♀Eleanor of Castile

Eleanor of Castile (about 1241 – 28 November 1290) was Queen of England as the first wife of King Edward I, a Spanish king’s daughter who went with her husband on crusade to the Holy Land and inherited a county in northern France from her mother. She was the twenty-second great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Joan of England (1272–1307).

Marriage

Eleanor, also called Leonor, was a daughter of King Fernando III of Castile and Leon^W by his second wife, Jeanne de Dammartin, Countess of Ponthieu^W. She was born about 1241. On 18 October 1254, when she was about thirteen, she married Edward, the son and heir of King Henry III of England, at the monastery of Las Huelgas^W in Spain. Edward and Eleanor had fifteen or sixteen children, several of whom died in childhood.

The crusade

Edward sailed on 11 August 1270 for the crusade^W and remained in the Holy Land until 15 August 1272. Eleanor went with him. A daughter was born to them in Palestine shortly after they arrived there in May 1271 and died within a few months, and their daughter Joan was born at Acre the next spring. At home their eldest son, John, died at Wallingford on 3 August 1271, in the care of Edward’s uncle Richard, Earl of Cornwall. On the way home Edward learned that his father had died and that he was king, and he was crowned at Westminster on 19 August 1274.

Queen and countess

When her mother died in 1279, Eleanor claimed the county of Ponthieu^W as her lawful inheritance, shutting out her brother Ferdinand’s son, Jean of Ponthieu. That year she and Edward traveled to Paris so that she could do homage to the French king for the county.

Death and the crosses

Eleanor died at Harby in Nottinghamshire on 28 November 1290, at a house about ten miles from Clipstone, and she was buried at Westminster Abbey on 17 December. Her body was carried from Lincoln to Westminster in stages, resting at Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St. Albans, Waltham, Westcheap and Charing, and the king commanded a cross to be raised in every town where her body rested on the way. Three of these Eleanor crosses^W, at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham, still stand.

Notes

Sources

Eleanor’s parentage, birth, marriage, children, her claim to Ponthieu and her death and burial are from Douglas Richardson, Plantagenet Ancestry (2nd ed., 2011), vol. I, ENGLAND 5, pp. 49–55 (CASTILE 5, p. 495, for her parents). Joan’s birth at Acre is from Richardson’s Magna Carta Ancestry (2005), CLARE 4, p. 198. These are printed genealogies of the medieval royal family and nobility, citing the chronicles, the patent and close rolls and the queen’s own letters. The account of the funeral procession and the crosses is from a 1902 paper of the East Herts Archaeological Society, as Richardson cites it (p. 52): “In every town and place where the corpse rested, the King commanded a cross of admirable workmanship to be erected to the Queen’s memory.”

Her death

The Annals of Worcester, as Richardson cites them (p. 51), record her death on 28 November and her burial at London on 17 December: “Elyanora regina obiit”. The house at Harby where she died belonged to Richard de Weston or to Sir John Weston.