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From: John Carmi Parsons< >
Subject: Queen Philippa's birth date
Date: 10 Dec 1998 13:07:17 -0800
I have at last located the published document that gives the date of Queen
Philippa of Hainaut's birth as (on or about) 24 June 1310. The document
appears in D.A. Trotter, "Walter of Stapeldon and the Premarital Inspection of
Philippa of Hainault," *French Studies Bulletin: A Quarterly Supplement*,
no. 49 (Winter 1993), pp. 1-4, with the text itself at the bottom of p. 2.
Walter of Stapeldon was bishop of Exeter, and in 1319 served on an English
diplomatic mission to the Low Countries to negotiate a naval agreement.
As part of their responsibilities, the emissaries also visited Hainaut and
gave Philippa the once-over. It is interesting that she was even then
being considered as a possible future queen of England, nearly a full
decade before Queen Isabella finally closed the negotiations.
The document gives a fairly full physical description of the young girl:
she was well built, without any obvious deformity; good hair, neither
light nor dark; neat head, with a somewhat bulbous forehead (considered a
sign of beauty); her eyes were dark brown, almost black, and fairly close
together (NOT a good sign). Her nose was all right, except the tip was a
bit broad and the nostrils a tad large. The lips were full, especially the
lower one. Her teeth were good, some whiter than others, and the lower row
was noticeably irregular while the upper row protruded just a bit--not too
much. Her skin was brownish, not the translucent white of a romance heroine.
She resembled her father a good deal (a good sign as it suggested she was
more masculine and might well have more sons than daughters), both parents
were very fond of her, and all the courtiers of Hainaut thought well of her
too, as far as the envoys were able to determine.
According to her mother, Philippa would have her ninth birthday at the next
feast of the Nativity of St John Baptist (24 June), which puts her birth on or
near that day in the year 1310. She was thus about two and one-half years
older than her future husband, and would have been about 45 when she bore her
last child Thomas in 1355.
This evidence underlines one point of interest that bears on the recent
thread concerning approximate dates. For a long time Philippa has been
assumed to have been born ca 1314, apparently on the assumption that she
was surely younger than her husband, born in 1312. We were wrong, as
guesswork so often is, even in these ranking families.
John Parsons
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