died before their first birthday, so having babies didn't necessarily mean having adult children.

Let's look at a few examples of well-documented royal women to see how many children they could have, starting with Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204).  (And note that these women had the best nutrition and medical care their time could offer.)

 

Eleanor was wife of two kings, Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and mother of two more kings, Richard I and John of England, as well as two queens (by marriage), Joan of Sicily and Eleanor of Castile.  But these four children were less than half of her total brood.  She gave birth to ten children, all but one of whom grew to maturity.  Her first, a daughter (she had two daughters and no sons with Louis VII) was born when Eleanor was twenty-one.  Her youngest, John, the future king, was born when she was forty-two.  Although all but the one son who died in early childhood grew up and married, she outlived all but two of her children.

(It seems like a good time to reiterate that medieval people would have been just as devastated by the loss of a child as we would be. One historian suggested that medieval people wouldn't have loved their offspring, but he clearly had no clue what he was talking about.) 

Let us turn now to Blanche of Castile (d. 1252), Eleanor of Aquitaine's granddaughter (Blanche's mother, also named Eleanor, had married the king of Castile).  Blanche, the wife of King Louis VIII of France (grandson of Louis VII), had twelve children.  She had the first when she was seventeen, having been married when only twelve (and presumably still too young to become pregnant).  She was thirty-six when she had her final child, being pregnant with him when her husband died.

Of these twelve children, the first four all died very young. The fifth, however, flourished, the future Louis IX. The other seven all lived  at least into their teens, with one exception, a boy who. died at age one. (Three others of these final seven died before their mother, so she outlived all but four of her twelve offspring.)

Margaret of Provence (d. 1295), wife of Louis IX, had eleven children, nearly as many as her mother-in-law. Margaret was daughter of the count of Provence, who had married all four of his daughters to kings.  Margaret married Louis when she was thirteen (he was twenty), but they did not start having children for another six years, probably because she was still very young. But once they started they didn't stop.

They had their first child, a girl who died as a toddler, when Margaret was nineteen, and their last when she was thirty-nine.  Of these eleven children, all but two lived at least into their teens, the first-born girl and a boy who died not long after birth.  One of Margaret's sons,  named John Tristan, was born in Egypt, where Louis and Margaret were (unsuccessfully) trying to wrest Jerusalem back from the Muslims through a great Crusade.  Perhaps ironically, when Louis tried Crusading again twenty years later, John Tristan accompanied his father and, like Louis, died on the campaign.  Margaret (who wisely did not attempt a second trip to Egypt) lived for another twenty-five years and outlived all but three of her children.

In spite of having large broods, these women all outlived their husbands as well as the majority of their children.  Eleanor of Aquitaine lived to be 80 and rode down to Spain in her 70s to pick out her granddaughter Blanche of Castile as a suitable bride for the French king. Blanche herself lived to be 64. Margaret of Provence lived to be 74. These queens were tough. They all started having children in their late teens/early twenties and packed them in at a rough average of one every two years, until they were somewhere around forty.  Although they cannot be typical of medieval women in general, frequent childbirth over a twenty-year period may well have been the norm for many.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval rulers, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

Women as Regents

 As I have noted previously, medieval aristocratic women had far more authority and ability to make major decisions than is often assumed.  One of the clearest examples of this is the role of powerful women as regents.

A regent is someone who rules, specifically in the name of someone else, awaiting the time when that person becomes an adult or comes back from far away.  If the lord of a castle headed off on Crusade, for example, his wife would normally act as regent until his return.  If the lord died and his children, his heirs or heiresses, were not yet old enough to rule in their own right, their mother would rule until they came of age.

The same was true of counts and dukes, even kings.  Marie de France, a French princess who married the count of Champagne, probably ruled longer than he did.  Adela of Blois, a member of the English royal family, similarly brought up her children and ran the county of Blois during her husband's repeated absences.  Sometimes powerful women ran the county for several generations, arranging the marriages of children and grandchildren.  Mathilda, countess of Nevers in the thirteenth century, guided her daughters. granddaughters, and great-granddaughters into advantageous marriages.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of Aquitaine, then queen of France, then queen of England during the final two-thirds of the twelfth century, did not keep having retired to a nunnery prevent her from emerging to make major decisions for her children or grandchildren or for that matter for England as a whole.

One of the most powerful regents was Blanche of Castile, queen of France (she was originally from Spain, hence called "of Castile").  Whe her husband Louis VIII died in 1226 after a short reign (you never hear much about Louis VIII, do you), she took over running the kingdom.  She proposed her oldest son as king of England (the English refused the offer), and kept busy for ten years as regent.  During this time, her oldest son, Louis IX, grew to adulthood and married.  Blanche was not at all happy about this, especially since it seemed to be a very happy marriage -- his wife was Marguerite, of the family of counts of Provence.  The story at the time was that Louis and Marguerite had to sneak around behind Blanche's back.  Finally after ten years she allowed him to start acting fully as king and husband.

Most of the women I mention above may barely have met their husbands before their wedding day, and often came from a different part of Europe, even speaking a different language.  But when they became regents they took a deep breath and did what needed to be done.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval women, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Medieval Queens

 Medieval queens exercised a great deal of authority, sometimes from "behind the throne," sometimes in their own right.  As I have earlier discussed, medieval women had more of what we would call "rights" (autonomy, ability to control their own property) than women in the nineteenth century in the US or UK.  Queens of course had an authority that most women never had, but then most men never had that kind of authority either.

 

A number of queens ruled in their own right.  In England, Mathilda, granddaughter of William the Conqueror, was declared ruling queen of England after her father's death.  She spent her whole reign battling her cousin Stephen for the throne.  He ended up being declared the rightful king in modern lists of kings of England, but at the time the English barons were more than happy to switch allegiance back and forth between Mathilda and Stephen, depending on who offered a better deal.  Stephen lived longer, which is probably why he now gets the nod.  Her being a woman wasn't so much of an issue as the fact that she was married to the count of Anjou, the county that had always been in competition with Normandy, where most of the English barons had property.

Mathilda's son Henry became King Henry II of England after Stephen's death in 1154.  Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had earlier been queen of France, married to Louis VII, who divorced her for not bearing a son (she had five sons with Henry, showing it wasn't her fault).  She was the only medieval queen to get to be queen of two different countries (France and England), though never actually a ruling queen.  On the other hand, as duchess of Aquitaine she brought essentially the whole southwest quarter of France to each of her husbands.  She also was very active during her life, going on Crusade with Louis VII, aiding and abetting her sons in their revolts against Henry II, and arranging the marriages of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In the fifteenth-century Iberian peninsula, the two most powerful kingdoms were Aragon and Castile, ruled respectively by Ferdinand and Isabelle.  They married, and their joint rule as "the Catholic kings" (both being king, you notice) was very significant both for a unified Spain and for world history.  They drove the last of the Moors out of Spain, finishing a 600 year project (the Reconquista), drove out the Jews while they were at it, and sponsored Columbus in 1492.

In addition to ruling in their own right, many queens were powers behind the throne.  They had their own courts, with their own court officials, their own hangers-on, and their own petitioners.  Anyone with an important request for the king would do well to start with the queen.  If she agreed, she would use her powers of persuasion to win the king around.

A major constraint on queens was the necessity that they produce an heir (as suggested in the example of Eleanor of Aquitaine).  The problem with heredity is that without children the property (or in this case the kingdom) can end up being passed off to some cousin.  And the queen had to be assumed to be totally pure, so that any child she bore would undeniably be the king's.  Kings were allowed a little latitude in their love life, to the point that by the early modern period (post medieval) Royal Mistress was a recognized position.  But queens were not any latitude.  Queens caught in adultery were supposed to be put to death, although in fact medieval queens were faithful enough (or discreet enough) that this didn't happen (but then in the post-medieval period you get Henry VIII and the wives beheaded for adultery).

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval kings and queen, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Queens

 We think of queens as wives of kings, as of course they were, but they also were rulers in their own right.  After all, Elizabeth II has been queen of England for going on for 70 years.  Let's not forget the sixteenth-century Elizabeth I.  There were ruling queens in the Middle Ages as well.  And even as wives of kings, queens exercised real power.

