Eleanor and Elizabeth were the daughters of John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury and his second wife, Lady Margaret Beauchamp. Eleanor was the older sister, born in 1436. At the age of 13 she was married to the much-older Sir Thomas Butler; the couple had no children and she was widowed when her husband was killed about six years later, probably whilst fighting against the House of York. King Edward IV confiscated Eleanor's Warwickshire estates and when she went to Court to appeal the decision, the King took a fancy to her. They may have been lovers; some historians believe she was either married or 'pre contracted' in marriage to the King, but a few years later he married Elizabeth Woodville and Eleanor did not remarry.

Elizabeth was born in 1442 or 1443. She married John de Mowbray, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1444–76), becoming Duchess of Norfolk. They had one child, Anne de Mowbray, 8th Countess of Norfolk. Anne, who was only three years old when her father died, inherited the earldom and his extensive lands and wealth.

In her late 20s Eleanor went to live with her sister Elizabeth in Kenninghall in Norfolk. Eleanor died in 1468 at the young age of 32 and was buried in Whitefriars, the Carmelite Priory in Norwich. 1n 1999, a Lauds for the Dead Service was held at Norwich Cathedral for Eleanor, attended by Corpus Fellow Oliver Rackham, who unveiled a plaque in her honour affixed to an archway which is all that remains of the Priory.

Both sisters were benefactors to the College, financing repairs and alterations to the College and its hostels and commercial properties in the town. Their visible monument are ten of the sixteen buttresses added inside the Old Court (for unknown reasons; they are not needed to hold the building up). In the 1480s Elizabeth approached the sisters' protégé, Thomas Cosyn, by then Master, to set up a memorial to her ‘famous and devout’ sister. This benefaction took the form of a ‘bible-clerkship’, what would now be called a graduate studentship, one of two endowed at about this time.

The totem of the Talbot family, a lop-eared hound called a talbot, sits atop the gable of the Old Court in Free School Lane. The stony bear who accompanies him may commemorate the mysterious figure of ‘the most noble Henry Duke of Warwick’, an associate of the Talbots, who was created Duke in 1444 at the age of 19, died the following year, and somehow appears on the roll of benefactors of a college which he probably never saw.

Elizabeth lived until 1506 or 1507. She is depicted in a stained-glass portrait in Long Melford church, Suffolk. The image is thought to have been the inspiration for John Tenniel's illustration of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland.