Eleanor of castile biography of michael jackson

The Eleanor Crosses are among the outstanding monuments of the Middle Ages. They represent one of the most developed of our ancient funeral routes,  and embody a wide range of architectural style and innovation. They also carry a weight of symbolism drawn from the mythic aspirations of a mediaeval dynasty. John Billingsley shares with NE this draft of a planned publication on this fascinating aspect of English history, with illustrations from Philip Rushworth. 

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Foreword

When I was a child, growing up in London, I remember being told, very sketchily, of the Eleanor Crosses. Some standing crosses were identified to me as Eleanor crosses; as we habitually went west of London on our holidays, I now realise that none of these except Charing Cross were Eleanor Crosses, and even the modern Charing Cross, being a rebuild, can be challenged. Nonetheless, the memorial crosses erected to mark the passage of Queen Eleanor’s body, and the related mythologisation of the love between Eleanor and her king, Edward I, have exerted a powerful imaginative influence over England, by which monumental crosses, if not actually influenced by the Eleanor memorials, are imagined to be.

When the antiquarian circles in which I move began to talk of ‘death roads’ and funeral routes as spiritual routes through the landscape, adding a magical dimension to local geography, I recalled the Eleanor Crosses and the route that the dead queen took from Lincoln to Westminster, and resolved to investigate further. I have been glad to refresh and deepen my slight acquaintance with Eleanor Crosses, and to at last becom

Studying domestic architecture has lead me some strange places. Adolf Loos’s essays reminded me that I didn’t know squat about Austria, and the process of figuring that out I keep ending up back in England. The architectural zone that Loos was writing about is marked by the historicism promoted by Jacob von Falke. The location— Ringstraße, the ring road— gave birth to Ringstraßenstil or ring road style.

The Ringstraße follows the path of an old fortification, a wall erected in the 13th century to protect Vienna financed by the ransoming of Richard the Lionhearted, who coincidentally was a lover of walls himself. He claimed that he could protect his own Château Gaillard (the saucy castle), perched over the Seine, if its walls were made of butter.

Historically, on many levels, houses have been centers of power. Wielding a lot of power, the Norman kings like Richard, did a lot of business in the keep, most often a square structure behind walls like Château Gaillard. Apparently, due to architectural constraints (primarily the difficulty in constructing strong roofs) these places were often quite small.

Austrian towns like Vienna liked surrounding themselves with walls. Many are still apparent other cities nearby, like this nice double wall in neighboring Bratislava, Slovakia:

Austrian walled towns began appearing in the 11th century, and the one in Vienna was a feature of the town until the 19th century, when it was torn down the surrounding buildings were kept on the newly constructed  Ringstraße, a historical district. It was a showpiece for the city; Sigmund Freud used to go for strolls there.

Architecture, as Loos reminded me, is often rhetorical. The renovations of many of the European capitals in the mid 19th century was fortification of a different sort. Baron Haussmann’s renovations of Paris for Napoleon III were part modernization, and part crowd control. Long straight streets make it easier to move troops, and harder for

English stone crosses erected in 1291–95

The Eleanor crosses were a series of twelve tall and lavishly decorated stone monuments topped with crosses erected in a line down part of the east of England. King Edward I had them built between 1291 and about 1295 in memory of his wife Eleanor of Castile. The King and Queen had been married for 36 years and she stayed by the King's side through his many travels. While on a royal progress, she died in the East Midlands in November 1290. The crosses, erected in her memory, marked the nightly resting-places along the route taken when her body was transported to Westminster Abbey near London.

The crosses stood at Lincoln, Grantham and Stamford, all in Lincolnshire; Geddington and Hardingstone in Northamptonshire; Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire; Woburn and Dunstable in Bedfordshire; St Albans and Waltham (now Waltham Cross) in Hertfordshire; Cheapside in London; and Charing (now Charing Cross) in Westminster.

Three of the medieval monuments – those at Geddington, Hardingstone and Waltham Cross – survive more or less intact; but the other nine, other than a few fragments, are lost. Some were destroyed during the Reformation and Civil War, due to their Catholic associations. The largest and most ornate of the twelve was the Charing Cross. Several memorials and elaborated reproductions of the crosses have been erected, including the Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross at Charing Cross Station (built 1865), 200 metres (220 yd) northeast – along the Strand roadway – of the original site of the Charing Cross.

Edward I's use of architecture is known for containing an element of propaganda. In her lifetime, Eleanor had been unpopular with the public, particularly for her acquisitiveness regarding land holdings, which had been associated with the abuse of Jewish loans, attracting strong criticism from the church. The series of Crosses played a