Author: thingloving758a24202c

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Jeannette Lucraft’s Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress. Alison Weir’s Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess followed in 2007. Remarkably, nearly twenty years later, they remain the two principal non-fiction books devoted entirely to Katherine’s life. (Internet Archive)

That alone makes this a suitable moment to return to them.

This is not an attempt to declare one book superior to the other. Both have their merits, and both helped to bring Katherine out of the shadow of the more famous man with whom her life became entwined. Yet they are very different works. They approach the same woman, often using the same fragments of evidence, but the Katherines who emerge are not quite the same.

Reading them again also raises a larger question. What happens to a biography when its subject has left so little of herself behind?

There are no surviving personal letters from Katherine, no words that can be confidently attributed to her and no account written from her point of view. Her will has been lost. Her appearance cannot be securely recovered, despite the many supposed portraits attached to her name. Much of what we know comes from grants, household accounts, legal documents, chronicles and records created by or for other people.

Katherine is present in the sources, but rarely speaking.

That is the challenge faced by anyone who attempts to write her life. The historian must assemble the surviving pieces while resisting the temptation to make them fit too neatly together.

Lucraft’s missing woman

Jeannette Lucraft’s book began in academic research. Her dissertation, Missing from History: A Reinstatement of Katherine Swynford’s Identity, won the History Today–Royal Historical Society prize for 2001, and an article based upon that work appeared in History Today the following year. (RHS)

The phrase “missing from history” is an important one. Lucraft does not merely ask what happened to Katherine. She examines how Katherine’s reputation was created, damaged and subsequently reshaped.

The publisher describes her method as treating Katherine almost as a missing person, reconstructing both the woman and her times from the surviving clues. That is a good description of the book, although Lucraft is also interested in something wider: the treatment of royal mistresses, the language used about powerful women and the gulf between a medieval woman’s lived experience and the accounts written about her by male chroniclers. (The History Press)

This produces a book that is not always a straightforward chronological biography. It is partly an investigation of reputation. Katherine was remembered as mistress, temptress and supposed cause of John of Gaunt’s moral and political failings. Lucraft asks how much of that portrait belonged to Katherine herself and how much was created by chroniclers with their own religious, political and gendered assumptions.

That remains one of the great strengths of the book.

Lucraft is alert to the danger of accepting hostile descriptions at face value. Medieval chroniclers did not stand outside the events they recorded. They wrote with loyalties, prejudices and moral purposes. A woman involved in an adulterous relationship with one of the most powerful princes in Europe was unlikely to receive dispassionate treatment.

Lucraft’s Katherine is therefore not simply the beloved mistress who eventually became a duchess. She is a woman negotiating position, reputation and security in a world that allowed her little control over how her story would be recorded.

The book is comparatively restrained. It does not always attempt to create an intimate, fully rounded character where the evidence cannot support one. That can leave the reader wanting to know more, but perhaps that is partly the point. Lucraft allows us to feel the spaces in the record.

Weir’s larger canvas

Alison Weir approached the subject differently. She acknowledged Lucraft’s earlier work, describing it as an academic study composed of a series of essays, while presenting her own as the first full-scale chronological biography of Katherine. (wadhursthistorysociety.org)

Weir’s book is broader, more detailed and deliberately narrative in form. It places Katherine within the courts of Edward III and Richard II, the Lancastrian household, John of Gaunt’s political ambitions and the changing fortunes of fourteenth-century England.

The result is vivid and highly readable. Weir has a considerable ability to create a sense of place. The reader moves between court, manor, palace, cathedral and battlefield. Katherine’s world is described in a way that makes it accessible to those approaching medieval history for the first time.

Yet the larger the canvas becomes, the more space John of Gaunt inevitably occupies.

This is partly a consequence of the evidence. Gaunt’s career is far better documented than Katherine’s. His movements, political decisions, expenditure, grants and military ambitions can be followed with a degree of detail unavailable for her. When the records fall silent about Katherine, they rarely fall silent about him.

It is therefore difficult to write a full chronological account of Katherine without writing a substantial biography of Gaunt alongside it. At times, however, Katherine seems to recede from her own book. The subtitle itself—The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess—warns us that this will be the story of a couple rather than of Katherine alone.

Weir is also more willing to propose possible explanations for the gaps in Katherine’s life. She frequently signals uncertainty, but a succession of possibilities can gradually acquire the weight of a continuous story. A careful reader can distinguish documented fact from informed reconstruction; a more casual one may remember the reconstruction as established history.

