Abstract
In January 1297, Joan of Acre, dowager countess of Gloucester and Hertford and daughter of King Edward I of England, contracted an illicit marriage with her household knight, Ralph de Monthermery. Unfortunately for Joan, her father was finalizing her marriage to Count Amadeus of Savoy, an alliance that would have cemented the already-close political connections between the Plantagenets of England and their cousins of Savoy. According to Laura Valentine’s 1891 travelogue Picturesque England: Its Landmarks and Historic Haunts as Described in Lay and Legend, Song and Story:
Joanna was in an agony of distress and perplexity when she heard that her father was arranging a marriage treaty for her; she could not marry; she was already a wedded wife, and yet she trembled at the thought of the mighty Plantagenet’s wrath. In her great distress she resolved to go to the Countess of Pembroke for counsel, and ordering her servants to send her little son, Earl Gilbert, to her there, she started for Goodrich Castle. There she received a loving welcome and tenderest sympathy, but the highminded widow of William de Valence abhorred all deceit or concealment, and persuaded Joanna to confess the whole truth at once to her father.1
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Notes
Laura Valentine, Picturesque England: Its Landmarks and Historic Haunts as Described in Lay and Legend, Song and Story (London and New York: Fredric Warne and Co, 1891), pp. 440–442. Downloaded from http://www.mspong.org/picturesque/goodrich_castle.html. Joan of Acre’s first husband was Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester and Hertford.
C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 5–6.
Cecilia de Sandford. Matthew Paris’s English History, trans. J. A. Giles (London: Henry Bohn, 1853), II: 441–442.
John Carmi Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 264 n. 49. CPR, 1258–66, 325.
Nigel Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages: History and Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 87.
Used effectively by Margaret Wade Labarge in A Baronial Household of the Thirteenth Century (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964).
Frances Underhill, For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
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© 2012 Charlotte Newman Goldy and Amy Livingstone
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Mitchell, L.E. (2012). Joan de Valence: A Lady of Substance. In: Goldy, C.N., Livingstone, A. (eds) Writing Medieval Women’s Lives. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074706_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137074706_11
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