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Birth:          1244 of Burgos, Castile, Spain
Death:          28 Nov 1290 Herdeby, Lincolnshire, England
Burial:         16 Dec 1290 Westminster Abbey, Westminster, Middlesex, England

Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_of_Castile
Eleanor of Castile (1241 – 28 November 1290) was an English queen, the first wife of 
Edward I, whom she married as part of a political deal to affirm English sovereignty 
over Gascony.

The marriage was known to be particularly close, and Eleanor travelled extensively 
with her husband. She was with him on the Eighth Crusade, when he was wounded at 
Acre, but the popular story of her saving his life by sucking out the poison has long 
been discredited. When she died, near Lincoln, her husband famously ordered a stone 
cross to be erected at each stopping-place on the journey to London, ending at 
Charing Cross.

Eleanor was better educated than most medieval queens and exerted a strong cultural 
influence on the nation. She was a keen patron of literature, and encouraged the use 
of tapestries, carpets and tableware in the Spanish style, as well as innovative garden 
designs. She was also a successful businesswoman, endowed with her own fortune as 
Countess of Ponthieu.
Life[edit]

Birth[edit]

Eleanor was born in Burgos, daughter of Ferdinand III of Castile and Joan, Countess 
of Ponthieu. Her Castilian name, Leonor, became Alienor or Alianor in England, and 
Eleanor in modern English. She was named after her paternal great-grandmother, 
Eleanor of England.

Eleanor was the second of five children born to Ferdinand and Joan. Her elder brother 
Ferdinand was born in 1239/40, her younger brother Louis in 1242/43; two sons born 
after Louis died young. For the ceremonies in 1291 marking the first anniversary of 
Eleanor's death, 49 candlebearers were paid to walk in the public procession to 
commemorate each year of her life. Since the custom was to have one candle for 
each year of the deceased's life, 49 candles would date Eleanor's birth to the year 
1241. Since her parents were apart from each other for 13 months while King 
Ferdinand was on a military campaign in Andalusia, from which he returned to the 
north of Spain only in February 1241, Eleanor was probably born toward the end of 
that year. The courts of her father and her half-brother Alfonso X of Castile were 
known for their literary atmosphere. Both kings also encouraged extensive education 
of the royal children and it is therefore likely that Eleanor was educated to a standard 
higher than the norm, a likelihood which is reinforced by her later literary activities as 
queen.[1] She was at her father's deathbed in Seville in 1252.[2]

Prospective bride to Theobald II of Navarre[edit]

Eleanor's marriage in 1254 to the future Edward I of England was not the first marriage 
her family planned for her. The kings of Castile had long made a tenuous claim to be 
paramount lords of the Kingdom of Navarre in the Pyrenees, and from 1252 Ferdinand 
III's heir, Eleanor's half-brother Alfonso X of Castile, hoped she would marry Theobald 
II of Navarre. To avoid Castilian control, Margaret of Bourbon (mother and regent to 
Theobald II) in August 1253 allied with James I of Aragon instead, and as part of that 
treaty solemnly promised that Theobald would never marry Eleanor.

Marriage[edit]

In 1252, Alfonso X had resurrected another ancestral claim, this time to the duchy of 
Gascony, in the south of Aquitaine, last possession of the Kings of England in France, 
which he claimed had formed part of the dowry of Eleanor of England. Henry III of 
England swiftly countered Alfonso's claims with both diplomatic and military moves. 
Early in 1254 the two kings began to negotiate; after haggling over the financial 
provision for Eleanor, Henry and Alfonso agreed she would marry Henry's son Edward, 
and Alfonso would transfer his Gascon claims to Edward. Henry was so anxious for the 
marriage to take place that he willingly abandoned elaborate preparations already 
made for Edward's knighting in England, and agreed that Alfonso would knight Edward 
before the wedding took place.

