ELEANOR

Edward and Eleanor reigned together until Eleanor died in 1290. Historian Loxton traces the 200-mile path of Eleanor’s funeral cortege from Harby, the village where she died, to London, where she was buried in Westminster Abbey. She walks the route alongside various friends and relatives and recounts Eleanor’s story with colorful anecdotes, mixing in entertaining conversations with locals. Enhanced by photographs and maps, the writing is engaging enough that the reader can feel the cold and damp along the way. “My body ached,” the author writes. “My resolution was waning, my enthusiasm curbing. This was no longer a pleasant stroll. This was hour after hour of long, hard trudging that never seemed to end.” Central to the journey is a series of 12 “glorious stone monuments,” known as the Eleanor Crosses, one at each overnight stop made by the cortege. Commissioned by Edward, each unique design was required to feature a sculpture of Eleanor and to be topped with a cross. Edward described his wife as the one “who in life we dearly cherished and in death we cannot cease to love.” Loxton paints an image of Edward on horseback behind the cart carrying Eleanor’s casket, followed by servants and others from the royal household, as his subjects lined the roadsides to pay tribute to his queen. Only three of the original crosses remain; the others were destroyed during the 17th-century English Civil War. In Stony Stratford, where the cross was destroyed, a 30-foot tall mural of Eleanor was painted in 2019, a “vision in glorious technicolour” reflecting the concept of the original cross. In 1865, a reconstruction of the Eleanor Cross was built at the final stop, Charing Cross. Eleanor herself has three burial sites along the cortege route—her body at Westminster Abbey, her viscera in Lincoln, and her heart alongside the body of her 10-year-old son, Alphonso, at the Dominican priory at Blackfriars in London.