Eleanor of Provence was feted by the whole city of London at her coronation at Westminster in 1236, a lovely thirteen-year-old royal bride, wearing a shimmering fur-trimmed gown. To the court of Henry III, whose life had been blighted by the loss of the royal wealth, especially the crown jewels by his father, who then died while Henry was still a child, she was dazzling.
Queen of Royal Fashion Style Colour
Eleanor well understood the importance of royal ostentation, and proceeded to dress her family and courtiers in highest fashion and style. Her entourage that accompanied her from Provence and stayed to look after her interests, and gain high office, were rewarded with lands, gold and jewels. They wore colourful fabrics, imported silks, satins and velvets interwoven with gold thread and were lavishly decorated with precious stones.
The noblemen were also wearing these imported fabrics and tabards. The tabard "was the one fashionable development of the early part of the thirteenth century," Costain observes. "It was a major change because it had sleeves, tight-fitting sleeves which covered the shoulders snugly." Eleanor had a fondness for bright coloured fabrics, with some sumptuousness. She famously favoured red damask and continued to develop expensive taste throughout her reign.
"With the rediscovery of the dyeing process, which had lapsed and been forgotten during the Dark Ages," Costain says, "color was being restored in exciting glory. In France and Flanders men were experimenting with the yellow-flowered madder and producing cloth of great beauty, while, more important still, in Italy dyes were being imported from the East." Italians knew how to make purple fabric dyes, too, by extracting orchil out of lichens from Asia Minor, Costain says, which was how churchmen in high office began wearing it.
Expensive Royal Wardrobe, Gold and Silver Accessories
The exchequer pipe rolls for 1252-1253 show details of expenditure by Eleanor, then 28 years old. Accounts and inventories for that year cover the queen's wardrobe finance. Howell suggests that they reveal the high fashion that Eleanor and the ladies of her household lived up to. Listed are orders for gowns of strong colours, russet, blue, green, for instance, with borders worked in gold and silver threads, sometimes with the use of large numbers of pearl buttons. Two tailors were mentioned that year, Colin and Richard. At Oxford, Colin bought a tabard of Ypres silk for the young prince Edward, and took orders for tunics for princes Edward and Edmund.
Howell mentions items made from fine fabrics, such as chemises, veils, wimples and silk kerchiefs. There are details of various trims and threads bought at fairs, or sent from abroad through the court's extensive network of family and friends abroad. They kept warm with fur trims on hoods and capes, and by wearing fine woollen hose and caps. Shoes included fine goatskin boots for the queen, though slippers were made to her order, presumably for indoor wear.
That same year Queen Eleanor spent hundreds of pounds on jewellery, some sixty one rings, ninety one brooches and thirty three belts, some with emeralds, pearls, rubies or sapphires, most of which were meant to be given as presents. Royal gift-giving especially at Christmas is a well-documented aspect of Henry III's reign. The royal family's grandeur and display clearly marked them out as who they were and how they should be treated as they travelled from one royal residence to another, whether the King was at home or campaigning abroad. It was used to impose a sense of power and authority in political affairs, too.
Eleanor Queen Mother Finery at Daughter's Wedding
One of the most ostentatious of royal displays in the whole of Henry's reign was in December 1251, when Henry and Eleanor's eleven-year-old daughter Margaret was married to Alexander III of Scotland at a ceremony in York cathedral. Matthew Paris recounts how a thousand English knights who attended the wedding nuptials, "clad in silken stuff" threw off their new silk cointises the next day in favour of yet more new outfits. Alexander was knighted by Henry with "the belt of knighthood, and initiated twenty others with him, who were all decorated in rich and costly dresses," Paris describes.
Henry and Eleanor attended their daughter's wedding wearing "garments of samite (a heavy silk) trimmed with gold braid, and mantels furred with ermine," Howell reports, while the royal prince Edward and his companions wore "tabards of cloth of gold embroidered with the royal leopards." Curiously, the record does not suggest what the bride wore but, later, those who travelled to Scotland to report back to the bride's parents on her welfare were richly rewarded with presents endowed in the usual royal manner.
Eleanor's own wedding to Henry is described in Thirteenth Century Royal Wedding Celebrations – King Henry Third and more insights into Henry and Eleanor's life from Matthew Paris in Royal Christmas Gift Giving & Feasting in the Thirteenth Century
Sources
- Thomas B. Costain (1951) The Magnificent Century: The Pageant of England Doubleday & Company Inc.
- Margaret Howell (2001) Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England Wiley-Blackwell
- Rev. J.A. Giles (translator) (1854) Matthew Paris’s English History Vol 2 1244 to 1252
- H. W. Ridgeway, ‘Henry III (1207–1272)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12950, accessed 2 Feb 2011]
Valerie Williamson - Dr. Val Williamson is a freelance journalist and academic specialising in historical and popular culture topics.
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