Medieval England loved rumours, conspiracies and fake news about queens

Rumours and gossip swirled around medieval England whenever there was societal unrest.

If you enjoy a good bit of gossiping, England in the 15th century would have been a great place to live. The kingdom was awash with rumours and conspiracy theories, some true, some false. Given the century witnessed several instances of popular unrest and civil war, this is unsurprising since conspiracy theories have a tendency to spring up during times of societal crisis.

Discussions of conspiracy theories often lead into questions of where they came from, who believed them and how they were spread. Today, the term “fake news” is often used about content used to spread deliberate misinformation. As the tales heard in England’s 15th-century court attest to, such stories have been around for a long time.

As a team of historians, we were fascinated by this modern concept in a historic context and wanted to understand how fake news operated in the middle ages. We decided to look particularly at rumours associated with queens of that period.

Medieval queens were powerful and often foreign women in a patriarchal society. This made them frequent subjects of rumour, gossip and slander. To understand how fake news spread, we decided to look for evidence of prosecutions against individuals spreading negative rumours about queens.

We wanted to consider how concerns about foreign influence shaped rumours. Royal marriages were often negotiated to bring about peace or create new alliances. Yet, a marriage of two privileged individuals was insufficient to allay long-term suspicions and prejudices.

For instance, the household of Joan of Navarre, Henry IV’s French wife, was suspected of being full of foreign spies who worked against the kingdom. These stories only arose however, after her husband, Henry IV, had died and she was simply the new king’s stepmother.

Another queen who was said to have damaged England was Henry VI’s French wife, Margaret of Anjou. One rumour circulated that she encouraged the French to attack Sandwich on England’s south-east coast in 1457 (though curiously our main evidence for this belief is from French writers, rather than English ones). Such rumours reveal concerns about foreign influence upon the general welfare.

One type of conspiracy theory that became increasingly prominent in 15th-century England was the belief that certain aristocratic women employed sorcery and witchcraft to advance their ends.

In 1464, Edward IV shocked England when he announced he had secretly married the widowed Englishwoman Elizabeth Woodville. Rather than marry a foreign princess that would be beneficial to the kingdom, the king decided to marry for love (or perhaps lust).

Rumours circulated that the queen’s mother, Jacquetta of Luxembourg, used sorcery to enchant Edward into the marriage. Jacquetta was later cleared of an allegation that she had fashioned lead images of the king, queen and Earl of Warwick for use in witchcraft.

The accusations were in one sense a smear against the queen and her unpopular relatives, tainting them with dabbling with ungodly forces. But it was also a means of explaining, or telling a story about, an unusual and, to many, deeply objectionable marriage.

Our research suggests many European queens of the 12th to 14th centuries – such as Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), Isabeau of Bavaria (1370-1435) and Joan, countess of Burgundy (1287/88-1330), Margaret (1290-1315) and Blanche (1296-1326) of Burgundy – were subject to rumours of sexual scandal both in their lifetimes and shortly thereafter, and with no reprisal for the originators of the scandal.

England in the 15th century seems unusual when thinking about queens because sexual scandal was uncommon. This all changes dramatically in the 16th century with Henry VIII and in particular an unusual conspiracy theory the king spread about his second queen, Anne Boleyn. The allegations that Anne Boleyn committed incest with her brother, George Boleyn, are generally unfounded. However, it is curious that such a scandalous accusation was evoked when it hadn’t been done for centuries. The charge had been levelled at Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 12th century but incest was not a common allegation.

While we knew about the existence of these rumours, we’re uncertain about their origins. To try to pin down where such rumours began, we examined a series of records from the Court of King’s Bench, which was the king’s court, and therefore the highest in the land. These vast Latin records have been used by generations of historians who have found numerous prosecutions of individuals for spreading seditious rumours about kings.

We know about many cases of individuals being punished for speaking ill of the king. Henry IV’s reign was dogged by rumours that the man he usurped, Richard II, was still alive and about to return. Many individuals were prosecuted for spreading this rumour. As king, Henry IV did everything he could to stop the fake news about his predecessor circulating because this was a threat to his own position.

We worked on the assumption that if individuals were prosecuted for speaking ill of the king and spreading false rumours, then the same might be true when the queen was the subject of rumour. To our surprise, we found no evidence of individuals incurring the full wrath of the law for spreading false rumours about these queens.

Despite the law’s apparent indifference, these rumours give us useful insights into the spread of conspiracy theories before mass communication. Fake news was a key part of medieval politics and queens were often the subject of stories, but few individuals seem to have been punished for spreading them.

Gordon McKelvie received funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grants Awards for the following project: ‘Rumour, Fake News and English Queens Consort in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century’ (SRG2223\230926)’

Gabrielle Storey received funding from the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Grants Award for the following project: 'Rumour, Fake News and English Queens Consort in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century' (SRG2223\230926)’.