Plates 3.12-3.17: Eleanor Crosses
This series of six plates illustrates the three surviving “Eleanor Crosses,” the monuments erected by Edward I in the three or four years after the death of his queen consort, Eleanor of Castile, in 1290. Beginning with the cross at Hardingstone near Northampton (Plates 3.12 and 3.13), the series continues with the Geddington cross (Plates 3.14 and 3.15) and the Waltham cross (Plates 3.16 and 3.17). The plates were engraved by James Basire Sr. (1730-1802) from six drawings made in 1789-90 by Jacob Schnebbelie (1760-1792); the drawings are not in the Red Portfolios at the Society of Antiquaries but may be in Gough’s papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Plate 3.12 is a view of the Hardingstone cross and Plate 3.13 illustrates details from the cross including the plan and elevations of four statues of Eleanor. Plate 3.14 shows the cross at Geddington (Northamptonshire), with Plate 3.15 showing details including a rather complicated composite plan and the three statues. Plates 3.16 and 3.17 are a pair illustrating the Waltham cross, in elevation and with a series of details.
Objects:
Plate 3.12: The Eleanor Cross at Hardingstone, just south of Northampton, was built in 1291-92 and is a five-story cross, octagonal in plan, with a stage of steps, a shaft with blank arcades, a stage of arcaded sculpture niches, an ornate cross-base, and a short eighteenth-century cross at the top.
Plate 3.13: This plate includes a composite plan of the Hardingstone cross (labelled “I”), showing the top of the octagonal steps, the eight blank arcades of the main shaft, the eight niches of the stage above, and, in the centre, the cross-base and cross-shaft. Drawings of the four statues of Eleanor are included (“A” to “D”), along with an elevation of one of the blank arcades of the second stage (without a letter), and small details of the royal arms of England (“E”) and sculpted foliage (“F” to “H”).
Plate 3.14: The Geddington cross is another five-story Eleanor cross resting on an octagonal stepped base; rather unusually, the two main stages of the cross are triangular in plan. Although poorly documented, it was presumably built between 1291 and 1294.
Plate 3.15: The plate illustrates significant details of the Geddington cross including the three sculptures of Eleanor on the third stage (“A” to “C”) and the carpet of roses on the second stage (details of six vertical bands, “D” to “I”). There are also details of the three arms on the second stage: her husband Edward’s arms of England (“K”), her father Ferdinand III’s arms of Castile and León (“L”), and her mother Jeanne de Dammartin’s arms of Ponthieu (“M”). A composite plan illustrates three of the stages of the cross (the plan has no letter-code but the locations of the three sculptures of Eleanor are indicated by “A” to “C”).
Plate 3.16: This plate illustrates the Waltham cross built in 1291-92, another five-stage octagonal cross with stages of steps (largely obscured by the road and by brick repairs to the base), blank arcades, sculpture niches, a cross-base, and a broken cross-shaft at the top.
Plate 3.17: The plate illustrates significant details of the Waltham cross including views of three statues of Queen Eleanor (“A” to “C”), along with two plans illustrating (“D,” left) the top of the steps supporting the second stage of blank arcades and (“E,” right) the sculpture niches and the cross-base. An elevation (“F”) illustrates one of the Geometric blank arcades of the second stage, this one featuring Eleanor’s arms of England (through her husband King Edward) and Ponthieu (through her mother Jeanne de Dammartin). Further details illustrate a four-leaved flower (“G”) from the spandrels of the arcades of the second stage and (lower right, without letter-code) Eleanor’s arms of Castile and León (through her father Ferdinand III).
Transcription:
Plate 3.12
The Cross erected in memory of Queen Eleanor, near Northampton.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament, April 23 1791.
Plate 3.13
Figures & ornaments on Northampton Cross.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament, April 23 1791.
Plate 3.14
The Cross erected in memory of Queen Eleanor at Geddington.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament, April 23 1791.
Plate 3.15
Figures & ornaments on Geddington Cross.
A. B. C.
Statues of Queen Eleanor the Letters refer to their situation in the Plan
D. E. F. G. H. I.
Specimens of the rich work on the shaft or body of the Cross—which is divided into two compartments on the upper one are placed the shields
K. L. M.
which are repeated and placed alternately
D. F. H.
exhibit specimens of the upper &
E. G. I.
the lower compartments
Schnebbelie del 1789
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament, April 23 1791.
Plate 3.16
The Cross erected in memory of Queen Eleanor, near Waltham.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament, April 23 1791.
