ABSTRACT
But these sparse facts represent a packed existence, particularly in her early life. In the space of only two years Alice had been hostage to a king, wife of a turncoat and part of a hurried exile to Normandy. Alice’s hostageship to John on account of her father’s custodianship ts perfectly with Adam Kosto’s denition of a medieval hostage as a type of surety, ‘a person deprived of liberty by a second person in order to guarantee an undertaking by a third person’,2 whilst her experience in the midst of the loss of Normandy demonstrates her potential greater importance as a ‘[pawn] in a complex, multilateral political game’.3
