r/EdwardII

Edward had technically been king since his father Henry III died in 1272, but he was away on crusade and did not return to England until August 1274. He was anointed and crowned by Archbishop Robert Kilwardby, with Alexander III of Scotland and many of the English nobility present.

The coronation marked the beginning of a long, turbulent, and memorable reign. Edward would go on to conquer Wales and wage decades of war against Scotland, earning the nickname “Hammer of the Scots.”

Eleanor of Castile was also crowned Queen of England on the same day as her husband.

Kathryn Warner has, over the years, made several quite categorical remarks about our ability to reconstruct Isabella of France's appearance. In 2013, she stated that "(n)o source records Isabella’s appearance, other than that she was very beautiful... We have no idea whether her hair was blonde or black or chestnut brown or auburn, whether she was slender or plump, short or tall, pale-skinned or darker, whether she had blue or green or hazel or brown eyes." Having looked at the available evidence, however, I've concluded that this degree of agnosticism is unwarranted. We actually are able to reconstruct, with a fair degree of certainty, aspects of her appearance, and one of those aspects is her hair colour. There are two main pieces of evidence I wish to present in this regard:

1. Isabella is explicitly referred to as being blonde in at least one English source dating from her lifetime.

And it is a very famous source indeed, one you would have almost certainly encountered before if you have explored the historiography of Edward II's life and reign before: the Lament. The relevant description occurs in the eighth stanza:

Parti m'ount un ju saunz joie;

de tel tristour my qoer se pleint

De cele est qe trover quidoye

fyn loialté, vers moi se feint.

Dieux! come bien amay la bloye;

mais ore est l'estencele esteint

fyn amour; pur ceo ma joie

s'en est alee, come est de meint. *

The fifth line reads, quite clearly, as "Oh God, how much did I love the blonde one!" Those who are familiar only with Paul Studer's translation of the poem, in which the relevant word is rendered simply as "fair", might assume it simply means "fair" in the sense of "beautiful" or "comely." Not so. La bloye is, unambigously, a reference to hair colour. When used as a noun-phrase, the Anglo-Norman dictionary explicitly translates bloi as "blond-haired person." It is true that blond hair, or crine bloie, was an element of courtly descriptio, one of the set of conventional features with which the domnas of courtly love poetry or the heroines of chivalric romances were described with as a matter of course. But there is an obvious difference between giving a fictional female character a specific hair colour in line with contemporary beauty standards and describing a famous living individual, who the reader is supposed to be able to identify, with a hair colour she did not have. If Isabella had had an unflattering hair colour, the author could simply have not made any mention to it at all. The Chronique métrique of Geoffrey of Paris describes Isabella as being “la plus belle des belles", so, to me, the most parsimonious explanation of the poem's phrase is that Isabella was indeed blonde, and this was one of the ways in which her appearance aligned with the beauty standards of the day.

There's an additional point to be made about the language of the poem itself. Anglo-Norman courtly love poetry would have had a readership that skewed heavily towards the societal elite. The people of England outside of the orbit of court still overwhelmingly spoke English. A substantial portion of the people who could even read this poem would have also seen Isabella in person on public occaisons. It remains, of course, possible this description was a mere idealisation with no relation to her actual appearance, but I really do not find that particularly probable.

2. Her father was explicitly described as blond too, and Geoffrey of Paris draws a direct connection between Isabella and her father's good looks

Philip IV is explicitly described, in an anonymous royal chronicle written c. 1342, when he was definitely still in living memory, as having been flavus, rubicundus et candidus et decorus; which Elizabeth A. R. Brown translates as “golden-blond, ruddy, fair, and seemly." While this may not seem all that relevant to Isabella, given that genetic inheritance is not deterministic, we do have a contemporary source that gives a fairly strong indication that Isabella did indeed resemble her father, and it is, once again, the Chronique métrique. Right after describing the dramatic incident in which Edward II saved Isabella's life after a fire broke out in their silken pavillion in Pontoise, Geoffrey of Paris, apropos of nothing, writes:

La noble et sage dame Ysabiau,

Son père des biax le plus biau;

Si est bien droite égalité,

Que bel engendroit grant beauté.

Which I would translate as:

"The noble and wise lady Isabeau,

her father, the fairest of the fair;

It is only right and proper,

that so fair a man should beget such beauty."

Notice that Geoffrey is using the grammatically masculine version of the same phrase he used previously for Isabella: the fairest of the fair. This is Geoffrey stating, in no uncertain terms, that Isabella got her good looks from her father. If her father was blond, as we have fairly good reason to believe, we have a good reason for taking the description of her in the Lament at face value. As much as it bums me out, as a Raven-haired Isabella headcanoner, I see no reason to doubt the preponderance of evidence here.

*As a side note, Studer translates the relevant line as "Fair Isabel I dearly loved" based on the version of the poem found in Longleat Manuscript 26, in which the line reads "beux tant amay la bloye." I have instead used the version of the poem found in the Royal manuscripts, in which the line reads as above. Studer and Aspin take "beux" as being a hypocorism of "Isabeaux" and translate it as "Isabel" on that basis. I, however, concur with Smallwood's critcism of this choice: "Studer's emendation from MS Beux or Deux relied chiefly on romantic appeal, and R's line must be preferred. It has never been shown that Beux was a known pet-form of Isabel."

A Science.org article by Andrew Curry details the archeological dig which unearthed an unfortunate victim of Edward I's Scottish ambitions. The whole thing is worth reading.

It begins:

>For one 20-something defender of Scotland’s Stirling Castle, death came from above—and arrived very, very quickly. Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the man was killed more than 700 years ago by a massive blow that shattered his skeleton in dozens of places before pinning him to the ground.

>In a presentation at the biannual European meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin last week, University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry called the skeleton the first confirmed evidence of trebuchet trauma in the archaeological record. “The breaks indicate a very large area of impact and devastation,” she says. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”

The image comes from the Science.org article and is by artist Bob Marshall.

>

Well, for all the mysteries surrounding Edward II, one thing is sure, he had luxurious wavy locks. It also appears he's wearing some sort of royal robe with a maybe ermine collar? It also doesn't look like he has a beard in this image.

If anyone knows of a clearer example of this coin, let me know.

Source: Hammered British Coins

(*until you know what)

As much as I like Edward, I'm also a big fan of Isabella. I think people are too often divided into tribalistic camps of liking one while disliking the other. I don't want to play that game. They were both brilliantly colourful and fascinating people.

But this brief post is about Isabella.

I think she played the cards she was dealt with great finesse. In a man's world, she managed to stand her ground admirably and refused to be sidelined.

She was married to a man who didn't have the sense to listen to her, he failed to pay attention to her sound advise when she urged him to rid himself of the society of the Despensers.

She had Edward's best interests at heart (which aligned with her own, of course) while the Despensers, including Eleanore only wanted to enrich and empower themselves at his expense.

What do you find most inspiring or fascinating about her?

 On page 301 in this book there's an interesting claim:

'Prince Edward’s [Edward II] savage treatment of ordinary and blameless Scots, including women and children, during his campaign to put down the Bruce rebellion in 1306-07, forced Edward I to rebuke his son.’

Is it true? Nope. It unequivocally is not. Edward I did not rebuke his son.

According to the highly acclaimed historian and biographer of Edward II, Seymour Phillips (’Edward II’, 2010, pp. 114-115) it was Aymer de Valence, the earl of Pembroke and others who were much too fierce in the field, forcing Edward I to rebuke them. Prince Edward on the other hand received praise for his fair treatment of the Scots, from the Scots themselves.

It’s also worth noticing that after Edward II became king he relaxed the terrifying conditions of imprisonment of Bruce’s sister and the countess of Buchan, who had been confined to specially built cages by Edward I.