Plate 3.17
[Untitled]
A. B. C. Figures on Waltham Cross.
D. Plan of the 1st Story.
E. Plan of the 2.d Story shewing Situation of the Figures.
F. One of the Sides.
G. Ornaments of the Spandrils.
Translation:
Bottom of each plate (lower left):
Published by the Society of Antiquaries of London.
Original Explanatory Account: Click here to read the original explanatory account for Plates 3.12-3.17.
Commentary by Nick Holder:
Life and death of Eleanor of Castile
Richard Gough’s (1735-1809) explanatory account of the three Eleanor crosses—at Hardingstone (near Northampton), Geddington (Northamptonshire), and Waltham (Hertfordshire)—is a fine explanation of the monuments and their context. Gough discusses the death of Queen Eleanor (p. 1) and summarises her life with King Edward (pp. 2-3); a fuller account is given in Sara Cockerill’s admirable biography of Eleanor (Cockerill 2015).
Funeral procession
More recent work has revised Gough’s account of the funeral procession that followed the death of Eleanor (Gough 1791, 4-8). The documentary evidence for the procession and the construction of the memorial crosses was examined in detail by Howard Colvin; the route and the location of the crosses have been studied by Jean Powrie and Decca Warrington (Colvin 1963, 1.479-85; Powrie 1990; Warrington 2018).
An Anglo-French tradition of an elaborate and choreographed royal funeral procession developed in the thirteenth century, particularly in cases where the king died far from his capital or royal mausoleum. Similar ritual – including a separate heart burial – was given to Blanche of Castile, consort of Louis VIII and regent of their son Louis IX, after her death in 1252 (Erlande-Brandenburg 1975, 18-21, 23).
Eleanor died at Harby (Nottinghamshire) on the evening or night of Tuesday, 28 November 1290 (see Table 1 and notes). Edward remained in the village of Harby for about three days before he embarked on a fifteen-day funeral procession with Eleanor’s corpse, beginning on Saturday, 2 December with the fifteen-mile journey from Harby to Lincoln.
The king, the funeral party and the coffin then left Lincoln on Monday, 4 December and travelled slowly southwards to Westminster, stopping overnight at eleven other locations over thirteen days (the precise location and dates of these stops have been the subject of some discussion; see Table 1). The funeral party may well have been smaller than the full royal retinue of several hundred (who had been accompanying the king and queen northwards) but there must have been a hundred or more travelling south from Lincoln, including nobles, religious, courtiers, servants with horse-drawn carts of provisions, and armed knights (Crockford 2016, 235-36; Warrington 2018, 21-22).
The stops after Lincoln were Grantham and Stamford (in Lincolnshire), Geddington and Hardingstone (Northamptonshire), Stony Stratford (Buckinghamshire), Woburn Abbey and Dunstable (Bedfordshire), and then St Albans (in Hertfordshire). Edward left St Albans to travel to London (where normal royal business presumably called) and the funeral party journeyed to Waltham Abbey (Essex). Entering London through Bishopsgate on Thursday, 14 December, the funeral party stopped at Holy Trinity Priory in the east of the walled city. The following day they travelled slowly westwards along Cheapside, halting at Grey Friars and St Paul’s Cathedral. The next day was the final day of the procession and, after a mass at Black Friars, the coffin arrived at Westminster Abbey on Saturday, 16 December, with the funeral taking place the following day (Holder 2021).
Although three centuries apart, Eleanor’s funeral procession through London may have resembled that of Queen Elizabeth (Plates 3.18-24): both processions would have had aristocrats, knights, the City’s mercantile elite, and royal servants following the coffin on foot with standard bearers. Eleanor’s procession would, however, have included many monks and friars as well as the bishops and chaplains who attended Elizabeth’s hearse.
Eleanor received a triple burial, with her entrails buried at Lincoln Cathedral (probably on Sunday, 3 December), her body buried at Westminster (on Sunday, 17 December) and, finally, her heart buried at Black Friars, London, 21 days after her death (on Tuesday, 19 December).
Crosses and commemoration
Large crosses such as the Ruthwell Cross (Plates 2.54-55) were part of the late Anglo-Saxon tradition of commemorating high-status deceased. The tradition continued in Norman England and William II erected a memorial cross to his mother on the Strand, London; this remained a prominent London monument two centuries later (Beardwood 1969, 98, 263–4; Gover 1942, 173).
