Ladies-in-Waiting with Caroline Dunn

Although they’re often presented as a sort of living, breathing set decoration, the women at aristocratic courts in the Middle Ages served many different functions, from the practical to the ceremonial. Educated and influential, these women served as ambassadors not only of their gender, but often of their families, and places of origin, as well. So, what was it like to be a daily companion to the elites of the medieval world? This week, Danièle speaks with Caroline Dunn about the lives of ladies in waiting.

You can support this podcast on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/medievalists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode two hundred and eighty
three of the Medieval Podcast. I'm Danielle Sabalski, also known
as the five minute Medievalist. Although they're often presented as
a sort of living, breathing set decoration, the women at
aristocratic courts in the Middle Ages served many different functions,
from the practical to the ceremonial. Educated, and influential, these

(00:38):
women served as ambassadors not only of their gender, but
often of their families and places of origin as well.
So what was it like to be a daily companion
to the elites of the medieval world. This week I
spoke with doctor Caroline Dunne about the lives of ladies
in waiting. Caroline is Associate Professor of Medieval History at

(00:59):
time Clemson University and the author of many works on
women's history, including Stolen Women in Medieval England, Rape, Abduction
and Adultery circa eleven ten to fifteen hundred. Her new
book is Ladies in Waiting in Medieval England. Our conversation
on what it was like to be a lady in waiting,
how a woman got the job in the first place,

(01:21):
and how she might influence the dynamics at Court is
coming up right after this. Well, welcome Caroline to talk
about ladies in waiting. I am so happy to have
you on the podcast because this is such an interesting
topic and I absolutely loved your books. So welcome to
the podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Thank you, Danielle. Thank you for saying that, and I'm
very excited to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
So you're talking about ladies in waiting in late medieval England,
and you're mostly talking about from the time of Henry
the Third to the time of Henry the eighth. Why
did you pick this time to talk about ladies in waiting?

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Well, I'm happiest in sort of the thirteen hundreds and
fourteen hundreds in medieval England, and when I came up
with a topic, I just wanted to find as many
ladies in waiting as I could possibly find. And I
really had no idea how many that could be, because
I hadn't dug into the topic at all or were
seen very much about it. And so I started in
the fourteenth century and then went backwards and found that,

(02:21):
as with so many other things in medieval English history,
it's really Henry the third twelve thirties where you do
start to see a lot of records, and so my
early earliest wardrobe account I think was twelve thirty six,
and the wardrobe account lists the people in the household
and the materials they got for clothing, and so twelve
thirty six became my officials starting point. And then I

(02:43):
went up to Catherine of Aragon because the more I
thought about it, the more I thought that she could
be considered England's last medieval queen. And it's kind of
odd when we think in terms of male driven kingships
and dynasties, to stop after Henry's first wife when he
still has five more to go. But there's a lot
of changes that take place with Katherin Averarragon, So there's

(03:05):
continuities from the previous reign. There's people who move from
Henry's mother's household into his wife's household, and it just
didn't seem like a natural ending point, whereas the Reformation
and the high turnover with Anne bol incoming and seemed
like a real change in court dynamics.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah, it really feels like the expectations placed on Catherine
Aragon are so different from the ones placed on Anne Balin.
And part of it, I think is because of these
these old ties with her Spanish heritage. But I mean,
we can get into that more. But I think that
it makes total sense to stop in between Henry's wives.
I mean, he still has so many more to go.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
And most of them are most of them are English,
and that foreign aspect is something that I was really
interested in. How many women come over with queens and
so Henry of course has Anne of Cleaves's fourth wife,
but only for a millisecond, and then it's English born
Queen's for the rest of the century. So another reason
why Catherine was a good stopping point.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Yeah. Absolutely. So you talked for a second about digging
into wardrobe accounts as one of the ways to find
out what's going on with these ladies in waiting. What
other sources do you go to to find out about
these women? Because they are sort of peripheral in many ways,
How did you find out about them?

Speaker 2 (04:20):
I did a lot of digging. I had to do
detective work looking at such a narrow topic. It was
just casting my net very widely and reading secondary sources
other scholars who had looked at royal households, kings, queens.
There are books on Queen Eleanor of Provence for example,
where there's a selection on her household and then a

(04:43):
smaller selection on the female members of her household. So
that sort of thing introduced me to the kinds of
sources that I would be able to use for this project.
There was a very helpful colleague at the National Archives
who also said, oh, at that topic, Well, don't just
look at the wardrobe rules, look at the issue roles
E four h three is the official designation of the

(05:03):
National Archives. And he was right, because that's where I
found all sorts of annuity payments made out to these
women who serve, so clothing is a major reward that
they received. Clothing was much more expensive in the Middle
Ages than it is today, and then in the fourteenth
century especially, a lot of women received these annual payments
or annuities, and luckily for them, it wasn't just while

(05:27):
they were working, but it was they were given for
her whole life, so it was a kind of a
retirement policy as well, and they just showed up at
the court and came, or the exchequer and came and
got their payment, usually twice a year.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
I love that shouting out to archivists and librarians telling
you where to go. I think that they are often
the forgotten, the unsung heroes, but sometimes we really need
their help to find out more about a topic. Where
to look? Yeah, okay, so how do you become a
lady in? How does this happen?