This is not a problem unique to Weir. It is the central difficulty of writing narrative biography about any medieval woman whose independent documentary record is slight. Biography demands movement, personality and connection. Evidence often supplies only isolated moments.

Weir gives us the fuller story. Lucraft makes us more conscious of how much of that story remains uncertain.

The presence of Anya Seton

Neither book can be considered without acknowledging Anya Seton’s novel Katherine.

Like many readers, I first encountered Katherine through Seton. Her novel has shaped the popular understanding of Katherine and John of Gaunt more profoundly than any work of non-fiction. It provided them with private conversations, motives, fears, separations and reconciliations that the surviving evidence cannot give us.

Seton’s achievement should not be dismissed. She researched Katherine’s world with seriousness and created a novel that has inspired generations of readers to look beyond the fiction and search for the woman herself.

Weir has always been open about the novel’s influence. She first read it at fifteen, remained captivated by it and described her biography as the fulfilment of a long-held ambition. She has also carefully identified places where Seton departed from the historical record. (alisonweir.org.uk)

Lucraft’s relationship with the romantic tradition is more analytical. She is interested in how Katherine’s reputation developed: from the condemnations of medieval chroniclers to the sympathetic heroine created by later writers.

The difference is significant.

Weir asks how much of the great love story can be recovered from history. Lucraft asks how and why that love story became the dominant way in which Katherine was remembered.

I do not think the two approaches are incompatible. John of Gaunt’s eventual decision to marry Katherine was extraordinary. Their connection survived political hostility, public separation, changes in fortune and the passing of many years. Affection seems the most convincing explanation for at least part of that history.

But we do not know the language in which they expressed that affection. We cannot enter their private rooms or recover their conversations. We should be cautious about allowing the emotional certainty of Seton’s novel to fill the silences in the historical record.

The love story may be true in its broadest outline. Its intimate details belong to fiction.

The titles we give women

The titles of both biographies now make me pause.

Lucraft gives us The History of a Medieval Mistress. Weir offers John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess. Both titles define Katherine principally through her sexual relationship with a powerful man.

This was doubtless influenced by publishing considerations. “Mistress” and “scandalous” attract attention in a way that “landholder”, “household servant” or “Lincolnshire widow” probably would not.

Nevertheless, the language matters.

Katherine was John of Gaunt’s mistress, but she was not only his mistress. She was a daughter of the Roët family, the sister of Philippa Chaucer, wife of Hugh Swynford, mother of Swynford and Beaufort children, a widow responsible for landed interests, a member of the Lancastrian household and eventually Duchess of Lancaster.

Her relationship with Gaunt transformed her life and ensured her dynastic importance, but it should not consume her entire identity.

There is an irony here. Books written to restore Katherine to history still have to place John of Gaunt’s name, rank or relationship prominently on their covers. The same problem confronts historians writing about many medieval women. The man provides the recognisable route into the story, but he can then occupy the space the woman was meant to reclaim.

Lucraft resists this by concentrating upon Katherine’s identity and reputation. Weir does so by gathering every available fragment relating to her. Neither escapes Gaunt’s shadow completely, perhaps because the surviving records make that impossible.

The temptation to see Katherine

One area in which my own views have become more cautious concerns Katherine’s appearance.

Readers understandably want to see the people they are reading about. A face appears to bring us closer to the person. In Katherine’s case, however, no securely identified contemporary portrait is known to survive.

There are later representations, the seventeenth-century drawing made by William Dugdale from her tomb monument and several manuscript figures that have been proposed as possible likenesses. None can safely be treated as a portrait drawn from life.

Weir’s willingness to explore possible identifications is engaging, but I would now place a much heavier line beneath the word “possible”. A figure in a manuscript may resemble the Katherine we have imagined, but resemblance to an imagined woman proves very little.

The desire to find Katherine’s face is part of the same impulse that drives biography. We want to cross the distance between her world and ours. Yet sometimes the most honest conclusion is that the evidence does not allow us to do so.

A supposed portrait may be a lens through which later generations imagined Katherine. It is not necessarily a window through which we can see her.

Have the books aged?

Neither biography has become redundant.

Twenty years have brought easier access to catalogues, digitised records and a growing body of work on medieval women, household structures, landholding, memory and reputation. They have also encouraged readers to question the language traditionally used about mistresses, illegitimacy and women associated with powerful men.

Yet no newly discovered collection of Katherine’s letters has transformed our understanding of her. The fundamental difficulty remains. We possess fragments, not a private life.

