Beatrice de Roos (d. 1415) and the Making of Art

Abstract

This article examines the involvement of Beatrice, dowager Baroness Roos (d. 1415) in the making of art. Her patronage of masons and tomb-makers, glaziers and seal-makers, is explored in detail, showing her to have commissioned works from two of the most prominent English artists of the late medieval period. Her interest in the inventive use of heraldry and her role in the creation of a major monument in St Paul’s Cathedral is established. Her right to be acknowledged as the donor of the St William window in York Minster is reasserted, and her influence on its content and meaning is demonstrated. The gift of this window made Beatrice the single most important secular benefactor of York Minster, a fact that has not been acknowledged before in print, but was recorded by the medieval cathedral chapter in the glazing of the Minster’s western choir clerestory.

Keywords:

• stained glass
• York Minster
• St Paul’s Cathedral
• St William window
• heraldry
• seals
• Roos
• female patronage

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the evolution of this paper, which emerged out of a lockdown project, I received a great deal of advice, practical help and moral support from my friends and colleagues Philip Lankester FSA and Professor Christopher Norton FSA. Dr Joseph Spooner FSA provided invaluable help in the interpretation of textual sources, and Janet Parkin provided essential artwork. For the helpful comments of the two anonymous readers, I record my thanks. Any shortcomings that remain are entirely my own.

Notes

1 In the Complete Peerage the Roos family name is spelt ‘Ros’ and this variant is commonly found in relation to this baronial family, with its seat at Helmsley Castle. However, Beatrice herself spelt her name ‘Roos’, and this is the spelling that has been adopted throughout this text.

2 T. French, ‘The glazing of the St William Window of York Minster’, JBAA, 140 (1987), 175–81.

3 Notably the research distilled in Reassessing the Roles of Woman as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, ed. T. Martin, 2 vols (Leiden 2012). Beatrice’s art patronage is of too late a date to have attracted the attention of L. L. Gee’s Women, Art and Patronage from Henry III to Edward III (Woodbridge 2002), while she is too early to appear in Susan E. James’s The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603 (Abingdon 2009) or in B. J. Harris’s English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450–1550 (Amsterdam 2018). She also escaped notice in Christine Hediger’s ‘Female donors of Medieval stained glass windows’, in Investigations in Medieval Stained Glass, ed. E. C. Pastan and B. Kurmann Schwarz (Leiden 2019), 239–50.

4 P. A. Fox, Great Cloister: A lost Canterbury Tale (Oxford 2020), 554–56. Fox first correctly states Beatrice to be the mother of William, but barely a page later describes her as William’s wife.

5 On the day of her marriage a wife was traditionally assigned a third of her husband’s possessions, and after his death retained this for her lifetime, whether she remarried or not: H. Leyser, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England 450–1500 (London 1995), ch. 8.

6 K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford 1973), 187–212; C. Rawcliffe, ‘Stafford, Ralph, first earl of Stafford (1301–72), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26211 (accessed 14 November 2022).

7 G. E. Cockayne ed., The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland (London 1910–59), IV, 241–42.

8 Calendar of Patent Rolls, 53 vols (London 1819–1916) (hereafter CPR), Edward III, 1358–61, 58, 16 June 1358. I am grateful to Dr Jeremy Goldberg for discussing with me the implications of this information.

9 K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford 1972), 174–75; Rawcliffe, ‘Stafford, Ralph’.

10 CPR, Edward III, 1358–61, 143, 271.

11 He served in France in 1355, 1356 and 1359–60: Complete Peerage IX, 100–01.

12 W. M. Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven and London 2011), 58, 137.

13 Complete Peerage IX, 100–1.

14 Simon Walker has estimated that Thomas Roos earned £250 per annum from his royal annuity, but only £50 from the duke, who was also slow to pay his debts: S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity (Oxford 1990), 62, 105.