Speaker 2 (06:02):
I find most of them when they are already in position,
so that's not the easiest question to answer, but there
are glimpses that we can find. First of all, a
lot of courtiers are married and women remain on, at
least by the time we get to the fourteenth century.
A lot of women are remaining on after they have
gotten married, and so we have husband and wife at court,

(06:26):
and then they have a daughter, and daughters show up
in the records as well. So we might have a
mother who is a damsel of the queen's chamber. That's
the official lingo. Even if she's married, she's called a damsel.
And then we have an under damsel, and that is
a person with the same surname who could be traced

(06:46):
to that mother, their nieces, grandchildren, relatives very commonly selected.
And then speaking of relatives, not just relatives of courtiers,
but relatives of the queens. The women who come up
at the higher levels not in large numbers, and there's
different trajectories with different monarchs, but there are some people
who can be traced either to the queen's homeland if

(07:08):
she's a foreign queen, or to her more distant kin
like illegitimate cousin or I legitimate cousins coming in second cousins.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
How much does a queen get a say in who's
going to be hanging out with her? Because they're with
her a lot of the time, most of the time,
some of them even overnight every night. So how much
of us, say, does a queen get in who's going
to be with her?

Speaker 2 (07:36):
I wish I could really answer that question. I can
only answer sort of one in the negative where this
is slightly out of my time period, but in the
fifteen thirties. So getting into Henry's third wife, Jane Seymour,
there's a really great letter collection that details one family's
attempts and successful attempts to get at least one of
their daughters into the royal court, and one of them

(07:59):
successful achieves that, but in the conversation with the queen,
it's reported that she will need to get Henry's approval first.
So the King's approval and so I don't know if
that's just because it was post Reformation and it was
a delicate political time. I think that queens are able
to select women that they are friendly with, at least

(08:22):
as a portion of the women who are serving them.
But it also seems that maybe some are placed into
the household without concern for their interests or not. And
I'm thinking here moving back to the fourteenth century, of
the late fourteenth century, Edward the Third's mistress Alice Perris.
She shows up as a damsel for Philippa of Heyno

(08:43):
near the end of Philippa's life, and I suspect Philippa
wasn't the one who instigated that, although we don't know
that for sure.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, that was immediately the example I was thinking of
as well as like, this is a very obvious mistress
to the king. Everybody knows it, and the queen kind
of has to put up with her being in her household. Yes, yikes,
all right, So we talked a little bit about these
queens being in the household, being part of the household.

(09:12):
Tell us they what they did and what do they
do for the queen.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
That's my favorite topic. Yeah, I was a kid when
I was a kid in My favorite book was really
little kid picture book, Richard Scary's What Do People Do
all Day? Since some of your readers might be familiar
with Richard Scary, And it was exactly as it said,
except it was depicted with animals, so an animal doctor,
a lion doctor, and pig farmers and things like that,
and just their daily life and their occupations. And so

(09:39):
when I thought about ladies in waiting as a possible topic,
that's what I wanted to know the most. So how
are they spending their days? And it's a very difficult
thing to come by, because that's not the sort of
thing that record keepers of the Middle Ages are making
note of. They are keeping track of the finances. So
the kinds of records that we tend to have, they
are find angel accounts like the annuities, like the wardrobe

(10:03):
list that I've already mentioned. But sometimes you can sort
of tease out how the ladies are involved through the
sorts of things that are mentioned in these accounts. So
the clothing that is delivered and handed over to Matilda
to Wilmington, one of the damsels, and so we imagine
that she is not just interacting with this person delivering

(10:25):
this and maybe paying them then taking it to the queen,
or taking it and storing it. Maybe if it's just fabric,
she's going to be the one who is going to
be manufacturing that into a finished garment. There are some
women who are especially trusted who are in charge of
the queen's jewels, and not just queen's but also noble
women and their ladies in waiting. So Philippa of Hainolts

(10:47):
again had had some women who were in charge of
her crowns. To women seem to share this task, so
I imagine they were particularly trusted to be given that custody. Beaufort,
the mother of Henry the Seventh had Edith Fowler is
the one who, at the end of Margaret Beaufort to death,
all of her jewels and treasured objects are in her

(11:10):
custody at the time of her death. So the inventory
is letting us know that Edith Fowler was trusted with
these resources. So financial accounts is how you tease out
a lot of the information about what they're doing every day.
Do you see things like payments for the queen's animals,
So there are queen's birds and queen's dogs. I don't

(11:31):
imagine that the high born ladies are actually cleaning up
after these pets, but they are enjoying their presence. Perhaps
Isabella of France, I think it was Asabella friends actually
had a porcupine. Not quite sure why or what that
was doing, or if it was kept inside the house
or outside somewhere in a cage. But entertainment of that sort,

(11:52):
entertainment of playing chess and backgammon, those kinds of activities.
We know that queen's and noble women from various inventories
have these kinds of games. Reading out loud, the possession
of books is another thing that we can see documented
in inventories, and we don't know about literacy rates exactly.