What has changed most may be the questions we ask.

Rather than concentrating solely on whether Katherine and Gaunt were in love, we might ask how she protected the interests of her Swynford children, how she functioned within the Lancastrian affinity, what widowhood allowed her to control, how her position affected her Beaufort offspring and how she managed the transition from condemned mistress to accepted duchess.

We might also ask why later generations have needed Katherine to be either a calculating temptress or an idealised romantic heroine. Both interpretations reduce her.

Lucraft’s book remains particularly valuable when considering those questions. Weir’s remains important because of the scale of the evidence she assembled and the number of readers she encouraged to take Katherine seriously as a historical subject.

Which Katherine should we read?

For a reader unfamiliar with the period, Weir offers the more expansive introduction. Her book supplies a detailed political and domestic setting and carries the reader through Katherine’s life in recognisable biographical form.

Lucraft offers something different. Her book asks the reader to think about how historical reputations are made and how the life of a medieval woman can be distorted by the needs of chroniclers, historians and later storytellers.

I would not choose between them. I would read them together.

Weir demonstrates what can be built from the surviving fragments. Lucraft reminds us to examine the foundations before accepting the completed structure.

There are conclusions in both books with which I would hesitate to agree. That does not diminish their importance. Historical writing is not fixed. Every generation returns to the evidence with different questions, and every serious study contributes something to the conversation.

Both authors recognised that Katherine deserved to be studied outside the pages of Anya Seton’s novel. Both rejected the simplest caricature of her as a destructive sexual temptress. Both attempted, in different ways, to return thought, purpose and dignity to a woman too often reduced to the word “mistress”.

Twenty years later, their books remain the starting point for anyone seeking the historical Katherine Swynford.

They are not the final word. I am not sure that Katherine’s scattered records will ever permit a final word.

Perhaps that is why she continues to fascinate us. We can establish the outline of her life and trace the consequences of the choices made around her, but the woman herself never quite steps fully into view.

Lucraft teaches us to question the reputation history gave her. Weir shows how powerfully her surviving story can still be told. Between them stands Katherine: not Seton’s romantic heroine, not the chroniclers’ corrupting mistress and not a woman whose every thought can be recovered from grants and household accounts.

She remains partly beyond our reach.

Recognising that is not a failure of biography. It may be the most honest place from which to begin.

Kettlethorpe Churchyard

Last week I had the pleasure of leading a walk for the Lincoln Bailgate U3A Walking Group around Kettlethorpe, Fenton and Laughterton, following a route closely connected with Katherine Swynford and the landscape she knew more than six centuries ago.

We gathered beside the medieval cross base at St Peter’s Church, Kettlethorpe, before stepping inside a building that, although much altered since Katherine’s lifetime, still serves the community that once formed the heart of her estate. From there we crossed the fields to Fenton, continued to Laughterton, walked down towards the River Trent and finally returned across what was once Katherine’s deer park to Kettlethorpe.

As always, I arrived with pages of notes.

Dates, charters, grants of land, church history, estate boundaries and the remarkable 1383 licence that allowed Katherine to enclose 300 acres of land and create a deer park. Those details matter. Accuracy matters. Anyone who follows this blog will know that I believe history deserves careful research and respect for the evidence.

Yet somewhere between Kettlethorpe and the Trent, the notes found their way back into my pocket and I simply began telling Katherine’s story.

Not an invented story, but a reasoned one.

The records tell us a great deal. They tell us where Katherine lived, the lands she held, the family she created and the extraordinary journey that took her from knight’s daughter to Duchess of Lancaster. They tell us about documents signed, estates managed and marriages arranged.

What they cannot tell us is what it felt like to stand where we stood, looking across the open Lincolnshire landscape.

Did she pause beside the Trent and watch the traffic on the river? Did she find comfort in the relative peace of Kettlethorpe when court politics became overwhelming? Did the deer park represent status, security or simply home?

No historian can answer those questions with certainty.

Our task is not to invent, but to interpret. We take the surviving evidence, place it within its historical context and, with care and honesty, build the most reasonable picture we can. Facts provide the foundations, but understanding creates the house.

Writing my biography of Joan Beaufort, Katherine’s daughter, has reinforced that lesson every day. Medieval records rarely hand us complete lives. Instead, they leave fragments: a payment, a licence, a will, a passing reference in a chronicle. The challenge is to connect those fragments without ever losing sight of the evidence.

