On 28 November 1290, Eleanor of Castile, queen of England, died at the age of roughly 49 in Harby, close to Lincoln. She had been married to Edward I for 36 years, and they had been king and queen for 18 of those years. She was pregnant at least fourteen times, and was survived by five daughters and one son, the future Edward II, who was only six when his mother died.
Her body (well, most of it) was slowly transported to London over twelve days before her funeral at Westminster Abbey on 17 December. Over the next five years, King Edward commissioned monumental crosses to be erected at every town where the funeral procession had stopped for the night. Whether there were eleven or twelve is disputed (see below); what is certain is that only three of the originals now remain, along with a Victorian reconstruction of a fourth that many of you have walked past, probably without realising what it is doing there.
I was at a loose end in London last Sunday, and, inspired by Alice Loxton’s book (again, see below), I decided to rent a car and visit the three remaining original Eleanor crosses. I left the Budget office near Victoria Station at 1045, reached the Northampton cross at 1245, left Northampton (after lunch) at 1415, reached Geddington at 1500, spent twenty to twenty-five minutes there, reached Waltham at about 1720, did not stay long, and had dropped the car back by 1900. So that was more than eight hours on the road, of which about six and a half were driving, for one long stop in Northampton and two short stops at the other two crosses. It was a bit mad, I must admit. But it was worth it.
I started with the cross at Hardingstone near Northampton. It’s easy to get to, as it’s on what is still the main road between London and the town centre. Parking, and then crossing the busy highway, were both exciting experiences. But the cross itself commands its surroundings, and would have dominated the pedestrian, mounted or horse-drawn traveller’s experience of approaching or leaving Northampton in the centuries before the railway or the car. It is about 10 metres tall, but stands on a prominence, somewhat obscured by trees which would not have been there in the 1290s.
My old friend Tommy, who comes from Magherafelt but has been working across the water for many years, happens to live within a stone’s throw of it. We failed to take any selfies together, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that he was there. It’s particularly appropriate to meet an Irish friend at Hardingstone, because according to the royal financial accounts, the sculptures of Eleanor on the Hardingstone cross were created by one William of Ireland between 1292 and 1294. This makes them literally the oldest surviving artworks by any Irish artist whose name is still known today.
Queen Eleanor, regal and unruffled, looks down at passers-by. The northern statue appears least weathered (or perhaps the restoration of the monument in 1713 was more long-lasting here). It’s sobering to think of the Irish sculptor seven centuries ago, pressed to meet a government-imposed deadline, and at the same time trying to preserve a sense of the dead queen’s personality for the ages. And he succeeded.
We went for lunch at the nearby Delapré Abbey (I actually ordered breakfast there, having skipped it earlier due to oversleeping), and I left Tommy to it and proceeded to Geddington Cross, the northernmost of the three survivors, in the middle of a quiet little countryside village. When I was 18, I worked for two months on an archaeology site at Raunds, 20 km away, so it’s a part of the country that I have some vague if increasingly distant experience of.
Geddington is a charming place. If driving to the Cross from the southwest (as I was) you have to brave a ford across the river Ise, the roadbridge being OK for pedestrians but not vehicles. Any objective assessment would rate the Geddington Cross as the best of the three survivors. At 13 metres, it is the tallest of them. It has only three sides, at a triangular junction in the middle of the village, so it is much slimmer than the other two. Eleanor looks sternly down in all three directions. The sculptor here is not known, but is thought to have been local, and unlike the other two crosses the stone was definitely local rather than imported from Normandy. (NB that although the soot and weathering makes Eleanor’s face look a bit skull-like, she’s just in need of a scrub.)
By great good fortune, local guide Kam Caddell was finishing up a tour as I arrived. He pointed out that the cross is rooted in an ancient sacred spring, mounted on pilings that will disintegrate if the water is ever drained. Then he took a few minutes to lead me through the history of Geddington – a major medieval centre of economic and political activity, which however was cut off in the Age of Steam. “If the railway had come to Geddington, we’d be 60,000 people. Instead it went through two tiny little farming villages called Kettering and Corby and everyone forgot this was the center of the Midlands.” You can hear him on this podcast with Alice Loxton, produced by Brigham Young University.
Kam is full of heterodox theories about the Crosses. He doubts that there was ever one at Grantham – the documentation is lacking. He doubts that there is a single original stone left in the cross at Waltham. Most provocatively, he doubts that they ever actually had crosses at the top. The picturesque stump at the top of the Northampton cross is a later addition. There is no room for one atop the Geddington cross. Myself, I kinda wonder why they would have been called “crosses” in that case. But Kam puts his case passionately.