(12:13):
Probably not all would have been able to read, but
definitely some would have. And even if the queen herself
knows how to read, she doesn't necessarily want to do
it all the time. So delegating that task and those
those are sort of the ordinary things that I think
that they are getting up to. And basically, just as
the name implies, they're waiting for their tasks, So whatever

(12:33):
gets delegated to them I see in the references. I
should clarify that that's not a medieval term, even though
I titled the book Ladies in Waiting, it's so well
known that I didn't want to move away from that term.
But it doesn't come until I think the eighteenth century,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But I do find
in my late medieval English sources some references to women

(12:54):
who are waited, so that concept is there, even if
the official lady and waiting term is not so waiting
for their tasks. And that's the kind of regular day
in and day out stuff. And then there are days
that are extraordinary, so when the queen is coming over
when she's not yet queen, so her coronation, her arrival

(13:15):
in the country, her coronation, her marriage to the king.
Ladies in waiting are expected to participate in all of
these ceremonies. The important ones are participating heavily through the
church services, for example, serving as godmothers to children at baptisms,
but all of them are expected to be present in processions,

(13:37):
so they kind of go in order of importance, status level,
and different clothing is allocated for them. So the elite
ladies the countesses get the fanciest firs and the highest
quality fabrics, and then it moves on down, but just
all of them serving as the entourage for the queen
demonstrates royal wealth and royal power over all of these people.

Speaker 1 (14:01):
Well, as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about the
fact that there are all these female rituals that are
really necessary to continuity, to magnificence, all of these things
that have to do with especially royalty, but even ceremonies
that move on down the line. And it's occurring to
me that it's probably a job of these ladies in

(14:21):
waiting to be the knowledge keepers of how these things work,
because we don't really have sources otherwise. Am I on
the right track here? You think?

Speaker 2 (14:30):
I do think so, And especially with foreign born queens,
they probably welcome the input from the women who are
entrusted to them because their customs are going to be different.
Whether it's Anne of Bohemia or Isabella of France. There
is a shared aristocratic and elite royal culture across Western Europe,
but in the minutia they're going to be quite different.

(14:51):
English coronation ceremonies or the feast of Saint George's Day
and the associated tournaments, And so I think they do
need to turn to the women for information, as do
the foreign women that they bring with them, like what
kind of clothing are they wearing? In England in thirteen
ninety some of Ann of Bohemia's attendants are made fun

(15:13):
of for their clothing. We don't know for sure that
they stuck with that clothing and they were determined because
that's what they're comfortable with, or if maybe they were
thinking about changing their fashion taste to become more accustomed
to the English styles that the native born ladies told
them about.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yes, I think we definitely see that. In the Tudor period,
lots of people made a big deal about the difference
in hoods, right, Spanish heads, Diffrench heads, things like that,
But this is happening much earlier as well. The influence
of fashion.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, and fashion, fashion is really important. I think it's
and I came to that conclusion not from any great
interest in fashion myself. This is not a video podcastingfully,
but just as I did the research along the way,
thinking about the expense of clothing and so all these
resources devoted to be deck these not just the female courtiers,

(16:05):
but their husbands and brothers and sons and all of
the men at court. It's a vast amount of sums
to make all these allocations of furs and fabrics to
these courtiers. And again, as I said before, this is
talking about how important and wealthy the monarch is. This
is showing off him. It was important for the women

(16:28):
to be dressed not just wealthily, but also beautifully, because
diplomats would come and they would see this and compliment
sometimes or some examples of descriptions of English courtiers female
courtiers being beautiful sometimes concerns that maybe they were not
living up to standards, and so it does seem to
be very much a propaganda way of looking at things.

(16:52):
So I think it's important in that sense. It's important
also in perpetuating relationships among these women, between these women
down from the queen, and so it was not unusual
for women to receive in wills or's outright gifts articles
of clothing coming from the queen, and they would wear them.
They would tailor them to their fit, but they would

(17:13):
wear them, and they would wear them proudly because that
is a garment that has touched the queen. It has
this royal aura around it. And even if you are
a countess, you're very high up in medieval society. But
this is another way of demonstrating how high up you are,
because people would know that is Queen so and so's
former garment, and she gave it specifically to this woman

(17:34):
as a sign of favor.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yes, it would be definitely something to show off to
your rivals.