Here a good example is Eleanor of Aquitaine, who I've discussed earlier.  She was successively queen of France and of England, by being married successively to Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and she was the mother of both King Richard the Lionheart of England and King John of England.  That's her tomb shown below.

Okay, Eleanor was unusual.  But for all medieval queens, they functioned as the power behind the throne.  They would have their own separate court, with their own faithful men.  Here they were entirely capable of advancing their own policies, which might or might not be the same as the king's.  Eleanor plotted against Henry II on behalf of her sons, who felt that Dad was not giving them what was Rightfully Theirs.  (Teenagers, they never change.)  Even when not working in opposition to the king, the queen could be a real power.  Someone who wanted a special favor from the crown might do well to start with the queen, figuring if she agreed, she could be a significant ally.

(First ladies, wives of presidents, have separate offices and staff, but people rarely go to them to get a special favor out of the president.  Maybe they're missing a bet.)

The above image is a twelfth-century depiction of a king and queen of the Old Testament, carved onto the facade of Chartres cathedral.  Not surprisingly, they have sort of a twelfth-century look to them.  That queen isn't going to stand for any nonsense.  I think she may be taller than the king, who looks worried.

Then there were ruling queens.  The mother of Henry II, Mathilda, thought of herself as ruling queen of England, though her cousin Stephen begged to differ, and the two carried out a long civil war.  (Stephen won by outliving her.)

The most famous ruling queen is probably Isabelle, of Ferdinand-and-Isabelle, who sent Columbus off on his crack-brained attempt to get to India by sailing west.  Isabelle was king (not queen) of Castile, the northern part of what is now Spain, as well as queen of Aragon (the eastern part of Spain), a position she gained by marrying King Ferdinand of Aragon.  (I don't think he was queen of Castile.)  They called themselves the "Catholic kings."

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval social and political history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback!

Robert of Arbrissel

Although Cluny and Cîteaux, as I have discussed earlier, are now the best known French monasteries of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there were plenty of other houses, not associated with either of these great monasteries, where the monks tried to follow a pure life, and where laypeople came seeking prayers for their relatives and themselves.

One of the most significant of these was Fontevraud, founded in the early twelfth century in the west of France, on the border between Anjou and Poitou.  It was patronized by great kings, including Henry II of England and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had already been queen of France before marrying Henry.

The above is Eleanor's tomb at Fontevraud.  (It was added well after her death.)

But Fontevraud had a distinctly non-royal origin.  It was founded by a man named Robert of Arbrissel (c. 1045-1116), so-called because he came from the village of Arbrissel, in Brittany.  He joined the church as a young man and became a priest.

He was very interested, as were many other well-educated men in the eleventh century, in trying to find a life that matched that of the early apostles.  In his early 50s he retreated to the forest of Craon, near his home village, to become a hermit.  There were actually quite a few hermits there already, men living alone, devoting their days to prayer and contemplation, living from offerings of people who came to seek their wisdom and from small vegetable gardens.

It would be difficult being a hermit.  On the one hand one didn't want to starve, and thus pilgrims bringing small offerings were good.  On the other hand, how can a hermit focus on spiritual matters if people keep showing up and asking all sorts of things?

Robert, because of his learning and wisdom, soon attracted a following, and disciples began assembling around him.  In essence, his hermitage became a monastery.  And with his disciples around him seeking his spiritual insights, Robert seems to have decided within a year that his real vocation was in preaching, spreading God's word.  The pope was visiting France, and he gave Robert an official "license to preach."  For the next twenty years, until his death, Robert wandered around, preaching and gathering followers.

He appealed especially to women.  He would come into town, preaching God's word, and when he left, a number of women would go with him.  Now without modern forms of entertainment and communication, a wandering preacher was much more exciting at the beginning of the twelfth century than it is now.  And one can certainly see that women would have been intrigued by the possibility of leaving a dreary life behind.  But walking cross country, living on hand-outs, and sleeping in fields was not going to be "fun" for long.  The women kept on, at least some of them, convinced they were drawing closer to God.