Edward and his advisors were already imagining a series of commemorative crosses during the funeral procession; the monastic chronicler of Dunstable records the initial planning for the cross at the town crossroads:
“And when the body of Queen Eleanor passed through Dunstable, it was placed in the middle of the marketplace, with a reliquary on top, until the Lord Chancellor and the nobles who had gone there chose an appropriate place where they would later—at the king’s expense—erect a cross of admirable size. And our prior sprinkled holy water to bless the chosen place” (Rolls Series, 36, 3.362-63).Twelve crosses were eventually built, commemorating the thirteen overnight stops of the funeral procession (with the three London and Westminster stops commemorated with two crosses). The monuments seem to have been planned as a series—increasing in size and cost—with crosses erected at Lincoln, Grantham and Stamford (Lincolnshire), Geddington and Hardingstone (Northamptonshire), Stony Stratford (Buckinghamshire), Woburn and Dunstable (Bedfordshire), St Albans and Cheshunt/Waltham (Hertfordshire; the cross at Waltham is in this county but the abbey, a mile to the east, is in Essex). The two London crosses were built at Cheapside in the City and at Charing, the latter a crossroads between the City and Westminster, and the location of the royal mews (Holder 2021).
Each memorial cross was sited in a prominent position on the funeral journey, near Eleanor’s resting place for that night of the procession. The choice was usually for a significant crossroads, junction or high street where Eleanor’s body had directly passed by, sometimes in the town or village, sometimes outside.
The Eleanor Cross at Hardingstone (Plates 3.12 and 3.13), just south of Northampton, was sited by the nunnery of Delapré Abbey, where Eleanor’s body presumably rested overnight. The cross was built in 1291-2 by the mason John of Battle at a cost of well over £100 (Colvin 1963, 1.479-85). The five-story monument rests on an octagonal base of steps, from which a broad shaft, also octagonal, rises, its arched arcades decorated with relief sculpture of heraldic shields and open books. Above this, the third stage has eight arcaded niches, four of which have statues of Eleanor. We can note that the draftsman, Jacob Schnebbelie, has adjusted the perspective to emphasise three of the four “occupied” niches, at the expense of the adjacent blank niches. The fourth stage is the decorated base from which the medieval cross-shaft rose. For this fifth stage, the engraver, James Basire Sr, following Schnebbelie, illustrates a small stone cross, which (as Gough records in his explanatory account, pp. 9-10) was added in 1713 by the county Justices of the Peace, along with an accompanying marble inscription. The eighteenth-century cross and inscription have since been removed, re-exposing the broken medieval cross-shaft itself.
The Geddington cross (Plates 3.14 and 3.15) was built at the crossroads in the village of Geddington, near the royal hunting lodge where Edward and Eleanor had stayed on several occasions, and where her body later passed. Like the Hardingstone cross, this was another five-story cross resting on an octagonal base of steps. However, the second and third stages of this monument are, rather unusually, triangular in plan. The second stage is decorated with a banded carpet of roses in relief. The third stage features the sculptural niches, framed with pairs of gabled arches. The combination of the triangular plan and the paired arches means that each of the three sculptures of Eleanor is partly hidden by a slender column. This could be considered an artistic mistake, but it may, in fact, have been the artist’s intention to force the viewer to walk around the monument, looking through the arcaded screen to glimpse Eleanor herself, just like on her tomb at Westminster (Holder 2021). The pinnacled gables of the statue stage clasp the fourth stage, the cross-base (its plan a crown or star). Schnebbelie would not have seen the nine-inch-square cross-shaft itself, a broken fragment just emerging from the cross-base (and visible only from above). No documentary records survive for the construction of this cross but, like the others in the series, it was presumably built between 1291 and 1294.
The third surviving cross was built just outside the village of Cheshunt in Hertfordshire (where the eponymous small town of Waltham Cross later developed), a mile to the west of Waltham Abbey where Eleanor’s funeral party had halted for the night (Plates 3.16 and 3.17). The cross was built in 1291-2 by the masons Roger of Crundale and Nicholas Dymenge, costing at least £110 (Colvin 1963, 1.479-85). Although surviving in situ, its location at a crossroads on the approach to London mean that the cross had already suffered significant wear and tear by the late eighteenth century, with Gough noting that “much of its beauty is concealed, and its ornaments damaged.” Schnebbelie and Basire’s image duly shows damaged pilasters and pillars, as well as illustrating the earlier conservation efforts of the Society of Antiquaries, who, in 1721, had “set . . . down certain posts to protect it from injury by carriages,” and, three decades later, arranged to protect the base with brickwork (Gough 1791, 13; see also Plate 1.7). The cross itself is clearly of a similar form to the Hardingstone cross, originally a five-stage cross, hexagonal in plan, with stages of steps (largely covered), blank arcades with Eleanor’s arms, arched sculpture niches, a cross-base and the cross-shaft. The three statues of Eleanor were removed in the 1950s and placed on display in Cheshunt Public Library; they are now on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (with the best-preserved example on display in the Medieval and Renaissance galleries).
