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Joan of England, King John’s illegitimate daughter, Henry III’s sister and the wife of arguably the most famous and successful Welsh ruler Llywelyn ap Iorwerth of Gwynedd is the subject of my new book Joan, Lady of Wales: Power and Politics of King John’s Daughter. It is a biography of a woman who played a central role in early thirteenth-century Anglo-Welsh politics, simply by the nature of design of her position as daughter, sister and wife to three enigmatic rulers of Britain in the High Middle Ages.
She was also player in Welsh courtly culture, again, by sheer design of her status, for all intents and purposes, as a ‘queen’. The ultimate intention and underlining drive behind the research and writing of this biography was a way of paying homage to a woman who’s name holds much significance in medieval Welsh and English history, but who’s real story has remained wholly unexplored, and arguably even misunderstood, over the past 800 years.
The aim is to finally pay this mysterious woman her dues. Wales and its history has always been a place of fascination for me. As young child and adolescent the legends of King Arthur were the first to captivate my attention, for both this seemingly singular place on earth where myth, history and landscape overlap. As a late-teen inching towards a desire and calling to be a historian, I became more enchanted by Wales through historical fiction. Fiction yes, but stories driven by events and people in history.
Above all, my hat needs to be taken off to Sharon Penman and her Here Be Dragons. Unsurprisingly, I was riveted – not only on its first read when first published, but with many subsequent reads over the years. More importantly, there was something in the undercurrents of the story line itself and characters that resonated with me on a much deeper level that first time around, in ways I probably still can’t explain in full. In particular, it was Joan’s character, Joan’s story that captured my attention in full. Who was this woman really?
For the past thirty years, Joan and the need to not only unearth her truth but to tell her story have haunted me. In essence, it was my fascination with Joan that drove my career to become a medieval historian by training and trade – specifically, to be come a women’s historian and a historian of medieval Wales, as it was before the end of the thirteenth-century.
Admittedly, it was very hard to write a whole book about a noble/royal woman who appears so little in sources, but who has been recognised, albeit often in a cursory manner, by both medieval contemporaries and later historians as being ‘relatively’ important in assuaging the political dynamics between an independent Welsh kingdom and the Angevin dynasty.
As readers will note, my book aims to fill in some of the gaps – of the records, of our knowledge of events and in our understanding of how that world worked. There is a fine line between outright conjecture and a truly educated appraisal of situations at hand based on what evidence does, in fact, survive. Often, deep, historical research is about unearthing patterns found through things such as activities or similarities in circumstances that helps bring some of the shadows into the light. This is most true for research concerning women and minorities.
Although this book on Joan is biographical, I’ve tried to provide more of a thematic focus on two fronts: 1) Joan’s identity as a woman, an illegitimate member of England’s royal family, as a foreigner to Wales and, more specifically, her identity and position based on her lifecycles a wife, daughter, sister and mother; and 2) her status as a Welsh ‘queen’ and ‘the king’s consort’.
As Joan’s appearance in sources is extremely limited, this approach provides a wider context to helping us understand what her influences were, what they may have been, and the how they may have helped define her agency and political activities. Again, assessing the patterns found in her activities and contextualising these against the backdrop of examples taken from her female forebears, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors, both in Wales and beyond, we find that, unsurprisingly,
Joan found herself in situations similar to those that other women of her position and status found themselves. Such a finding of similarities also helped put pieces into place. Her story is an individual one, of course. But, it also falls within the greater collective.
One of the main threads I followed to try to tease out a better idea of how she may have been more politically involved in Anglo-Welsh relations than is actually recorded was to look at her economic agency, mapping English manors that she was gifted by the English Crown and when. Though there is supposition, it’s based on viable information in English Chancery sources that strongly suggests Joan was gifted her English lands as rewards for her role as a political diplomat – including the three instances during her lifetime in which England set out to invade and subjugate Wales.
In the overall picture, there just seems to be too many instances where her lands were either gifted or taken away by the English Crown exactly around specific times when political relations were fraught. Although much of the history of the medieval royal woman is centred around the personal being political, in Joan’s case it seems that the political was personal, too.
I also throw into the mix an underlining thematic discussion on what Welsh queenship may have looked like, in both practice and custom. A deeper reading of Welsh sources collectively suggest that a recognised royal consort in Wales was viewed as the female-symbol of the hegemonic authority of her husband. Such a perception likely included real expectations that women in these positions be more active, both in the royal court and the realm, than has been recognised by historians.
In many ways, Joan can be seen to be a paragon of Welsh ‘queenship’. Based on her activities that we do know about and our newer understanding of what ‘queenship’ may have looked like in Wales at this time, Joan’s story goes hand-in-hand with discussions of what a ‘queen’ or ‘queen consort’ was, certainly as pertains to the court of Gwynedd and the Venedotian rulers.
Ultimately, Joan, Lady of Wales: Power and Politics of King John’s Daughter aims to provide a fuller understanding of Joan’s life and activities, not forgetting the important notion that she was, after all, a human being, interacting with other human beings; all of whom were driven by emotions, and those emotions were conflated with ambition, necessity and protocol.
Danna R Messer
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