15 He served abroad in in 1369, 1370, 1372, 1373 and 1378: Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 280.

16 Ormrod, Edward III, 571.

17 Four sons and two daughters; John, William, Thomas, Robert. See E. and M. L. Toulmin Smith ed., The Itinerary of John Leland, 5 vols (London and Carbondale 1909–64), I, 92.

18 S. Armitage-Smith ed., John of Gaunt’s Register (1371–1375), Camden Society Third Series, 4 vols (London 1911–37), II, 56–57, no. 989.

19 Richard Almond, Medieval Hunting (Stroud 2011), 101–15.

20 A. Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills (Lincoln 1888), 70; Itinerary of John Leland, I, 92.

21 Complete Peerage XI, 101; Tobias Capwell, Armour of the English Knight 1400–1450 (London 2015), 135, figs 1.194, 1.224, 1.264, 1.268.

22 CPR, Richard II, 1385–89, 8. Pardon granted 20 August 1385.

23 J. Rosenthal, ‘Aristocratic Widows in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Women and the Structure of Society, ed. B. J. Harris and J. McNamarra (Durham, GA 1984), 36–52.

24 N. Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London 1997), 129.

25 J. L. Leland, ‘Burley, Sir Simon (1336?–1388)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online, https://doi-org/libproxy.york.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/4036 (accessed 27 March 2023).

26 H. E. L. Collins, The Order of the Garter 1348–1461. Chivalry and Politics in Late Medieval England (Oxford 2000), 49, 96–97.

27 Saul, Richard II, 84, 87–88.

28 A. Gross, ‘Pembridge, Sir Richard (c.1320–1375), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online, https://www-oxforddnb-com.libproxy.york.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-21826?print=pdf (accessed 27 March 2023).

29 A. Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (Harlow 1992), 228–29.

30 G. F. Beltz, Memorials of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London 1841), 291–94; J. L. Gillespie, ‘Chivalry and Kingship’, in The Age of Richard II, ed. J. L. Gillespie (Stroud 1997), 115–38.

31 Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 91–92.

32 15 November 1386: Calendar of the Close Rolls, 47 vols (London 1900–63), Richard II, 3, 1385–89, 286–88.

33 By the 15th century, the financial security of the dowager was at its height: R. Archer, ‘Rich old ladies: The problem of late medieval dowagers’, in Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History, ed. A. J. Pollard (Gloucester and New York 1984), 15–31.

34 Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 266.

35 Saul, Richard II, 148–50. Burley served under Sir John Holland, half-brother of the king and one of the duke of Lancaster’s sons-in-law, infamous as the murderer of Beatrice’s nephew, the son and heir of the earl of Stafford.

36 J. H. Parry ed., Registrum Johannis Gilbert: episcopi Herrfordensis 1375–89, Canterbury and York Society 18 (London 1925), 109–12.

37 L. C. Hector and B. F. Harvey ed., The Westminster Chronicle (Oxford 1983), 191; Calendar of Inquisitions Post-Mortem, 26 vols (London 1904–2010), XVI, 514, 515.

38 Complete Peerage, XI, 101.

39 Testamenta Eboracensia I, Surtees Society (London 1836), IV, 375–79; J. Ward trans. & ed., Women of the English Nobility and Gentry 106–1500 (Manchester 1995), 227–30.

40 That of 1388 is in the National Archives, Kew, attached to E213/73, published in R. H. Ellis, Catalogue of Seals in the Public Record Office, Personal Seals Vol. II (London 1981), no. P1960, 91 and pl. 26, and document reference online at https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3422554 (accessed 23 March 2022). That of 1404 is attached to British Library Add. Ch. 22391, published in W. G. de Birch, Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 6 vols (London 1887–1900), III, no. 13073, 448–49, and pl. VIII. The BL is also in possession of a sulphur cast said to have been attached to a charter dated 1412–14 in the possession of the second Earl of Leicester, now department of Western Manuscripts, detached seal LXXVI.42, reference online at https://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do;jsessionid=32189C38F2F52FA52A23C944AA9950EF?ct=display&fn=search&doc=IAMS040-002215002&indx=1&recIds=IAMS040-002215002&recIdxs=0&elementId=0&renderMode=poppedOut&displayMode=full&frbg=&frbrVersion=&dscnt=0&scp.scps=scope%3A%28BL%29&vid=IAMS_VU2&mode=Basic&srt=rank&tab=local&vl(freeText0)=Beatrix%20de%20Roos&dum=true&dstmp=1676806386547&tabs=moreTab&gathStatTab=true (accessed 23 March 2023). A drawing of the same seal impression but minus the legend, attached to an unidentified document, is shown in London, College of Arms MS Aspilogia 2, fol. 32r, where it is mistakenly attributed to Simon de Burley.

41 Bedos-Rezok has observed, in relation to the French sigillographic evidence, that while the seal of a woman carried as much legal weight as that of a man, documents issued by a man and wife were usually validated by the man’s seal alone: B. Bedos-Rezak, ‘Medieval Women in French sigillographic sources’, in Medieval Women and the Sources of Medieval History, ed. J. T. Rosenthal (Athens, GA 1990), 1–36.

42 C. H. Hunter Blair, ‘Armorials on English seals from the twelfth to the sixteenth century’, Archaeologia, 89 (1943), 1–26; A. Ailes, ‘Heraldic marshalling in medieval England’, in Proceedings of the VIII Colloquium of the Academie Internationale d’Heraldique (Canterbury 1995), 15–29; P. Coss, The Lady in Medieval England (Stroud 1998), 38–50; A. Ailes, ‘Armorial portrait shields of medieval noblewomen—Examples in the Public Record Office’, in Tribute to an Armorist, ed. John Campbell-Kease (London 2000), 218–34; M. Keen, ‘Heraldry and the Medieval Gentlewoman’, The Coat of Arms, 3rd series, vol. I, part 1, no. 209 (2005), 1–8; R. Davis, ‘Material Evidence? Reapproaching elite women’s seals and charters in late Medieval Scotland’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 150 (2021), 301–26.

43 Hunter Blair, ‘Armorials on English seals’, 23; H. S. London, ‘The greyhound as a royal beast’, Archaeologia, 97 (1955), 139–63.

44 Hunter Blair, ‘Armorials on English seals’, 23–25.

45 Hunter Blair, ‘Armorials on English seals’ 23, pl. XVI v.

46 William Roos rests his head on a helm surmounted by a peacock on his surviving effigy now at Bottesford, while the feet of a lost bird remain on the helm of his son, John (d. 1421): Capwell, Armour, figs 1.191, 1.301.

47 London, ‘The greyhound as a royal beast’, 150–51.

48 William Dugdale’s ‘Book of Monuments’, London, British Library, Add. MS 71474, fol. 181v, watercolour drawing by William Sedgwick; W. Dugdale, The History of St Pauls [sic] Cathedral in London (London 1658), 38, 102 and fold-out plan.

49 Dugdale, History of St Pauls, 90–91.

50 A post-medieval plaque, of unknown date and origin, attached to the wall above the recumbent effigy, wrongly identified the figure as being that of Sir Simon de Burley (d. 1388), uncle of Sir Richard, an identification accepted at face value by Dugdale and Ashmole: E. Ashmole, The Institutions, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London 1672), 205–06. After his execution in 1388 Simon Burley was buried in the Cistercian abbey church of St Mary Graces, not St Paul’s Cathedral. See Hector and Harvey, The Westminster Chronicle, 290–92. This misattribution has been the cause of much subsequent confusion. The correct identification of Richard Burley’s monuments was recognized by J. Stow, Survey of London, 3 vols (London 1908–1927), I, 336, and in more recent literature by Beltz, Memorials of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, 289 and P. Begent, ‘A Note upon the Practice of encircling Arms with the Garter’, The Coat of Arms N.S. 8, no. 144 (1989), 186–95.

