SOURCE: “Some Legends Concerning Eleanor of Aquitaine,” Speculum, Vol. 16, 1941, pp. 459-68.

In the following essay, Chambers contrasts the known historical evidence with various legends of Eleanor, including: her supposed participation in the Second Crusade, engaging in several love affairs, causing the death of Rosamond Clifford, and ruling over poetry courts.

Of the few details associated in the common mind with Eleanor of Aquitaine, several are patent fictions which no sober historian would accept, although her biographers have done so all too often. But these stories, false as they are, generally have some basis in fact; and it will be my purpose here to present the facts as they are recorded by Eleanor's contemporaries, and to examine the growth of the legends from them.

I

Eleanor, as everyone knows, inherited about a third of France from her father (William X of Aquitaine), and married Louis VII, who became at...