In addition to the twelve commemorative crosses there were three funerary monuments for the three burials (her entrails at Lincoln, her body at Westminster and her heart at London Black Friars), as well as a chantry chapel at Harby where she had died (Holder 2021). In addition to these sixteen physical monuments Edward commissioned dozens of chantry masses and anniversary services at several churches and chapels (Gough 1791, 7; see also Cockerill 2015, 357-59).
Edward I’s great project of commemoration was a success on many levels, not least in the physical survival of some of the monuments over seven centuries later. Edward and his team of advisors, designers and craftsmen created a new Eleanor, a more saint-like figure on her crosses. As well as expressing grief for the deceased Eleanor this was a project of political theatre to enhance the prestige of living royalty (Cockerill 2015, 347-57). Contemporary suspicion of Eleanor – a foreigner, a protector of Jews, an avaricious landlord – quickly faded and within two decades of her death a St Albans chronicler described Eleanor using the appropriate architectural metaphor, the "pillar of all England" (Davies 2018, 76-9).
Art-historical context of the crosses
The Eleanor crosses are undoubtedly influenced by the monumental series of “Montjoie” crosses, erected in the 1270s to commemorate the funeral route of Louis IX (Evans 1949; Zukowsky 1974).
In the eighteenth century, Richard Gough and George Vertue responded to the quality of the architectural and figurative sculpture of the Eleanor crosses by assuming a link to a great Italian master, selecting the thirteenth-century Roman artist Pietro Cavallini as the likely sculptor (Walpole and Vertue 1762, 1.17-19). In fact, the largely complete construction accounts (first printed in 1841 and later studied by Howard Colvin) give the names of most of the senior masons in charge of the design and execution of at least nine of the twelve crosses and of the three tombs. All, with the possible exception of Nicholas Dyminge, are English or Irish. Michael of Canterbury and/or Richard Crundale seem to have been the artistic leaders of the project, with the former taking charge of the Cheapside cross and the latter supervising the grandest and costliest cross at Charing. John of Battle supervised the five crosses from Hardingstone to St Albans, with Richard’s brother Roger Crundale taking charge of the Waltham cross. Alexander of Abingdon, described as imaginator, (here clearly meaning sculptor), worked with Nicholas Dyminge on the Charing and Waltham crosses, followed by the Lincoln and Blackfriars tombs, and William of Ireland carved the Hardingstone figures (Botfield 1841, 95-139; Colvin 1963, 1.479-85; Coldstream 1991, 58-59; Alexander and Binski 1987, 363, no. 374; Harvey and Oswald 1984, 15, 77, 89, 158, 225, 286). Although the tomb effigies are in bronze (cast by William Torel) and the cross sculptures in stone, they are clearly designed by the same artistic team. Indeed, any one of the surviving stone cross sculptures of Eleanor could be placed horizontally on a raised chest tomb.
Viewed as a group of mounments, the crosses are strikingly original, stretching the boundaries of English Gothic by combining architecture and sculpture in freestanding memorial cross-towers. In this fusion of architectural and decorative sculpture, the sculptors created a new hybrid decorative style that was to influence the design of religious space for the next two centuries (Coldstream 1991, 65-66; Alexander and Binski 1987, 361-66).
Production of the prints
Like other Vetusta Monumenta commissions of this date, Richard Gough (1735-1809), director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, was a prime mover in the process, selecting the subjects, commissioning the artist and then the engraver, and approving the final images. Jacob Schnebbelie was commissioned to do the drawings in March 1789 and he had finished the Northampton and Geddington drawings by the end of the year (SAL Council Minutes III.96, 110). In June 1790 James Basire was commissioned to engrave six plates from the six drawings, for the sum of £84 (SAL Council Minutes III.122). In February the following year Basire showed Gough and the Society’s council members the page proofs; the fact that he “again exhibited” (emphasis added) suggests that these were the second proofs. The final images were agreed after ‘some small alteration was directed to be made’ (SAL Council Minutes III.131-32). A month or so later Gough had written his 7000-word discussion of the crosses and the Society agreed to publish the six plates and the accompanying essay, the latter printed over fourteen pages in 1791 (SAL Council Minutes III.134).