The bishops were distraught.  What was this old guy doing, wandering around with a lot of women?  One bishop accused him of looking like the village idiot, going barefoot and dressed in shabby clothes.  He even accused him of practicing some strange exercise in self-control, in which a man would deliberately sleep next to women without any sexual activity, to test their ability to resist temptation:  but, he said, this never worked, "as the cries of babies show us, if you get my drift." He told Robert that he had to found a nunnery and put all these women in it.

Robert rather reluctantly established the monastery of Fontevraud in 1101 for the women.  But it was not just for women.  Under the authority of one woman, an abbess, there was a house for women, a house for men, and a leprosy, a house for lepers.  Fontevraud immediately became known for its holiness of life, which is why it gained so much attention in the following generations, including from kings and queens.  The bishop expected Robert would stay there, but he kept right on wandering and preaching.  He would promise to stay put "this time" and head right out again as soon as the bishop's back was turned.  His followers considered him a saint after his death, for his humility and holy wisdom, but he has never officially become a saint, probably because of his failure to follow the rules.

The monastery is still there, all the different components surrounded by a long wall, though it is now a museum, without monks or nuns or lepers.  The former leper house is now a luxury hotel.

Two "lives" of Robert were written shortly after his death by men who had known him, translated into English by Bruce L. Venarde, as Robert of Arbrissel:  A Medieval Religious Life (Catholic University Press, 2003).


© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on monasticism and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers.  Also available in paperback.

Hundred Years War

 The Hundred Years' War, as the name suggests, went on for an awfully long time.  It was a war between France and England that lasted over a century (1337-1453), through the Black Death and the invention of gunpowder. The central issue was the crown of France, and it was entirely fought in France, where the results were grim for the population.  France lost almost all the battles yet ultimately won the war, due to Joan of Arc.

The war is a sharp indication of the dangers of having hereditary rulers.  When family and politics mix, the results can be deadly.

The problem went back to the twelfth century, when Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of Aquitaine (essentially the southwest quarter of France), divorced her husband, the king of France, and married King Henry II of England.  For the next two centuries, through various incidents and adventures, the English crown held onto much of Aquitaine.  The French were not pleased.

Then (1328) the last direct Capetian monarch, Charles IV, died without a son.  The French crown was taken by his cousin Philip VI, the beginning of the so-called Valois line--Philip was a direct male-line descendant of Hugh Capet (d. 996), the first Capetian king, but his line went through a younger son.  So far, so good--except that Charles had a sister who had married King Edward II of England.  She thought her son, King Edward III, was the rightful king of France.

There were a few years of grumbling and threatening, and then in 1337 the French and English kings got into a big argument over Scotland (still a separate kingdom and an ally of France).  King Philip declared that King Edward III had failed as a vassal and thus no longer could hold Aquitaine, and the war was on.

There are multi-volume modern accounts of all the ins and outs of the war.  The English kept winning, including at one point capturing the French king and holding him for ransom.  When the ransom wasn’t paid, he left England to go home and get the money together, promising to return if he couldn’t get it.  He couldn’t get it.  He returned to captivity in England.  These guys believed in “honor.”  The actual battles, however, were brutal.  English bowmen and pikemen, and then the newly developed cannons devastated cavalry charges.

In 1420, there was an attempt to settle the war, basically by doing the same thing that had started it in the first place (maybe they were slow learners...).  After winning the battle of Agincourt, still considered a great triumph of English warfare, King Henry V of England married a French princess, with the understanding that their future son would be king of both France and England.  (Shakespeare wrote a play about this, that has been turned into several quite splendid movies.  The play makes it sound as if all was set now.  It wasn’t.)

The queen of England (French princess)’s brother, Charles VII, was declared illegitimate and set aside.  This is where Joan of Arc enters the picture, having been told by angels to get Charles crowned as rightful king of France, which, although it seems startlingly unlikely, she actually did in 1429.  The angels told her he really was legitimate, and he had perked right up when Joan gave him the news.

The English, in alliance with a number of great French nobles who had turned against Charles VII, captured Joan and had her burned at the stake as a heretic.  In 1430, the boy king Henry VI of England was formally crowned king of France.  But Joan had inspired the French, and a lot of the great French nobles switched sides back to Charles VII.  It took another generation to make peace formally, but in spite of some ongoing battles it was clear that France had won.

