Long-lived Lincolnshire Widows: Petronilla de Craon and her Contemporaries

The presence of high-profile landholding ladies, such as Countess Lucy of Chester and the women of the de la Haye family, may well have facilitated a degree of acceptance of aristocratic female landholding in the East Midlands during the reigns of Henry II, Richard, john and Henry III of England. This chapter takes as its central focus the life of a hitherto neglected and long-lived Lincolnshire widow, Petronilla de Craon (c. 1183–1262), the thrice-married lady of Freiston barony in Lincolnshire and South Warnborough in Hampshire.15 It considers Petronilla’s experiences as a baronial heiress during the reigns of four English kings, those of Henry II (d. 1189), Richard I (d. 1199), John (d. 1216) and Henry III (d. 1272). This chapter examines how far Petronilla’s experiences as an heiress, widow and mother resonated with those of other elite women landholders in the East Midlands during the decades immediately before and after Magna Carta (first issued in 1215) became established in English law. This period was critically important in the transition of aristocratic women’s rights from vulnerability to improved security.16 As Thomas Keefe’s analysis of the proffers and income for heirs and heiresses received by the crown has shown, the years after John’s accession in 1199 witnessed ‘a more intense exploitation [by the king than before] of wardships and marriages as a financial resource’.17 Yet, it was in response to this ‘exploitation’ that Magna Carta’s clauses which protected heiresses against disparagement (marriage to social inferiors), guaranteed widows free and relatively swift access to their property, and safeguarded widows against the threat of forced remarriage by removing the danger of distraint, were conceded first by John to the baronial rebels in 1215 and later by Henry III’s government to his English subjects.18