Comparison of the two Vetusta Monumenta engravings of the Waltham cross
The Waltham cross had already appeared in an earlier Vetusta Monumenta engraving, Plate 1.7, which was engraved by George Vertue in 1721 after a drawing by William Stukeley. The 1721 Vertue engraving (Plate 1.7) shows the Waltham cross as new, in an idealized landscape on a grassy knoll; the 1790 Basire engraving (Plate 3.16), however, illustrates the cross as it existed in its eighteenth-century state, “warts and all.” On the later plate we see two arms of the crossroads and notice the dilapidations including broken corner pilasters and missing cornice pieces. Whereas Vertue reconstructed the full cross, including a complete octagonal base and the upper shaft of the cross itself, Basire shows the raised road surface obscuring the steps and leaves the cross broken at the top. Vertue shows a gentleman—presumably Stukeley—looking up at the cross in contemplation. Basire, similarly, uses a human scale but in his case by including two younger men casually leaning against a wall. It is also worth noting that the 1790 Basire engraving is a three-dimensional view with full perspective; in contrast, Vertue’s engraving seems to flatten the cross and its background, combining the monument, its details and captions on a single image (Lolla 1999, 20, 22).
Katharina Boehm cautions, however, against reading too much difference between the two representations, pointing out that Vertue and Stukeley—like Basire and Schnebbelie—make use of the latest archaeological style, incorporating the analytical possibilities afforded by showing details of plan and elevation in addition to the general view (see Plate 1.7). Yet there remains a sense that Stukeley and Vertue have travelled back in time to the 1290s, standing before their idealised cross; in contrast, Schnebbelie and Basire remain in the eighteenth century, showing the cross as heritage, a picturesque yet vulnerable survival from half a millennium earlier.
The influence of the Vetusta Monumenta Eleanor cross engravings
The Vetusta Monumenta engravings of the three surviving Eleanor crosses certainly helped to bring the monuments to the wider attention of historians and architects. The crosses were, of course, mentioned in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English histories, but printed references to Eleanor crosses take off from the 1790s, presumably following their publication in Vetusta Monumenta. According to searches using Google Books and Google Ngram, there are further “spikes” of usage around 1815 and in the 1840s (Michel et al. 2011).
The Gothic Revival architect George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) played a particularly significant role in the popularisation of the Eleanor crosses. Scott recalled studying “Athens . . . Vitruvius . . . and gothic” as a sixteen-year-old while under the tutelage of James Edmeston: did the latter’s “scanty” library include Vetusta Monumenta? Scott visited and sketched all three crosses over the following three years (Scott 1879, 56, 59). A decade later in 1840 he was invited to tender for a new Gothic cross in Oxford and, after consulting his old Eleanor cross sketches, he looked at “every drawing of old crosses I could lay hand on” (Scott 1879, 89-90). His Martyrs’ Memorial, completed in 1843, commemorates the Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer (the first two executed in Oxford; Stamp 2015, 142-43). Scott may well have been involved in the design of the 1840 memorial to Mary Watts-Russell in Ilam, Staffordshire, as he knew the widower and later carried out other work in the village (Scott 1879, 100). Both these monuments were Gothic Revival versions of Eleanor crosses, with the familiar pattern of five concentric stages of octagonal steps, blind arcades, statue niches, cross-base and cross-shaft. The influential Martyrs’ Memorial inspired a wave of Gothic commemorative crosses throughout England, including, in 1865, a new Charing cross, designed by Edward Barry and placed outside the eponymous railway station. The chain of influence can also be seen in Scott’s Albert Memorial of 1872, another Gothic cross-tower that expressed the grief of a monarch (in this case, Queen Victoria) for a consort (Albert). By the end of the nineteenth century, public crosses ranging from the medieval Eleanor crosses to Victorian Anglo-Saxon monuments such as St Augustine’s Cross (near Ramsgate, Kent) had, in a sense, become ‘timeless’ monuments with an ideological force that symbolized an idealized Protestant England (Davies 2018, 96-106).
The design influence of the range of Gothic Revival crosses can be felt in the crosses and monuments erected in many British towns and villages after the First World War (Historic England 2022). And, in a more general sense, the nineteenth-century crosses probably paved the way for the twentieth-century crosses by neutralising British Protestant iconophobia (in a similar context see Saunders 2003, 14). The Society of Antiquaries and Vetusta Monumenta also played a role here, increasing awareness of the heritage of medieval crosses by publishing (in addition to the Eleanor crosses) surviving market crosses at Winchester (Plate 1.61), Chichester (Plate 1.64), Gloucester (Plate 2.8) and Doncaster (Plate 2.10), as well as the Anglo-Saxon Ruthwell Cross (Plates 2.54-55); see also the general discussion of crosses in Vetusta Monumenta.
