Birth

Eleanor was born in Burgos, daughter of Ferdinand III of Castile and Joan, Countess of Ponthieu.^[13][14] 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, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II 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. As the tradition was to have one candle for each year of the deceased's life, 49 candles would date Eleanor's birth to 1240 or 1241.

As 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 towards 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.^[15]

She was at her father's deathbed in Seville in 1252.^[16]

Prospective bride to Theobald II of Navarre

Eleanor's marriage in 1254 to the future Edward I of England was not the only marriage her family planned for her.^[17]

The kings of Castile had long made a tenuous claim to be paramount lords of the Kingdom of Navarre due to sworn homage from Garcia VI of Navarre in 1134. In 1253, Ferdinand III's heir, Eleanor's half-brother Alfonso X of Castile, stalled negotiations with England in hopes that she would marry Theobald II of Navarre.

The marriage afforded several advantages. First, the Pyrenees kingdom also afforded passage from Castile to Gascony. Secondly, Theobald II was not yet of age, thus the opportunity existed to rule or potentially annex Navarre into Castile. 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

In 1252, Alfonso X resurrected another ancestral claim, this time to the duchy of Gascony in the south of Aquitaine (the 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 1253, 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 (by now the titular duke), 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 on or before the next Feast of Assumption.^[15]

The young couple were 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.^[18] She journeyed to England alone in late summer of 1255. Edward followed her a few months later.^[19]

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.

The presence of more English, French and Norman soldiers of fortune and opportunists in the cities of Seville and Cordoba, recently conquered from the Moorish Almohads, would be increased, however, 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.

Eleanor

Second Barons' War

There is little record of Eleanor's life in England until the 1260s, when the Second Barons' War, between Henry III and his barons, divided the kingdom. During this time, Eleanor actively supported Edward's interests, importing archers from her mother's county of Ponthieu in France. It is untrue, however, that she was sent to France to escape danger during the war; she was in England throughout the struggle and held Windsor Castle and baronial prisoners for Edward. Rumours that she was seeking fresh troops from Castile led the baronial leader, Simon de Montfort, to order her removal from Windsor Castle in June 1264 after the royalist army had been defeated at the Battle of Lewes.

Edward was captured at Lewes and imprisoned, and Eleanor was confined at Westminster Palace. After Edward and Henry's army defeated the baronial army at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, Edward took a major role in reforming the government and Eleanor rose to prominence at his side. Her position was greatly improved in July 1266 when, after she had borne three short-lived daughters, she gave birth to a son, John, to be followed by a second boy, Henry, in the spring of 1268, and in June 1269 by a healthy daughter, Eleanor.

Crusade

Eleanor came from a family heavily involved in the Crusades. She appears to have been very committed to the church's call to arms, and took a vow to participate. Unlike men, women were not obliged to travel to fulfill their vow, and were discouraged from doing so, if not actually barred. Although other women members of her family had travelled on crusade, it was still an unusual thing to do.^[20]

By 1270, England was at peace and Edward and Eleanor left to join his uncle Louis IX of France on the Eighth Crusade. Louis died at Carthage before they arrived, however, and after they spent the winter in Sicily, the couple went on to Acre in the Holy Land, where they arrived in May 1271. Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, known as "Joan of Acre" for her birthplace.^[21]

The crusade was militarily unsuccessful, but Baibars of the Bahri dynasty was worried enough by Edward's presence at Acre that an assassination attempt was made on the English heir in June 1272.^[1] He was wounded in the arm by a dagger that was thought to be poisoned. The wound soon became seriously inflamed, and a surgeon saved him by cutting away the diseased flesh, but only after Eleanor was led from his bed, "weeping and wailing".^{[22][lower-alpha 1]}

They left Acre in September 1272, and in Sicily that December, they learned of Henry III's death (on 16 November 1272).^[23] Following a trip to Gascony, where their next child, Alphonso (named for Eleanor's half brother Alfonso X), was born, Edward and Eleanor returned to England and were crowned together on 19 August 1274.

