#I really appreciated how Seah acknowledged the uneven surviving evidence for her subjects and how that affects her analysis. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

wonder-worker · 4 months ago

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"Administratively, too, [...] queens were considered the legal lords of their landholdings. [...] Grants noted that the queen's officials had administrative autonomy without being subject to the king or anyone else, and evidence of the same assumption can be gleaned from court rolls that were recorded with headings indicating the lord of the manor whose court proceedings were being enrolled. As an example, some court rolls for the manor of Haveringatte-Bower specified that it was the court of [Margaret of Anjou] that was in session, while later rolls recorded Elizabeth Woodville as the lord of the manor court."

-Michele Seah, 'My Lady Queen, the Lord of the Manor': The Economic Roles of Late Medieval Queens", Parergon, Volume 37, Number 2, 2020.

#queenship tag #margaret of anjou #elizabeth woodville #I really appreciated how Seah acknowledged the uneven surviving evidence for her subjects and how that affects her analysis.#It was very brief but it was more than what most historians do so it was very refreshing :)#my post #english history #this is for @ anon who asked if its true that Margaret mostly hosted her own courts while EW mostly stayed with her husband #I'm not sure which (if any) historian has said something like this* but I highly doubt it's true !#We don't really have solid itineraries in place for either queen to make any kind of firm conclusions of the sort #(ie: about their residences or anything else) though I'm sure it would have varied depending on the situation #But either way it's explicitly clear that both Margaret and Elizabeth held their own courts in their own lands on multiple occasions #And we also have evidence of both of them residing with their husbands in regular circumstances #*tbh this is too long to get into right now but this assumption does fit into the few 'revisionist' interpretations of both Margaret and EW #(which imo is just as degrading as her traditional interpretation for the latter) so I wouldn't be surprised if some #historians may have framed their situations in such a way and relied entirely on their own assumptions to do so #Either way as far as I know there is no evidence of any such contrast existing - at least not on a consistent basis.#and the evidence we do have contradicts the assumption #Hope this helps! I figured a proper excerpt from this article would clarify the point better than any direct answer from me <3 #also in case anyone was wondering I *think* the title ('My Lady Queen the Lord of the Manor') was referring to administrative accounts #of EW based on what Seah wrote here - though ofc I'm not sure #queue

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