51 Registrum Johannis Gilbert), 109–12.

52 O. D. Harris, ‘“Une tresriche sepulture”: The tomb and chantry of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster in Old St Paul’s Cathedral’, Church Monuments, 25 (2010), 7–35.

53 Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 102.

54 Begent, ‘A Note upon the Practice’, n. 48.

55 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Top. Gen. d.19, fol. 300v. The anomalies in the visual evidence occur in the treatment of the gables of the narrower east and west bays. In both gables Sedgwick, likely to be the more reliable witness, as he saw the monument prior to its destruction, depicts the undifferenced arms of Burley encircled fully by a garter with its motto; Hollar shows the impaled arms of Burley and Stafford, but with a garter without a motto that does not fully enclose the shield.

56 J. Harvey, English Medieval Architects: A Biographical Dictionary down to 1550 (Gloucester 1984), 366 (although the reference incorrectly attributes the monument to Simon Burley). I am grateful to Professor Christopher Wilson for discussing this with me in email correspondence, 25 June 2022: ‘I would be very surprised if there were any large architectural monuments in south-east England dating from the late 14th century that were not designed by Yevele.’

57 Harris, ‘The tomb and chantry of John of Gaunt’, 11–13.

58 How it was accessed is not clear, as Hollar’s engraving suggests that the Burley monument filled the full width of the internal bay, although his plan shows it standing forward from the wall and somewhat shorter than the full width of the bay.

59 CPR, Henry IV, 1408–13, 40; C. J. Kitching ed., London and Middlesex Chantry Certificate 1548, London Record Society, 16 (London 1980), no. 109; M. H. Rousseau, ‘Chantry Foundations and Chantry Chaplains at St Paul’s Cathedral in London c. 1200–1545’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2003), 35–36, 245.

60 S. Brown, ‘Our Magnificent Fabrick’: York Minster, An Architectural History c.1220–1500 (Swindon 2003), 176–87.

61 T. French, York Minster: The St William Window, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Summary Catalogue, 5 (Oxford 1999), 17.

62 The scheme includes the arms of known Minster benefactors, including Walter Skirlaw (SIX, 2c) and Thomas Langley (SIX, 2a), as well as those of prominent Minster clergy of an earlier generation, including treasurer, John de Clifford (1375–93, SVIII, 2d), and Richard and John Ravenser (prebendaries of Knaresborough 1371–81 and of Holme 1391–93 respectively, SIX, 2b).

63 A. Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills (Lincoln 1888), 70–71, 136–77; Testamenta Eboracensia, I, 357–60.

64 French, York Minster: The St William Window, 12–15.

65 This was the location of the high altar throughout the Middle Ages. The altar was moved one bay east in 1726 when the wooden altar screen was removed: F. Drake, Eboracum (York 1736), 173.

66 S. Harrison, ‘The shrines of St William of York reconstructed’, in York: Art, Architecture and Archaeology, ed. S. Brown, S. Rees Jones and T. Ayers, BAA Trans. xlii (London and New York 2022), 1–25.

67 K. Harrison, ‘Illuminating Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Fifteenth-Century St Cuthbert Window, York Minster’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 2019), ch. 3.

68 French, ‘The glazing of the St William Window of York Minster’.

69 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Yorks. C14, fol. 28r; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Dodsworth MS 137, fol. 12v. The medieval heraldry painted on these shields was replaced when the monument to Sir Henry and Lady Ursula Bellasis was installed immediately below the window in 1624.

70 French, York Minster: The St William Window, 17–19.

71 J. Fowler, ‘On a window representing the Life and Miracles of St William of York, at the north end of the eastern transept of York Minster’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 11–12 (1874), 198–348, at 317; E. Milner-White, ‘The return of the windows’, Friends of York Minster Annual Report, 27 (1955), 25–30.

72 As the window was apparently made starting at the bottom, an alteration rather than a production error seems more likely.

