Eleanor of Castile

Eleanor of Castile (1241 – 28 November 1290) was Queen of England as the first wife of Edward I. She was well educated at the Castilian court. She also ruled as Countess of Ponthieu in her own right (suo jure) from 1279. After intense diplomatic manoevres to secure her marriage to affirm English sovereignty over Gascony, she was married to Prince Edward at the monastery of Las Huelgas, Burgos, on 1 November 1254, at 13. She is believed to have had a child not long after.

Eleanor's life with Edward is better recorded from the time of the Second Barons' War onwards, when she spent a time imprisoned in Westminster Palace by Simon de Montfort's government. She took an active role in Edward's reign as he began to take control of Henry III's government after the war. The marriage was particularly close, and they travelled together extensively, including on the Ninth Crusade during which Edward was wounded at Acre. She was capable of influencing politics but died too young to have a major impact.

In her lifetime, she was disliked for her property dealings, as she bought up vast lands such as Leeds Castle from the middling landed classes after they had fallen behind loan repayments to Jewish moneylenders forced to sell their bonds by the Crown. These transactions associated her with the abuse of usury and the supposed exploitation of Jews, bringing her into conflict with the church. She profited from the hanging of over 300 supposed Jewish coin clippers, and after the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290, gifted the former Canterbury Synagogue to her tailor. When she died, at Harby near Lincoln in late 1290, Edward built a stone cross at each stopping-place on the journey to London, ending at Charing Cross. The sequence appears to have included the renovated tomb of Little St Hugh – falsely believed to have been ritually murdered by Jews – in order to bolster her reputation as an opponent of supposed Jewish criminality.

Eleanor exerted a strong cultural influence. 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 a generous patron of the Dominican friars, founding priories in England and supporting their work at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Notwithstanding the sources of her wealth, her financial independence had a lasting impact on the institutional standing of English Queens, establishing their future independence of action. Her reputation after death was shaped by competing positive and negative fictitious accounts, portraying her as either the dedicated companion of Edward I, or a scheming Spaniard. These accounts influenced the fate of the Eleanor crosses, for which she is probably best known today. Only in recent decades has she begun to receive serious academic study.