For the love of Eleanor

A grief-stricken Edward I built a legacy to love across the middle of England in memory of his adored Queen Consort, marked by 12 Eleanor Crosses. The historian Alice Loxton walks in the footsteps of the epic funerary procession from Lincoln to London

- Alice Loxton

In September 2022, a curious spectacle played out in the streets of London. Over the course of six days, 250,000 people gathered in an extraordinary queue, at times 10 miles long. The phenomenon was caused by mourners, crowds of ordinary people, deeply moved by the death of a beloved Queen, Elizabeth II.

She was not the first queen to be commemorated on such a scale: 121 years earlier, on February 2, 1901, the grand state funeral of 81-year-old Queen Victoria unfolded at Windsor Castle, a great gathering of European royalty; three centuries before that, in 1603, London played host to the funerary procession of Elizabeth I, who died aged 69. There was ‘such a general sighing, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known in the memory of man’.

However, there was another queen whose death was commemorated in epic fashion: Eleanor of Castile, the consort of Edward I. When Eleanor died unexpectedly aged 49 on November 28, 1290, in the village of Harby, in Nottinghamshire, her body was taken to nearby Lincoln, where it was embalmed and her internal organs buried in a visceral tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. The following month, in a 200-mile procession, her body was taken on the road south to London and honoured with ‘great devotion, with services and holy vigils’. Eleanor’s funeral took place in Westminster Abbey on December 17, 1290, and she was later buried in a magnificent tomb beside the shrine of Edward the Confessor.