The young couple married at the monastery of Las Huelgas, Burgos, on 1 November 
1254. Edward and Eleanor were second cousins once removed, as Edward's 
grandfather King John of England and Eleanor's great-grandmother Eleanor of England 
were the son and daughter of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Following the 
marriage they spent nearly a year in Gascony, with Edward ruling as lord of Aquitaine. 
During this time Eleanor, aged thirteen and a half, almost certainly gave birth to her 
first child, a short lived daughter[citation needed]. She journeyed to England alone in 
late summer of 1255. Edward followed her a few months later.[3]

Henry III took pride in resolving the Gascon crisis so decisively, but his English 
subjects feared that the marriage would bring Eleanor's kinfolk and countrymen to live 
off Henry's ruinous generosity. A few of her relatives did come to England soon after 
her marriage. She was too young to stop them or prevent Henry III from supporting 
them, but she was blamed anyway and her marriage soon became unpopular. 
Interestingly enough, Eleanor's mother had been spurned in marriage by Henry III and 
her great-grandmother, Alys of France, Countess of Vexin, had been spurned in 
marriage by Richard I of England.

However, the presence of more English, French and Norman soldiers of fortune and 
opportunists in the recently reconquered Seville and Cordoba Moorish Kingdoms would 
be increased, thanks to this alliance between royal houses, until the advent of the 
later Hundred Years War when it would be symptomatic of extended hostilities 
between the French and the English for peninsular support.
Death[edit]

Further information: Eleanor cross

Eleanor was presumably a healthy woman for most of her life; that she survived at 
least sixteen pregnancies does not suggest that she was frail. Shortly after the birth of 
her last child, however, financial accounts from Edward's household and her own 
begin to record frequent payments for medicines to the queen's use. The nature of the 
medicines is not specified, so it is impossible to know what ailments were troubling her 
until, later in 1287 while she was in Gascony with Edward, a letter to England from a 
member of the royal entourage states that the queen had a double quartan fever. This 
fever pattern has led to suggestions that she was suffering from a strain of malaria. 
The disease is not fatal of itself, but leaves its victims weak and vulnerable to 
opportunistic infections. Among other complications, the liver and spleen become 
enlarged, brittle, and highly susceptible to injury which may cause death from internal 
bleeding. There is also a possibility that she had inherited the Castilian royal family's 
theorized tendency to cardiac problems.

From the time of the return from Gascony there are signs that Eleanor was aware that 
her death was not far off. Arrangements were made for the marriage of two of her 
daughters, Margaret and Joanna, and negotiations for the marriage of young Edward 
of Caernarfon to Margaret, the Maid of Norway, heiress of Scotland, were hurried on. 
In summer 1290, a tour north through Eleanor's properties was commenced, but 
proceeded at a much slower pace than usual, and the autumn Parliament was 
convened in Clipstone, rather than in London.[5] Eleanor's children were summoned to 
visit her in Clipstone, despite warnings that travel might endanger their health. 
Following the conclusion of the parliament Eleanor and Edward set out the short 
distance from Clipstone to Lincoln. By this stage Eleanor was travelling fewer than 
eight miles a day.

Her final stop was at the village of Harby, Nottinghamshire, less than 7 miles (11 km) 
from Lincoln.[6] The journey was abandoned, and the queen was lodged in the house 
of Richard de Weston, the foundations of which can still be seen near Harby's parish 
church. After piously receiving the Church's last rites, she died there on the evening 
of the 28 November 1290, aged 49 and after 36 years of marriage. Edward was at her 
bedside to hear her final requests. For three days afterward, the machinery of 
government came to a halt and no writs were sealed.
Procession, burial and monuments[edit]

Further information: Eleanor cross

Eleanor's embalmed body was borne in great state from Lincoln to Westminster Abbey, 
through the heartland of Eleanor's properties and accompanied for most of the way by 
Edward, and a substantial cortege of mourners. Edward gave orders that memorial 
crosses be erected at the site of each overnight stop between Lincoln and 
Westminster. Based on crosses in France marking Louis IX's funeral procession, these 
artistically significant monuments enhanced the image of Edward's kingship as well as 
witnessing his grief. The "Eleanor crosses" stood at Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, 
Geddington, Hardingstone near Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St 
Albans, Waltham, Westcheap, and Charing – only 3 survive, none in its entirety. The 
best preserved is that at Geddington. All 3 have lost the crosses "of immense height" 
that originally surmounted them; only the lower stages remain. The Waltham cross has 
been heavily restored and to prevent further deterioration, its original statues of the 
queen are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The monument now known as "Charing Cross" in London, in front of the railway 
station of that name, was built in 1865 to publicise the railway hotel at Charing station. 
The original Charing cross was at the top of Whitehall, on the south side of Trafalgar 
Square, but was destroyed in 1647 and later replaced by a statue of Charles I.
In the thirteenth century, embalming involved evisceration and separate burial of heart 
and body was not unusual. Eleanor however was afforded the more unusual "triple" 
burial – separate burial of viscera, heart and body. Eleanor's viscera were buried in 
Lincoln Cathedral, where Edward placed a duplicate of the Westminster tomb. The 
Lincoln tomb's original stone chest survives; its effigy was destroyed in the 17th 
century and has been replaced with a 19th-century copy. On the outside of Lincoln 
Cathedral are two statues often identified as Edward and Eleanor, but these images 
were heavily restored and given new heads in the 19th century; probably they were 
not originally intended to depict the couple.[7]

The queen's heart was buried in the Dominican priory at Blackfriars in London, along 
with that of her son Alphonso. The accounts of her executors show that the monument 
constructed there to commemorate her heart burial was richly elaborate, including wall 
paintings as well as an angelic statue in metal that apparently stood under a carved 
stone canopy. It was destroyed in the 16th century during the Dissolution of the 
Monasteries.

Eleanor's funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on 17 December 1290. Her body 
was placed in a grave near the high altar that had originally contained the coffin of 
Edward the Confessor and, more recently, that of King Henry III until his remains were 
removed to his new tomb in 1290. Eleanor's body remained in this grave until the 
completion of her own tomb. She had probably ordered that tomb before her death. It 
consists of a marble chest with carved mouldings and shields (originally painted) of the 
arms of England, Castile, and Ponthieu. The chest is surmounted by William Torel's 
superb gilt-bronze effigy, showing Eleanor in the same pose as the image on her great 
seal.

When Edward remarried a decade after her death, he and his second wife Margaret of 
France, named their only daughter Eleanor in honour of her.

Legacy[edit]

Eleanor of Castile's queenship is significant in English history for the evolution of a 
stable financial system for the king's wife, and for the honing this process gave the 
queen-consort's prerogatives. The estates Eleanor assembled became the nucleus for 
dower assignments made to later queens of England into the 15th century, and her 
involvement in this process solidly established a queen-consort's freedom to engage in 
such transactions. Few later queens exerted themselves in economic activity to the 
extent Eleanor did, but their ability to do so rested on the precedents settled in her 
lifetime.

Historical reputation[edit]

Despite her lack of popularity in her own day, Eleanor of Castile has had a largely 
positive reputation since the 17th century. The antiquarian William Camden first 
published in England the tale that Eleanor saved Edward's life at Acre by sucking his 
wound. Camden then went on to ascribe construction of the Eleanor crosses to 
Edward's grief at the loss of a heroic wife who had selflessly risked her own life to 
save his. Camden's discussion of the crosses reflected the religious history of his time. 
The crosses were in fact meant to induce passersby to pray for Eleanor's soul, but the 
Protestant Reformation in England had officially ended the practice of praying for the 
souls of the dead, so Camden ascribed Edward's commemoration of his wife to her 
alleged heroism in saving Edward's life at the risk of her own. Historians in the 17th 
and 18th centuries uncritically repeated Camden's information wholesale, and in the 
19th century the self-styled historian Agnes Strickland used Camden to paint the 
rosiest of all pictures of Eleanor. None of these writers, however, used contemporary 
chronicles or records to provide accurate information about Eleanor's life.

Such documents began to become widely available in the late 19th century, but even 
when historians began to cite them to suggest Eleanor was not the perfect queen 
Strickland praised, many rejected the correction, often expressing indignant disbelief 
that anything negative was said about Eleanor. Only in recent decades have 
historians studied queenship in its own right and regarded medieval queens as worthy 
of attention. These decades produced a sizeable body of historical work that allows 
Eleanor's life to be scrutinized in the terms of her own day, not those of the 17th or 
19th centuries.

The evolution of her reputation is a case study in the maxim that each age creates its 
own history. If Eleanor of Castile can no longer be seen as a paradigm of queenly 
virtues, her career can now be examined as the achievement of an intelligent and 
determined woman who was able to meet the challenges of an exceptionally 
demanding life.

