Anniversaries

27 November 1358: Isabella of France, dowager queen of England, was buried at the Greyfriars Church in London, with all due ceremony and in the presence of her son Edward III and daughter-in-law Queen Philippa (and I presume of her other surviving child Joan, queen of Scotland).  With Isabella was buried the cloak she had worn at her wedding to Edward II half a century previously, and a silver casket with her husband's heart inside.  (NOTA BENE: being buried with your spouse or child's heart was perfectly normal in royal burials of the era; Isabella was not buried next to Roger Mortimer or even in the same city; she was buried with Edward II's heart, not Mortimer's, a point I make especially because this is often erroneously stated online.)

28 November 1290: Edward II's mother Eleanor of Castile, queen of England, lady of Ireland, duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Ponthieu in her own right, died at the house of one Richard de Weston in Harby, Nottinghamshire.  She was probably forty-nine.  Her tomb and effigy in Westminster Abbey still survive, as do three of the Eleanor Crosses her widower erected in her memory.  Only six of the fourteen or sixteen children she bore outlived her, one of them - Joan of Acre - then pregnant with the king and queen's eldest grandchild, Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester.

Edward of Caernarfon, then aged six and Eleanor's youngest child and sole surviving son, can barely have known his mother: she and Edward I left England for Gascony in May 1286, shortly after his second birthday, and only returned in August 1289.  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Eleanor's death, 28 November 1315, her son paid thirty-five shillings to seventy Dominicans (the favourite order of both Edward and Eleanor) for "performing divine service at the anniversary of the lady the queen, mother of the present lord the king."

29 November 1314: Philip IV, king of France, Edward II's father-in-law and second cousin (their paternal grandmothers Marguerite and Eleanor of Provence were sisters) was killed in a hunting accident near Fontainebleau, aged forty-six.  Philip survived his accident long enough to make a codicil to his will the day before he died, in which he left two rings to his daughter Ysabella Regina Anglie, one of them set with a large ruby, which she had once given him.

29 November 1330: Roger Mortimer, earl of March and lord of Wigmore, was hanged naked at Tyburn - an execution site for common criminals but not, previously, a nobleman.  He had been dragged to Tyburn wearing the black tunic he had worn at Edward II's funeral in December 1330.