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‘Alionor Cobhame conspyryd the kynges deth’: The Magic Trial of Eleanor Cobham, 1441

My clerks called up and down

All was but mischief that they meant;

Our sovereign lord and king with crown

Him to destroy was our attempt.

Almighty God omnipotent,

He knew full well our cruelty;

Look, for such harms I am now ruined –

All women may be warned by me.1

For Eleanor Cobham—Duchess of Gloucester and wife of King Henry V’s brother—the accusation of magic against her in July 1441 came as a complete surprise. Four of her personal astrologers and nigromancers (magicians who perform magic with the help of demons) and the witch Margery Jourdemayne were also imprisoned for practising magic against the king. At this point, the duchess was aware of her perilous situation. After taking refuge in Westminster Abbey, she was brought before the royal council. The charges were: using harmful magic against the king with the help of Roger Bolingbroke, Thomas Southwell, and other clerics; and ordering a love potion to be made by Margery Jourdemayne so that she could marry the king’s brother Humphrey. Hilary Carey argues that the harmful magic ordered by the duchess was a horoscope predicting the king’s death.2 Contemporaries often regarded astrology as a demonic art, and calculating the date of the king’s death was treason. The duchess’ interest in such a horoscope could be explained by the fact that her husband was next in line to the throne.

In England, the case of Eleanor Cobham is one of the most famous late medieval accusations of magic against a noblewoman. Even contemporaries showed great interest in her trial, as the verse from John Lydgate’s poem, quoted at the beginning of this blog post, shows. But this is not an isolated case. In late medieval England and France, noblewomen were accused of ordering or practising harmful magic against a ruler surprisingly often. Such accusations must be seen in the context of political power struggles. The aim was to cause political damage either to the accused themselves or to their families.

Figure 1: Miniature of Eleanor and Humphrey Gloucester from Thomas Walsingham’s Liber Benefactorum. British Library Cotton MS Nero D VII, fol. 154r.

The Project

My PhD project focuses on accusations of magic against noblewomen in late medieval England and France, examining them as both a political instrument and an imagined reality. The accusation of magic could easily be interpreted as lèse-majesté against God and treason against the secular ruler, as it was based on the accusation of heresy.3 All the women I am studying were very close to the Crown as queens, sisters-in-law, or mothers-in-law of the king. The trials resulted in unprecedented sentences for noblewomen and influenced the development of what we would now call gender equality in criminal law. At the same time, I consider not only judicial cases, but also mere suspicions of having practised magic, directly or indirectly.

I would like to explore how these accusations came about, how they developed, and what their consequences were. Was it possible to combat rumours of magic with a solid network and knowledge of the law? Given the gender-historical approach of the work, I ask further questions about the roles women were expected to play in medieval society. To what extent did the women analysed here deviate from these roles? Is there a link between certain events and allegations, or even between individual cases? My project also aims to shed light on the late medieval understanding of magic, which laid the foundations for early modern witch hunts. I therefore analyse the terminology and concepts of magic used in the sources.

Medieval Magic: A Research Problem

The term ‘magic’ is not easy to define, due to its diachronic changes and the way its connotations have been shaped by modernity and contemporary popular culture. Moreover, contemporaries rarely used the term ‘magic’, and when they did, it was usually in a negative sense. Apart from the main body of critical writings against magic, only a few magical recipe books have survived, giving us a glimpse of how medieval magicians saw themselves. Instead of ‘magic’, various practices such as nigromantie (nigromancy), sortilegium (sorcery), maleficium (harmful magic), and veneficium (the preparation of potions) were referred to in writing and speech. Nevertheless, ‘magic’ is useful as a working tool because of its openness, and I use it as a generic term for all forms of occultism.

Research on medieval magic distinguishes between scholarly magic and so-called ‘common magic’. The former was initially embraced by the clerical underworld and, with the rise of the universities and increasing literacy, by the laity.4 So-called ‘common’ or ‘folk magic’ was a tradition passed down orally from generation to generation. In my opinion, this distinction is problematic because of the lack of written sources for ‘common magic’. It is difficult to form categories when these are hard to analyse due to the source situation. Also, anthropologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries devalued the practice of magic—especially ‘common magic’—as superstition in contrast to religion and science.5 This is a Eurocentric perspective that has long dominated research discourse and still exists today.6 I work with sources which reveal magic was something ordinary that was offered as a commodity. Magic spells and amulets were often used to support religious prayers and petitions. It was only punished in certain circumstances.