Land acquisition and unpopularity

Eleanor's acquisition of lands was exceptional by any standard: between 1274 and 1290 she acquired estates worth about £2600 yearly.^[12] In fact, it was Edward himself who initiated this process^[12] and his ministers helped her. He wanted the queen to hold lands sufficient for her financial needs without drawing on funds needed for government.^[12]

Leeds Castle, in Kent acquired at vast discount by Eleanor through the forced sale of debt bonds from Jews^[4]

However, the main method for Eleanor to acquire land was the cheap purchase of the debts that Christian landlords owed Jewish moneylenders. In exchange for cancelling the debts, she received the lands pledged for the debts. Since the early 1200s, the Jewish community had been taxed well beyond its means, leading to a reduction in the capital the small number of rich Jewish moneylenders had to support their lending. Jews were also disallowed from holding land assets. To recoup against a defaulted debt, the bonds for the lands could be sold. However, these could only be bought and sold by Royal permission, meaning that Eleanor and a select group of very wealthy courtiers were the exclusive beneficiaries of these sales. The periodic excessive taxes of the Jews called "tallages" would force them to sell their bonds very cheaply to release their capital, and would be bought by courtiers.^[2][3][24]

By the 1270s, this had led the Jewish community into a desperate position, while Edward, Eleanor and a few others gained vast new estates.^[4] Contemporaries, however, saw the problem as resulting from Jewish "usury" which contributed to a rise in anti-Semitic beliefs. Her participation in "Jewish usury" and dispossession of middling landowners caused Eleanor to be criticised both by members of the landed classes and by the church.

It has been argued that debtors were often glad to rid themselves of the debts, and profited from the favour Eleanor showed them afterwards; she granted many of them, for life, lands worth as much as the estates they had surrendered to her, and some of them became her household knights.

A spectacular example of an estate picked up cheaply can be seen in the release of Leeds Castle to Edward and Eleanor by William de Leybourne, which became a favourite residence.^[4]

Eleanor acquired an "unsavoury reputation".^[4] Records of her unpopularity are common. For instance, Walter of Guisborough highlighted her reputation and preserves a contemporary poem:

The king would like to get our gold,
the queen, our manors fair, to hold  …^[5]

The annalist of Dunstable Priory echoed him in a contemporary notice of her death: "a Spaniard by birth, she acquired many fine manors".^[25]

John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury warned Eleanor's servants about her activities in the land market and her association with the highly unpopular moneylenders: "A rumour is waxing strong throughout the kingdom and has generated much scandal. It is said that the illustrious lady queen, whom you serve, is occupying many manors, lands, and other possessions of nobles, and has made them her own property – lands which the Jews have extorted with usury from Christians under the protection of the royal court."^[5]

Peckham also warned Eleanor of complaints against her officials' demands upon her tenants. She must have been aware of the truth of such reports since, on her deathbed, she asked Edward to name justices to examine her officials' actions and make reparations. The surviving proceedings from this inquest reveal a pattern of ruthless exactions, often (but not always) without Eleanor's knowledge. Her executors' financial accounts record the payments of reparations to many of those who brought actions before the judicial proceedings in 1291. It has been claimed that in her lifetime, Eleanor had righted such wrongs when she heard of them, and her deathbed request of Edward indicates that she knew, suspected, or feared, that her officials had perpetrated many more transgressions than were ever reported to her. Others interpret her deathbed actions as an admission of guilt, and an attempt to make amends before she met her judgment.

Other income

Eleanor had other kinds of income as Queen. She was granted significant income from anything hidden or unclaimed assets resulting from trials. For instance, during the late 1270s, Jews were targeted for coin-clipping offences. Although the evidence was largely fictional, around 10% of the Jewish population was sentenced to death, representing over 300 individuals. As a result, their assets were seized and forfeit to the Crown; together with fines for those who escaped hanging, over £16,500 was collected, from which Eleanor received a significant portion.^[6]