Speaker 3 (17:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
I got this directly from the queen, and maybe you didn't.
One of the things that you mentioned that we haven't
mentioned so far that gets passed down to ladies and
waiting down the line is hair ornaments and head ornaments. Right.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah, sometimes the bequeathing of coronets. At least one woman
in Isabella Frand's lifetime, it was when Isabella was the
dowager Queen. When she was widowed, she was given a
circlet of gold I think so a small crown, and
I think it was lent to her. The sources is
not clear. I don't think it was actually given outright
to her, but I think it was lent to her

(18:16):
for her marriage. So the queen is promoting the marriage
from damsel to another courtier. There's some interesting hairstyle examples
showing up in artistic work. We have the lutoral assalter
from the fourteenth century that has a handmaiden who is
combing the hair and starting to affix the hair of
an elite woman. And my favorite reference is one to

(18:39):
the daughters of Henry the Fourth whose servant, female servant,
Catherine Puncherden, was paid to shave their heads, which I'm
pretty sure was not shaving them bald, but shaving their hairlines,
because a high forehead with the receding hairline was the
fashion of the era.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
You can see this in a lot of manuscript illustrations,
where the hair is way way back on the head.
I haven't seen that come back around since then. A
fashionable at the.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
Time, if probably it will.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
So you talked a little bit about Isabella supporting a
marriage and one of her ladies, so let's talk about
how becoming a lady in waiting was sort of a
marriage market for them as well. Let's talk a little
bit about that.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yes, I did find a lot of examples of the
royal family promoting marriages, and so we see that so
and so we'll get a gift of forty pounds, and
again it's the financial record that is, they need to
keep track of this money. So that's why it was
saved and shows up for US historians, so forty pounds
given to Edmund and Agnes because of their marriage or

(19:52):
after their marriage as a consequence of their marriage. So
we have to imagine the monarchs maybe behind the scenes
with the pair and the family members. We don't know
for sure that except in some cases, that the monarchs
are deliberately promoting the specific marriage between these two individuals,
but they did like to have their courtiers married to
one another. It's just these trusted people who are forging relationships,

(20:17):
and they are going to be continuing to serve loyally
the dynasty as it moves forward. And so there are
all these brands to support the marriage. And then we
sometimes see the children that are coming out of it
and gives to god children. So the child of Edmund
and Agnes might end up as a godchild of the
king or the queen, and then they themselves received gifts

(20:38):
from the monarchs. It's easier to find these kinds of
references that document marriage is made than to know for
sure if every single lady is married. So I did
some statistical analysis trying to figure out exactly what percentage
could I find in any particular household, and it changed
over time, so that almost all of elanorth Castile's women

(21:02):
at the end of at the end of the twelve
hundreds were married or widowed, so they had been married
to courtiers, and then the rates that I found were
more close to fifty percent. But again, I think there's
probably more marriages out there. It's just hard to know.
They're not as many unique surnames as one would like.
In medieval England, and especially when you get into the

(21:22):
elite realm, the same families are perpetuating. But it could
be that this person who has the same surname as
this woman is her husband, but it might be her brother,
and it might be a second cousin. Then it might
be a very distant cousin that they don't even know
each other very well. Sometimes I could find that information
and sometimes I could not, So I think there's probably

(21:43):
more marriages married courtiers out there than I could find.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
Well, it makes a lot of sense, especially when the courtiers,
both the male and female courtiers, are having really intimate
interactions with the sovereign right. They are the ones who
are changing the beds, and they're the one that One
of the things that you pointed out briefly is like
they might be making menstrual products for the queen. Like,
these are people who are really intimately involved with the

(22:08):
sovereign and you don't want these people just wandering around.
It's safer to have them married to each other.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yes, yeah, So the husband might have a job in
the queen's household. He might be the queen's treasurer, or
he might be a clerk, he might be an usher,
or he could be posted to the king's household, and
there's transfers over time. There's some fluidity for the men
between the king's household and the queen's household. But yeah, absolutely,
you want to be able to rely on these people,

(22:35):
and so it's very comfortable to have the same families
day in and day out.

Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah. Absolutely. And one of the things that you mentioned
natural consequence of these people being married is that sometimes
the queen's ladies have babies. So what happens How do
they manage to balance the work life balance of a
lady in waiting.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah, we know a little bit more about this from
the late Middle Ages, where it does seem women are
at court for a lot of their pregnancies. We don't
know exactly how much, how long they are there. There
is one example, again from those Lyle letters that are
just outside my area of the timeline, where it's commented

(23:15):
that a particular woman is at court even though she's
very large. I don't remember the exact way that they
phrased it, but clearly she is in the later stages
of pregnancy, but remaining at court. And then quite frequently
women are expected to go home, give birth, and return
back to court pretty quickly. And of course not all
women are going to do that. Some women get married

(23:37):
at court and then go home and manage the states
and remain at home. But those that do return, they
do seem to come back pretty quickly, not spending a
lot of time with their newborns.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, so what are they doing with their newborns?

