Showing posts with label Rosamund. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rosamund. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

The King's Ward/Mistress

Little is known about Ida de Tosny, but she was likely the daughter of Ralph de Tosny (c.1130 - 1162) and Margaret Beaumont. Orphaned at a young age, she was lucky enough to be given to the protection of the King, Henry II.

She first enters the public record in Christmas 1181, when she is married (quite advantageously for her) to Robert Bigod, the 2nd Earl of Norfolk. Robert's father had joined Henry's sons when they rebelled against their father inn 1173-74, so the family lands had been confiscated. The estates—Acle, Halvergate, and South Walsham, all in Norfolk—were returned to Robert (who had remained loyal to Henry) upon his marriage. He did not, however, get his father's earldom until 1189.

Robert and Ida were loyal to the royal family, and provided several (four boys and two girls) loyal children. Their eldest, Hugh, became the third Earl of Norfolk and married a daughter of the powerful William Marshall.

Ida doesn't really become more interesting until long after her death, when a charter is discovered connected to William Longespée, 3rd Earl of Salisbury; it refers to Comitissa Ida, mater mea ["Countess Ida, my mother"]. William was known to be an illegitimate child of Henry II, but his maternity was not known prior to this stray comment. It had been assumed (but the rumors came long after his lifetime) that his mother was Rosamund Clifford, Henry's best-known mistress. Clearly, Henry treated Ida as something more than a ward.

And that's all the historical significance we can find for Ida de Tosny, except that she does become, with her husband, a character in the historical novels of Elizabeth Chadwick, most notably The Time of Singing. Immortality can come from very small occurrences, sometimes.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Fair Rosamund

Fair Rosamund's Well today.
Blenheim Palace is of fairly recent vintage—the early 1700s is "recent" in the context of a blog devoted to the Middle Ages—but the site contains some much older features. A spring on the property fills a well that existed at least as far back as 1166, when royal accounts list a building project designed to enclose the spring, known at the time as Everswell. The name can be accounted for by a local legend that says it never runs dry. Nowadays, it has a different name; from the 16th century on, it has been referred to as "Rosamund's Well."

The Rosamund of the name is Rosamund Clifford, who would have been unknown to history but for an event that pushed her into prominence. Daughter of Walter Clifford, she was born sometime before 1150. Her father's position in government was sufficient that the king had reason to call on him. Sometime in 1163 (according to best guesses), Henry II did just that, stopping at Clifford Castle on the River Wye on his way to deal with a Welsh problem. That is likely where and when he first met Rosamund...

...and when they fell in love.

Henry was married—Eleanor of Aquitaine had divorced the king of France in 1152 and married Henry in 1154—but kings never let marriage stop them. There is much gossip and legend surrounding "Fair Rosamund," but there are a few things we can say for certain. One is that she was a very patient lover: given Henry's campaigns in England and on the continent, between 1163 and her death in 1176, they would not have been able to be in each other's presence for more than 2-3 years total. Stories that she traveled with him can not be substantiated by contemporary evidence.

The likelihood that she bore children for Henry is slim. Later suggestions that his son Geoffrey was hers make no sense, given that she would have had to been pregnant with Geoffrey while she was a baby.*

It is very likely that Henry kept her in Woodstock, which at the time was essentially a hunting lodge about 10 miles north of Oxford. The legend that he built a maze around it to keep her safe is untrue. It is possible, I suppose, that she really did bathe at Rosamund's Well. Blenheim Palace is just west of Woodstock, built on the grounds that once were part of the Woodstock lodge and the enclosed deer park.

She went to live in seclusion among the nuns at a monastery in Godstow in 1176, once her status as the king's mistress became known. She died shortly thereafter, and the king contributed to a family-built  tomb for her at Godstow. In 1191, the bishop of Lincoln found that her tomb, situated in the choir of the church, had become a popular site for locals to leave flowers. Shocked at the veneration given to a mistress, he had her tomb moved outside the monastery. Like so many other sites, it was destroyed by another Henry known for mistresses: Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries.

*The illegitimacy of Geoffrey is not an invention; Eleanor was not his mother. The chronicler Walter Map (1140 - c.1209) claims Geoffrey's mother was someone named Ykenai.