Following the 1290 Edict of Expulsion, where the whole Jewish population of expelled from England, their houses, debts and other property was forfeit to the Crown. Around £2,000 was raised for the Crown from sales, but much was given away in about 85 grants to courtiers, friends and family, including the Synagogue at Cambridge, which Eleanor gave to her tailor.^[7]

Political influence

It has traditionally been argued that Eleanor had no impact on the political history of Edward's reign, and that even in diplomatic matters her role was minor, though Edward did heed her advice on the age at which their daughters could marry foreign rulers. Otherwise, it has been said, she merely gave gifts, usually provided by Edward, to visiting princes or envoys. Edward always honoured his obligations to Alfonso X, but even when Alfonso's need was desperate in the early 1280s, Edward did not send English knights to Castile; he sent only knights from Gascony, which was closer to Castile.

Eleanor did played a role in Edward's counsels, although she did not exercise power overtly except on occasions where she was appointed to mediate disputes of a between nobles in England and Gascony. Some of Edward's legislation, for example the Statute of Jewry and his approach to Welsh resettlement show some similarities to Castilian approaches. His military strategies, too, appear to have been influenced by the work of Vegetius, to which Eleanor directed his attention when she commissioned an Old French translation while on Crusade in Acre in 1272.^[23] She also intervened to defend the Earl of Cornwall in 1287 against charges of inompetence, arguing they were unjustified.^[12] She was a "clever operator" at court, with "unique influence" given the love that Edward had for her.^[12]

Edward was, however, clearly prepared to resist her demands, or to stop her, if he felt she was going too far in any of her activities, and that he expected his ministers to restrain her if her actions threatened to inconvenience important people in his realm, as happened on one occasion when Robert Burnell, the Lord Chancellor, assured the Bishop of Winchester, from whom the queen was demanding a sum of money the bishop owed her, that he would speak with the queen and that the business would end happily for the bishop.

Nevertheless, as queen, her major opportunity for power and influence would have been later in her life, when her sons grew older through promoting their political and military careers.^[12]

Promotion of her relatives

Coat of arms of Eleanor of Castile as Queen of England

She patronised many relatives, though given foreigners' unpopularity in England and the criticism of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence's generosity to them, she was cautious as queen to choose which cousins to support. Rather than marry her male cousins to English heiresses, which would put English wealth in foreign hands, she arranged marriages for her female cousins to English barons. Edward strongly supported her in these endeavours, which provided him and his family (and Eleanor herself, in her potential widowhood) with an expanded network of potential supporters.

In a few cases, her marriage projects for her lady cousins provided Edward, as well as her father-in-law Henry III, with opportunities to sustain healthy relations with other realms. The marriage of her kinswoman Marguerite de Guines to the earl of Ulster, one of the more influential English noblemen in Ireland, not only gave Edward a new family connection in that island but also with Scotland, since Marguerite's cousin Marie de Coucy was the mother of Edward's brother-in-law Alexander III. The earliest of Eleanor's recorded marriage projects linked one of her Châtellerault cousins with a member of the Lusignan family, Henry III's highly favoured maternal relatives, not only strengthening the king's ties with that family but also creating a new tie between the English king and a powerful family in Poitou, on Gascony's northern flank.

Cultural influence

If she was allowed no overt political role, Eleanor was a highly intelligent and cultured woman and found other satisfying outlets for her energies. She was an active patroness of literature, maintaining the only royal scriptorium known to have existed at the time in Northern Europe, with scribes and at least one illuminator to copy books for her. Some of the works produced were apparently vernacular romances and saints' lives, but Eleanor's tastes ranged far more widely than that and were not limited to the products of her own writing office. The number and variety of new works written for her show that her interests were broad and sophisticated. In the 1260s she commissioned the production of the Douce Apocalypse. She has also been credibly linked to the Trinity Apocalypse, although the question of whether she commissioned it, or simply owned an apocalypse which influenced its production, remains a matter of debate. On Crusade in 1272, she had De Re Militari by Vegetius translated for Edward.

The Alphonso Psalter, believed to have been commissioned by Eleanor

After she succeeded her mother as countess of Ponthieu in 1279, a romance was written for her about the life of a supposed 9th century count of Ponthieu. She commissioned an Arthurian romance with a Northumbrian theme, possibly for the marriage of the Northumbrian lord John de Vescy, who married a close friend and relation of hers. In the 1280s, Archbishop Peckham wrote a theological work for her to explain what angels were and what they did. She almost certainly commissioned the Alphonso Psalter, now in the British Library, and is also suspected to be the commissioner of the Bird Psalter which also bears the arms of Alphonso and his prospective wife. In January 1286 she thanked the abbot of Cerne for lending her a book; possibly a treatise on chess known to have been written at Cerne in the late thirteenth century. Her accounts reveal her in 1290 corresponding with an Oxford master about one of her books. There is also evidence suggesting that she exchanged books with her brother Alfonso X.

Relevant evidence suggests that Eleanor was not fluent in English, but was accustomed to read, and so presumably to think and speak, in French, her mother's tongue, with which she would have been familiar from childhood despite spending her early years in Spain. In this she was luckier than many medieval European queens, who often arrived in their husband's realms to face the need to learn a new language; but the English court was still functionally bilingual, in large measure through the long succession of its queens, who were mostly from French-speaking lands. In 1275, on a visit to St Albans abbey in Hertfordshire, the people of the town begged her help in withstanding the abbot's exactions from them, but one of her courtiers had to act as translator before she could respond to the plea for assistance. All the literary works noted above are in French, as are the bulk of her surviving letters, and since Peckham wrote his letters and his angelic treatise for her in French, she was presumably well known to prefer that language.

Water feature in the Fountain Court at Leeds Castle

In the domestic sphere she popularised the use of tapestries and carpets – the use of hangings and especially floor coverings was noted as a Spanish extravagance on her arrival in London, but by the time of her death was plainly much in vogue amongst richer magnates, with certain of her hangings having to be reclaimed from Anthony Bek, the bishop of Durham. She also promoted the use of fine tableware, elegantly decorated knives, and even forks (though it remains uncertain whether the latter were used as personal eating utensils or as serving pieces from the common bowls or platters). She also had considerable influence on the development of garden design in the royal estates. Extensive spending on gardens is evidenced at her properties and in most places she stayed, including the use of water features – a common Castilian garden design feature, which was owed to Islamic and Roman influences in Spain. The picturesque Gloriette at Leeds Castle was developed during her ownership of the castle.

Religious views and patronage

The queen was a devoted patron of the Dominican Order friars,^[12] founding several priories in England and supporting their work at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. Not surprisingly, then, Eleanor's piety was of an intellectual stamp; apart from her religious foundations she was not given to direct good works, and she left it to her chaplains to distribute alms for her. Her level of charitable giving was, however, considerable.

Eleanor as a mother

Edward I & II Prince of Wales, portrayed in 1301, some eleven years after Eleanor's death

It has been suggested that Eleanor and Edward were more devoted to each other than to their children. As king and queen, however, it was impossible for them to spend much time in one place, and when the children were very young, they could not tolerate the rigors of constant travel with their parents. The children had a household staffed with attendants carefully chosen for competence and loyalty, with whom the parents corresponded regularly. The children lived in this comfortable establishment until they were about seven years old; then they began to accompany their parents, if at first only on important occasions.

By their teens the children were with the king and queen much of the time. In 1290, Eleanor sent one of her scribes to join her children's household, presumably to help with their education. She also sent gifts to the children regularly, and arranged for the entire establishment to be moved near to her when she was in Wales. In 1306 Edward sharply scolded Margerie de Haustede, Eleanor's former lady in waiting who was then in charge of his children by his second wife, because Margerie had not kept him well informed of their health. Edward also issued regular and detailed instructions for the care and guidance of these children.

