Gifts and Rewards: Exploring the Expenditure of Late Medieval English Queens

Abstract

ABSTRACT Understanding queenly expenditure is a key part of studying queenship, not least because it provides insight into how queens carried out their roles and responsibilities. But examining such expenditure also serves a purpose in relation to research on the material foundations of queenship. This article examines one aspect of that expenditure, namely the gifts and rewards given by Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth of York, two fifteenth-century English queens consort. Gifts and rewards serve as signal examples of how these queens used their economic resources and provide an additional entry into how to view these queens in economic and social/cultural terms. It shows that relating the queens’ gifts and rewards to and demonstrating the implications of their practices on both their economic and social roles is a fruitful method of extending our understanding of the economic resources available to the queens and how they used them. This article is part of a research cluster in this issue on the economic power of medieval queens.