 Felly, ddod i'n ddweud i'n ddweud i'r unrhyw deall, er mwyn i'n dda ni i eich ddweud i ni'n ddweud i'r unrhyw deall. Felly, dydyn ni'n meddwl i'r gweithio'r cywlau'r cyllid Eleanor, Margaret a Elizabeth yn ddigonwch ei hunain sydd yn ei brydau cwladol yng nghylch yn 14 yma. Maen nhw'n b bubble i gyd yn rhan o'r cymorth o'i groes iawn, felly byddai'n berthynas i'r bwysig o'r organ a'r rhwng. Wrth gwrs, mae'n meddwl i fynd i eu hunain bod hynny'n meddwl i'w chy pause i'ch cyfrwyddwr yn y casodau a'u cyfrwsig, a wedi'i fath de Chylo cyfwyr yn y cwm. Rwy'n meddwl yma fod Edw i'r drwsig o'r hon fain ddechrau yn yn 1307. Mae'r cymdeithas cyngorau yn enw yn rhan o'r holl yng Nghymru. Mae Magna Cata, lle dyn nhw'n iawn gyda'r teimlo bwysig i'r bwysig o'r gwaith a bwysigol rhai. A gael yng Nghymru yn ystyried o'r llwyddiol yn ystyried o'r rhwlaeth a'r rwyd. Yn oedd ymgyrch yn gweithio sydd yn mynd i gael y cymdeithas cyfwysigol, sydd ymgyrch o'r llwyddiol, ddyn nhw'n gwybod yma wedi Gavrston, a Gaskin Night. In 1311, the Barons forced Edward to agree to a number of demands in the ordinances which fundamentally constrained royal power and provided for a greater baronial influence over the realm, as well as exiling peers from the kingdom. The exile and seizure of peers' lands in the Erdyn McCornwall however didn't last for long, but upon his return to the kingdom, Eveston was captured and assassinated by some of the leading nobles of the period. The fallout of this episode, as well as the renewed advancement of unsuitable and unpopular councillors, such as the dispensers, as well as military failures across the border in Scotland, ensured that the struggle between the Barons and King continued until Queen Isabella's invasion and Edward's deposition in 1326 and 1327. Conflict in these years centred around the nature of royal authority, who and what constituted good counsel to the king, and the tensions between loyalty to the crown as an institution and the crown as the power invested within the person of the king himself. His successor, Edward III, was however considered too young at 14 to rule in his own right, so Queen Isabella and her reputed lover, the marcher Lord Roger Mortimer, took control of the kingdom until Edward ousted them in a coup to secure his personal rule in October of 1330. So this period of continual political upheaval obviously required careful navigation by all those within the political community, not least following the outbreak of hostilities and the defeat of the baronial faction at the Battle of Borough Bridge in March 1322. This was especially true of the Declare sisters, whose mother Joan of Acre had been Edward II's sister. Particularly as the death of their only brother Gilbert at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 meant that they became heiwresins to equal parts of the wealthy erldums of Hartford and Gloucester, as well as to other lordships and lands across the British Isles. As nieces of the king, they operated at the highest level of the aristocracy and brought into perspective marriages a great deal of wealth and influence. The eldest sister, Eleanor, was married to Judas Spencer the Younger in the last year of Edward I reign. For the purposes of this paper, we don't have much evidence of her engagement in politics until the late 1310s, when Hugh and his father very imaginatively also named Hugh became the king's favourites and took an increasing role in the governance of the realm, thus supplanting the traditional claim to the queen in offering counsel to the king. As Queen Isabella's influence with the king reigned, Eleanor began to be seen as fulfilling a role as a quasi-queenly intercessor. We have a letter from Eleanor Declare in February 1323, which you can see in the background here, and which I'm grateful to Paul Driver from the National Archives sending it to me. This was in response to a plea from Joan de Genville, who had been imprisoned following her husband, Roger Mortimer's rebellion. In this letter, Eleanor asked for resistance from the treasurer in obtaining payment to maintain Joan in greater comfort, and we see similar letters where she takes on this role in interceding with the king for people who had personally appealed to her. This change in her public profile coincided with her appearance in the charterie roles as a recipient of a number of lands conversated from dead or imprisoned rebels that were granted to her by the king. Essentially, what we see here is Eleanor occupying the space that was traditionally reserved for a queen. Her extensive gifts of land from the king and her intercession echoed most significant mechanisms through which a married queen could both exercise personal power and influence the politics of time. It's really interesting then that as Queen Isabella's relationship with the king deteriorated and her access to these forms of power declined, there was still this ready-made role at the heart of power for women to moderate the king's actions. I think this says rather a lot about what contemporaries believed women's role in politics was. Her situation, however, changed rapidly with the successful invasion of Queen Isabella and the capture of her husband and father-in-law, as well as a bed with the second in 1326. Following her husband's execution, we know that she was imprisoned in the Tower of London, but it does seem that she was treated fairly leniently with an order made to provide for her reasonable expenses and another order in February 1328, which caused her to be released from captivity alongside her children, household and her goods and chattels. Later in that year, her inheritance in South Wales was returned to her since the king did not, quote, considerate consonant with reason that her land should be deemed forfeited by Hughes forfeiture, end quote. However, in the first parliament of Edward III's majority in November 1330, Eleanor, who had by now, perhaps unwillingly, married William Lizzouche, petitioned that Roger Mortimer