In the second part of her ‘Marriage at Court’ series, Laura looks at the pressures faced by young royal brides to start paying their ‘marital debt’, and its potentially life-threatening consequences.  

In the first of a three-part series on ‘Marriage at Court’, researcher Laura Slater explains how aristocratic marriages were brokered, and how love was mostly for the lower orders of society.

In March, project team member Dr Laura Slater visited the Dr Williams’s Library in London. Her project looks at the cultural patronage of Queen Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III of England, focussing particularly on the manuscripts made for her personal religious devotions. One of these manuscripts, a psalter possibly made for Philippa on her arrival in England in 1327, is today part of the collections held by this fascinating library.