Perhaps that explains why I find history so endlessly fascinating.

I have always been open about my dyslexia. Less well known is that I also have a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests itself through motor tics.

For much of my adult life I tried to hide them, convinced that other people noticed far more than they actually did.

Age has a wonderful habit of changing perspective.

The tics have not changed, but my relationship with them has. What once felt like something to conceal has become simply another part of who I am. There is a quiet freedom in that realisation. Energy once spent worrying can instead be devoted to curiosity, conversation, research, writing and sharing stories.

Perhaps that is why I am increasingly drawn to the people behind the records. Medieval men and women were not names on family trees or figures in chronicles. They were individuals with ambitions, loyalties, griefs, humour and resilience. Katherine Swynford was certainly all of those things.

As we walked from village to village, history became something more than dates and documents. The church remained. The fields remained. The River Trent still flowed northwards as it did in Katherine’s lifetime. Even the outline of her deer park can still be traced across the landscape.

For a moment, six centuries seemed a very small distance indeed.

Crossing the old parkland on our return to Kettlethorpe, I was reminded that history is often found in the spaces between certainty and imagination. Not imagination that invents, but imagination disciplined by evidence and informed by place.

That is where Katherine still lives.

Not simply in charters or chronicles, but in the landscape she knew and in the stories that careful research allows us to tell.

Finally, my thanks go to the members of the Lincoln Bailgate U3A Walking Group, a group that has contributed enormously to my wellbeing over the years. Their friendship, support and enthusiasm have enriched far more than my walking. Their questions and observations on this walk were a reminder that history is not confined to archives, libraries and books. Sometimes it is found beneath our feet, in familiar fields and forgotten paths.

And that, perhaps, is why I keep returning to Kettlethorpe and to Katherine Swynford—a remarkable woman whose story still rewards those willing to slow down, look carefully and walk in her footsteps.B

 

Georgette Heyer Wikimedia Commons

Every so often a book gains a reputation that becomes difficult to shake. Readers hear that it is disappointing, flawed or unsuccessful and approach it already expecting to be underwhelmed. Georgette Heyer’s My Lord John is one such book.

Published after Heyer’s death in 1975, the novel has often been dismissed as an unfinished curiosity rather than a major work in its own right. Many readers expecting the wit and romance of her Regency novels were disappointed to discover a dense, highly detailed story set in the late fourteenth century. Yet having recently revisited the book, I find myself wondering whether it deserves far more credit than it usually receives.

The first misconception concerns the title itself.

Many people assume that the “John” of My Lord John is John of Gaunt. In fact, the title refers to his grandson, John of Lancaster, the future Duke of Bedford and son of Henry IV. Heyer intended the novel to be the opening volume of an ambitious trilogy exploring the House of Lancaster. Sadly, she never lived to complete it.

That said, John of Gaunt remains one of the most important figures in the book.

When we encounter him, he is in the final years of his life. This is not the fiery young commander of the Castilian campaigns or the controversial political figure denounced by some chroniclers. Instead, Heyer presents an ageing statesman whose long experience has given him both wisdom and perspective. He is shown as a devoted family man, deeply concerned with the future of the Lancastrian dynasty and conscious that his life’s work is nearing its end.

For those of us interested in Katherine Swynford, this portrayal is particularly fascinating.

Popular culture has often struggled to know what to do with John of Gaunt. Depending upon the author, he can appear as a villain, a romantic hero, a political opportunist or a tragic figure. Heyer’s version feels much closer to the John emerging from modern scholarship. He is intelligent, pragmatic, loyal to those he loves and, above all, conscious of his responsibilities.

What struck me most on rereading the novel was how naturally Katherine Swynford and the Beaufort children are woven into the story.

By the period covered in the book, Katherine is no longer the duke’s mistress but his wife. The long years of uncertainty are behind them. The Beaufort children are increasingly visible within the Lancastrian family circle and are treated as part of that world. Modern readers sometimes forget how remarkable this transformation was. Within a few years the Beauforts would be formally legitimised and become one of the most influential families in England.

For anyone researching Joan Beaufort, as I currently am, these scenes carry particular resonance.

Joan is not a central character, but she is present within the wider family network. We are reminded that before she became Countess of Westmorland and matriarch of the Neville dynasty, she was a daughter of the House of Lancaster. Her childhood and early adulthood were shaped by the political and familial world that Heyer recreates so effectively.

Indeed, one of the novel’s greatest strengths is its understanding of family.

