To touch a dead king's eyeball.

The trouble with Edward III was his fecundity, with so many children there were going to be problems further down the line. The conflict between his two grandsons, Richard and Henry, was only the beginning. 

Richard II was the legitimate king but unhinged.

The Wilton Diptych is a wonderful piece of art. It also illustrates the scale of Richard's sense of grandeur. It was a travelling altar piece commissoned by Richard at the time of his marriage to the six year old Isabella of France.  The first picture shows Richard being presented to the Virgin and Child by the martyred king St Edmund, Edward the Confessor, and no less than John the Baptist

The panel below, shows his homage being received by the infant Christ and the angels of Heaven, all wearing the king's personal emblem of the White Hart. 

His cousin, Henry, with less right to the throne was made for the job. When the increasingly tyrannical Richard banished Henry and seized his lands it quickly became a matter of life or death – for them both. Henry however prevailed, seizing what proved to be a poisoned chalice. Worn out by his exertions, Henry died in 1413. Deeply religious and consumed by guilt, he asked to be buried next to St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury. 

But even in death, neither king was left in peace.

Henry and his queen, Joan of Navarre

Henry hadn't even been buried before rumours circulated. One in particular. En route to Canterbury a violent storm appeared from nowhere, threatening to overturn the barge carrying Henry’s coffin. Terrified, the boatmen threw the body into the Thames and the storm miraculously cleared. A judgement from God—a monk with a grudge duly noted—an empty coffin being buried at Canterbury.

The story was clearly absurd but in 1832, antiquarians with more time than sense decided to exhume the body just to make sure. 

A section of the elmwood lid was sawn to allow a small cavity. Ropes of twisted hay used as packaging were removed. Beneath that lay a lead shroud in the form of a body. Two workmen removed an oval 7 x 4 inch section of lead only to find five layers of leather wrapping.The indefatigable antiquarians persisted.

The good news: they became the first people for over 400 years to see the face of Henry IV – the lower half at least: a rich auburn beard and a full set of teeth bar one at the front—probably knocked out in battle.

The bad news: an influx of air saw immediate decay, cartilage and nose withered, sank and vanished as they watched, though the embalmed skin remained moist and brown.  Feeling cheated by not being able to see the top part of his face, one enterprising investigator wriggled his fingers in the small space remaining and ‘felt the orbits of the eyes prominent in their sockets.’

Over the years, Richard II's tomb in Westminster Abbey, fell into a gross state of repair. Five metal coats of arms had been stolen leaving behind five holes in the tomb. These remained unsealed for years, allowing  anyone to put their hands inside and have a good grope.

In the 1870’s, under the auspices of Dean Stanley, everything was taken out piece by piece, labelled and catalogued. Queen Anne had more of her bones missing than her husband’s because most of the shield holes had been where she lay. Richard was less badly damaged, though his jawbone was missing. 

In its place were random objects dropped in by visitors to the abbey or the boys of Westminster School: ‘marbles, three tobacco-pipe bowls, seventy-two copper coins, a peach stone; an iron buckle, a copper-gilt button, the bones of a bird; a small broken table-knife, the bell from a dog’s collar; parts of a leather ball.’

Only after  meticulously restoring the tomb to its former glory did Dean Stanley receive a letter from a country vicar; it concerned  a treasured heirloom passed down from father to son— King Richard II’s missing jawbone. 

Back in the 1760s, his grandfather had been one of those sixteen year old schoolboys in Westminster. A fellow pupil had poked his hand through a hole in the tomb and dug a large piece of bone out and passed it out to the schoolboy in question.  It had even been labelled ‘the jawbone of King Richard the Second taken out of his coffin by a Westminster scholar 1766’

Richard II, one suspects, would not have been amused.

 

Should I be worried?

I recently googled Record of a Baffled Spirit to access a previous post. 

To my surprise, I discovered a whole new world: deep AI. I’ve been reading how AI is about to take over the world, at best make us all stupid, at worst terminate us one and all. I considered the options, considered I was fairly stupid anyway and clicked on the AI overview. My mind boggled. The amount of stuff it had dredged up on me—no dental records as yet—and all in semi-readable prose. 

The world and its wife now belongs to AI—largely to our benefit though others may argue. But as AI becomes ever more powerful, where will it all end? At present, it has access to our past, but why stop there? Quantum AI will no doubt predict our future as well: a boon for Insurance Companies, care homes filling vacancies with maximum efficiency, and the euthanasia business looming on the horizon. All very  gloomy for the likes of me who clicks out of idle curiosity and discovers he’s going to die next Tuesday- and no doubt being able to read a pre-written obituary 

Byland Abbey

The grand abbey entrance leading to:

In 1400, a monk of Byland Abbey chronicled how  James Tankerley, a dead priest, rose one night from his grave at the entrance of the abbey’s chapter house. The corpse then wandered into the nearby village of Cold Kirby, and there gouged out the eyes of his former mistress for reasons unexplained. The frightened monks promptly exhumed Tankerley’s body, which was thrown into Gormire Lake, a few miles away. 

It's a nice little ghost story and easy to believe when seeing the ruins of the abbey on a cold winter's night.  Not too hard to believe on wandering through the ruins on an overcast but hot summer's day. There was something about them that reminded me of Pompeii, easy to imagine ghosts lurked there still.

It began in 1177, when on the 31st  October, Cistercians arrived,  dedicating their lives to prayer and hard work. It had been a long journey, starting from the Cumbrian coast 43 years previously and involving several false starts, each time warfare and disputes forcing them to move on, until at last they settled in Byland and there built their abbey.

At the abbey’s  height in the early C13th there were 80 monks and 160 largely illiterate lay brothers who served God with their labour, while the monks sang and praised God in Latin. Monks and lay brothers were strictly segregated, the monks residing in the eastern part of the abbey, the lay brothers occupying the buildings to the west. 

Peace was shattered when Scottish soldiers sacked the abbey after defeating the army of King Edward II at the battle  of Old Byland. According to some medieval sources, King Edward who was at the abbey at the time of the battle, fled in panic when he heard of the defeat. No surprise there.

After that, little changed until 1538 when the monastery was dissolved, the 25 remaining monks were pensioned off and the great buildings left to decay.

It's very easy to wander through ruins, 

harder to work out their meaning and purpose. 

The illustration was a great help, enabling us to locate the east wing where the monks lived and the west wing where the lay brothers were quartered. If you zoom in, you can see how easy it was to locate the most important parts of the abbey.

The Chapter House

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Built in the late C12th. The Chapter House was where the monks gathered for their daily meeting. It would begin with the reading of a chapter from the Rule of St Benedict – a feature of all monastic life – and giving the building its name. Here the dead were commemorated, sins confessed, business done and distinguished guests received. It is believed that a memorial to Sir Roger de Mowbray, the founder of the abbey, was built under one of the niches in the eastern end of the building. Roger himself died on crusade in 1187, his body remaining in the Holy Land. 

The Cloister

The most important buildings of the monastery were arranged around the cloister, it’s central open square planted with fruit trees.

Byland Abbey boasted one of the largest Cistercian cloisters in England, an indication of the size of the community, which in its C13th heyday comprised as many as 240 monks and lay brothers. 

The quiet and seclusion of the cloister made it an ideal location for contemplation and was interpreted by monks as a form of earthly paradise.

On each side of the central square were covered walkways. Here, silence was strictly enforced. The north walkway was used for reading and copying manuscripts, the others  used for religious processions on Sundays and important holy days. 

What was truly amazing was that so much of the original tiling remains intact. You can almost hear the scuff and hiss of Cistercian feet. 

The Refectory and South Range.

Built in the late C12th, the refectory was where the monks dined together as a community. Meals were eaten in silence while listening to a spiritual reading from the pulpit, which would have been in a recess in the west wall. The monks sat at tables around the edges of the building and communicated using sign language.

The diet was healthy by vegetarian standards at least: hot thick soup  and vegetables like peas and beans with bread and ale. Meat was forbidden, but fish, eggs and cheese were allowed on special occasions. Food was served  through a hatch. The refectory, shown in the picture above, was on the first floor and accessed from the cloister by a short flight of stairs. Its position may have been a deliberate attempt to reflect the Upper Room in the New Testament where the Last Supper of Christ and his apostles was supposed to have been held.

And finally, all good things necessarily coming to an end, it was time to go—albeit with a further and more profound disappointment.

The pub opposite the Abbey was closed.