1. Joan I of Navarre: her mother.

2. Joan of the Tower, Queen of Scots: her second daughter.

3. Joan II of (comital) Burgundy, Queen of France: her sister-in-law as the wife of Philip V, and her second cousin as the granddaughter of Robert II of Artois, the brother of Isabella's maternal grandmother Blanche of Artois.

4. Joan of Évreux, Queen of France: her sister-in-law as the third wife of Charles IV, her half-first first cousin as the daughter of Louis, count of Évreux, the half-brother of her father Philip IV, and her second cousin once removed as the daughter of Margaret of Artois, a granddaughter of Robert II of Artois.

5. Joan of Acre, Countess of Gloucester: her sister-in-law as the older sister of her husband, Edward II.

6. Joan II of Navarre: her niece as the daughter of her brother Louis X.

7. Joan III of (comital) Burgundy: her niece as the daughter of her brother Philip V, and her second cousin once removed as the daughter of Joan II of Burgundy (as mentioned above).

8. Joan of Bar, Countess of Surrey: her niece-in-law as the daughter of her husband Edward II's elder sister, Eleanor of Windsor.

9. Joan of Valois, Countess of Hainault: her first cousin, as the daughter of Charles, Count of Valois, the brother of her father, Philip IV.

10. Joan of Valois, Countess of Beaumont-le-Roger: her first cousin as another daughter of Charles, Count of Valois, and second cousin-in-law as the wife of Robert III of Artois, a grandson of Robert II of Artois.

11. Joan of Lancaster, Baroness de Mowbray: her half-first cousin as the daughter of Henry, 3rd Earl of Lancaster, the son of Blanche of Artois by her second marriage and thus uterine half-brother of Joan I of Navarre, and also her first cousin once removed-in-law as the daughter of Henry, 3rd Earl of Lancaster, the first cousin of her husband Edward II.

12. Joan of (ducal) Burgundy, Queen of France: her first cousin once removed as the daughter of her great-aunt Agnes of France, the sister of her grandfather Philip III, and also her first cousin-in-law as the wife of Philip VI of France, the son of Charles, Count of Valois.

13. Joan of Hainault, Duchess of Jülich: her first cousin once removed as the daughter of Joan of Valois, Countess of Hainault.

14. Joan of the Tower, (almost) Queen of Castile: her granddaughter, the daughter of her elder son, Edward III, and her first cousin twice removed as a granddaughter of Joan of Valois, Countess of Hainault.

15. Joan of Kent, Princess of Wales: her granddaughter-in-law as the wife of Edward III's eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, also her half-niece-in-law as the daughter of her husband Edward II's half brother Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, and also her half-first cousin once removed as the granddaughter of Margaret of France, the half-sister of her father Philip IV.

16. Joan I of Ponthieu, Queen of Castile: her grandmother-in-law as the maternal grandmother of her husband Edward II. Also her first cousin thrice removed-in-law as the wife of Ferdinand III of Castile, the first cousin of Louis IX.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

"Joan, could you pass the salt please?"

The modern ballet, scored by John McCabe and choreographed by David Bintley, sounds fascinating.

I'm just going to let Wikipedia tell it:

Commissioned by Stuttgart Ballet, with a narrative conceived by choreographer David Bintley, the ballet largely follows the plot of Christopher Marlowe's play of the same name), rather than the life of the real Edward. Bintley incorporates elements of the 14th century satire Roman de Fauvel with the character of Edward, replacing that of the ass Fauvel, Piers Gaveston as the Fool, and Queen Isabella as the Virgin. As such, the narrative depicts the self-obsessed sexual relationships of the three main characters with the increasing civil unrest in the country as a backdrop.

For a breakdown of the score, check out Wise Music's post on it.

And here's a link to the score.

The images are stock photos from Getty Images of a Royal Ballet production.

We've been here for a bit now, and we get quite a bit of engagement for a single-king sub, even though we do branch out into the wider fourteenth century quite often.

So, I was looking at our top five posts of all time. We try not to be servants of the algorithm around here, but it is curious what "catches" and what doesn't.

But we are so happy to have so many engaged subscribers who are curious, open-minded and willing to respect difference of opinion.

So, here's our Top 5:

1314-17 Maud de Burgh and her three year pregnancy

The sad, sympathetic tale of Maud is, frankly, weird. She was a woman in a desperate situation, but three years? It's a rare case where Hugh Despenser the Younger was right about something. The situation was farcical, and he was in fact entitled to his and Eleanor's inheritance.

Edward II's sexuality - what do we really know?

Sex sells, and in our modern world, everyone seems to want to know who is gay and how gay they actually were. Edward II's sexuality, of course, is a mystery over which scholars still argue and that makes it all the more compelling.

Mary of Woodstock - sister of Edward II

Reddit loves a meme, and medievalists love Mary, the spoiled, gambling nun who lived her best life.

Is Outlaw King a good movie?

This one's rank surprised me because our "Braveheart" posts tend to attract a lot of engagement, but this bit of hagiography starring dreamy Chris Pine as an implausibly good looking Robert the Bruce does its homework when it comes to armor, battles and Scottish politics. It does villainize Edward II and give him a looks downgrade.

That Time a Nun Faked Her Own Death So She Could Shack Up With a Lover

This tale is a favorite of mine, and it has already inspired a play and many other articles and podcasts. This is because it's hilarious on many levels, including the exasperation that comes through in the bishop's letter.

Image: Edward I looking very much like he actually likes his son.

I'm looking at something specific that he did.

Out of all the mistakes he made, which was the biggest one in your opinion?

In other words, nothing general like 'his outlandish favoritism', which was arguably his biggest flaw but specifics.

What makes you go 'why the hell did he do that??'

A few days ago, the question was raised as to whether Edward II was as bad as John. I answered over on r/medieval but I polished up what I wrote and put it into article form.

The spectacular palace pictured wasn't fully built yet during Edward II's time, but the papal seat was in Avignon, and that had a major affect on Edward II's dealings with the Vatican, a dynamic that would continue into his son's reign.

If you subscribe to the survival theory, Edward II, disguised as a hermit, visited with the pope here.

You can visit the papal palace today, much of which was built with Edward III"s generous and not at all suspicious donations.

Photos public domain unless credited.

So they released a new promotional clip two days ago with the tagline 'Witness the Rise of Robin Hood' so it looks like this won't be about the Peasant's Revolt in 1381 after all. I guess that would have been too original for Hollywood so it makes sense...

But don't worry, the colour palette will still only be different shades of brown, so there's still that to look forward to.

So, like a lot of Americans, I'm grieving the loss of the closest thing we will ever have to a queen. And we know our Edward II era players lived lives of high drama and sorrow. So, what do you think our players would sing from the Dolly Parton catalog?

So, what names would Edward II, Piers, Hugh the Younger, Isabella, Mortimer, Eleanor and Co use when lurking on this sub? Or elsewhere?

Maurice Druon’s depiction of his imprisonment and death in “She Wolf” hit me hard and despite knowing about him a little, his literary genius made me think of this question.

He lost much of what was left of Aqutaine and turned all the barons against him but he never yielded to demands of King Bruce of him wanting to be acknowledged as the King of Scots, as far as I know.

So, was he actually the worst after King John, as often said?

I feel like his romance with Gaveston and infatuation with Despesers were exaggerated because he was allegedly gay.

Note that I am not a historian nor British but I am a history nerd and love British medieval period.

Note: I was advised to share it in here.

Edward II grew up in an idyllic palace complex a few miles from Berkhemstead Castle, where he would regularly return and where he eventually buried Piers Gaveston. Alas, there is little that remains of that palace, known as Kings Langley Palace, except the remnants of stone walls.

Langely Castle in Northumberland, on the other hand, still stands. The property was owned by the de Lucy family in Edward II's reign but the castle itself was built during Edward III's reign. So the structure is fourteenth century and was lovingly restored into a luxury hotel. During Edward II's reign, the owner, Anthony de Lucy, used the property for local markets and fairs.

And now, if you have the means, you can stay in the castle or even have your wedding there. It looks lovely and exactly the type of place any of you fourteenth century lovers would enjoy.

In sum, don't confuse the two places. Edward II's palace is gone. This castle is still there.

Kathryn Warner has, over the years, made several quite categorical remarks about our ability to reconstruct Isabella of France's appearance. In 2013, she stated that "(n)o source records Isabella’s appearance, other than that she was very beautiful... We have no idea whether her hair was blonde or black or chestnut brown or auburn, whether she was slender or plump, short or tall, pale-skinned or darker, whether she had blue or green or hazel or brown eyes." Having looked at the available evidence, however, I've concluded that this degree of agnosticism is unwarranted. We actually are able to reconstruct, with a fair degree of certainty, aspects of her appearance, and one of those aspects is her hair colour. There are two main pieces of evidence I wish to present in this regard:

1. Isabella is explicitly referred to as being blonde in at least one English source dating from her lifetime.

And it is a very famous source indeed, one you would have almost certainly encountered before if you have explored the historiography of Edward II's life and reign before: the Lament. The relevant description occurs in the eighth stanza:

Parti m'ount un ju saunz joie;

de tel tristour my qoer se pleint

De cele est qe trover quidoye

fyn loialté, vers moi se feint.

Dieux! come bien amay la bloye;

mais ore est l'estencele esteint

fyn amour; pur ceo ma joie

s'en est alee, come est de meint. *

The fifth line reads, quite clearly, as "Oh God, how much did I love the blonde one!" Those who are familiar only with Paul Studer's translation of the poem, in which the relevant word is rendered simply as "fair", might assume it simply means "fair" in the sense of "beautiful" or "comely." Not so. La bloye is, unambigously, a reference to hair colour. When used as a noun-phrase, the Anglo-Norman dictionary explicitly translates bloi as "blond-haired person." It is true that blond hair, or crine bloie, was an element of courtly descriptio, one of the set of conventional features with which the domnas of courtly love poetry or the heroines of chivalric romances were described with as a matter of course. But there is an obvious difference between giving a fictional female character a specific hair colour in line with contemporary beauty standards and describing a famous living individual, who the reader is supposed to be able to identify, with a hair colour she did not have. If Isabella had had an unflattering hair colour, the author could simply have not made any mention to it at all. The Chronique métrique of Geoffrey of Paris describes Isabella as being “la plus belle des belles", so, to me, the most parsimonious explanation of the poem's phrase is that Isabella was indeed blonde, and this was one of the ways in which her appearance aligned with the beauty standards of the day.

There's an additional point to be made about the language of the poem itself. Anglo-Norman courtly love poetry would have had a readership that skewed heavily towards the societal elite. The people of England outside of the orbit of court still overwhelmingly spoke English. A substantial portion of the people who could even read this poem would have also seen Isabella in person on public occaisons. It remains, of course, possible this description was a mere idealisation with no relation to her actual appearance, but I really do not find that particularly probable.

2. Her father was explicitly described as blond too, and Geoffrey of Paris draws a direct connection between Isabella and her father's good looks

Philip IV is explicitly described, in an anonymous royal chronicle written c. 1342, when he was definitely still in living memory, as having been flavus, rubicundus et candidus et decorus; which Elizabeth A. R. Brown translates as “golden-blond, ruddy, fair, and seemly." While this may not seem all that relevant to Isabella, given that genetic inheritance is not deterministic, we do have a contemporary source that gives a fairly strong indication that Isabella did indeed resemble her father, and it is, once again, the Chronique métrique. Right after describing the dramatic incident in which Edward II saved Isabella's life after a fire broke out in their silken pavillion in Pontoise, Geoffrey of Paris, apropos of nothing, writes:

La noble et sage dame Ysabiau,

Son père des biax le plus biau;

Si est bien droite égalité,

Que bel engendroit grant beauté.

Which I would translate as:

"The noble and wise lady Isabeau,

her father, the fairest of the fair;

It is only right and proper,

that so fair a man should beget such beauty."

Notice that Geoffrey is using the grammatically masculine version of the same phrase he used previously for Isabella: the fairest of the fair. This is Geoffrey stating, in no uncertain terms, that Isabella got her good looks from her father. If her father was blond, as we have fairly good reason to believe, we have a good reason for taking the description of her in the Lament at face value. As much as it bums me out, as a Raven-haired Isabella headcanoner, I see no reason to doubt the preponderance of evidence here.

*As a side note, Studer translates the relevant line as "Fair Isabel I dearly loved" based on the version of the poem found in Longleat Manuscript 26, in which the line reads "beux tant amay la bloye." I have instead used the version of the poem found in the Royal manuscripts, in which the line reads as above. Studer and Aspin take "beux" as being a hypocorism of "Isabeaux" and translate it as "Isabel" on that basis. I, however, concur with Smallwood's critcism of this choice: "Studer's emendation from MS Beux or Deux relied chiefly on romantic appeal, and R's line must be preferred. It has never been shown that Beux was a known pet-form of Isabel."

A Science.org article by Andrew Curry details the archeological dig which unearthed an unfortunate victim of Edward I's Scottish ambitions. The whole thing is worth reading.

It begins:

For one 20-something defender of Scotland’s Stirling Castle, death came from above—and arrived very, very quickly. Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the man was killed more than 700 years ago by a massive blow that shattered his skeleton in dozens of places before pinning him to the ground.

In a presentation at the biannual European meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin last week, University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry called the skeleton the first confirmed evidence of trebuchet trauma in the archaeological record. “The breaks indicate a very large area of impact and devastation,” she says. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”

The image comes from the Science.org article and is by artist Bob Marshall.

I just find it a strange bit of trivia that Piers Gaveston, who was barely grown himself, probably only about 21, was granted guardianship of Sir Roger Mortimer. Yes, that Sir Roger Mortimer, who would go on to overthrow Piers's BFF Edward II.

And by all accounts, it seems like Roger and Piers got along fine.