This is not simply a story of kings and battles. It is a story of relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, uncles and nephews. John of Gaunt’s influence extends through every page, not because he dominates events but because his legacy shapes the lives of those around him. The future Henry V, the young Duke of Bedford and the Beaufort children all inhabit a world that he helped create.

Critics frequently complained that My Lord John was too historical and not sufficiently novelistic. There is some truth in that observation. The book contains lengthy discussions of politics, administration and dynastic affairs. It demands patience from the reader. Yet these are also the qualities that make it rewarding.

Heyer spent decades researching the period. She immersed herself in chronicles, records and medieval scholarship. Reading the novel often feels less like reading historical fiction and more like stepping into the late fourteenth century. The texture of everyday life, the political assumptions of the age and the intricate web of family loyalties all feel authentic.

Perhaps that is why I enjoyed it more on this reading than I did years ago.

As my own research has increasingly focused upon Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt and Joan Beaufort, I found myself appreciating details that I might once have skimmed past. The novel captures a moment when the Beaufort family stood on the threshold of greatness. Their future importance is not yet fully visible, but the foundations are already being laid.

The tragedy of My Lord John is not that it is unfinished. Rather, it is that Heyer never had the opportunity to complete the larger story she intended to tell. One cannot help wondering what her portrayal of Henry V, Bedford and the later Beaufort generation might have looked like.

Even in its incomplete state, however, the novel offers something valuable. It provides one of the most sympathetic and thoughtful fictional portrayals of John of Gaunt that I have encountered. It presents Katherine Swynford as a respected member of the Lancastrian family rather than a historical footnote. Most importantly, it reminds us that the Beauforts did not emerge from nowhere. They were part of a family whose influence would shape English history for generations.

For readers interested in Katherine Swynford, John of Gaunt and the Beaufort dynasty, My Lord John deserves to be remembered not as a failure but as an ambitious and often overlooked achievement. It may not be Heyer’s easiest book, but it is certainly one of her most interesting.

Coronation street epitomises strong northern women

This week has felt rather different from most others. For the first time, Joan Beaufort has begun to feel less like a distant historical figure and more like someone whose life I am genuinely beginning to understand.

I have spent much of the week working on the opening sections of my Joan Beaufort biography, particularly the introduction and Chapter One. There is something slightly daunting about beginning a first history book after years of writing talks, blog posts and academic work. A book feels more permanent somehow. It demands not only research, but structure, confidence and patience. Some days I have felt immersed in fourteenth-century England; on others I have stared at the screen wondering whether any of it truly works at all.

Alongside the writing itself, I have also been exploring publishing options. I have had encouraging communication with a publisher, which has given me some hope that Joan’s story might finally find the wider audience she deserves. At the same time, I have also been researching alternative publishers and considering what route might best suit a serious but accessible work of medieval history. The publishing world can feel almost as complex and political as the late medieval court itself.

Much of the week has also been spent searching archives, chasing references and trying to untangle long-repeated assumptions from actual evidence. That process, although often frustrating, is also one of the things I enjoy most. There is a strange excitement in finding a small overlooked detail buried in a patent roll, ecclesiastical register or nineteenth-century antiquarian text. Slowly, a clearer picture begins to emerge.

What has surprised me most, however, is how much I have begun to like Joan Beaufort herself.

History has often treated Joan as an appendage to others — daughter of Katherine Swynford, wife of Ralph Neville, mother of Cecily Neville. Yet the more I read, the more I sense a woman of intelligence, resilience and political awareness moving quietly through an unstable world. She survived scandal by birth, dynastic insecurity, political upheaval and the constant demands placed upon aristocratic women, eventually becoming matriarch of one of the most powerful family networks in England.

Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that I feel drawn toward writing about strong northern women.

Long before Joan Beaufort entered my life, my MA dissertation explored another formidable northern female world: the women of the UK soap opera Coronation Street. Although separated by six centuries, there is something oddly familiar in the emotional strength, endurance, wit and survival strategies of women navigating difficult environments. Medieval noblewomen and Weatherfield matriarchs may appear very different on the surface, but both inhabit worlds shaped by family loyalties, reputation, power and resilience.

One of the pleasures of historical writing is discovering those unexpected human connections across time.

At the start of this project Joan Beaufort felt important. Now she is also beginning to feel real.

 May 10th marks the anniversary of the death of Katherine Swynford in 1403. She died in Lincoln, probably at the so-called Priory within the Cathedral Close, and may well have been in declining health for some time before her death. Over six centuries later, her presence still lingers quietly across the city she came to call home.