Two incidents cited to imply Eleanor's lack of interest in her children are easily explained in the contexts of medieval royal childrearing in general, and of particular events surrounding Edward and Eleanor's family. When their six-year-old son Henry lay dying at Guildford in 1274, neither parent made the short journey from London to see him; but Henry was tended by Edward's mother Eleanor of Provence. The boy had lived with his grandmother while his parents were absent on crusade, and since he was barely two years old when they left England in 1270, he could not have had many substantial memories of them at the time they returned to England in August 1274, only weeks before his last illness and death. In other words, the dowager queen was a more familiar and comforting presence to her grandson than his parents would have been at that time, and it was in all respects better that she tended him then. Furthermore, Eleanor was pregnant at the time of his final illness and death; even given the limited thirteenth-century understanding of contagion, exposure to a sickroom might have been discouraged.

Similarly, Edward and Eleanor allowed her mother, Joan, Countess of Ponthieu, to raise their daughter Joan of Acre in Ponthieu (1274–1278). This implies no parental lack of interest in the girl; the practice of fostering noble children in other households of sufficient dignity was not unknown and Eleanor's mother was, of course, dowager queen of Castile. Her household was safe and dignified, but it does appear that Edward and Eleanor had cause to regret their generosity in letting Joan of Ponthieu foster young Joan. When the girl reached England in 1278, aged six, it turned out that she was badly spoiled. She was spirited and at times defiant in childhood, and in adulthood remained a handful for Edward, defying his plans for a prestigious second marriage for her by secretly marrying one of her late first husband's squires.

When the marriage was revealed in 1297 because Joan was pregnant, Edward was enraged that his dignity had been insulted by her marriage to a commoner of no importance. Joan, at twenty-five, reportedly defended her conduct to her father by saying that nobody saw anything wrong if a great earl married a poor woman, so there could be nothing wrong with a countess marrying a promising young man. Whether or not her retort ultimately changed his mind, Edward restored to Joan all the lands he had confiscated when he learned of her marriage, and accepted her new husband as a son-in-law in good standing. Joan marked her restoration to favour by having masses celebrated for the soul of her mother Eleanor.

Character

Two letters from Peckham show that some people thought she urged Edward to rule harshly and that she could be a severe woman who did not take it lightly if any one crossed her, which contravened contemporary expectations that queens should intercede with their husbands on behalf of the needy, the oppressed, or the condemned.^[26]

Thus, he warned a convent of nuns that "if they knew what was good for them", they would accede to the queen's wishes and accept into their house a woman the convent had refused, but whose vocation Eleanor had decided to sponsor. Record evidence from the king's administrations shows that Hugh Despenser the Elder, who agreed to allow the queen to hold one of his manors for a term of years in order to clear his debt to her, thought it well to demand official assurances from the King's Exchequer that the manor would be restored to him as soon as the queen had recovered the exact amount of the debt.

It is only with a chronicle written at St Albans in 1307–08 that we find the first positive assessment of her character, and it is hard to avoid the impression that the chronicler was writing to flatter her son, Edward II, who had succeeded his father in 1307.

Procession, burial and monuments

The Northampton 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 three survive, none in its entirety. The best preserved is that at Geddington. All three have lost the crosses "of immense height" that originally surmounted them; only the lower stages remain. The top (cross) part of the Hardingstone monument is believed to reside in the Northampton Guildhall Museum. 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 involving 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.^{[lower-alpha 2]}

Also built in the same style with the Eleanor crosses and Eleanor's tomb at Lincoln was the renovated shrine of Little Saint Hugh,^[8] a cult based on a false ritual murder allegation made against Jews. It is likely that the association with Eleanor was made in order to help improve her posthumous reputation, as she had been closely associated with the abuse of Jewish loans.^[9][11] The crosses and tomb amounted to a "propaganda coup" rehabilitating Eleanor's image and portraying her as the protector of Chritians against the supposed criminality of Jews, in the wake of the Expulsion of the Jewry.^[10]

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 tomb effigy in Westminster Abbey

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.

