Eleanor cross

The crosses, erected in her memory, marked the nightly resting-places along the route taken when her body was transported to Westminster Abbey near London.

In her lifetime, Eleanor had been unpopular with the public, particularly for her acquisitiveness regarding land holdings, which had been associated with the abuse of Jewish loans, attracting strong criticism from the church.

The series of Crosses played a role in rehabilitating Eleanor's image as an idealised Queen and woman, as well as projecting royal and spiritual power.

The series has architectural parallels, most notably the 1271 montjoies marking the funeral route of King Louis IX of France, which were designed as part of an attempt to promote his canonisation as a saint.

He was deeply affected by her death and displayed his grief by erecting twelve so-called Eleanor crosses, one at each place where her funeral cortège stopped for the night.

Her body was buried in Westminster Abbey, at the feet of her father-in-law King Henry III on 17 December; while her heart was buried in the church of the London Dominicans' priory at Blackfriars (a house that she and Edward had heavily patronised) on 19 December, along with those of her young son Alphonso, Earl of Chester, who had died in 1284, and of John de Vesci, who had died in 1289.

These were elaborate structures incorporating sculptural representations of the King, and were erected in part to promote his canonisation (a campaign that in 1297 succeeded).

[35] By the end of that period, the crosses at Lincoln, Hardingstone, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans and Waltham were complete or nearly so, and those at Cheapside and Charing in progress; but those at Grantham, Stamford and Geddington apparently not yet begun.

[36] A number of artists worked on the crosses, as the account rolls show, with a distinction generally drawn between the main structures, made locally under the direction of master masons appointed by the King, and the statues of Eleanor, made of Caen stone, and other sculptural details, brought from London.

"[43] The cult of Little St Hugh venerated a false ritual murder allegation against the Jewish community of Lincoln, and was revived after the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290.

Eleanor had been widely disliked for large-scale purchase of Jewish bonds, with the aim of requisitioning the lands and properties of those indebted.

[46] The crosses suffered greatly during the Reformation and the English Civil Wars, as they represented a Catholic worldview, of public iconography.

[50] It stood at Swine Green, St Catherine's, an area just outside the city at the southern end of the High Street, but had disappeared by the early 18th century.

A letter from the 18th-century antiquary William Stukeley (now untraceable) is alleged to have stated that he had one of the lions from Eleanor's coats of arms in his garden.

[56][61] In 1745, William Stukeley attempted to excavate the remains of the cross, and succeeded in finding its hexagonal base[62] and recovering several fragments of the superstructure.

His sketch of the top portion, which seems to have stylistically resembled the Geddington Cross, is found in his diaries in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

[56][63][57] A single small fragment from among Stukeley's finds, a carved Purbeck marble rose, was rediscovered in about 1976, and identified as part of the cross in 1993.

[66] It is possible that the other northern crosses (Lincoln, Grantham and Stamford) were in a similar relatively simple style; and that this reflects either the need to cut back expenditure in the latter stages of the project for financial reasons,[67] or a decision taken at the planning stage to make the crosses progressively larger and more ornate as the sequence proceeded south.

[73] The terminal appears to have gone by 1460: there is mention of a "headless cross" at the site from which Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, watched Margaret of Anjou's flight following the Battle of Northampton.

[74] The monument was restored in 1713, to mark the Peace of Utrecht and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, and this work included the fitting of a new terminal in the form of a Maltese cross.

Celia Fiennes in 1697 describes it as "a Cross, a mile off the town call'd High-Cross – it stands just in the middle of England – its all stone 12 stepps which runs round it, above that is the stone carv'd finely and there are 4 large Nitches about the middle, in each is the statue of some queen at length which encompasses it with other carvings as garnish, and so it rises less and less to the top like a tower or Piramidy.

[52][53] The cross here was built between 1291 and 1293 by John of Battle at a total recorded cost of over £100,[47] with some of the sculpture supplied by Ralph of Chichester.

[97][91][98] It was erected at the south end of the Market Place, and for many years stood in front of the fifteenth-century Clock Tower in the High Street, opposite the Waxhouse Gateway entrance to the Abbey.

A drinking fountain was erected on the site by philanthropist Isabella Worley in 1874: this was relocated to Victoria Square nearby in the late 20th century.

In 1721, at the instigation of William Stukeley and at the expense of the Society of Antiquaries, two oak bollards were erected "to secure Waltham Cross from injury by carriages".

[103][104] The bollards were subsequently removed by the turnpike commissioners, and in 1757 Stukeley arranged for a protective brick plinth to be erected instead, at the expense of Lord Monson.

[114][118] The cross came to be regarded as something of a public hazard, both as a traffic obstruction and because of concerns about fragments of stone falling off; while in the post-Reformation period some of its Catholic imagery aroused resentment, and elements were defaced in 1581, 1599 and 1600–01.

After Charles I had fled London to raise an army, the destruction of the cross was almost the first order of business for the Parliamentary Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry, led by Sir Robert Harley, and it was demolished on 2 May 1643.

Two Purbeck marble fragments of the original cross, displaying shields bearing the royal arms of England and of Castile and León, were recovered in 1838 during reconstruction of the sewer in Cheapside.

The cross here was the most expensive of the twelve, built of Purbeck marble from 1291 onwards by Richard of Crundale, the senior royal mason, with the sculptures supplied by Alexander of Abingdon, and some items by Ralph de Chichester.