Hanley Lionessheart

The Life and Times of Joanna Plantagenet
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80399-517-5
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

Richard the Lionheart travelled to far-flung realms, went on crusade, met kings and popes, and exerted a great deal of influence on the world around him ... and so did his sister. The sons of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine have been the subject of much historical attention, but their daughters have been curiously overlooked. The youngest of them, Joanna, led a particularly extraordinary life full of adventure and danger - and not a little controversy - that was more than a match for those of any of her brothers, including the famed Lionheart himself. Lionessheart is Joanna's story, and also an exploration of the wider world of the twelfth century as seen through the eyes of a woman who was a princess and a pioneer, a warrior and a wife, a captive and a queen.

Dr CATHERINE HANLEY holds a PhD in Medieval Studies (Sheffield, 2001), is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is the author of historical works in several genres. Her scholarly writing includes a monograph based on her PhD thesis and academic journal articles in the UK, US and France, as well as contributions to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology. She has written seven books of popular history: three for Yale University Press, two for The History Press and one each for Osprey and Pen & Sword.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hanley, Catherine

Leseproben

1

A King’s Daughter

It was terrifying, the day the men came.

Fontevraud Abbey was normally a scene of peace and tranquillity, prayer and contemplation, but on this summer’s day its grounds were filled with soldiers and horses. The silent nuns were surrounded by chaos and clamour, by masculine figures and deep voices echoing from the walls, and the press and the danger of flying and kicking hooves. The sights, the sounds, even the of the incursion … all was unfamiliar, intimidating and loud. And in the midst of the turmoil was its principal object: an 8-year-old girl.

It was late June or early July 1174, and the young Joanna had been living in the calm environs of Fontevraud for some while, perhaps for as much as half her life and certainly for most of the time she could remember. It was the nearest thing she had to a home, and she felt safe there within the familiar walls and daily routines. With her was her little brother, John, who was 7; they were the two youngest children in the family of King Henry II of England and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and they had been sent to the abbey for their education.

Such an arrangement was not unusual for royal children, whose parents tended to be almost constantly on the move, and it did not mean that either Joanna or John were destined for a life in holy orders. The care and education of girls until the time of their marriage or betrothal, and of boys up to the age of around 6 or 7, was considered a female concern, and convents were centres of female literacy. It therefore made sense for young princes and princesses to be based in such establishments, where they could enjoy a stable period of residence during their early lives while their parents and older siblings were on the move. It might be the only peace and quiet they would ever know, and the longest they would ever reside in one place, given the peripatetic nature of royal life. This situation was particularly pronounced in the case of Joanna’s family, which ruled huge swathes of territory, not only in England but also in France, from Normandy in the north to Aquitaine in the south. Frequent travel was a necessity, and this made studying difficult.

Fontevraud Abbey was situated in the beautiful, fertile Loire Valley, in the very heart of the family’s accumulated lands at the point where Poitou, Anjou and Touraine met. It was a large and prosperous foundation, established in the year 1100, and a very unusual one: although it housed both monks and nuns, it had been made explicit as soon as the abbey was established that the male community was subordinate to the female. All the monks, whether clerical or lay brothers, had to take an oath of obedience to the nuns, and the abbey was under the authority of an abbess, not an abbot.

Both sides of Joanna’s family – the counts of Anjou and the dukes of Aquitaine – had long been associated with Fontevraud, and it was her mother’s favourite foundation, so it was considered a suitable and safe environment in which to place the two royal children.1 The abbey was a peaceful and well-ordered place in which to grow up. The male members of the community were set to work – such labour being either spiritual or physical in nature, according to clerical or lay status – while the nuns were a silent and contemplative order confined to the cloister, as noted by a twelfth-century writer:

No other place possesses such multitudes of devout women, fervent in their obedience to God. For in addition to the rejection of other allurements, how great is this! that they never speak but in the chapter: the rule of constant silence being enjoined by the superior, because, when this is broken, women are prone to vain talk.2

As a male cleric, this commentator probably could not help himself when he added the snide remark about women’s supposed propensity for gossip, as this was a common accusation at the time – despite the fact that most talk came from, and nearly all decisions of note were made by, men. Such evident double standards of perception and behaviour would surround Joanna for all her life, as we will see.