Katherine remains one of the most recognisable women of fourteenth-century England. To many, she is remembered primarily through the lens of romance: the long relationship with John of Gaunt, the eventual marriage, and the extraordinary rise of their Beaufort children. It is certainly a remarkable story, but I have increasingly come to feel that reducing Katherine to a romantic heroine alone does her a considerable injustice.

What fascinates me most is not simply the love story, but the woman herself. Katherine survived at the heart of one of the most dangerous royal courts in medieval Europe. She endured public criticism, political upheaval, widowhood, exile from court life, and the uncertainties of dynastic politics, yet emerged with influence, dignity, and lasting significance. In many ways she represents something more complex and more interesting: an intelligent, resilient, and independent medieval woman navigating a world largely controlled by men.

Lincoln forms an important part of that story. Here she spent some of the final years of her life. Here she died. Here she was buried in Lincoln Cathedral beside her daughter Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland. Even now, standing near their tombs in the Cathedral, there is a powerful sense that these are not simply distant historical figures but women whose lives shaped the course of English history.

Increasingly, my own research has begun to turn towards Joan Beaufort. Overshadowed at times by both her parents and her descendants, Joan was nevertheless one of the great matriarchs of fifteenth-century England. Through her children and grandchildren, her influence stretched deep into the Wars of the Roses and ultimately towards the Tudor dynasty itself. Yet Joan also had her own story of power, family, grief, survival, and political importance.

As I begin my journey into historical non-fiction writing, it is Joan who is increasingly drawing me in. There is something compelling about attempting to recover the lives of medieval women not simply as supporting figures in the stories of powerful men, but as individuals who shaped events in their own right.

Perhaps that, ultimately, is what continues to draw me back to Katherine Swynford and her family. Their story is not simply one of romance or scandal, but of legacy, resilience, motherhood, ambition, survival, and memory. And in Lincoln, their story still feels very much alive.

The last couple of weeks have been spent debating whether I could actually write a book about Joan Beaufort. Given my lifetime of imposter syndrome I can think of many reasons why I shouldn’t. However at my stage of life there is a strong argument there is nothing to loose and I might actually enjoy it.

So I have accumulated a pile of biographies, a jumble of documents from the National Archives and a whole host of other potentially useful records.

It is clear at this stage that planning is going to be the most important part of the whole project.

It’s tempting to rush into writing, but with Joan that simply isn’t going to work. She isn’t a figure with a ready-made narrative. More often, she appears briefly—through family connections, landholdings, or the actions of others—before disappearing again. So the first  has to be to take a step back andthink carefully about how her story can be told.

At the moment, my focus is on shaping the approach rather than drafting chapters. Do I follow a

straightforward chronological structure, or build the book around themes—power, land, family,

widowhood? Joan sits at the centre of all of these, but rarely in a way that is obvious at first glance.

A lot of this stage is about mapping: identifying where she appears in the records, and just as

importantly, where she doesn’t. That means working through sources and resisting the temptation to write yet, but to understand the landscape I’m dealing with.Place is also feeding into the planning. 

Locations such as Raby Castle and Lincoln Cathedral are helping me think about structure. These aren’t just settings—they may well become anchors for different parts of the book.

I’m also very aware of what I don’t want to do. Joan is too often reduced to a supporting

role—daughter of Katherine Swynford, or matriarch of a family caught up in the Wars of the Roses. I need to find a way to keep her at the centre, even when the story of those around her take centre stage.

So for now, this is slow, deliberate work. No dramatic breakthroughs, just building a framework that feels honest to the evidence. If I get this stage right, the writing should follow

 

Painting of Joan

Painting of Ralph first Earl of Westmorland

Raby

Visiting Raby Castle as part of my ongoing research for a forthcoming talk on Joan Beaufort.

What a place. Peaceful, beautiful and steeped in history — yet once home to one of the most influential women of the fifteenth century.

Raby is forever linked with Joan’s marriage to Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland. Together they had fourteen children, and through them Joan became ancestress to an extraordinary cast of later history. Their daughter Eleanor Neville was mother of Henry Percy, Hotspur. Cecily Neville became mother of Edward IV and Richard III. Another grandson was Richard Neville, remembered as the Kingmaker.

Yet Joan’s life was no fairytale. Her first marriage to Robert Ferrers brought two daughters before early widowhood. Her second marriage brought status and power, but also years of bitter inheritance dispute with her Neville stepchildren.