Perhaps it was the long hours of driving, and the light (such as it was) beginning to dwindle, but I was unable to summon much enthusiasm for Waltham Cross, in one of the more godforsaken corners of Essex just outside the M25. Perhaps at a time of week other than Sunday evening, it would not feel like it is sitting at the core of a decaying Home Counties burgh, asserting history despite its neighbours, covered with bird mesh to minimise the amount of poo on the dead queen.
The original statues were also created by a known sculptor, Alexander of Abingdoni. They were moved to Cheshunt Public Library in the 1950s, and are now in the the V&A. The replacements are putting on a stiff upper lip, under the mesh.
Waltham Cross is a depressing place, with St George’s Cross flags drooping from the lamp-posts around the unloved monument to a forgotten foreign royal. I did not stay long.
The last of the Eleanor Crosses was originally erected on a spot now occupied by the equestrian statue of King Charles I on Trafalgar Square – 350 years before King Charles was beheaded, more than half a century before the Battle of Trafalgar after which the square is named. It is still the spot from which distances from and to London are measured. I went and took a couple of photographs on Tuesday (it is not far from my employers’ London office).
Like the other missing crosses, the original was destroyed by anti-monarchist Puritans in the 1640s, 350 years after Eleanor’s death. Unlike the others, the Victorians decided to recreate it in 1864, about 200 metres from where it had originally stood, doing their best to echo the monument originally built near the ċierring, the bend in the river Thames. And they put a railway station beside it. It is blackened with a century and a half of soot now, but if you look for even half a second, you can see the best known work of Thomas Earp – the replica statues of Queen Eleanor in the replica of the old Charing Cross in the station forecourt.
Are the crosses England’s Taj Mahal? Yes and no, I suppose. They are a visible monument constructed at the direct order of the monarch to express his private grief. Many other memorial structures in England are based on the structure of the Eleanor Crosses (though having said that, there are only so many ways to build a tall stone thing). The Albert Memorial, also commemorating a deceased royal consort, was explicitly modelled on the Eleanor Crosses by Gilbert Scott, and boasts a representation of William of Ireland on its frieze, complete with the shadow of the Hardingstone Cross in the background.
We know nothing about William of Ireland except that he was alive and sculpting in the early to mid 1290s. We know more about Eleanor of Castile, and much much more about Edward I (memorably portrayed by Patrick McGoohan in that awful film Braveheart). The crosses were erected on main roads and significant interchanges, so that people would remember Eleanor. People don’t remember her, most of the crosses are lost, and the paths of commerce and politics have diverted to other routes. But 730 years on, an unimaginable length of time, three of the crosses are still there; so I think that as a building project, it counts as a success.
I was inspired to take this journey by reading Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, by Alice Loxton. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Your body was laid with feet pointing east and head to the west – the idea being that you were looking east towards Jerusalem and, on the event of Jesus’ second resurrection, the Second Coming, you could easily sit up and watch it all unfold. So everyone in the churchyard was ready to sit up, where theyd be facing the same direction, like theatre stalls. No swivelling required. It’s worth keeping this in mind – if you want to make the front row, make sure you’re buried in the east corner of the churchyard. And make sure your plot isn’t near someone who coughs.
Alice Loxton went the whole hog, recapitulating Eleanor’s funeral procession on foot in December 2024, matching the dates of 734 years earlier to her own progress as far as possible, finding the traces of folklore and history at each stop, and documenting the process with photographs which are integrated nicely into the text. The tone is breezy and breathless, but also respectful of the histories through which she is walking. She is a bit more cheerful than me (on the whole she had better weather than I did last weekend, though she is frank about the days when she did not). The reader will cheer for her when, at the end of the journey, she is admitted to the closed chapel in Westminster Abbey where Eleanor now rests. She also reports on a mural about the history of the crosses in Charing Cross tube station – I must look for it next time I am passing and not in a rush. It’s a book that you could comfortably get for someone with at least a vague interest in English history, whether or not they are particularly interested in the thirteenth century. You can get Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen here.
I also managed to get hold of Carsten Dilba’s Memoria Reginae: Das Memorialprogramm für Eleonore von Kastilien, a massive scholarly assembling of everything that is known about the Eleanor Crosses and the other funerary art commissioned in Eleanor’s memory by Edward I, and I have dipped into it for my notes above. The second paragraph of the third chapter has 387 words in the original German with another nine footnotes, so I won’t post it (also I have really only read a few pages so I feel it’s cheating to tick it off my list). The list price is €78, but I was able to get it for €7.80 here.
I hope this will inspire you to go and look at the local equivalent to an Eleanor Cross in your own neighbourhood.