Speaker 2 (23:53):
Leaving him in the custody of relatives of nurses. There
are a few who are brought to court, or at
least a few that I could find, who are actually
brought to court not to necessarily be with their mothers,
but to be raised in the nursery with the royal children.
So I suppose it probably depends on what age the
royal children are. If there are appropriate companions and nurses

(24:14):
who are caregiving at the same age, then it might
be more acceptable to bring your child to courts with you.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
I think that these are important things to bring up
because these are things that tend to be hidden in
women's history. And I think if you're having very largely
pregnant women just wander around the court, this is an
important thing to note in that there are many circumstances
in different cultures, different times where pregnancy might be hidden, right,
but here they are. They're just like they're still doing

(24:40):
their work while pregnant, and I think that really kind
of speaks to the culture of the Middle Ages in
a way that's different from other cultures and times.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's obviously most of
the childbirth discussion focuses around the queen's and the protection
of airs, and that is a very public event. But yeah,
that in order to have women who are knowledgeable with
her while she's giving birth, she wants to have women
who have gone through this experience before, and everybody knows

(25:10):
that that they have done this, that they have produced
these children. It's not the same kind of Victorian sensibility
that we're familiar.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
With, yeah, exactly, And when so many victorians read back
onto the Middle Ages. Sometimes it's really important to like
tease these things apart. And then the other thing that
I noticed in your book when you're talking about children
of ladies in waiting is that the queen would grant
permission for these women to go off and visit their
children sometimes, which means that she thought that this was

(25:39):
a good reason to leave her service for a time.
And I think that's important as well as saying that
this is an okay priority to have even if you
are working for the queen.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, there's examples of that. There's examples of women visiting
sick husbands. I don't know if they were on their
deathbeds or not, but sick husbands or being sick themselves
given this dispensation for a time. So there are records
of payments to monasteries, for example, for looking after this
woman because she could not continue traveling with the queen.
She had to stay behind with this monastery for a

(26:11):
time because she was sick. And then, also on the
subject of work life balance, I think we do have
to remember that the women who are serving the queen,
they had so many interests to be thinking about at
all times, so they might be angling for promotion for
themselves or for various rewards for themselves. If they have

(26:31):
had children, they might be angling for privileges for their children.
And then they have both their husband's family and their
natal family, the family of their fathers and brothers, who
might be angling for various positions, and so they have
in addition to balance the needs of the monarch, so
all of these family concerns from so many different sides,

(26:53):
plus also making sure that they're continuing to perform their
duties successfully.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah, and I think that they know going into this
work that there is going to be pressure on them
from all sides, and this is something that they just
have to deal with. It is part of the job.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Yes, absolutely it is.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
So we're talking about the pressure from outside, all of
these people trying to get the ladies in waiting to
do what they want, whether that's the monarch, whether that's
their family, their in laws. You mentioned in the book
that this is also a precarious position for women in
some ways. In some ways it is a position that
gives them a long career or some stability, but in
other ways we see them getting into trouble, getting into

(27:34):
danger at times. So can you tell us a little
bit about what you found there.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
Yeah, sure, I means sometimes it depends on who they
are serving. So for example, Joan of Navarre, Henry the
Fourth's wife in the early fourteen hundreds, gets unfairly accused
of witchcraft, and I think all historians are now on
the same page with that. That's an unfair accusation that
is really aimed at getting at her money. And so
when she's charged of witchcraft, she's in prison and her

(28:00):
women go along with her, or at least some of
them go along with her, probably not the entire large entourage,
but there are payments to make sure that she has
these women in her household still, and so they end
up in captivity. There are women who end up in
captivity through no fault of their own or through no
charges against them or their family specifically, So that's one example.

(28:24):
There are some queens who are very involved in warfare,
and so Isabella of France and Philip of Hainauld to
the first the first half of the thirteen hundreds are
spending time up on the Anglo Scottish border with the
warfare that is persistent up there, and there are some
cases of ladies encountering dangerous situations because they are sent there.

(28:49):
Philip of Hainauld also goes over to France at the
start of one hundred Years War, and there are two
women who are killed in the sea voyage going over
to France at the start of the war.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
There's also Eleanor of Castile who ends up going on
crusade as well. Right with her husband, she does.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Go on crusade, and one woman who is married to
an important courtier. I suspect that she also went Shirly.
Eleanor would not have traveled all the way to the
eastern Mediterranean without a handmaiden or two, but I have
not been able to confirm that. I know that the
husband went as one of the king's companions, but I
suspect that his wife also did. Moving later, there are

(29:30):
the wars of the Roses, so women are getting involved
in politics on that front. It seems that sometimes women
are targeted as a shorthand for targeting the monarch if
they don't feel comfortable targeting the monarch, and that happens
with some of the foreign ladies in waiting in the
wars against France, Isabella and of Bohemia. That does not

(29:52):
seem to happen in the War with the Roses interestingly,
and I think it's probably because people did not like
the queen, and they were quite happy to say that
they did not like the queen who Margaret Devantjous, and
they felt that they could criticize her in a way
that perhaps in earlier times it's a lot more challenging
to criticize the king or the queen, and so Margaret

(30:13):
of Anjou felt the brunt of that. And even though
she did have foreign relatives and other courtiers who were
at her court, they are not the ones who seemed
to be attacked. They seem to be going about the
normal lives of being a lady in waiting.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
Yeah, Margaret Devonjou didn't have a lot of champions to
come to her rescue.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Now I feel for her.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
Yeah, absolutely, I'm speaking of Wars of the Roses. One
of the most exciting ladies in waiting moments that you
have in here is the Duke of Buckingham's son really
relied on I think it was was it his nurse
or governess that was taking care of him in a
very perilous situation, right.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yes, his father had I can't remember if he had
been killed or he was about to be killed, but
they wanted to at the air and all the children,
and probably this young boy eleven years old, eleven or
twelve would have been killed himself, but his nurse disguised
him as a girl, and they left the castle and
are going through the countryside to safety. And they were

