Word: eleanor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...moment, Queen Eleanor's state of mind made little difference to pious Louis VII; he went right on saying his prayers. But in time the sense of incompatibility grew on Louis too; he agreed to have their marriage annulled-on the ground that they were fourth cousins and were not rightly wed in the first place. Before the year (1152) was out, Eleanor conferred her person and her provinces, which covered a third of France, on hot-blooded Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and King Louis' great enemy...
...Honey Spread. By Eleanor's alliance the Plantagenet adventure was loosed on Europe, France and Britain were pounded into dusty poverty under half a century of campaigns, the feudal system itself was staggered. Yet, also, the sweet Provengal culture was spread like honey over Britain, and three sun-washed, heroic figures rose for a long moment against the Dark Ages. They were the three great Plantagenets: Henry II, Eleanor, and their son Richard the Lion Heart. The greatest of them was Eleanor herself, though centuries passed before the world realized...
...many of her contemporaries Eleanor was a byword for wantonness, in Shakespeare four centuries later a "canker'd grandam"; by the time of Victoria, Charles Dickens thought it sufficient to call Eleanor "a bad woman." It was only as the 20th Century began that Historian Henry Adams took the queen's full measure, and pronounced her "the greatest of all Frenchwomen." Amy Kelly's Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings is the finest attempt, in English, to tell the queen's full story. It is a tale that the queen herself might have gasped...
...Barons Dress. When Eleanor left Louis to his orisons, she was 30, and knew more of life than most women twice her age. Married at 15, she had gone with Louis VII on the Second Crusade and on tours of their domains, had given him two daughters and (so legends tell) some reason to doubt that at least one of them was his. After the second daughter, Louis, who still had no heir, was glad...
...Eleanor bore Henry a line of five sons and three daughters. A year after her second marriage, Henry's chief rival for the throne of England, Eustace of Blois, strangled on a dish of eels, and shortly after the Duke of Normandy added Britain to his fiefs. In the first years of their reign, Eleanor was Henry II's full partner in the building of empire. She made long progresses with him through their possessions, sometimes levied justice and taxes when he was away, and more than all, reformed the manners of Western Europe to woman...