When both Charles VII of France and Henry VI of England died in 1453, the war was officially over.  Just in time for the English to start the War of the Roses.

The memory of the Hundred Years’ War still lingers in southwestern France (old Aquitaine), where much of the fighting took place.  They’d barely gotten over the Albigensian Crusade when the war started.  Many of the castles switched hands (French-English and back) multiple times, including Beynac, illustrated above.  The area is peaceful, even dreamy now, but that’s a recent phenomenon.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018 

For more about the war, Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and so much more, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Anglo-Norman Kings

One sometimes hears that medieval kingship was a simple matter of inheritance--the king was succeeded by his eldest son, and that was that.  The kings of England totally undercut that model.  From the middle of the eleventh century to the early thirteenth century, a grand total of 1 king became king by simple father-to-oldest-son inheritance.

These kings are usually called Anglo-Norman, because they had been dukes of Normandy (in France) before becoming kings of England and held onto the duchy.

William the Conqueror of course became king of England in 1066 by conquest (his nickname is a clue...).  When he died, he was succeeded not by his oldest son, Robert Curthose, but by his second son, William II, also called William Rufus.  Robert Curthose became duke of Normandy.  When William Rufus died without children in 1100, he was succeeded by his youngest brother, Henry I.

Robert Curthose was in Jerusalem at the time, on the First Crusade.  He was distraught, thinking that he ought to succeed as king.  He came back to Europe, fought Henry for half a dozen years, lost, and ended up imprisoned for the rest of his life.  So much for brotherly love.

Henry I had no shortage of sons.  He had over a dozen.  There was no problem there, except for one crucial issue.  All but one of them was illegitimate.  His one legitimate son was lost at sea (a group of young men trying to cross the English Channel during rough weather, all probably DUI).  There was no way Henry could make one of his other sons king, even though several of them became bishops, and all of them had comfortable lives.  So he chose his daughter Mathilda to succeed.

Mathilda was supposed to be king, not queen.  She in fact usually called herself Empress, because she had been briefly married to the Holy Roman Emperor, though he had died without them having children.  She had married a second time, to Geoffrey, count of Anjou.  The county of Anjou is next to Normandy, and the Angevins had decided Normandy was rightfully theirs.

The great Anglo-Norman lords hated Mathilda, partly because she was a woman, partly because they hated Geoffrey of Anjou.  They quickly declared they hadn't really sworn to support Mathilda and went instead for her cousin Stephen, son of a daughter of William the Conqueror.  England now calls Stephen the rightful king, so Henry I was succeeded by his nephew.

Mathilda spent much of the next two decades fighting Stephen.  She never won, but at the end of his life, when he had no children to succeed (what's with these guys? low sperm count?), he agreed that Mathilda's son, Henry II, would become king after him.  So Stephen was succeeded by a first cousin once removed, a man who was already duke of Normandy and count of Anjou.  Henry also acquired Aquitaine, essentially the southwest quarter of France, through his marriage.

Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, had five sons.  (No low sperm count there!)  Though their oldest son, William, died very young, and the second, Young Henry, died as a young man while his father was still alive, the third son, Richard the Lionheart, was alive and ready to succeed when Henry II died in 1189.  This was the first time an English king was succeeded by his oldest surviving son since before the Conquest.

But Richard had no children, so he was succeeded by his younger brother, John.  When John died in 1216, his young son succeeded as Henry III, and (at least for a little while) there was a sense that this father-son inheritance should be the model.

Henry II and his five sons had not had a happy Dad-and-lad relationship.  Richard and Geoffrey (the fourth son) rebelled against their father.  They also did not get along with each other.  Geoffrey was killed in a tournament, and his young son, named Arthur, mysteriously vanished after visiting his Uncle John.  When Richard the Lionheart was preparing to go on the Third Crusade, he seems to have wanted to make John come with him, fearing that if John were left behind he would seize the English throne.

Although the King Arthur stories that developed in the twelfth century (which owe essentially nothing to the fifth century) cannot be seen as simple metaphor or roman-à-clef, there are similarities between the King Arthur of the stories and the real Anglo-Norman kings.  Arthur in the stories never had a legitimate son, like Henry I.  He was rebelled against by his son Mordred, like Henry II.  Mordred was the product of an incestuous union, Arthur's nephew as well as son, which made it worse--and evoked nephews in royal succession (at least none of the Anglo-Norman kings were thought to have had incestuous relations with their sisters).  The first people who heard the King Arthur stories saw parallels with their own line of kings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on Anglo-Norman kings and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.

Eleanor of Aquitaine

If you know anything about medieval history you have sort of heard of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204).  She used to be treated as a "fabulous female," supposedly one of the very few women who actually had power then.  As I discussed in an earlier post, however, medieval women actually had far more power and agency than women did either in antiquity or in the modern period, before the twentieth century.  They did not have what we would call "equal rights," but then neither did most men.

(My theory is that modern historians looked back on the nineteenth century, when married women lost rights to their property to their husbands, and figured, "Gee, they must have been even worse off even earlier."  But history does not proceed in a straight line.)

Eleanor is and was a striking figure, with a much larger space to work on than most women, but her ability to exercise power was not unique.  She first appears as heiress to the duchy of Aquitaine, essentially the southwest quarter of France.  When her father, the duke, was dying without sons in 1137, he designated her as his heir and asked the French king, the Capetian Louis VI, to arrange a suitable match for his little girl (she was about fifteen at the time).  The French king found a suitable match all right, his own son, who shortly became Louis VII.

Louis had not originally been intended to be king.  His older brother Philip was the official crown prince, but Philip had been killed while horseback riding through the streets of Paris with his friends (racing, probably DUI), when a porcus diabolicus ran out, got tangled in the horse's legs, and threw him.  Young Louis was also about fifteen, like Eleanor, when they got married, and since he immediately became king, he had a lot on his plate for a teenager.

Then he and Eleanor had daughters but not sons, and they went on the Second Crusade which turned into a disaster, and he figured out that they were actually cousins, so he managed to get a divorce (on which see more here).  She promptly married King Henry II of England and bore him five sons, including Kings Richard the Lionheart and John. This attached Aquitaine to the English crown, which understandably caused all sorts of issues for the French, leading eventually to the Hundred Years War.

You can see why she is considered so unusual.  Very few women get to be married to two different kings (though neither was what we would call a happy marriage) and be the mother of two others.  Two of her daughters also became queens.  She was vilified during her lifetime, and stories were made up about her, such as that she flirted shamelessly with her uncle in the Holy Land while on Crusade.  She has also more recently been credited with "introducing courtly love" to northern France, which is quite unlikely.

She remained active throughout her life, helping her sons rebel against Henry II, even though at one point he had her under house arrest.  She eventually did become a nun, but she popped out to offer homage to the French king for Aquitaine, so that her son Richard would not have to go down on his knees before another king.  When she finally died, she was buried next to Henry and Richard at the monastery of Fontevraud (that's her effigy, above).

Fun fact:  She was the first person named Eleanor.  Her mother was named Aanor, a common name at the time, and she was named for her.  But she was the "other" Aanor (Aanor junior we'd say), Alia Aanor in Latin, which became Alianor, or Eleanor.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Richard the Lionheart

Richard the Lionheart (1189-1199) is one of England's most beloved kings.  It helps that he spent less than a year, total, of his reign actually in England.

The nickname comes from a story that he was attacked by a lion.  But when the lion opened its jaws to bite him, he reached into its mouth and down its throat, grabbed its heart, and pulled it right out.  This seems wildly unlikely.

He was actually the third son (out of five) of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and not originally intended to be king.  Eleanor had been divorced by Louis VII of France for not producing sons, so the fact that she immediately started cranking them out with Henry showed it wasn't her fault.

The oldest son (William) died young, but Prince Henry, his father's favorite, was supposed to be king of England after him.  Richard, Eleanor's favorite, was supposed to become duke of Aquitaine, succeeding his mother in that office, and take over his father's French lands--Henry II held Normandy, as had all English kings since the Norman Conquest, and also had Anjou (the county next to Normandy) from his mother.  So Richard spent his youth in France, not England, and in his teens led rebellions against his father.

Young Prince Henry, the favorite, died before their father, so Richard became the heir to the throne.  Their father died, at the castle of Chinon (in France, illustrated below), just as the Third Crusade was getting underway.  Richard raced off to fight the infidel, delighted not to be burdened with anything as tedious as governing.  The fourth brother, Geoffrey, had also predeceased their father--killed accidentally in a tournament--so the fifth brother, John, was left in charge of England.

Richard had a great time on Crusade, earning the admiration of Saladin, but on the way home through the Holy Roman Empire he was captured and held for ransom.  John had to raise the money to free him, an enormous amount, a "king's ransom," which did not help his reputation with the people from whom money was extracted.  (Between the fact that Prince Geoffrey's little son Arthur mysteriously disappeared while visiting his Uncle John, and the excesses that later led to the Magna Carta, John has never had a good reputation.)

Once freed, Richard stopped by the house long enough to be the "good king" of the Robin Hood stories, but he quickly zipped off to France.  Although he'd survived Crusade, he was shot down while besieging a castle--where it's possible great treasure was hidden.  Dying, he tried to make it to the castle of Chinon, to die where his father had, but only made it into the lower town below Chinon before expiring.  He was buried at the French monastery of Fontevraud--the image from his tomb is below.

By the way, you'll sometimes see the suggestion that Richard was gay.  This is based only on an account that he and young Philip II of France became very close friends--when not at war with each other.  Medieval men, unlike modern American men, found such closeness normal, not a sign of anything queer.  In fact Richard, who was indeed married but left no heirs, seems to have been uninterested in sex with anyone--why have sex when you could be out fighting instead?

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

Women in the Middle Ages

There is a popular idea that women in the Middle Ages were marginalized, forced to be subservient, under the thumb of the men.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Medieval women actually had much more rights and autonomy in the Middle Ages than women did either in ancient Rome or in the modern period (before around the 1920s).  They certainly did not have what we would now call "equal rights," but then neither did most men.  Some careers, like the priesthood, were closed to women, but this did not keep them from having a great deal of influence.

Christianity stressed that women and men were equal in the eyes of God, which put them well ahead of the women in ancient pagan Rome.

As I noted before in a post on medieval marriage, the heart of a valid marriage was the consent of the two parties, which meant that a woman could not be married against her will, any more than could a man.  In practice of course young women would be heavily pressured by their relatives into choosing whom the relatives thought an appropriate spouse, but then young men experienced similar pressure.

Although women could not be priests, they could become nuns.  In the early Middle Ages, it was fairly common to have a double monastery, one house for men and another for women, with a single head--and the head would be an abbess, a woman, because it was considered wrong for women to be under a male abbot.  Even abbesses who only ruled over women in their nunneries could and did influence men.  Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth-century abbess of a German nunnery, who had mystic visions greatly admired by men, wrote to bishops and even to popes to straighten them out on key details.

(Hildegard also wrote a lot of really lovely music for her nuns, which is still being performed and recorded.  She has recently been adopted by New Age folks, which Hildegard, a traditionalist Christian, would have found appalling.)

Women were as likely as men to know how to read and write, and aristocratic women taught their children, both boys and girls, their first lessons.  (Literacy was low by our standards, but it was not determined by sex.)

It was appreciated that women were weaker physically than men, but this was taken as a reason to see them as spiritually stronger--they had more to overcome (Peter Abelard especially made this point).  If some argued that sin first came into the world via a woman, Eve, then others argued equally vehemently that salvation came into the world via Mary, because Jesus would not have been able to save humans if he had not had human flesh, which he got from her--and, in addition, women were the first to see the risen Christ.

Inheritance went preferentially to sons, rather than daughters, but girls were not excluded from their parents' inheritance, and in the absence of brothers they could inherit, not just land and property but castles and lordships.  Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess of Aquitaine by heredity and queen of both France and England (successively, click here for more detail), ruled Aquitaine in her own right.  In the early twelfth century, when Henry I of England was dying without sons, he named his daughter Mathilda as king (not queen) of England to succeed him.  She spent the next twenty years fighting her cousin Stephen, who thought he was the rightful king of England, but there wasn't any doubt that a women could be ruling kings.