had forced her on account of the great covetousness which he had for their lands to give him part of her inheritance to secure her freedom. It isn't particularly clear what this imprisonment, what the cause of this imprisonment was. It may have been an unlicensed marriage between her and William, although there were some allegations of a dual theft, but it's one of these great historical mysteries, I suppose. In this petition to parliament, she echoed the language of Magna Carta, claiming that she was wrongfully imprisoned without charges and cause, and it's probably this link to Magna Carta that influences the success of her petition here. There's clearly a degree of royal sympathy for what she'd been through, with the king claiming that the return of her lands was because his conscience was moved. So as we can see, Eleanor has quite a varied experience, to say the least, of the political world in these years, going from benefiting from the spoils of civil war to being victimised by Roger Mortimer and other nobles who had previously suffered under a second. The middle sister, Margaret, was married to Piers Gaveston in what has been considered a cynical attempt to legitimise the extensive land holdings granted to the king's favourite by way of marriage to a woman of royal blood. The 1311 ordinances demanded Gaveston's exile, and while he did leave the country, he returned very shortly afterwards, probably within about six weeks, to even greater hostility for obvious reasons. We don't see a great deal about Margaret in the political world until she's widowed by Gaveston's assassination in the summer of 1312. Although Gaveston had been restored to his lands at the time of his assassination, Margaret did not receive the third of his lands that she was entitled to as Dower, and that would be for her maintenance as a widow. And which was especially important following the birth of her child with Piers. After her brother Gilbert's death in 1314, she became a prized marital asset with her third of the clare inheritance, and the king secured her as a wife for one of his close confidants, Hugh Ordley, assuming that in doing so, his loyalties would remain to the king. However, her brother-in-law Hugh Disfenson's repeated attempts to gain control over her portion of the clare inheritance served to put an end to Margaret and Hugh Ordley's turn of favour in the King's Circle as the tension mounted between the two Hughes. In 1319, Margaret and Hugh petitioned for the return of lands that Margaret was due as Dower from her marriage to Gabbistan. Their claim was based on the Great Charter, which states that her inheritance and her Dower are to be given to a widow immediately after the death of her husband, and no one's right is to be delayed, and no one is to be ejected from his free tenement without a judgment and decision of the law of the land. Her case relying on Magna Carter was therefore threefold. Not only was it against Article 39 of the Charter to turf her out without legal judgment, and that no one's right should be delayed according to Article 40, but she was also entitled to some form of maintenance during her widowhood under Article 7 of Magna Carter. Ultimately, however, this was rejected by the king on the basis that the ordinances had extinguished Pearson-Margwick's rights in the lands and which Edward claimed had been approved by the Prelates Earl's Barons and the whole community of the realm. It is important to note the contrast between Edward's consistent refusal to accept the ordinances and his reliance on them here as a convenient excuse to punish those who were now politically hostile to him. What is therefore significant about Margaret De Clairs' petition was that it emphasised not only that even when confronted with a firm basis in Magna Carter, the authorities could turn a blind eye if it was not in their interest act and equally that the 1311 ordinances could be subverted from a mechanism which ultimately constrained the king's authority to one which could be weaponised against those who presented opposition. The youngest sister, Elizabeth, is perhaps most interesting to us in an exploration of political culture in this period. She was one of the great dowager ladies of the age and maintained a tight hold over her estates, surviving her siblings and three husbands. Her first two marriages to John de Burr, the son of the Earl of Ulster and Theobald Diverdon, ended in widowhood before conflict once again arose between the crown and Barons towards the end of the 1310s. Following Theobald's death, she was married to Roger Damary who at that point was a close confidant of the king. Just as Margaret's husband Hugh had been. So clearly, Edward had a policy of raising up men through marriage to royal women and bolstering his inner circle in the political world in doing so. Like Hugh Ordling, Roger became estranged from the king as a result of dispensers increasing power and the threat presented to his share of the Clare inheritance, joining the rebel party in the lead up to Barrow Bridge. Whilst Margaret was able to successfully intervene for her husband's life, Roger was condemned to death in the wake of the defeat, but perhaps mercifully succumbed to win sustained whilst fighting. With her husband dead, Elizabeth was in a vulnerable position and was taken from her castle where asked and imprisoned in Barking Abbey alongside her young children. Many of her lands were initially confiscated by the crown, but equally dispenser encouraged further disinheritance to his prophet, forcing her to exchange the prophetable lordship of Usk the Gower and then arranging for William de Breos to fraudulently recover Gower from her, essentially depriving her of any Welsh holdings and what would have been a significant financial asset for her in her widowhood. Elizabeth, however, did not take this lying down and has left behind a really valuable source in the process. Her protest against the dispensers is dated to May of 1326, thus