Category: Women’s History
-
Royal People: Queen Joan of Navarre’s Confinement as a Witch

As my blog has been up and running for just over 6 months now, I thought I would return to the topic of my Masters dissertation: fifteenth-century English royal witches. My first post here was about Eleanor Cobham, the aunt-by-marriage of Henry VI who in 1441 was scandalously tried for using witchcraft, with her accomplices…
-
Stand and Deliver, Your Money or Your Life: Female Highwaymen of the Seventeenth Century

As yesterday was International Women’s Day, I couldn’t resist writing a female-related post, and for this one I drew inspiration from a local legend in my area of the ‘Wicked Lady’. If you happen to pass through Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, you will probably notice a pub with the same name, and may hear the legend of…
-
Royal People: Boudica, Queen of the Iceni

For this latest post in my Royal People series I go back a lot further than most of my posts have focused on so far, to Roman Britain. Boudica is one of the most famous women in English history, and as I grew up in one of the towns she burnt to the ground, I…
-
Royal People: Isabella of France, “She-Wolf of England”

As my last blog post on medieval English royals was about a woman from my masters dissertation, I thought I would continue the trend and go back to my undergraduate dissertation for the next in the series. For this we go back to the previous century, the early fourteenth century, and look at the wife…
-
Royal People: Eleanor Cobham, Royal Witch?

I thought it only fitting to write my first post about one of the women my recent Masters dissertation focused upon. Eleanor Cobham was a woman who lived in England during the fifteenth century. In 1428, she married Humphrey, the Duke of Gloucester, who was one of Henry V’s brothers, and uncle to the current…