Castilian princess and wife of Edward I, who went with him on crusade, built a great landed estate of her own, and at her death in 1290 was commemorated by the Eleanor crosses along her funeral route from Lincoln to Westminster.
Eleanor of Castile was the daughter of Ferdinand III of Castile and the first wife of Edward I of England, whom she married in 1254, when she was about thirteen and he fifteen. Their marriage of thirty-six years was one of the closest royal partnerships of the Middle Ages: she travelled with him almost everywhere, including on crusade to Acre, and bore him at least fourteen children, among them the future Edward II.
She was also a shrewd accumulator of land, acquiring estates worth thousands of pounds a year, often by taking over debts that Christian landholders owed to Jewish lenders, and contemporaries criticised her for it. When she died in 1290 Edward commemorated her with twelve stone crosses marking the places where her funeral procession rested, three of which survive.
Eleanor was born in Castile around 1241, the daughter of Ferdinand III, conqueror of Córdoba and Seville, and his second wife, Joan of Dammartin, Countess of Ponthieu. Her half-brother Alfonso X was one of the great patrons of learning in Christian Spain, and she grew up at a court of translators and poets. The marriage to Edward was arranged to settle Castile's claim to Gascony, which Alfonso gave up in return; the wedding took place at the royal convent of Las Huelgas in Burgos on 1 November 1254, where Alfonso also knighted Edward.
Eleanor's contemporaries saw two sides of her. Her household accounts show a cultivated woman who commissioned romances, employed scribes, brought Castilian carpets and gardeners to England, and played chess, and the depth of her marriage is plain from Edward's grief. Yet in 1283 the archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham, warned her that her land dealings were causing scandal, and a verse of the time complained that the king wanted the people's gold and the queen their manors.
The legend that she saved Edward's life at Acre in 1272 by sucking the poison from an assassin's dagger wound first appears decades after her death, in an Italian chronicle. The English accounts say that surgeons treated the wound while Eleanor was led from the room in tears. The story reflects the reputation of the marriage rather than the event.
In 1270 Eleanor went with Edward on crusade and reached Acre, where she gave birth to a daughter, Joan, in 1272. They were travelling home through Sicily when they learned of Henry III's death, and they were crowned together at Westminster on 19 August 1274. In 1279 she inherited the county of Ponthieu from her mother and ruled it as countess.
As queen she built one of the largest estates in England. With Edward's encouragement she acquired manors by buying up debts owed to Jewish moneylenders, whose collection the crown controlled, and then taking the mortgaged land. She played a quiet part in Edward's dealings with Castile and Aragon, and her letters show close attention to her children's marriages.
Eleanor fell ill in 1290 and died at Harby, near Lincoln, on 28 November, with Edward beside her. Her entrails were buried in Lincoln Cathedral, her heart in the Dominican church in London and her body at Westminster Abbey. Edward ordered a stone cross raised at each of the twelve places where her body rested on the way south, among them Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham and Charing.
Three of the Eleanor crosses survive, at Geddington, at Hardingstone near Northampton, and at Waltham Cross; the cross outside Charing Cross station is a Victorian replacement. Her gilt-bronze effigy by William Torel in Westminster Abbey, cast in 1291–1293, is one of the finest works of English medieval metal sculpture, and Edward's mourning became the core of her enduring reputation.