In nineteenth-century England, married women's property became their husband's property, but this was not true in the Middle Ages.  If a medieval woman wanted to sell or give away her own property, she was free to do so, although she would generally have her husband formally agree.  He on the other hand could not give away or sell her property and would need her consent to do anything with his own.

Interestingly, medieval spouses did not inherit from each other.  Among the aristocracy, widows generally had a right to a third of their late husband's property for their lifetime, but they could not sell it or give it away, because it wasn't theirs.  Property instead was inherited by the children of a couple, or in the absence of children, by the relatives of the late couple, her property going to her relatives, his to his.  Widows could and did become regents for their minor children, effectively ruling great estates, even duchies, even if in the name of an infant son (see more here on regency).

In many occupations, like farming, husbands and wives worked side by side.  In the guilds, women could become masters, even though most of the masters were men--only the guilds of professors and merchants were closed to women, and on the other hand men couldn't join the ribbon-makers' guild.  Women ran the castles, as everyone knew, including the titular lords of the castles.

Click here to see more on medieval women.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval women, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Royal Divorce in the Middle Ages - part two

If you're the king, your private life becomes public knowledge.  In an earlier post I discussed some well-known royal divorce cases from medieval Europe.  Here I discuss two more.

One of the most significant for political history was the divorce of Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1150s.  He was the heir to the French throne and she the heiress to the duchy of Aquitaine, essentially the southwest quarter of France, a very wealthy territory, so it seemed like an excellent match when they married back in 1137.  But they were related within the "forbidden degrees," being third cousins.  When after years of marriage they had only had a couple of daughters, Louis became convinced they were being punished by God for the sin of incest.  After all, one of the main duties of a king is to have a son to keep the line going.

They went on the Second Crusade together as penance, but the Crusade was a disaster.  On the way home, they stopped in Rome, where the pope formally forgave them for their "incest" and promised them a son.  The next year they had another daughter.

So Louis got the French bishops to annul their marriage (the pope was furious when he found out) and quickly married again.  He did eventually have a son, the future Philip II.  He seems to have expected Eleanor to retreat to a life of seclusion and contemplation.

Instead she too remarried.  Initially, on the way back to Aquitaine from Paris, she was pursued by half the unmarried nobles of France--and some of the married ones.  But she managed to outride them (think of the scene with Arwen and the Black Riders in the first "Lord of the Rings" movie).  But it was obvious she would only be safe if married.  She chose Henry, the young heir to Normandy and Anjou in western France, soon to become Henry II of England.  They went on to have five sons (and a couple of daughters), suggesting the failure of Louis and Eleanor to have sons was not her fault.

Politically, Aquitaine now was attached to the English crown, not the French one--an issue that caused tension throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, culminating in the Hundred Years War.  Interestingly, the new spouses Eleanor and Louis married after their divorce were also their third cousins.

Louis's son and heir, King Philip II of France, also had a messy divorce.  He went on the Third Crusade in 1189, got sick (perhaps malaria, there were lots of diseases in the Near East unknown in western Europe), and went home.  Shortly thereafter he married Ingeborg of Denmark, who actually was not his cousin.  But on their wedding night he took an inexplicable dislike to her, perhaps related to  his recent illness.

In the morning he declared they had not consummated their union and that the marriage should therefore be annulled.  Ingeborg, on the other hand, said that they had in fact performed the "copula carnalis" (on which click here), that she had been right there, it was not the sort of thing a girl was likely to be mistaken about.  The pope backed her up, but Philip refused to recognize her as his wife.  It took years, and France put under interdict, before they finally reached an amicable agreement and Philip married a different woman, who gave him a son.  This divorce case indicates the very strong medieval sense that marriage ought to be insoluble.

Interestingly, the church's emphasis from here on was on the permanence of marriage.  To avoid quite so many divorces like Louis's and Eleanor's, the number of "forbidden degrees" was reduced from 7 to 4 in 1214, meaning anyone related more distantly than third cousins could not claim divorce on the basis of incest.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval marriage and divorce, and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.