Annual Clarendon Lecture by Ellie Woodacre on how queens consort in premodern England were major landowners and wielded dower power.
Ellie Woodacre is coming to The Salisbury Museum on Thursday 19 November for the annual Clarendon Lecture. She's a reader in Renaissance History at Winchester University, and the talk is called Queen of the Castle: Surveying the Landed Power of Queens in Premodern England.
It's a bit of a rethink of how we usually picture queens consort in premodern England. The standard view is that they were mostly just the wives and mothers of kings, but Woodacre argues they were often the realm's greatest landowners after the monarch. She'll be talking about how they ran manors, castles, parklands and forests from the south coast right up to the northern border with Scotland, rather than just sitting in the background.
There's a local angle to it, too. She spends a good deal of time on the cluster of estates around Clarendon, including the castles of Ludgershall, Odiham and Devizes, and the great manor of Hampstead Marshall, which she describes as a significant locus of queenly 'dower power'. If you've spent any time around the old castles and manors of the region, it's a nice way of seeing them as something more than just ruins or landmarks.
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Doors open at 7pm and the talk starts at 7:30pm. Tickets are £12 for Salisbury Museum members and Friends of Clarendon Palace, and £15 for non-members. The museum is accessible by lift or stairs, and the lecture is now sold out.