Joanna and John’s education was extensive, as befitted the children of a king. They learned to read,* studying Latin as well as their everyday languages, the Norman-French of their father’s court and the local Occitan that was their mother’s native tongue; and they received a good grounding in religious studies and some elementary politics as well as matters of etiquette and behaviour. At this early stage of their lives the education of sister and brother did not differ markedly, but they were nearing the age at which John would be removed from female care to take his place in the world of men, practising with armour and weapons while studying the physical martial arts that were prohibited to Joanna. Royal girls, meanwhile, would learn more sedately about the many duties of being a consort and might also be taught foreign languages, particularly whichever was spoken in the land where they were destined to spend their married lives.3

Joanna’s memories of her time at the abbey were dominated by a sense of serenity and good order and also by the experience of female authority – something that was unusual in the outside world, where women of all social classes were generally subordinate to the men in their lives. The company she kept was almost exclusively female: at Fontevraud, the adults of both sexes were strictly separated, so the only men Joanna saw were the priests who officiated at Mass and administered Communion. The rest of the time she was surrounded by women, secure and safe in her calm learning environment amid the cool, echoing silence of the cloister.

All of this came to an abrupt end on that summer’s day in 1174 when the men arrived, sent by Joanna’s father, King Henry II. They were, of course, not enemies, not here to attack the abbey or harm its inhabitants, but they shattered its peace and Joanna’s, nonetheless. Any non-clerical males at all were an unusual sight for the little girl, but these were of a different stamp altogether from anything she was used to – hardened and experienced knights and warriors mounted on lively horses. It was all entirely alien.

Joanna’s feelings on encountering them can only be guessed at, but an 8-year-old girl who had led such a sheltered life for so long must surely have been intimidated. And her apprehension might well have turned to outright terror when it transpired that these armed soldiers were here to tear her and John away from the place they had called home for much of their lives. But she could not argue; as a king’s daughter her place was to obey, so she said her goodbyes to the nuns and was swept up and carried off.

Joanna was about to be reunited with her parents in some of the most shocking circumstances imaginable.

As the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joanna was never destined for a dull life. She was born in October 1165, though we do not know the exact date; indeed, we only know the month and the year because of a throwaway remark by a single chronicler while he was in the middle of narrating something else. ‘In the month of October a daughter was born to queen Alienor at Angers, and her baptismal name was Johanna,’ he writes, in a passage dealing with 1165, before moving swiftly on to talk about holy relics.4 Contemporary writers often recorded the birth of sons – and especially heirs – to reigning kings, but daughters tend only to appear in such narratives later in their childhoods, when their marriages are under discussion, which gives us an idea of what these girls were principally valued for.

Henry and Eleanor’s family of seven surviving children fell into two distinct groups.* The four eldest had been born in rapid succession (Young Henry in 1155, Matilda in 1156, Richard in 1157 and Geoffrey in 1158) and were thus much of an age, but after that there was a longer gap before Leonor** arrived in 1162, and then another before Joanna in 1165 and John at the end of 1166. The three youngest, therefore, had little to do with their older siblings; by the time Joanna was born, her brothers were 10, 8 and 7 and of an age to have been moved from female care to the male world, so she saw them rarely – probably only at Christmas or Easter courts, and even then, not all of them at once.

As a baby, Joanna was kept in her mother’s household, along with her two elder sisters and various other girls, and she travelled with them as Eleanor moved around the different family lands. They were all at Angers at both Easter and Michaelmas 1166, before moving to England later in the autumn, where John was born at Oxford on Christmas Eve. After that, though, it was not long before the wrenching separations began: Matilda, the eldest sister, left England in September 1167 to travel to Germany for her wedding to Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, and Joanna would never see her again.

Joanna and the rest of Eleanor’s household remained in England until December of that year before travelling to Normandy, where Joanna was at Henry II’s Christmas court at Argentan, along with both parents and her siblings Richard, Leonor and John. In early 1168 Queen Eleanor removed to Poitou and would remain there for most of the next six years, and it was at some point during this time that Joanna and John were sent to Fontevraud. Joanna was forced to endure another permanent separation when her remaining sister, Leonor, departed for Castile and her marriage to Alfonso VIII in the summer of...