The Longespées were an important and high-born family in thirteenth-century England.1 They have been described in recent years as being ‘amongst the greatest in the land and exceptionally well connected’.2 They were closely related to the ruling members of the English royal family. Indeed, they were members of the royal family itself, the founder of the line being the illegitimate son of Henry II, William Longespée, who married Ela, the heiress of the earldom of Salisbury, and became earl of Salisbury himself, dying in 1226. His wife was the founder after his death of Lacock Abbey (Wiltshire), of which house she became the first abbess in 1239, an office she resigned in 1257, to die in 1261.3 This William was half-brother to Kings Richard I and John, his sons and daughters were cousins (or half-cousins) to Henry III, and his grandchildren were second cousins of Edward I, that king, for example, referring to Nicholas Longespée in 1292 as consanguineus noster dilectus.4 They all had the royal blood of Henry II flowing in their veins and, as we shall see, were immensely proud of their inheritance. William, the earl of Salisbury, and his wife, Ela, produced a prolific progeny. Their eldest son, William (William Longespée II), was a conspicuous crusader, being eventually killed at Mansurah on Louis IX’s crusade in 1250.5 Another son, Stephen, served Henry III as seneschal of Gascony from 1254 and became justiciar of Ireland in 1258, which office he retained until his death in 1260,6 and the youngest son, Nicholas, was elected and consecrated bishop of Salisbury in 1292 and died in 1297.7 Nicholas was outlived by the most remarkable of the couple’s daughters, Ela, who married first Thomas, earl of Warwick (d. 1242), and secondly, in about 1255, Philip Basset, Henry III’s justiciar in 1261–63, after whose death in 1271 she remained a wealthy, childless widow until her own death in 1298.8 Other notable members of the family appeared in its many junior or collateral branches.
The aim of this paper is, on the basis of the identifiable seals of members of the family, male and female – whether the seals survive as originals, casts or drawings – to investigate and illustrate how different individuals made use of various elements in the family’s repertoire of heraldic arms and symbols to identify themselves as members of the Longespée family and at the same time mark their own individual identity. We are concerned here primarily with two things: the symbolism arising from the family name, on the one hand, and the family arms, on the other, since both spawned a variety of iconographic consequences, either on their own or in combination.
The family name is usually given in its French form, in some variation of Longespée or Lungespée, the form that is often used even in Latin charters and other texts, but it could be rendered in Latin, particularly down to the twelfth century, as ‘Longa spata’ or ‘Longe spate’, a form used also in the thirteenth century by the St Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris; and, of course, in modern times it has also been rendered as Longsword.9 The name first occurs early in the history of the Duchy of Normandy, having been borne by the successor of Rollo, the first duke, William, who died in 942. It presumably passed subsequently down the ducal line of Normandy, although evidence of its use is lacking, and then, with the Empress Matilda’s marriage to Geoffrey, count of Anjou, in 1128, it came to the house of Anjou, from which it passed to the ruling house of England with the succession of Geoffrey’s eldest son as Henry II of England in 1154.10 Geoffrey’s second son, William, Henry’s brother, is usually called by historians William Fitz Empress, and that is what he is called on his seal (Willelmus filius Imperatricis), but in his own charters he is called ‘William brother of the king’, and at least once, in a slightly later charter by his nephew, the Young King, he is referred to as William Longespée.11 Moreover, in a considerably later set of monastic annals, those of Osney Abbey, we find him called W. Lungespeie frater regis Henrici secundi.12 With his death without offspring in 1164, however, the name is lost to view until it reappears as the name of Henry II’s illegitimate son, William, whom we have already met. As a family name, it is doubtful whether it signified that this William possessed or used a particularly long sword, but the name might well have been applied to Rollo’s son in the early tenth century because he did use such a sword, and the name stuck to his descendants. It is certainly interesting in this context that the funerary plaque of Geoffrey, count of Anjou, to which we must soon turn, and which is more frequently discussed in the context of the Longespée arms, depicts the count holding up, almost brandishing, a prominent and quite long sword. At any rate, after the adoption of the name by William, earl of Salisbury, and his family in the thirteenth century, representations of the long sword form an important element in the iconography of the family’s seals.
The family’s heraldic arms can be traced back to the later years of Henry I’s reign, although the precise form in which they have come down to us was probably not settled until around the middle of the twelfth century. As is well known, they have their origins in the year 1128, in the charges of a shield given by Henry I to Geoffrey, count of Anjou, on the occasion of the latter’s knighting by the king shortly before his marriage to Henry’s only daughter and heir, Matilda, widow of the emperor Henry V of Germany, the Empress Matilda.13 The chronicler, John of Marmoutier, records that at his knighting Geoffrey received from the king, among other equipment and insignia, a shield bearing symbolic golden lioncels (or little lions), which was hung about his neck (clipeus, leunculos aureos ymaginarios habens, collo eius suspenditur).14 As Adrian Ailes has reminded us, the exact number of lioncels (or, indeed, of any multiple charges on a shield) was at this date not an important consideration, and no number is specified in John of Marmoutier’s account, nor is the ground colour of the shield given, but both these matters had evidently been settled by the time of Geoffrey’s death in 1151.15 Soon after that, probably in the late 1150s, the celebrated funerary plaque of enamel depicting the count was produced to hang above his tomb in Le Mans cathedral.
Miraculously, it has survived, and shows the count standing, holding up a long sword (as mentioned earlier) and bearing on his left arm a pointed shield, not fully visible but evidently bearing six golden lioncels rampant on a blue ground in the formation 3-2-1.16 It was precisely these arms that were to be carved and painted on the shield worn by the effigy in Salisbury cathedral of his illegitimate grandson, William Longespée, earl of Salisbury (d. 1226), to whom they must have descended via King Henry II of England.17 These arms were not those borne by his uncle, William, brother of Henry II, which comprised a single lion rampant, even though, as we have seen, William possessed the cognomen ‘Longespée’.18 After Geoffrey of Anjou’s death the arms seem to have been dormant, as it were, in his descendants’ possession until conferred (presumably) by Henry II on his illegitimate son, William. Incidentally, William’s monument and effigy at Salisbury are justly celebrated as among the earliest and finest military examples in the whole of England; and the lioncels on the shield do have a striking resemblance to those of Geoffrey’s funerary plaque.19
With these preliminaries concluded, we can turn to my main theme. This is far from virgin territory and the Longespées have exerted a fascination on a number of antiquarians and scholars. In particular, The Revd William L. Bowles (1762–1850), vicar of Bremhill (Wiltshire), who, among his various talents, had a certain skill as an antiquarian, produced, in 1835 with J. G. Nichols, a book entitled Annals and Antiquities of Lacock Abbey in the County of Wilts, a work which contains a large amount of detailed history on the Longespée family in the thirteenth century. Even more to my purpose the volume includes four plates of drawings of Longespée family seals coming down to the mid-fourteenth century.20 The marvellous seventeenth-century heraldic and antiquarian manuscript, known as Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, now in the Northamptonshire Record Office, is also a fine primary source, for example, for the appearance of the complete seal of Countess Ela of Salisbury.21