Ela Longspée and Ela Longspée

I belong to a web group that occasionally posts 'silly plurals', and here's one for them, I think.  We have here two outstanding women, mother and daughter, both called Ela.  Are they the Ela Longspées, the Elas Longspée, the Elas Longspées?

The first Ela was Countess of Salisbury, and founder of Lacock Abbey.  The second, her daughter, was Countess of Warwick, a patron of Walter of Merton's college at Oxford, and was buried in Oseney Abbey.  Both women were, therefore, patrons and benefactors of the Augustinians.  (L. L. Gee has written about women as Austin patrons, and Emilie Amt has written about Ela II.)  So they can both quite happily appear here!  Let's look at their seals and counterseals.

 These make for a good spot-the-difference.  They are not dissimilar to that of Joan de Munchensy, Countess of Pembroke, who holds a hawk. Joan's background is plain; Ela is surrounded by .  What, if anything, the hawk signifies is discussed elsewhere, but the figure's dynamic-but-elegant pose is worth noting.  Ela I stands between two lions, not so much rampant as climbing the walls.  (Perhaps they're after the bird.)  She stands on a nice corbel.  Her daughter also has a nice corbel, and instead of rampant lions, she has a couple of rampant ramblers.

The counterseals:  both heraldic, showing that the shield had already gone from primarily military to a proclamation of lineage.  Ela I's has the six lions rampant of Longspée.  Ela II has two lions passant above and below her shield, which is encased in a hexafoil.  It has the six lions rampant, and the inscription shows that although she's Countess of Warwick, she's still a Longspée.  It wasn't common for women to keep their names, but not unknown, especially when the woman was descended from people like Ela's parents...  She was Longspée and proud.

Ela's second seal is more mid-to-late century in style, with a church-style canopy.  She stands on a fleur-de-lys corbel.  The three shields on seal and counterseal are hers and her husbands'.  Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick is dexter on the seal; she holds, sinister, her Longspée shield; the counterseal is Philip Bassett.  Again, the counterseal arms are encased in a foil, this time a quatrefoil, with dainty trefoils at the corners, and between two lions rampant.


Another image of Ela II's seal is here, from the Merton College archives.