(31:16):
safe because they're overlooked as two women.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
Traveling m saving children from Richard third, something that you know,
maybe not all women took on as their duty, but
this woman certainly did. She did and successfully, yes, which
is so important. And I was thinking about the women
who are getting imprisoned, as you mentioned one of them.
I can't remember which kingness is off the top of

(31:39):
my head, but he's giving ladies in waiting to one
of the women he's in prison, and he's like, make
sure they're not mirthful. It's like, oh my gosh, it's
already bad enough you're in prisoned, but your companions have
to be really serious and not fun at all, just
to make it worse.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Need to be sensible, need to be pragmatic, looking out
for government interests. Yeah, don't let her have a good
time in there.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I think maybe
is important to point out is you do have, i mean,
such a great analysis like percentages and numbers and like this.
This is really great detailed work. One of the things
that maybe we should mention is even with all these
ladies in waiting, the queen's household is still majority male.
This is just how it is. So that the women

(32:25):
around the queen, they can be a fair amount to them,
but it's still going to be a small amount relative
to her entire household.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
Yes, no, more than ten percent of the household is
going to be women. And if you factor in both
the kings and queen's household, then it's even more male dominated.
And so what ends up happening is that queens are
served by more and more women over time. Generally they're
served by more core years over time, so the proportion

(32:53):
of women doesn't necessarily change, but there are more women
at court. There's more visibility for women at court. It
was more frowned upon in the early Middle Ages to
or at least in the post conquest English Middle Ages,
to have there's strict restrictions against them. Sometimes they say okay, well,
only if she's definitely married to a courtier. But the

(33:14):
phenomenon of maids of honor, young girls entering a marriage
market that's so prominent in the Tutor era. We don't
find that very much in the early Middle Ages. But
then there's this acceptance that women do need to be
at court. They fulfill these certain functions, not just to
get the queen dressed and looking pretty for the day,

(33:34):
but so that the men at court can find marriage partners.
Entertaining in the games and the dances and the banquets
and the tournaments, that the women not participating the tournaments,
but being important witnesses and audience members of these tournaments.
So there are generally, over the course of Middle Ages
more women at court.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
Yes, And I think that gust follows as you're saying,
that trend of chivalry where you can't have knights pledging
themselves to women and the women are not there, So
they have to be there, even if they're just kind
of ornamentation. But you get the silence that they're not
just ornamentation, right, These women are working behind the scenes
to put forward the cases of maybe their families, themselves

(34:19):
and maybe the greater good of the kingdom. Is that
something that you're noticing.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
Yeah, sometimes, certainly there's a lot of maneuvering for themselves.
And I do want to say that that's not just
the job of women, female courtiers. It's something that men
have to do too. So whether the man is an
usher or a yeoman, or a clerk or a stable boy,
he's trying to maneuver and get positions for himself and
for his family. So sometimes those kinds of activities are

(34:46):
seen as female or gendered female because they happen behind
the scenes. It's informal invaguing, but the male courtiers are
having to do that too. And then in terms of
women involving themselves on behalf of the kingdom, certainly the
women who are supporting Cathain Averragon during the Reformation crisis,
they are doing what they believe is best for the kingdom.

(35:09):
So some of them are continuing to send her information
after she has sent from court. Some of them are
traveling to be with her after she is sent from court,
and refusing to swear the oath of loyalty that Henry
insisted upon after the birth of Princess Elizabeth, so holding
firm for their convictions, and they're believing that Cathin of
Aragon remains the rightful queen and should be governing the

(35:32):
kingdom alongside her husband.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
And I think that this is an important moment when
we're talking about Catherine, for sure, but I think you
can apply it to many other queens, where you have
women who might have come along with the queen from
her own homeland, and now they are aligning themselves with
what is best for the queen within her new context
and making sure that they're loyal to her within the
new context. And this is a dicey thing, I think,

(35:56):
to come from somewhere else and juggle these loyalties just
familial ones, but also ones of kingdom's sort of proto nations.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Yeah, when the Spanish women arrived, the English are making
fun of them for their clothing, for their physical appearance.
Thomas Moore calls some of them pigmies, and he uses
some terminology to refer to them as dark skinned and
I cannot remember what that specific terminology is, but critical
and hostile to these women as being very foreign and
different and outsiders. And then we have letters from Spanish

(36:30):
ambassadors several years later complaining that they can't get as
much information out of these women as they used to
be able to get out of them that they are
behaving too much like English women and not being at
all helpful when the Spanish ambassador is trying to get
the specific information that they want to receive.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
I think that's kind of amazing where you have these
women performing agency, even if it's just not returning their
phone calls. Right, I don't want to talk to you
about this, so I'm just not going to This is agent, see,
even if it's not, you know, leading a charge with
a sword drawn.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
Absolutely, and we know now that there are more queens
and important noble women who were wielding authority. But in
the case of ladies in waiting, they always, of course
are going to be subservient to the monarch, but they're
getting a lot done and they do have access to
power or the philosopher or do you refer to it