Issue[edit]
1.Daughter, stillborn in May 1255 in Bordeaux, France. Buried in Dominican Priory 
Church, Bordeaux, France.
2.Katherine (c 1261 – 5 September 1264) and buried in Westminster Abbey.
3.Joanna (January 1265 – before 7 September 1265), buried in Westminster Abbey.
4.John (13 July 1266 – 3 August 1271), died at Wallingford, in the custody of his 
granduncle, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. Buried in Westminster Abbey.
5.Henry (before 6 May 1268 – 16 October 1274), buried in Westminster Abbey.
6.Eleanor (18 June 1269 – 29 August 1298). She was long betrothed to Alfonso III of 
Aragon, who died in 1291 before the marriage could take place, and in 1293 she 
married Count Henry III of Bar, by whom she had one son and one daughter.
7.Daughter (1271 Palestine ). Some sources call her Juliana, but there is no 
contemporary evidence for her name.
8.Joan (April 1272 – 7 April 1307). She married (1) in 1290 Gilbert de Clare, 6th Earl of 
Hertford, who died in 1295, and (2) in 1297 Ralph de Monthermer, 1st Baron 
Monthermer. She had four children by each marriage.
9.Alphonso (24 November 1273 – 19 August 1284), Earl of Chester.
10.Margaret (15 March 1275 – after 1333). In 1290 she married John II of Brabant, 
who died in 1318. They had one son.
11.Berengaria (1 May 1276 – before 27 June 1278), buried in Westminster Abbey.
12.Daughter (December 1277/January 1278 – January 1278), buried in Westminster 
Abbey. There is no contemporary evidence for her name.
13.Mary (11 March 1279 – 29 May 1332), a Benedictine nun in Amesbury.
14.Son, born in 1280 or 1281 who died very shortly after birth. There is no 
contemporary evidence for his name.
15.Elizabeth (7 August 1282 – 5 May 1316). She married (1) in 1297 John I, Count of 
Holland, (2) in 1302 Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford & 3rd Earl of Essex. The 
first marriage was childless; by Bohun, Elizabeth had ten children.
16.Edward II of England, also known as Edward of Caernarvon (25 April 1284 – 21 
September 1327). In 1308 he married Isabella of France. They had two sons and two 
daughters.

It is often said, on the basis of antiquarian genealogies from the 15th-17th centuries, 
that Eleanor delivered 2 daughters in the years after Edward II's birth. The names 
most often associated with these ephemeral daughters are "Beatrice" and "Blanche"; 
later writers also mention "Juliana" and "Euphemia," and even a "Berenice," probably 
by confusion with the historical daughter Berengaria. At least one eighteenth-century 
writer made "Beatrice" and Berengaria into twins, presumably because of the 
alliteration of names; but Berengaria's birth in 1276 (not the 1280s) was noted by more 
than one chronicler of the day, and none of them reports that Berengaria had a twin 
sister. Queen Eleanor's wardrobe and treasury accounts survive almost intact for the 
years 1288-1290 and record no births in those years, nor do they ever refer to 
daughters with any of those names. Even more records survive from King Edward's 
wardrobe between 1286 and 1290 than for his wife's, and they too are silent on any 
such daughters. It is most unlikely that they ever existed in historical fact. It is not 
unlikely, however, that there were other unsuccessful pregnancies and short-lived 
children in the years before 1266, when records for Eleanor's activities are very slight.

Parents
ALFONSEZ Fernando III "The Saint" (5 Aug 1201 - 30 May 1252)
DE DAMMARTIN Joan (ABT 1220 - 16 Mar 1279)

Siblings
OF CASTILE Eleanor (Leonor) (1244 - 28 Nov 1290)

Marriage To PLANTAGENET Edward I "Longshanks" (17 Jun 1239 - 7 Jul 1307)
    m. 18 Oct 1254 Burgos, Spain

Notes
marriage was a contract marriage. Note when children born

Parents
PLANTAGENET Henry III (1 Oct 1206 - 16 Nov 1272)
OF PROVENCE Eleonore (Leonor) (ABT 1222 - 25 Jun 1291)

Children by PLANTAGENET Edward I "Longshanks" 17 Jun 1239 - 7 Jul 1307
____ Joan of Acre (Apr 1272 - 23 Apr 1307)
PLANTAGENET Elizabeth (7 Aug 1282 - 5 May 1316)
____ Edward II (25 Apr 1284 - 21 Sep 1327)

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