Eleanor of Castile

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• Cockerill, Sara (2014). Eleanor of Castile: the shadow queen. Stroud: Amberley. ISBN 9781445635897.
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• Parsons, John Carmi (1995). Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth Century England.
• Parsons, John Carmi (1997). "Mothers, Daughters, Marriage, Power: Some Plantagenet Evidence, 1150-1500". In Parsons, John Carmi (ed.). Medieval Queenship. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 63–78. ISBN 978-0312172985.
• Parsons, John Carmi (1984). "The Year of Eleanor of Castile's Birth and Her Children by Edward I". Mediaeval Studies. 46: 245–265. doi:10.1484/J.MS.2.306316. esp. 246 n. 3.
• Parsons, John Carmi (1998). "Que nos lactauit in infancia': The Impact of Childhood Care-givers on Plantagenet Family Relationships in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries". In Rousseau and, Constance M.; Rosenthal, Joel T. (eds.). Women, Marriage, and Family in Medieval Christendom: Essays in Memory of Michael M. Sheehan, C.S.B. Kalamazoo. pp. 289–324.
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General history

• Carpenter, David (2004). The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066–1284. London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-1401-4824-4. OL 7348814M.
• Morris, Marc (2009). A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain. London: Windmill Books. ISBN 978-0-0994-8175-1.
• Powicke, Frederick Maurice (1991). The Thirteenth Century, 1216–1307. Oxford University Press.

Renaissance

• Fuchs, Barbara; Weissbourd, Emily, eds. (2015). Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1-4426-4902-6. JSTOR 10.3138/j.ctt14bth82.
• Griffin, Eric J. (2009). English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-4170-9. JSTOR j.ctt3fh8z6.
• Hamilton, Bernard (1996). "Eleanor of Castile and the Crusading Movement". In Arbel, Benjamin (ed.). Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean. Frank Cass.

Eleanor and the Crusades

• Hamilton, B. (1995). "Eleanor of Castile and the Crusading Movement". Mediterranean Historical Review. 10 (1–2): 92-103. doi:10.1080/09518969508569686.
• Reynolds, Gordon (2023). "Proxy over Pilgrimage: Queen Eleanor of Castile and the Celebration of Crusade upon her Funerary Monument(s)". Peregrinations. 8 (4): 117–39.

Finances and anti-semitism

• Hillaby, Joe (1994). "The ritual-child-murder accusation: its dissemination and Harold of Gloucester". Jewish Historical Studies. 34: 69–109. JSTOR 29779954.
• Hillaby, Joe; Hillaby, Caroline (2013). The Palgrave Dictionary of Medieval Anglo-Jewish History. Basingstok: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230278165.
• Huscroft, Richard (2006). Expulsion: England's Jewish solution. Stroud: Tempus. ISBN 978-0-752-43729-3. OL 7982808M.
• Rokéah, Zefira Entin (1988). "Money and the hangman in late thirteenth century England: Jews, Christians and coinage offences alleged and real (Part I)". Jewish Historical Studies. 31: 83–109. JSTOR 29779864.
• Stacey, Robert C. (1997). "Parliamentary Negotiation and the Expulsion of the Jews from England". In Prestwich, Michael; Britnell, Richard H.; Frame, Robin (eds.). Thirteenth Century England: Proceedings of the Durham Conference, 1995. Vol. 6. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. pp. 77–102. ISBN 978-0-85115-674-3.
• Stacey, Robert (2001). "Anti-Semitism and the Medieval English State". In Maddicott, J. R.; Pallister, D. M. (eds.). The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell. London: The Hambledon Press. pp. 163–77.
• David Stocker (1986). "The Shrine of Little St Hugh". Medieval Art and Architecture at Lincoln Cathedral. British Archaeological Association. pp. 109–117. ISBN 978-0-907307-14-3.
• Stokes, H. P. (1915–1917). "The relationship between the Jews and the Royal family of England in the Thirteenth century". Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England. Jewish Historical Society of England. 8: 153–170. JSTOR 29777686.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
• Tolan, John (2023). England's Jews: Finance, Violence, and the Crown in the Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-1512823899. OL 39646815M.

Web sources

• Cockerill, Sara. "Eleanor of Castile's Final Journey". Retrieved 24 October 2014.
• lincolnian (24 March 2006). "Edward & Eleanor, Lincoln Cathedral".