Claudia Gold | The Spectator columnists & writers

The cruel legacy of the She-Wolf of France

The 14th century was ‘a bad time for humanity’. In the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman: If [those years] seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labour for the fields... and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God. It was a century when the four horsemen of St John’s apocalyptic vision – Death, Famine, War and Conquest – became a miserable band of seven, joined by Taxes, Bad Government and Schism in the Church.

How the wreck of the White Ship plunged England into chaos

Never was a monarch so undone by water as Henry I. A fruit of the sea killed him in 1135: he ate too many lampreys, a jawless, parasitic fish that sucks its prey to death. But the tragedy of his reign occurred 15 years earlier. At the most ill-fated party of the Middle Ages, his heir — the 17-year-old William Ætheling (Anglo-Saxon prince) — drowned when the White Ship sank, taking nearly 300 of his friends and relatives with him. The ramifications of his death were seismic, leading to a succession crisis that saw thousands die in a bitter civil war. The author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle famously described this 19-year-war as a time when ‘The earth bore no corn, for the land was all laid waste... and people said that Christ and his saints slept.

Eleanor of Aquitaine is still as elusive as quicksilver

Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most famous woman of the Middle Ages: queen of France and England, crusader, mother of kings — ‘lionhearted’ Richard and ‘bad’ John — and ancestress to the royal dynasties of Europe. Yet more nonsense has been written about her than almost any other woman. Much of what we think we know is falsehood or half-truth, and many respected historians fall foul of her myth, endlessly repeating misinformation as fact. For someone so renowned, the written record is astonishingly thin. Even her birth date (1122 or 1124) is uncertain, as is her place of birth. We know nothing of her looks, personality, education or early familial attachments. In fact we know very little until the death of her second husband, Henry II, in 1189, when Eleanor was 65 (or 67).

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