Meister der Münchner Legenda Aurea:
Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmoreland as wife of Ralph Neville,
from an image in the Neville Book of Hours (1430-35)

" They created the new worlds their husbands just imagined."

No Fambly's genealogy could ever be understood without acknowledging the role PowerfulWomen played. The histories might be relatively thin on the details describing their influence, but they were just as crucial to creating history as the most noteworthy male. Charlemaigne's second wife (of four), Hildegarde de Vintzgau Herstal, was married at 12 or 13 and traveled with her husband on his military campaigns, dropping nine babies all along the way, including a set of twins and a future king of Italy. She thereby secured her husband's legacy. She died at 26 in childbirth. It's said that she was the grandmother of every subsequent king of England and France, not to mention that one of Italy.

Each generation featured equally PowerfulWomen. While the men battled for mere territory, their wives and handmaids ensured the culture survived and thrived, for the women were responsible for teaching both sons and daughters how to properly comport themselves. They ran the schools that taught Latin and Greek, geometry and literature, religion, and history. They taught their offspring what damned well pleased them to teach, the husband king, knight, or duke off fighting for or against something. They were always fighting. Sometimes, they'd manage to get themselves killed, after which the next generation would rise up off the bench, ready to take charge, or, often, their mother would steward the government until junior came of age.

The daughters served as pawns in the eternal medieval chess tournament. Marrying them off ensured secure relations with otherwise opponents, though this strategy required patience. Often in my Fambly's history, three or four generations later, the great-granddaughter of some arranged marriage managed to deliver the intended Coup d'état. Jean Beauford, great-grand-daughter of John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford, brought Gaunt's grandson's relations into her first marriage with Robert St. Lawrence, First Baron of Howth, who was later, as a result, able to claim his cousin Margaret Beaufort's son Henry VII entitled to become England's first Tudor monarch; and so he was.

Eleanor of Castile, my twenty-first great-grandmother and queen to Edward I of England, might have more profoundly influenced the monarchy than anybody in several generations, for she had been properly reared in Castile after a long line of gentility dating back at least two centuries. I think of these PowerfulWomen as preserving the soul of civilization while their husbands focused upon the body politic. Their influence continued into the New World, too. It was not due to lighter workloads that the women in my family sometimes outlived the men. These women were precursors to Ginger Rogers' famous insistence that she did everything Fred Astaire did, but backward and in heels. The men fathered the kids while the women drove the ox team while nursing and pregnant. They planted the quince, rhubarb, and hops that enabled pioneering families to leaven their bread and take coherent shits.

The men were far from worthless, but each would have been worth considerably less had they not had a StrongWoman for a spouse. It stands as a considerable credit to patience and cleverness that women throughout the centuries managed to make more than merely the best of their often sorry opening circumstances. They were forbidden from living as they pleased, and many managed to do precisely what they pleased anyway. They had studied much more than most of their husbands. They understood advanced mathematics, logic, and strategy in ways their jousting spouses never even cared to imagine. They found their advantages by focusing on what their powerful husbands couldn't see, much less comprehend. They created the new worlds their husbands had just imagined.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz