#I hope it's okay that I combined the two asks - they were both on EoY's finances and I was not 100% sure about either

[wonder-worker]

Elizabeth of York got Elizabeth Wydeville's properties in 1487 by Henry VII?

(don't reblog)

Hi! Yes, Elizabeth Woodville’s dower lands were transferred to her daughter in 1487. However, it doesn't seem that Elizabeth of York received all the properties her mother possessed during her time as queen.

Mainly because J.L Laynesmith said that “Elizabeth of York received a portion of her mother's lands and fee farms and an annuity from the town of Bristol, which amounted in total to less than half of her mother's income”.

Derek Neal’s analysis amounts to something similar. He wrote that Elizabeth Woodville’s properties were confiscated by Richard III, and after 1485, “Henry VII restored 27 properties and added seven new ones, meaning that Elizabeth lost at least 70 per cent of her pre-1483 estate, though she regained almost all her original fee-farms. By 1486, however, there was a new queen needing a dower of her own, and when Elizabeth Woodville left court the next year*, her daughter received these 34 lands along with the fee-farms.”

Likewise, Michele Seah wrote that after recognizing Elizabeth Woodville as dowager queen, Henry VII "re-granted to her most, but not all, of the lands initially granted in 1465." (I presume the numerous lands and income Elizabeth had additionally acquired across her queenship weren't included). These were the lands then transferred to Elizabeth of York in 1487.

So it seems that other historians have oversimplified and/or misunderstood what the transfer entailed, first assuming that Elizabeth Woodville was granted all her former lands by Henry VII, and then that Elizabeth of York received the lands her mother had as queen rather than the ones that had been specifically granted to her in 1485.

Either way, Elizabeth of York was additionally granted some of her aunt Isabel Neville’s property during the Earl of Warwick’s minority in 1489, followed by a grant of Fotheringhay (a property her father was known to have enjoyed, and which she may have thus been attached to) in March 1495. The death of her grandmother Cecily Neville in that same year significantly improved her estate, giving her an additional annual income of around £1,399, as was the case in 1496.

Also, while Elizabeth did struggle with debts, this was not unusual at all among queens, and it was Henry VII who regularly repaid them for her. It's worth keeping in mind that while some former queens who were struggling financially ended up having to reduce the size of their household (eg: Joan of Navarre, Margaret of Anjou) or merge it with the King's (eg: Philippa of Hainault), Elizabeth of York was not made to do any of those things and maintained unchanged autonomy of her household until her death.

Anon asked: I read that Elizabeth of York's last year finance was actually for half year?

Again, it's unclear. This comes from Retha Warnicke's book Elizabeth of York and her Six Daughters-in-Law: Fashioning Tudor Queenship, where she wrote “After [Elizabeth's] death in February 1503, Richard Decons noted in her privy purse accounts that he had collected £3,535, 19 shillings, 10 1/2 pence. Since the financial year had begun at Michaelmas (September 29) in 1502, as it did every year, this sum was not inconsequential.”

However, Michele Seah's newer article "Gifts and Rewards: Exploring the Expenditure of Late Medieval English Queens" explicitly states that the household accounts kept by Decons were for the months March 1502 to February 1503.

But again, I'm not super familiar with this topic and so my answer may be off-balanced. I hope that Seah’s upcoming book Financing Queenship in Fifteenth-Century England will shed more light on the situation!

*We don't know much about Elizabeth Woodville's situation after 1487, including whether she truly left court. See here for a longer explanation.