SOURCE: “Legend” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend, Blackwell, 1993, pp. 103-61.

In the following excerpt, Owen discusses Eleanor's chroniclers, particularly on the subject of King Henry's affair with Rosamond, and on the relationship between history and legend.

Historical truth in the Middle Ages was a perishable commodity, apt to degenerate with time. Its recording was largely in the hands of churchmen, who were not above adapting it to their own code of values, slanting it perhaps to the advantage of their own community or to the detriment of a rival cause, and often with the intention of courting the favour of a patron. Such considerations apart, the facts of Eleanor's multifarious activities, wide-ranging in space as well as time, readily lent themselves to honest misinterpretation if not malicious distortion. Not only had she spent her long life caught in countless currents of political intrigue which the best...