Text this colour is a link for Members only. Support us by becoming a Member for only £3 a month by joining our 'Buy Me A Coffee page'; Membership gives you access to all content and removes ads.
Text this colour links to Pages. Text this colour links to Family Trees. Place the mouse over images to see a larger image. Click on paintings to see the painter's Biography Page. Mouse over links for a preview. Move the mouse off the painting or link to close the popup.
All About History Books
The Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbroke. Baker was a secular clerk from Swinbroke, now Swinbrook, an Oxfordshire village two miles east of Burford. His Chronicle describes the events of the period 1303-1356: Gaveston, Bannockburn, Boroughbridge, the murder of King Edward II, the Scottish Wars, Sluys, Crécy, the Black Death, Winchelsea and Poitiers. To quote Herbert Bruce 'it possesses a vigorous and characteristic style, and its value for particular events between 1303 and 1356 has been recognised by its editor and by subsequent writers'. The book provides remarkable detail about the events it describes. Baker's text has been augmented with hundreds of notes, including extracts from other contemporary chronicles, such as the Annales Londonienses, Annales Paulini, Murimuth, Lanercost, Avesbury, Guisborough and Froissart to enrich the reader's understanding. The translation takes as its source the 'Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynebroke' published in 1889, edited by Edward Maunde Thompson. Available at Amazon in eBook and Paperback.
Effigy of Eleanor of Aquitaine is in Monumental Effigies of Great Britain.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (deceased), or Guienne, was the eldest daughter and heiress of William V. Duke of Aquitaine, by Eleanor of Chastelleraut, his wife. She was first married to Louis VII. of France, but, owing to some dissension which arose between them, Louis applied to the papal see for a divorce: and it appearing that there was consanguinity between the parties, they were separated by authority of the Church in Easter 1151. Henry the Second, then Duke of Normandy, thought that a marriage with the Countess of Poitou and Aquitaine offered too large an accession of dominion and political power to his crown to be neglected, and so promptly took his measures that he espoused her the following Whitsuntide. She bore King Henry six sons and three daughters. Their eldest daughter Matilda married Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony; among the issue of which marriage was Otho the Fourth, Emperor of Germany (age 29), and William (age 19), progenitor of the Dukes of Brunswick, who assumed as his arms the two lions which his grandfather Henry bore, and which seem to have been the ensign of the early English Kings of the Norman race as Dukes of Normandy. Eleanor thwarting the amours of her husband, and taking part against him with their elder son Prince Henry (who had received the titular and aspired to the actual honours of King during his father's lifetime), incurred his deep displeasure, and, according to Matthew Paris, banished from his bed, passed sixteen years of her life in close confinement. On the death of Henry in 1189, and the accession of her third son Richard to the Crown, he invested her with sovereign authority during his absence in Normandy; and her first act was a very general release of malefactors from confinement. She accompanied Richard to the Holy Land, died in 1204, the sixth year of the reign of her son John (age 37), and was buried at Fontevraud [Map]. She lies, like the other effigies at that place, upon a bier, attired in her royal vestments, with a crown upon her head.