The Eleanor Crosses – even the vanished ones – continue to have an influence on their localities. Most sites are marked by commemorative plaques but at Stamford there is a striking modern sculpture by Wolfgang Buttress (2009; a short distance from the location of the original cross). After extensive and repeated restoration of the original Hardingstone and Waltham monuments, these two crosses are also, in a sense, modern sculptures.
When the Society of Antiquaries began publishing Vetusta Monumenta in the second decade of the eighteenth century, many people still viewed crosses in the English landscape with Protestant-tinged suspicion. Two centuries later, the combined effects of the “discovery” of English medieval heritage, the Gothic Revival movement, the rise of high church factions within Anglicanism, and the national memorializing following the First World War had transformed the English view of the cross. No longer seeing them solely as a religious symbol of Jesus’ execution, Protestants, art historians, veterans, and villagers now looked to these public crosses as largely secular monuments, whether commemorating the living memory of war or a more ancient English past.
Notes to Table 1:
1 Eleanor’s household accounts-book gives this day (“decessus regine”; Parsons 1977, 25-26), as does Edward’s letter to the Abbot of Cluny written two months later ("quarto kalend’ Decembris"; Rymer 1816, i(2).743). The date is supported by chroniclers from London, Oseney and Worcester (Rolls Series, 76, 1.99; Rolls Series, 36, 4.326; 4.504). And, given that the monks of Westminster performed their anniversary service on the eve of the feast day of St Andrew (30 November), Eleanor may have died during the night of 28 to 29 November (Powrie 1990, 22, 193).
2 Powrie 1990, 23.
3 Gough 1900, 2.76.
4 Black Friars is more likely than St Catherine’s Priory: Powrie 1990, 62-63.
5 The funeral party appears to have stayed in Lincoln from the Saturday to the morning of Monday 4 December; the burial might, therefore, have taken place on the Sunday: Gough 1900, 2.76.
6 The friary was a very recent foundation in 1290 and it therefore seems more likely that her body rested in the large parish church: Powrie 1990, 78-79; VCH Lincoln, 2.217-18.
7 The funeral party passed through Great Casterton (Rutland), immediately north-west of Stamford, on Tuesday, 5 December: Gough 1900, 2.76.
8 Powrie 1990, 95.
9 It is possible that the two-night stay occurred at Stamford (before Geddington) or Hardingstone (after) but the royal hunting lodge at Geddington had a particular emotional resonance for Edward and Eleanor, having hosted them on a number of occasions, most recently only a few weeks before in September: Gough 1900, 2.72-73; Cockerill 2015, 199, 230, 235, 269, 288, 341.
10 Powrie 1990, 107-8.
11 Business was conducted at Northampton on Saturday 9 December, presumably in the morning before departure: Gough 1900, 2.76.
12 Powrie 1990, 122-25.
13 Powrie 1990, 128-29. For the possibility that Eleanor’s body rested in St Mary Haversham, see Cockerill 2014.
14 The King may have missed this stop and the following halt at Dunstable, proceeding directly to St Albans to attend the election of the new abbot: Powrie 1990, 126-27, 130-31.
15 The Dunstable annalist records the visit of the funeral party, apparently without the king at this point; the date is not given: Rolls Series, 36, 3.362-63; Powrie 1990, 134-36.
16 Royal business was conducted at St Albans on Wednesday 13 December, presumably in the morning before departure: Gough 1900, 2.76.
17 Rolls Series, 28, 2.121.
18 Powrie 1990, 142-43, 148.
19 Rolls Series, 95, 3.71, “xix kal. Januarii.”
20 Rolls Series, 95, 3.71, “die Veneris xviii kal. Januarii.”
21 Rolls Series, 95, 3.71, "die Sabbati xvii kal. Januarii;” Warrington 2018, 33-34.
22 Rolls Series, 95, 3.71-72, “die Dominica xvi . . . kal. Januarii;” same date in Rolls Series 36, 3.362; 4.504.
23 Rolls Series, 76, 1.99; Rolls Series, 95, 3.72 (“die Martis . . . xiv kal. Januarii”); Rolls Series, 36, 4.331.
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