The Scottish poet and churchman John Barbour approved of Prince Edward.

So where does this myth come from?

Readers of ‘Arise, England’ won’t know, as the superficial book lacks footnotes and does not elaborate on where their information is from. But it’s likely to stem from Barbour’s poem ‘Bruce’. The damning verse:

‘And to the king of England sone

Thai wrate haly as thai had done;

And he wes blyth of that tithing,

And for dispyte had draw and hing

All the prisoneris, thouct thai war ma,

Bot Schyr Amery did nocht sua.'

Phillips tells us that the passage has been misread.

‘If the word ‘sone’ is understood as ‘son’, which was Johnstone’s interpretation [in 1946], then the passage is indeed highly critical of Edward’s behaviour and character. If, on the other hand, ‘sone’ is translated as ‘soon’, which it is in the latest edition of Barbour’s 'Bruce', then Edward I and not his son becomes the focus of attention and of criticism. If Barbour’s remarks really had been intended to refer to Prince Edward, they would sit very oddly with his strong approval of Edward in his account of the siege of Kildrummy only three months after the battle of Methven.’

 

Over on our sister sub r/RoyalConsorts there's a thread discussing everyone's favorite pop culture portrayals of consorts. There's so many great choices, but when it comes to the E2 era our choices are limited.

So, instead, who would you LIKE to see play one of our players?

Pictured is my current pick for Edward II, Scottish actor Jack Lowden from Slow Horses.

The Great Famine was a rare disaster in Edward II's reign, as it was not of his own making, and it seems he did try and do what little he could to help his people during the crisis. That said, he had a large household to feed. Edward would indicate several times over the years that he was aware that his, and the large, hungry households of his fellow lords, put undue pressure on local food supplies.

According to the abbey chronicler at St. Albans, Edward's stay area found his own household staff struggling to buy bread.

Photo: St. Alban's Cathedral and Abbey, wikicommons.

On 27 February 1310 Edward II issued a pardon and a grant to Piers Gaveston. Spoiler alert, things weren't going so well for Edward in 1310. He'd recently invited the barons to parliament but they refused to talk to him. Edward was however aware that he needed their support in order to govern efficiently and was trying to find a way to make things work somehow.

But there were so many details to keep track of. Someone appears to have told him that Gaveston had been hunting and fishing on his lands - without permission to do so! Accompanied by some curses, probably, Edward first issued a pardon for these minor infringements so they could not be used against Gaveston by the barons, and then granted him permission for life to hunt and fish as much as he pleased.

The barons would prove unfazed by this, as they formulated their demands which would be outlined in the Ordinances of 1311, through which they sought to restrict royal authority, limiting the king's financial and appointment powers, and demanding a second exile for Piers Gaveston.

Image from the Calendar of the Patent Rolls 1307-13.

According to Kathryn Warner:

"Edward passed through Shelford near Nottingham, where he attended masses and distributed five shillings and sixpence in oblations at the conventual church for the soul of his nephew the earl of Gloucester, "whose heart lies there inhumed," although the rest of the young earl's body was buried at Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire."

Then, as now, it was a humble parish church, but the king still visited.

There's apparently been a church there since the early Norman days, but the building in use today was started in the early 1300s and work continued into the 1500s, and renovations still happen today as it is a living church still in use by its congregation.

Photo: All Saints Church, Little Shelford, Wikicommons

*messenger

According to Kathryn Warner:

"Edward II gave a very generous gift of twenty marks to the messenger who brought him news that his brother-in-law the future Philippe V of France's wife Jeanne of Burgundy had borne a son, Louis, on 24 June.  The boy died a few months later.  In November 1316 Louis X's posthumous son by Queen Clemence, King Jean I, died at five days old, and Philippe became king of France."

RIP Little Jean I. If you had grown up and had kids, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. And once more, I think your uncle Edward II knew it. He probably saw the implications.

Image: public domain