(37:25):
as symbolic capital, that these women are able to get
things done, and people understand that they're able to get
things done, and even if under pristicular circumstances they can't,
they're still perceived to have this access to power, and
so there's people coming to them and asking for favors
and probably giving them some gifts in exchange for these

(37:49):
favors or potential favors.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
And why not, because you need to look good if
you're going to be a lady in waiting. One of
the things that you mentioned is I think one of
the members of the Stonor family writing back and saying,
there is a criticism from this noble woman that her
ladies in waiting, the sisters of the letter writer are
not well enough dressed.

Speaker 2 (38:08):
Right, and this worry that she's actually going to dismiss them.
That's the message that comes down that she spoke to me,
and she's going to fire you if you don't look
the part, if you're not wearing sumptuous enough clothing to
represent her well. So I had talked previously about ladies
being given this clothing. They're usually clothing allowances twice a year,

(38:30):
but that's not going to provide their entire wardrobe. They
have to fund a lot of it themselves.

Speaker 1 (38:36):
Which I think is interesting because we talk about this
quite a lot when it comes to nights, right, people
deciding they're going to stay squires because it's very expensive
to be a night It's very expensive to be a
lady in waiting as well.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Right, It is so it's an investment, I'd say, an
investment that pays off for some because they're able to
get that position and they are able to advance themselves
and their families, and others are not able to to
make the investment payoff, and there are a few examples
of women going into debt unfortunately.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Do you get the sense that they need to provide
pretty much everything from horses to a company the queen,
to the outfits to all of these things, or do
you get the sense that as part of their job,
as part of their room and board, they get things
like a horse that they can use for a hunting party.
What's your sense of that.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Yeah, it is not really mentioned in the records, but
it sounds as if anytime they're being transported anywhere that
it's the queen's carriage and the queen's stable person who
is in charge of provisioning that. So I think it's
mostly appearance related expense that they are required to undertake,

(39:46):
probably travel expenses when it is for personal reasons rather
than for official royal reasons. And then there's some gray
areas in between that, for example, going on pilgrimage. There
are a couple of cases of women having their pilgrimage
payments made for them or undertaking this venture. And we
don't know whether it is the woman herself who wants
to go on this pilgrimage and her noble woman or

(40:07):
queen is supporting her, or if she is actually meant
to be praying for her employer on that pilgrimage. But
they do. They receive the clothing gifts twice a year,
and that they're entitled to room and boards, so they
don't have those kinds of expenses.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
So the moment, we've been talking about how ladies and
waiting are helping with the queen while she is alive,
but they also have roles to play when she dies.
So what happens when the queen dies, What happens to
her core, what happens to all her women?

Speaker 2 (40:37):
Well, first of all, there's the great big funeral to arrange,
and a few times you see specific examples of additional
grants of clothing, so it's not just the twice of
your normal allocation, but specific mourning where that is being
made up for the funeral procession and the event of
the funeral ceremony. And then upon Queen's death, I was

(40:58):
able to trace some into the subsequent queen's households. It
sort of depends on whether a son is inheriting from
a father and whether that son is already married. So
there's all sorts of variables, because sometimes you have Coos
in thirteen ninety nine and transitions like that. But tracing
women across across queen's households after death, sometimes they are

(41:20):
going into househoods of the children of the queen, so
Philippa of Haynolds when she dies, or the third's wife,
some of the women go into the households of her children,
John of Gaunce and so forth. Most famously, Jeffrey Chaucer's
wife named Philippa was serving the queen and then ended

(41:41):
up serving in John of Gaun's household alongside her sister Catherine,
who famously was John of Gaun's mistress.

Speaker 1 (41:49):
Well, I mean, they have to be asking themselves what
happens to me after the queen dies, because the new
queen is going to bring all of her favorite people,
and if she's not English, they could be people who
are completely from outside the court and you you just
don't know. So I thought it was important that you
traced what happened to these women afterwards, because I think
that the way you're looking at them and seeing them

(42:10):
as distinct individuals and really looking at what their lives
were like, and so these individuals are going to be
thinking about that quite a lot what happens to me later.
So on the topic of individuals, as we wrap this up,
I need to ask you, when you were looking through this,
did you come to have any personal affection for certain
ladies in waiting or for even some queens that you

(42:31):
thought really treated their ladies?

Speaker 2 (42:32):
Well, it's funny for queens. I really like Philip O Hayne.
She's one of the queens we know least about. It's
just because she's left us such good records. I think
the reason why I am partial to her and to
her ran. As for the ladies, I'm not sure that
affection is quite the right word. But the woman who

(42:54):
brought me into this project I have a special affinity for.
I had previously written a book on the abduction of women,
and there was a woman named Agnes Lance Crona who
was abducted in the late thirteen hundreds in the era
of Richard the Second And when I was writing the
abduction book, I was just paying attention to the law
and the legal cases and all sorts of those aspects.

(43:16):
But then when I was revising that material and I
looked back on it, I said, oh, yeah, it does
say she is a damsel of the queen's chamber. That's
kind of interesting. I hadn't really thought about that before,
and I was curious to see if other people had
worked on that field. And as I said before, it's
mostly just people who had written books about queens and
include some things about the queen's household, and nobody looking

(43:40):
at ladies and waiting in medieval England as a whole
from a historical perspective. So Agnes Lancecrona is the woman
who brought me into this project, and she was horribly
vilified as this bohemian woman. That's at a time where
there's hostility against the King Richard I, and the hostility
gets attached to the foreign court who are coming to

(44:02):
serve alongside his Queen Anne of Bohemia. Agnes was abducted
by the man that she would go on to marry,
Robert de Vere, who was already married to another woman,
and so it caused this great scandal at court, and
it sort of magnified this great, big situation where everybody
seemed to be hating all foreigners. But she's really the

(44:24):
only one that I can say was specifically criticized. It's
kind of like everybody takes her story and applies it
to all foreigners at court and say we don't like
all of them because of this kind of behavior.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yikes, that is too familiar throughout history, right.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
It is.

Speaker 1 (44:43):
But I think it's important to talk about these women's
stories and as you have done, looked into them individually,
and so I'm so happy that you came on to
talk about this. I'm so happy that you are here
and writing books about ladies and waiting because I think
it's such an important topic to really get at the
everyday stuff that you're interested in I'm interested in. So

(45:04):
thank you so much for coming on and telling us
all about Ladies in Waiting.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
Thank you so much, Danielle. I'll enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
To find out more about Caroline's work, you can visit
her faculty page at Clemson University. Her new book is
Ladies in Waiting in Medieval England. Before we go, here's
Peter from medievalis dot Net to tell us what's on
the website.

Speaker 3 (45:26):
What's that, Peter, Hey, Hey, So there's a really interesting
study about female scribes that came out of Norway last week.
It's basically like trying to look for women who actually
ended medieval manuscripts, and they were looking to see if
they can find information through like what they call a callophone,
like just a little bit at the end where they
say who they were, and often they'll come off, you know,

(45:48):
a I was a non at so and so, and
pray for me, things like that. So what they did
was they looked at a database of about almost twenty
four thousand manuscripts and found that one point one percent
of them were actually penned by women.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
That is not surprising, but I love to see that
because we know that women were writing manuscripts or at
least copying manuscripts. So it's really nice to see figures
that this is represented hidden figures, right.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
Yeah, yeah, So the kind have worked it out. If
there's a million medieval manuscripts, you know, one point one percent,
it actually turns out that as much as like one
hundred and ten thousand medieval manuscripts were actually written by women,
of which eight thousand survive.

Speaker 1 (46:32):
Yes, that's incredible. When you'd say one point one percent,
it doesn't sound like a lot, but it represents a
huge amount of work. So I love that this study
has come out.

Speaker 3 (46:41):
Yeah. Yeah, So it's really fascinating, really a chance for
other scholars to look through the archives and look through
these monastic centers and see what was being produced. So
we have that. Plus we have this wonderful piece news
piece again about the Black Sea and apparently for most
of the middle it was not navigable during the winter.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
I imagine it was pretty nasty. I wouldn't want to go
out on the Black Seat in the middle of winter either.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
Up until a thirteenth century it was basically a Byzantine lake.
They did not allow ships from other maritime powers even
to go into the sea. But eventually the Venetians and
the Genuesese start sailing in and they're having a lot
of trouble just sailing around, and like, don't get caught
in winter. Those storms will really tear your ship apart.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
M hmm.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
Well, we were talking about global ships not too long ago,
and you have to have the right ship for the
right weather.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
So we've got that. Plus we have a piece on
the changing image of Saladin during the Middle Ages, and
at this really great piece by Richard Abels talking about feudalism,
the history of this kind of concept.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
That's important because people are still debating about feudalism, so
it's important to know where it comes from. Indeed, well,
thank you Peter for stopping by and showing us all
of these amazing things are on the website. Thanks, thanks,
Thank you as always to all of you who continue
to support this podcast and all of my work by

(48:06):
not skipping the ads, by sharing your favorite episodes on
social media, by reading my books, borrowing them from libraries
and lending them to your friends, and by becoming patrons
on patreon dot com. Patrens can access all sorts of
goodies like medievalist dot net's book club, extensive list of
open access articles, and access to this podcast ad free.

(48:28):
To find out more or to become a patron, please
visit patreon dot com slash Medievalists for everything from ladies
to the eighties. Follow Medievalist dot net on Instagram at
medievalistnet or blue Sky at Medievalists. You can find me
Danielle Sabalski across social media at five in Medievalists or
five minute medievalist, and you can find my books at

(48:51):
all your favorite bookstores. Our music is Beyond the Warriors
by Gifron. Thanks for listening, and have yourself a fantastic day.