73 French, York Minster: The St William Window, 19.

74 Marks of cadency were also deployed with care in the depiction of Scrope heraldry in clerestory window NIX nearby.

75 Beatrice’s oldest brother, Ralph Stafford (d. 1347). The murder of Hugh Stafford’s own oldest son, also named Ralph, was said to have hastened his father’s death: Complete Peerage, XII, 179–80.

76 C. Norton, St William of York (York 2006), xiv, 186; Complete Peerage, XI, 93–94.

77 C. Norton, ‘Richard Scrope and York Minster’, in Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr, ed. P. J. P. Goldberg (York 2007), 138–213.

78 Norton, St William, 153.

79 French, York Minster: The St William Window, 107–08 (described prior to conservation when the panels occupied positions 24b and 24c). For what follows I am indebted to Christopher Norton for discussion of his as yet unpublished reinterpretation of the window.

80 Norton, St William, 150–92.

81 Inquisitions Post Mortem Relating to Yorkshire of the Reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, ed. W. Paley Baildon and J. W. Clay, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, 59 (Leeds 1918), 107–09; Mapping the Medieval Countryside, King’s College London, 2014. Available at http://www.inquisitionspostmortem.ac.uk/view/inquisition/20-371/388 (accessed 14 November 2022).

82 C. Cross, ‘The last generation of Augustinian Canons in Sixteenth-Century Yorkshire’, in The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, ed. J. Burton and K. Störber (Turnhout 2011), 387–402.

83 Through the marriage of Everard de Roos to Roese, daughter of William Trussebut, lord of Warter: N. Denholm Young, ‘The Foundation of Warter Priory’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 21 (1934), 208–13.

84 A. P. Baggs, G. H. R. Kent and J. D. Purdy, ‘Thornton’, in A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 3, Ouse and Derwent Wapentake, and Part of Harthill Wapentake, ed. K. J. Allison (London 1976), 179–90; at British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yorks/east/vol3/pp179-190 (accessed 10 May 2022). The largest number of personal servants rewarded in Beatrice’s will seem to be those associated with her properties in Storthwaite and its immediate vicinity: Inquisitions Post Mortem, 107–09.

85 Ward, Women of the English Nobility, 227–30; the will was proved on 16 May 1415.

86 J. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries (Woodbridge 1988), 68–69.

87 Itinerary of John Leland, I, 92; J. Burton, Kirkham Priory: From Foundation to Dissolution, Borthwick Paper 86 (York 1995), 2–3, 23; S. Harrison, Kirkham Priory, North Yorkshire (London 2010).

88 Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills, 70; Itinerary of John Leland, I, 92; Ward, Women of the English Nobility, 223–24. Margaret’s slab was to resemble that which lay over her grandmother, Lady Margaret de Oreby, at St Botolph’s, Boston. Nigel Saul has suggested that this was probably an incised slab rather than a brass: N. Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages (Oxford 2009), 104.

89 Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills, 136; Itinerary of John Leland, I, 92. The tomb chests and armoured effigies of both William and John were transferred to the Rutland mausoleum at Bottesford by their descendant: N. Pevsner and E. Williamson, The Buildings of England: Leicestershire and Rutland (London 1992), 105–06.

90 J. Barker, Stone Fidelity. Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture (Woodbridge 2020), 152–215.

91 Rawcliffe, ‘Stafford, Ralph’.

92 C. Rawcliffe, ‘Stafford, Hugh, second earl of Stafford (c.1342–86)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26206 (accessed 14 November 2022).

93 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Annual Report, Part IV, The Manuscripts of the Duke of Rutland, vol. I (London 1888), 28–30.

94 Ward, Women of the English Nobility, 229.

95 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Annual Report, 28.

96 Ward, Women of the English Nobility, 228.

97 Barker, Stone Fidelity, 127.

98 Harris, ‘Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt’, 21–22.

99 Of Beatrice’s affection for her daughter Elizabeth Clifford there can be no doubt, as she made generous gifts to her and her granddaughter Mathilda, who received a silver-gilt covered vessel that had once belonged to Beatrice’s older son, John: Ward, Women of the English Nobility, 228.