A couple of readers want to know how on earth I could have any sentimental

connection with Eleanor of Castile.

Well, when the lady died, in November 1290, she was on her way to join her

husband, Edward Longshanks (Edward I of England), who had hastened ahead on

some urgent business in Scotland. Reaching Lincoln, however, she died of a

fever. Edward came when he heard she was ill, but arrived too late. It had

been a diplomatic arranged marriage, but they seem to have fallen in love,

and Edward’s grief was, so far as one can judge across 700 years, genuine.

He ordered her body taken back to London; and at every place where the

funeral cortege stopped for the night, he ordered a tall stone cross built.

One of these crosses was at Delapre, just south of the small midlands

farming town of Northampton. I grew up (ages 3-18) in Delapre, and used to

play around the foot of what we always called “Queen Eleanor’s Cross”

(official guidebooks and so on tend to favor “the Eleanor Cross”), and in

the woods and fields that stretched away behind it for ever (as it seemed to

us). There is a picture of Queen Eleanor’s Cross here.