Alyce Chaucer

                                       Alyce Chaucer

Tucked away at the end of a straggling Oxfordshire village, very near to the modernity of an RAF base (a modest one, to be sure) is a group of C15 buildings, still serving their original purposes. The history of these buildings, and that of their chief creator and lasting benefactor, is the story in microcosm of that turbulent and significant century.

The village is Ewelme; the airbase is Benson; the benefactor is Alyce Chaucer, granddaughter of Geoffrey the great poet. She live 1404-1475 and is buried in an elaborate tomb in the Church. The other buildings, founded by Alyce, are almshouses and a school, all in continuous use, still supported by her endowments.

Alyce was far more than the pious founder of charities.  Owing to the fortunes of marriages, births and deaths, she became an immensely wealthy wife, widow and mother, and lived at the centre of the fateful politics and conflicts (much the same things) of the C15. Her story touches at every point on the history of the era, which saw the continuation of, and end to, the 100 Years’ War with France and the subsequent civil Wars of the Roses, culminating in the ascendancy of the Tudor Monarchy.

In feudal Europe birth and inheritance were key to power. On the whole, birth had to be legitimate, produced by a marriage lawful in the eyes of Church and monarch. Accordingly, marriage among royalty and aristocracy was an an intricate game: boys and girls (especially girls) were pushed round an uncertain board of snakes and ladders; where success could realise fortune and status , if not a throne, and failure (an ill-judged marriage to the wrong person or at the wrong time) could lead to downfall or death.

Alyce and her family were to enjoy or suffer a goodly amount of such vicissitudes.

One great destroyer of well-laid dynastic plans was untimely death. Infants and very young children frequently perished, causing succession rights to fly off in unexpected directions. Unending military conflicts steadily culled kings and nobility, again disrupting lineages.

Aristocratic family trees in the C15 are spiders’ webs of matrimonial alliances and births, severed by the unexpected; re-spun; severed again- and so on and on.

Such tangles and loose ends inevitably produced the chief engines of wars: rival claims to the same lands; same titles; same throne.

Lands in France and the very  throne itself  were bloodily disputed between the soi-disant royal houses of France and England. And at the end of the century, following the French wars, the rivals to the English throne fought until Henry Tudor (Henry VII) defeated and killed the Yorkist Richard III. Even then, Henry’s right was disputed, until he eliminated the possible alternatives (Alyce’s descendants among them).

Alyce and her family rose and sank among all these treacherous cross currents. Geoffrey Chaucer’s son, like his father, was a successful functionary in England and married a noble-born wife. They owned the land that included Ewelme. Their daughter, Alyce, was “married” at age 10 to another aristocrat (one assumes by proxy: they never lived together ). But Husband 1 went to the 100 Years’ War and died of dysentery. The marriage settlement had been negotiated  favourably to Alyce;at a young age she enjoyed her first well heeled widowhood. Husband 2 was another aristocrat, this time the marriage more conventional in substance. But the French wars were unsparing: at the siege of Orleans Husband 2 was hit by fragments of a cannonball and died. Alyce accumulated more widow’s wealth.

Then came the scaling of matrimonial and political heights. Alyce married a man who became the Duke of Suffolk and both a chief adviser to and general for Henry VI. Status, almost the highest in the realm, seemed assured.

Alas, the Duke overplayed his hand. He led the negotiations for the marriage between Henry and Margaret of Anjou. A secret chapter of the agreement gave away English lands in France, a surrender that rendered others precarious (and eventually lost). When the secret came out, there was political and popular revulsion against Suffolk. He was impeached and sent into exile. On his way over the Channel his ship was ambushed by disaffected sailors and he was murdered.

Husband 3 dead, Alyce married no more, but remained a wealthy Dowager duchess. Her son, now Duke, married high into the ascendant House of York. His son became, from the insistent lottery of premature deaths, the heir presumptive of Richard III. That turned out to be a bad position to occupy. The Suffolks were eventually ruined, one executed, one imprisoned for life, by the Tudors.

Alyce’s legacy remains alive in Ewelme, and she lies there herself in death. She lies alone, styled as Duchess of Suffolk.

Her death’s 550th anniversary in May 2025 was celebrated by a weekend of events that drew together her life, her times, her legacy in a series of excellent talks, together with medieval music in the Church.

A truly memorable aesthetic and intellectual experience.

May 2025