After Ralph’s death, Joan appears to have turned increasingly to religion and later took a vow of chastity — perhaps understandable after a lifetime of childbearing, politics and family conflict.

It strikes me that Joan’s story is so often told through others: in books about Katherine Swynford as daughter, or Cecily Neville as mother. Yet Joan herself deserves centre stage. I am increasingly tempted to try to tell her story myself.

For now, Raby was a reminder that Joan Beaufort was never merely adjacent to history. She helped shape it.

Millennium window Harby

Harby Church today

Victorian representation

Looking towards the supposed site of Harby Manor

In November of that year, Eleanor was travelling with Edward I. By the 13th, her health was clearly failing, and the court left Clipstone heading towards Lincoln, perhaps intending to visit the shrine of Hugh of Lincoln to pray for her recovery. The journey, however, was cut short. On 20 November, Eleanor was brought to Harby, to the manor house of Richard de Weston—a reminder that this was not a grand royal residence, but a local house drawn suddenly into royal history. Suffering from what contemporaries described as a “slow fever,” she declined steadily over the following days.

Her final hours were carefully attended. Present at her deathbed were the local priest, William de Kelm, and the Bishop of Lincoln, Oliver Sutton. On the evening of 28 November 1290, Eleanor died. The setting could hardly have been more modest, yet the consequences of that moment would extend across the whole of England.

The response was immediate and practical. Eleanor’s body was taken to St Catherine’s Priory in Lincoln, where it was eviscerated and embalmed. Her viscera were buried in Lincoln Cathedral, while her body and heart began the long journey south. On the morning of 4 December, the funeral cortège set out on the first stage of a journey of some 172 miles to Westminster Abbey. Travelling in the short daylight hours of December, it moved along medieval roads, stopping at twelve places that would later be marked by the Eleanor Crosses. These monuments have come to dominate the narrative, fixing Eleanor’s memory across the landscape, but Harby was the point from which that process began.

Edward did not forget the place of her death. At Harby he founded a chantry chapel so that prayers would be said for Eleanor’s soul in perpetuity. Consecrated in 1294 and served by its first incumbent, Roger de Newton, the chantry was supported by an endowment that included the manor of Navenby. Unlike the great crosses, which proclaimed royal grief in public, the chantry represented something quieter and more enduring: a daily act of remembrance rooted in place. It is here that Edward’s words—“I loved her dearly during her lifetime … I shall not cease to love her now that she is dead”—feel most appropriate.

The medieval church associated with these events has not survived intact. Rebuilt over centuries and ultimately replaced in 1877, the present building stands on the same site, carrying forward layers of memory rather than preserving a single moment in time. Within it, one of the most striking commemorations of Eleanor is the stained glass window installed in 2008.

Designed and made by Lincoln Cathedral glazier Stephen Lewis, the window commemorates Eleanor’s death at Harby and, more broadly, celebrates two thousand years of Christianity. Eleanor stands at its centre, framed by her heraldry—the arms of León and Castile, England, and Ponthieu. Around her, twelve crosses flow across the design, symbolising the original Eleanor Crosses and echoing the stages of her funeral journey.

At the heart of the window, a roundel places the cross itself as the central symbol of Christianity, accompanied by a carnation and narcissus—emblems of enduring love and resurrection. It is a composition that brings together dynastic identity, personal loss, and theological meaning within a single visual narrative.

The use of stained glass is particularly apt. As the light changes, so too does the image: colours deepen, soften, and shift, and the sequence of crosses seems almost to move. In this way, Eleanor’s final journey is not simply depicted but quietly re-enacted, carried again in light across the interior of the church.

Other traces of Eleanor remain: a statue set into the tower, heraldry that anchors her identity, and smaller details that connect past and present. Yet even here, memory is not entirely secure. A brass plate by the altar rail records her death as 27 November 1290, a small but telling error that reminds us how easily history can shift in the act of commemoration.

Standing in the churchyard today, looking out across the fields, there is little to suggest that this was once the setting for a royal death. There is no sense of spectacle, no grand architectural statement—only the quiet continuity of a village landscape. And yet from this place, Eleanor’s memory travelled the length of England: fixed in stone, carried in ritual, and sustained here, most quietly of all, in prayer, glass, and light.

 

Harby is not simply where Eleanor died. It is where her memory began.

