My 500th post!

This is the 500th post on the Edward II blog!  Yay to me and Edward!  :-)

Today is 1 November, the feast of All Saints, which is quite an important day here on Planet Edward II, as it happens.  Firstly, there were two weddings.  The later one, which took place on 1 November 1307, was that of Edward's niece Margaret de Clare and his beloved Piers Gaveston, earl of Cornwall.  Margaret was then almost certainly about thirteen and a half, Piers considerably older, at least twenty-four and perhaps as much as thirty (?).  Edward gave jewels worth thirty pounds to the bride and groom, a roan-coloured palfrey worth twenty pounds to Margaret and expensive cloth worked with gold and pearls to her ladies, and provided the generous amount of seven pounds, ten shillings and six pence in pennies to be thrown over the heads of the bride and groom at the door of the chapel.  His almoner collected the money, which would comfortably have fed several families for a year, and distributed it to the poor.  The king spent an enormous twenty pounds on the minstrels, and evidently it was quite a celebration, as Edward had to give a local man five shillings' compensation for "damage done by the king's party" to his property.

Another wedding took place on 1 November, in 1254: that of Edward II's parents.  Fifteen-year-old Lord Edward, elder son and heir of King Henry III of England, and twelve or thirteen-year-old doña Leonor, half-sister of King Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, married in the church of the Cistercian monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos, northern Spain.  Just under thirty years later on 25 April 1284, their heir Edward of Caernarfon was born, the youngest of their fourteen or more children.

1 November 1311 was the deadline for Piers Gaveston to leave England yet again, for his third exile.  He actually left on the 3rd, or possibly the 4th, and returned little more than two months later.

Another Edward II post coming soon.  And 500 more after that, and 500 more after that...:-)