Alienor’s story has been constantly reinvented to suit each generation and I find the different versions fascinating. I was particularly interested in an article by historian Rágena C. DeAragon titled ‘Do we know what we think we know? Making assumptions about Eleanor of Aquitaine’. The piece is widely available online for anyone who wishes to look it up. The basic premise is that for all that has been written, we actually know very little and assume an awful lot about Alienor – and that includes the historians.

While writing The Summer Queen, I was constantly told that Alienor was a ‘woman ahead of her time’. But my own take is that she was a woman of her time doing her best within the boundaries of what society would permit. Any attempt to go outside those boundaries was immediately and sometimes brutally quashed, but she was nothing if not resilient.

I have called her Alienor in the body of the novel and not Eleanor because Alienor is what she would have called herself and it is how her name appears in her charters and in the Anglo-Norman texts when she is mentioned. I felt it was fitting to give her that recognition.

Alienor’s birth date in the past has been given as 1122, but historians now accept the more likely date of 1124 and that her marriage to Louis VII took place when she was thirteen – the age of consent for a girl then being twelve years old. I suspect her father knew he was not going to return from Compostela and arranged a secure future for his daughter (so he thought!) and Aquitaine before he left on his pilgrimage. Alienor is sometimes seen as a political player at this stage in the game, but when one looks at the hard facts, it becomes very clear that the power lay in the hands of the high barons and clergy of France and Aquitaine, and they were the ones brokering the deals.

We know Alienor’s father was on battle campaign with Geoffrey of Anjou the year before he died and I wonder (this is pure speculation) if he broached the subject of a betrothal between Alienor and his infant son Henry at that point. We do know from the historical record that the Counts of Anjou had long sought to unite their lands with those of Aquitaine. Geoffrey, keen to continue that pursuit, hoped to betroth little Henry to Alienor’s daughter Marie, and that match was considered for a while, before finally being turned down on the grounds of consanguinity (the all-purpose twelfth-century get-out clause should it need to be invoked). Geoffrey was still pursuing a link with Aquitaine though. I strongly believe that as the head of the family, the initial driving force behind the marriage arrangements that took place between Alienor and his then eighteen-year-old son Henry in Paris in 1151 were of his design. That Geoffrey did not live to see the marriage is a pity. It would have been interesting to observe the family dynamic.

I work hard at the historical research and do my best not to defame the dead, and I try to portray my characters within the realms of historical likelihood and to stay true to their characters, inasmuch as we know them from primary sources. However, this is a work of historical fiction and, within the parameters of integrity I set for myself, I have had the leeway to explore paths where historians might not choose to tread.

One of the great speculations of Alienor’s life is whether or not she committed adultery and incest with her uncle Raymond during her stay at Antioch during the Second Crusade. Several chroniclers accused her of improper behaviour while on the journey and there are dark hints about certain goings-on in Antioch, but when one reads the texts, none go so far as to accuse her of having sexual intercourse with her uncle. Some biographers have taken the bit between their teeth and decided Alienor probably did have an affair with Raymond anyway, but to me the evidence fails to stack up. Alienor and Raymond were both astute players who had been through the political mill. They were together for around nine days, and while I am certain that plotting and manoeuvring went on, I can’t see either of them kicking over the traces and going mad with lust for each other in that short space of time, especially as Raymond was known to be a devoted and faithful husband. It doesn’t ring true.

I do suspect – but cannot prove through conventional research – that Alienor had a long-term affair with her vassal Geoffrey de Rancon. Finding Geoffrey at all in the historical record is difficult. There are numerous different and contradictory genealogies, not to say some far-fetched longevity in some of Alienor’s biographies that have the same Geoffrey around in the reign of Richard the Lionheart, when, given his earlier career, he would have been pushing a hundred! The Geoffrey de Rancon mentioned in Richard’s reign was obviously a son or grandson of the man known to Alienor.

Walter Map, one of the less reliable chroniclers with a tabloid journalist mentality, suggested that Alienor had an affair

with Geoffrey of Anjou when he was seneschal of Poitou. Whether Geoffrey ever held this title is dubious, and whether he would have found the time, place and suicidal bravado to romp with his overlord’s wife is also open to doubt. I had an epiphanic moment while researching when I came across Sidney Painter’s article ‘Castellans of the Plains of Poitou in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’ published in Speculum

in 1956, where he discusses the career of various de Rancons in their position as important ducal castellans. I have a suspicion that this is the smoke that started the chroniclers’ fires

and they attached the scandal to the wrong Geoffrey. I also suspect that Alienor’s closeness to Geoffrey de Rancon was the cause of some of the scandal hinted at in Antioch. It certainly makes far more sense to me than Alienor and her uncle leaping into bed together at the drop of a hat. De Rancon up until that point had been a mainstay of the crusading army, but at Antioch was sent back home. Historians debate whether this is because he was in disgrace having nearly got the King killed during the crossing of Mount Cadmos (now called Mount Honaz in northern Turkey), or whether he had completed his stint and was needed back in Aquitaine. Perhaps there was another reason. It’s a point still open to conjecture – as is Alienor’s relationship with her uncle. My own take on the proceedings based on all aspects of my research and filtered through reasoning and imagination is that Alienor and Geoffrey de Rancon conducted a clandestine affair that has escaped the history books but might just be seen as a flicker in the shadows in the comments of certain chroniclers. Alienor and her uncle may have spent a lot of time together, but my belief is that they were formulating policy and even plotting against Louis rather than enjoying each other’s bodies. Certainly Alienor asked for an annulment and Louis was worried enough to leave Antioch at night, abducting his wife by force when she refused to leave of her own accord.