 

It has been on my mind for months to find a walk that explores the Kettlethorpe estate as it might have been in the time of Katherine and Hugh. Not just to walk it, but to try—properly—to find Katherine within her own landscape here in Lincolnshire. With the help of a leaflet available in Kettlethorpe Church, I have finally managed to piece together a short 4.5-mile route that does exactly that.

In glorious sunshine this afternoon, with my wife Rosemary and Henry—our cockapoo, on his lead throughout—we set out from the door of Kettlethorpe Church to test it.

The route takes you first to Fenton, then on to Laughterton, before an out-and-back stretch down to the River Trent via Marsh Lane. On the surface, it is a straightforward rural walk. But look more closely and it maps almost perfectly onto what was once the core of a medieval estate of around 3,000 acres, centred on Kettlethorpe and worked through settlements like Fenton and Laughterton.

Fenton feels exactly what it would have been: working land. Productive, organised, and essential to the estate. Laughterton is different. Its long, linear form still hints at planning—at structure imposed rather than grown. You begin to see that this is not random countryside, but something shaped, managed, and understood.

And then, if you slow down and actually look, the land starts to give itself away.

In places the pasture rises and falls in long, gentle waves—ridge and furrow. Medieval ploughing, still there under your feet. These are the strips worked by tenants of the estate, turned over season after season, year after year, building up those ridges almost imperceptibly. It is one of those moments where the past stops being abstract. You are not imagining it—you are standing in it.

We stopped in Laughterton to read the memorial to the two RAF crashes in 1944. A Stirling lost on a training flight. A Lancaster returning from operations. It is a quiet, understated memorial, but it shifts something. The same fields, six centuries later, carrying very different lives and very different losses. It doesn’t feel like an addition to the story—it feels like part of the same place continuing.

From there, Marsh Lane takes you down towards the Trent. The name alone tells you what you need to know. This is marshland—low, wet, and always slightly uncertain. In Katherine’s time, before any modern drainage, this would have been ground that demanded attention. Sometimes valuable, sometimes problematic, always needing to be managed. The estate didn’t just sit on the land—it had to work with it.

And then the Trent itself. Wide, slow, and deceptively calm. A boundary, a resource, and at times no doubt a problem. Standing there, it is easier to understand the scale of what Katherine held here—not just status, but responsibility. Land, water, people, obligation.

This walk doesn’t give you spectacle. It gives you something better.

It gives you a landscape that still makes sense.

And for me, that is where Katherine is easiest to find—not in the grandeur of Lincoln Cathedral, but here, in the fields around Kettlethorpe, where her life was actually lived.

 On Saturday 14 March I had the pleasure of attending a talk by historian Alison Weir on Katherine Swynford in the beautiful setting of the Chapter House at Lincoln Cathedral.

It was a glorious spring day in Lincoln and the Chapter House looked particularly magnificent. Sunlight streamed through the stained glass windows, casting vivid colours across the stone walls and floor. Anyone familiar with the space will know how dramatically it can change with the weather; on a grey day it can feel rather cold and cavernous, but in bright sunshine it becomes a wonderfully atmospheric place in which to listen to history being brought to life.

Alison spoke for around fifty minutes about the life of Katherine Swynford. Her talk was eloquent, engaging and inspirational, and it was clear that the audience was captivated by the story she told. The structure of the talk followed the central arguments of her biography of Katherine, but what made it particularly effective was the way she interspersed the narrative with quotations from Chaucer and other contemporary chroniclers. These voices from the medieval world helped place Katherine firmly within the cultural and political context of the fourteenth century.

One aspect of the talk that particularly struck me was Alison’s effort to “rehabilitate” the reputation of John of Gaunt. In popular history Gaunt is often portrayed in a rather negative light, yet Alison emphasised his achievements and his steadfast loyalty to the English crown. It was a thoughtful and balanced perspective, and one that I suspect deserves more attention. It also reminded me that this is something I should address more fully in my own talks about Katherine.

The event itself was clearly a success. The Chapter House was well filled, the audience attentive, and there was a real sense of enthusiasm for Katherine’s story. It is encouraging to see such interest in a figure who for so long has been somewhat overlooked outside specialist circles. Perhaps it also signals that Lincoln Cathedral is continuing its journey in recognising the significance of Duchess Katherine within the history of Lincoln.

Finally, I must thank Alison Weir for such a wonderful talk. She came across as both charming and generous with her time, remaining afterwards to speak with members of the audience, sign books and pose for photographs. I was delighted to have my own copy of her biography signed, which will serve as a pleasant reminder of an enjoyable and memorable afternoon.