My project focuses on groups of noblewomen at court who developed a deep interest in magic, as evidenced by automata, horoscopes, and love and healing potions. This sphere of magic was called ‘courtly’.7 In the late Middle Ages, it was fashionable to have horoscopes cast and to have an astrologer at court. It was also not uncommon for magical experts to be brought in to treat illnesses or to get rid of unwelcome rivals with poisons—not to mention the spells used to control or harm people which have come down to us through magic recipe books.

Archival Works

The accusations of magic that I am analysing come down to us in different ways. If the accusations were sensational, they were mentioned in contemporary chronicles. These chronicles belonged to collections that came into the possession of various libraries, such as the British Library, and as scholars and nobles developed an interest in magical books, they were absorbed into scholarly collections in institutions such as the library of Gloucester Cathedral, or university colleges such as Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. Court records and other administrative documents relating to England are now held at the National Archives in London (Kew). Few personal documents, such as letters, have survived. Fortunately, letters and payment receipts of the duchesses of Brittany and Orleans are now held in the British Library, probably brought to England during the imprisonment of Charles of Orleans and Arthur de Richemont during the Hundred Years’ War.

Figure 2: Roger Bolingbroke’s Horoscope for his Lady, Gloucester, Cathedral Library MS 21, fol. 100r.

What Happened to Eleanor Cobham?

To conclude, I would like to return briefly to Eleanor Cobham’s accusation of magic in order to highlight the potential of my study. The royal jury accused the duchess of using magic against the king in October 1441. As she was deemed to have committed both a secular and an ecclesiastical offence, Eleanor had to do public penance. So, barefoot, she had to place candles on the altars of various churches in London. In addition, her marriage to Humphrey was annulled, so she lost her rank.8 Eleanor was eventually imprisoned until her death in 1452. Her co-defendants Bolingbroke and Jourdemayne were executed. From the different sentences passed, we see that Eleanor received a more lenient punishment. This was because of her noble status, or rather because of a loophole in the law that did not provide for the conviction of noblewomen. The Magna Carta, the code of law, provided only for the judgment of noblemen. In response, Parliament extended the law the following year: female nobles could now be judged, too.9

The GHIL Scholarship

With the financial support of the Max Weber Foundation, I was able to complete my archive tour in England this summer. I had the privilege of visiting institutions all over England and looking at individual manuscripts, something that was not possible on previous trips due to financial and time constraints. For example, this summer I was able to look at the astrological treatises of the aforementioned nigromancers Thomas Southwell and Roger Bolingbroke. One of the astrological treatises was explicitly addressed to a lady known to Bolingbroke (see Fig. 2). Other benefits of my stay at the German Historical Institute in London included the stimulating conversations with other scholars and fellows, as well as the weekly colloquium.


Title quote from John G. Nichols (ed.), Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London (London, 1852), 18.

Feature Image: Eleanor’s trial has fascinated for centuries. This is a Victorian depiction of Eleanor’s penance: Richard Evans, The Duchess of Gloucester doing Penance. From James E. Doyle, A Chronicle of England: BC 55–AD 1485 (London, 1864), 392.

  1. John Lydgate, ‘The Lament of the Duchess of Gloucester, 1441’, in Rossell H. Robbins (ed.), Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), 178. I have edited the Middle English text into Modern English with the help of Jozef van der Voort (GHIL). []
  2. Hilary M. Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 1992), 144–7. []
  3. Andrea Berlin, Magie am Hof der Herzöge von Burgund: Aufstieg und Fall des Grafen von Étampes (Konstanz, 2016), 29; John G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1970), 106–7. []
  4. Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (London, 2014), 63–4. []
  5. See e.g. James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. (New York, 1894); Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris, 1912). []
  6. See Bernd-Christian Otto, Magie: Rezeptions- und diskursgeschichtliche Analysen von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit (Berlin/New York, 2011), 39–132, especially 98–110. []
  7. For an overview, see Kieckhefer, Magic, 95–115. []
  8. Henry A. Kelly, Inquisitions and Other Trial Procedures in the Medieval West (Aldershot, 2001), 227. []
  9. Anne Curry (ed.), The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England: 1275–1504, vol. xi: Henry VI 1431–1445 (Woodbridge, 2005), 1442, no. 28, 367–8. []

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Olivia Mayer (October 31, 2024). ‘Alionor Cobhame conspyryd the kynges deth’: The Magic Trial of Eleanor Cobham, 1441. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved February 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12lox


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Olivia Mayer

Olivia Mayer is a research assistant at the University of Kassel. She is currently working on a PhD project on accusations of magic and charges against noblewomen in late medieval England and France. Her research interests include the English and French late Middle Ages, the relations between the two kingdoms, and female power.

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