Alienor’s sister Petronella proved a conundrum. In the records she is sometimes referred to as Aelith and sometimes Petronella. I have used the latter as it is a name of southern France and perhaps linked to the cathedral of Saint-Pierre in Bordeaux. Petronella did indeed marry a man decades older than herself, and it appeared at the outset to be a love match. Chronicler John of Salisbury tells us she died circa 1151, but then she just may appear in a later pipe roll of Henry II in connection with Alienor. I have steered a middle course in the novel to explain her exit from the stage. I suspect that she may have had a lot in common with her maternal grandmother, the notorious ‘Dangerosa’ or ‘Dangereuse’. The latter was a nickname, and one has to wonder how she came by it!

Readers will not find Henry’s mistress Aelburgh in the historical record under that name. However, he did have a mistress called ‘Hikenai’ of whom the chroniclers were disparaging and who was the likely mother of his son Geoffrey. I take it that Hikenai was probably a garbling of ‘Hackney’, the term for a common riding horse, and derogatory, so I gave her the name that turned up in my Akashic Records research.

In The Summer Queen, I have given Alienor dark blond hair and blue eyes. This is based on my alternative research method of the Akashic Records, which I use to fill in the blanks and explore what happened in the past from a psychic perspective. You can find out more about them on my website. Using conventional resources, it is a fact that we don’t know what Alienor looked like. One modern historian tells us she had black hair, an olive complexion and a curvaceous figure that didn’t run to fat in old age! However, there is not a shred of evidence to prove this and is, I suspect, modern male wish fulfilment! Another historian gives her ‘sparkling black eyes’. Again, it’s pure fabrication. There has been the suggestion that a mural at Chinon depicts a crowned, auburn-haired Alienor riding a horse, but this is now thought to be unlikely; it probably depicts Henry’s children, including the Young King as the crowned figure. However, we do know Alienor had blond hair in her ancestry as one of the Dukes of Aquitaine was called William the Towhead, suggesting his hair was the colour of straw.

It has been quite a journey researching Alienor’s young womanhood from 1137 to 1154 and bringing her story to life. By turns I have been fascinated, frustrated, enlightened and uplifted. I have come to admire Alienor’s grit, dignity

and endurance in often distressing and trying times. Also her wit, intelligence and determination. On occasions I have been very angry on her behalf for what was done to her, and for all the lies and damned lies told about her down the centuries. However, drawing Alienor out from the shadows has been ultimately one of the most rewarding experiences of my writing career.

She was a woman of her time, but what a woman.

I am so looking forward to continuing the story of her marriage to Henry II and her life as Queen of England in The Winter Crown and The Autumn Throne.


Select Bibliography

In my opinion the most useful biographies are Ralph Turner’s and Jean Flori’s, and the Wheeler and Parsons series of articles provide an excellent summary of aspects of Alienor’s life.

Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures, edited, translated and annotated by Erwin Panofsky, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0 691 003 14 9

Baldwin, John W., Paris, 1200, Stanford University Press, 2010, ISBN

978 0 8047 7207 5

Boyd, Douglas, Eleanor April Queen of Aquitaine, Sutton, 2004, ISBN 978 0750 932905

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John C. Parsons, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, ISBN 978 0 230 60236 6

Flori, Jean, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen and Rebel, Edinburgh University Press,

2004

Gobry, Ivan, Louis VII 1137–1180, Pygmalion, 2002, ISBN 978 2 7564 0391 5

Grant, Lindy, Abbot Suger of St-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France, Longman, 1998, ISBN 0 582 051508

John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court, translated from the Latin with introduction and notes by Marjorie Chibnall D. Phil., Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1956

Kelly, Amy, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, 1950, ISBN 978 067424254 8

King, Alison, Akashic Records Consultant

Meade, Marion, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography, Frederick Muller, 1978, ISBN 0 584 10347 6

Odo of Deuil, De Profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem, edited with an English translation by Virginia Gingerick Berry, Columbia University Press, 1947

Owen, D. R., Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend, Blackwell, 1993,

ISBN 0 631 17072 3

Painter, Sidney, ‘Castellans of the Plains of Poitou in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, article published in Speculum, 1956

Pernoud, Régine, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Collins, 1967

Sassier, Yves, Louis VII, Fayard, 1991, ISBN 978 2213 027869

Seward, Desmond, Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen, David & Charles, 1978, ISBN 0 7153 7647 0

Turner, Ralph, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Yale, 2009, ISBN 978 0 300 11911 4

Weir, Alison, Eleanor of Aquitaine: By the Wrath of God, Queen of England, Pimlico, 2000, ISBN 978 0 7126 7317 4

The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, edited by Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu, Boydell, 2005, ISBN 1 84383 114 7