Eleanor cross

The Eleanor crosses were a series of twelve tall and lavishly decorated stone monuments topped with crosses erected in a line down part of the east of England. King Edward I had them built between 1291 and about 1295 in memory of his beloved wife Eleanor of Castile. The King and Queen had been married for 36 years and she stayed by the King’s side through his many travels. While on a royal progress, she died in the East Midlands in November 1290, perhaps due to fever. The crosses, erected in her memory, marked the nightly resting-places along the route taken when her body was transported to Westminster Abbey near London.

The crosses stood at Lincoln, Grantham and Stamford, all in Lincolnshire; Geddington and Hardingstone in Northamptonshire; Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire; Woburn and Dunstable in Bedfordshire; St Albans and Waltham (now Waltham Cross) in Hertfordshire; Cheapside in London; and Charing (now Charing Cross) in Westminster. They appear to have been associated with the former shrine of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, built in the same style, for a child allegedly murdered by Jews in the most widely-known English blood libel.

Three of the medieval monuments – those at Geddington, Hardingstone and Waltham Cross – survive more or less intact; but the other nine, other than a few fragments, are lost. The largest and most ornate of the twelve was the Charing Cross. Several memorials and elaborated reproductions of the crosses have been erected, including the Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross at Charing Cross Station (built 1865).