WHAT MEMORIES WERE PRESERVED about Joan? Just a few vivid cameos and impressions remain recorded. If Richard II had not been deposed, and had left an heir of his body, her memory would have doubtless been honoured as a matriarch of royal lines. However, the Yorkist dynasty (keen to honour Richard's memory) commemorated Yorkist ties with Joan. Among the banners which accompanied Edward IV's coffin in 1483 was one depicting a white hind, called ‘of the Fair Maid of Kent’. Her granddaughter Joan Holand, daughter of Thomas, earl of Kent, and second wife of Edward's forbear, Edmund of Langley, the first duke of York, also had the hind as her badge.

It was crucial for Joan's lack of lasting fame that her tomb was destroyed at the Reformation – in contrast, for instance, to the first two dukes of York buried in the church of the dissolved college of Fotheringhay (Northamptonshire), which remained the parish church. Their monuments survived partly because they were ancestors of Henry VIII. Had Joan's doubtless conspicuous monument and chantry remained at Stamford, they are likely to have renewed interest in her from Tudor times onwards in an era of proliferating antiquarian studies. Had she been buried next to the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral interest in her would never have faded. Indeed if the prince had not predeceased his father by barely a year she would have been queen, but these conjectures, though tempting, add nothing to Joan's story and should be resisted.

We lack evidence that Joan's Holand descendants associated themselves conspicuously with her memory, except for her eldest son Thomas, earl of Kent and his family. Like his daughter, he had a hind badge, depicted on the seal which he used in 1387 and 1396. None of the Holands was buried in her chapel in the Franciscan friary at Stamford. Her son Thomas willed to be buried in Bourne Abbey, as did his grandson Edmund, earl of Kent. Perhaps continuing tittletattle about the marriage of Joan and Thomas induced a wish among their descendants to be distanced from them in death.