predating Isabella's invasion and the fall of the dispensers. It is a real rarity to see such views expressed whilst the dispensers were still in power and especially detailing how they had co-opted the machinery of government and royal power in order to line their pockets. She too describes her treatment in terms of breaches of Magna Carta regarding her free tenement and that the seizure of her lands was contrary to the law of the land, emphasising how many different legal and lawful attempts she had made to gain back her lands, including the failed introduction of bills in Parliament and the approaches she made to sheriffs to execute rits in her favour. Her protest makes clear her fear for the political community as a whole, the oppression of the good people of the land, but equally the fear that she had for her personal safety and that of her children. She ended her public protest bravely, declaring that she wished to make this protest openly and publicly as civil law demands. If fear of royal power with the peril that could follow did not stop her and she shares her hopes that the political situation resolves itself and that in the future, race may be more open and the law of the land better maintained and common to all. Eventually, when Edward III came to the throne, she was restored to her full South Wales inheritance and from that point onwards, she became an adept manager of her extensive estates and became one of the great patronesses of the age. So piecing together the stories of these sisters, what might they tell us about political culture in the early 14th century and the role that women might play within it? Firstly, I think we can see just how much ideas stemming from Magna Carta about access to justice and the legal parameters of rule had become integrated into society's understanding of the political world in which they lived. Petitions and protests written by all three sisters refer to clauses of the Great Charter. We know that there was enduring interest in the ideas underpinning the charter with frequent re-issues and at least one surviving Anglo-Norman translation of the charter dating to the reign of Edward I. So this is around the time that the sisters were born. Although there has been debate about the applicability of Magna Carta to women, I think it matters less whether those involved in the original creation of the charter intended to cover women on equal terms as men and far more that subsequent generations believed it did and felt able to use it in defence of their rights. Not only could this be seen as these women using any means necessary to secure the rights they believed had been infringed upon, but we might consider these implications of Magna Carta to be attempts to situate their struggle within a wider political frame. This has the impression of being even more critical about the state of the realm. As Linda Mitchell argued convincingly in her book on Joan de Valence, there was clearly some form of education available to elite women that was designed to prepare them for their careers as wives, mothers and managers. But I think it is perhaps necessary to go even further than this. The Declare sisters lived in exceptional times in which a sound understanding of the social and political developments that the realm had undergone and which continued to influence the relationship between ruler and ruled was critical. A conception of how change in this arena might affect their personal rights would surely be an essential component of their informal training as managers of their estates. I think that women of this significantly elevated status in society would almost certainly have been aware of these broader social and political ideas. Equally, I think we can see how past a powerful women could be carved out by political change, but which seemingly replicated those ideas previously. Eleanor Declare was the prime example of this phenomenon. Even if Queen Isabella had been recognised officially as still acting as queen, it is clear that contemporaries increasingly saw that female power court lay with Eleanor and treated her in a way that replicated the approaches made to queens. Although we can see that Eleanor did try to help the victims of her husband's regime in the aftermath of our bridge, she was still one of the primary beneficiaries of the acquisition of level lands made between 1322 and 1326. Despite trying to ease the burdens of those who had been targeted, perhaps even to the maximum extent of her powers, she was still at least somewhat complicit in the regime that had allowed this to happen. Through exploring the Declare sisters' attempts to right the wrongs, they felt to be perpetrated against them. We can see the many different avenues that were available to those in medieval England. Petitions could be made to both the king personally as well as in open Parliament. In addition to more informal requests made to those who could influence the king, legal statements could be drawn up publicly, bills could be introduced in Parliament and sheriffs influenced to enact wits in favour of the claimant. However, when every part of machinery of government was co-opted by a regime that ignored the law, it is clear that these forms of protest, these forms of making wrongs known to the authorities wouldn't bear fruit. In short, these legal methods only worked when the regime itself worked within the boundaries of the law. To conclude, I hope to have shown just how important it was for aristocratic women to be able to negotiate the changing political landscape as women on their own, perhaps even more so than when they were married. In looking at the Declare sisters as key examples in the reign of Edward II, we can see that medieval women's political careers were closely intertwined with the fortunes of their husbands. Finally, women had sufficient legal and political knowledge to know the routes to address they could pursue, even if an unscrupulous regime blocked them at every turn. Thank you.