The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - Doncaster to Blyth

The cortège resumed its journey with its banners and torches and attendant ceremonial after a requiem Mass the following morning.  It must have passed along Frenchgate, High Street, past the Carmelite friary, and along Hallgate. The town was enclosed by earthen and timber ramparts, with a ditch on the outer side. Four stone gates on the main roads allowed access. Outside on the south Hallgate cross still exists as a landmark. 

The procession would have passed this and continued southwards in the same way as it had the previous day towards Bawtry and then south-west to cross the small river Ryton to arrive at Blyth and the priory that was to accommodate the Ducal remains that night.

Blyth Priory had been founded in 1088 as a dependency of the Benedictine house of the Trinité sur Mont, later known as St Katherine’s, at Rouen. Like other alien priories the fourteenth century brought problems and in 1409 it was refounded as an independent house. In the fifteenth century it appears very much to have been under the patronage of the duchy of Lancaster, who often appointed the prior, exercising the rights as successors to the founder Roger de Busli, whose Honour of Tickhill was now a part of the Lancastrian estates. The core of the church dates from the late eleventh century and is one of the earliest Norman buildings in England. Architecturally it is of great importance, and closer in style and detail to buildings in Normandy.

Blyth Priory from the south-west

Image: southwellchurches.nottingham.ac.uk

The south aisle was built as a parochial chapel about 1300, and the tower may have been under construction in 1476. Bequests that year and in 1481 for the fabriciae ecclesiae are thought to be for this work, and a bell was acquired in 1509, which helps establish a completion date. 

The crossing tower, transepts, each with an apsidal chapel, and the choir with its apse and aisles with squared-off apses were destroyed soon after the suppression.

The nave of Blyth Priory

                        Image:nottshistory.org.uk

In the fifteenth century the church appears to have been  cut completely in two by the erection of the east wall which was then painted with a Doom, of which only fragments survive. It is dated to the later fifteenth century and in 1476, if not recent work, may still have been in the process of being painted.

There is more about the Doom at Medieval Wall Painting of the Doom, Blyth, Nottinghamshire

 

The east wall of the nave with the remains of the Doom painting

Image: Flickr/derelinquat impius 

The hearse was set up as at Pontefract with the five candelabra and the Office of the Dead sung. Given the probable presence of the Doom I would think the coffins may have lain here rather than in the monastic choir, but the accounts give no indication on this point.

Due to its location Blyth was used to accommodating visitors at the Priory and at inns in the town, or at the two local almshouses. Only a few weeks earlier in 1476 that curiously unsuccessful political prelate Archbishop George Neville, one of the younger brothers of Warwick the Kingmaker, had died on June 8th whilst staying at Blyth. 

 

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - Pontefract to Doncaster

The cortège began the journey to Fotheringhay on the morning of Monday July 21st 1476. The day began with a requiem Mass celebrated in the Pontefract Blackfriars by the Bishop of Durham who also preached. After this he appears to disappear from the record, and presumably returned to his estates as Bishop of Durham or continued his preparations to become Archbishop of York.

This pattern of the evening Dirige and a morning requiem became the daily regimen for the following week as well as the distribution of alms in return for prayers for the deceased.

It was decided to send the bishops and abbots in attendance one or two miles ahead to set up and so that they could be ready in their black copes and white mitres simplex to receive the bodies at the next stational church. 

All the mourners were clad in full length black gowns with hoods to cover the head, and so swathed they prepared for the journey to Fotheringhay.

Following the Requiem the body of the Duke was transferred to the funeral carriage. The contemporary accounts make no mention in this respect of Rutland’s remains. It is therefore unclear if his bones were conveyed with his father or in a separate vehicle.

 

We do have illustrations of this type of four wheeled carriage

The funeral procession of King Richard II

Image: Medieval Histories

A Flemish depiction of the funeral procession 

of King Richard II painted in 1468

Image: Wikimedia / Berlin State Library

The funeral procession of Alexander the Great by Willem Vreelant 1470

Image: Wakefield Historical Society

The carriage was  covered in black velvet which could be drawn back to display the funeral effigy and pall-covered coffin.

The arrangement is very similar to the very impressive funeral vehicle reserved for Dutch monarchs, and used in 1962 and 2004. 

Seven horses, trapped to the ground in black cloth bearing the arms of the deceased pulled the carriage. Such complete covering in black would be rarely seen today, but can be seen in film of the Portuguese 1908 double royal funeral.

At the front of these horses rode Sir John Skipwith with the undifferenced English royal standard to again assert  York’s claim to the throne which he had made in the last months of his life. Behind Skipwith the other six horses were in the charge of three riders who guided the other horse in their pair with a whip and reins.

Accompanying the carriage were three Kings of Arms - March, Norroy and Ireland - five heralds - Windsor, Falcon, Chester and Hereford from England , and Snowdon from Scotland - and four pursuivants - Guisnes, Comfort, Ich Dien and Scales. Some of their titles reflect territorial or heraldic associations of the Duke, such as March and Falcon, whilst the Welsh and Chester titles may be a reference to the fact that when he died, under the Act of Accord, he enjoyed the status and revenues of the Principality of Wales. Scales pursuivant suggests the involvement of Queen Elizabeth’s brother Anthony Earl Rives who was also Baron Scales.

Although clothed in the same mourning gowns and hoods as all the other mourners the Kings, heralds and pursuivants wore their tabards over them. They stood outside the barriers round the hearse when in the various churches.

There were five religious banners depicting the Trinity, Our Lady, St George, St Edward and St Edmund and four with heraldic badges of the Yorkists, the White Hart, the White Lion, the Falcon and fetterlock and the White Rose semme

In addition to the sixty men who had kept watch overnight and were paid twelve pence a day and twenty shillings at their departure - no mean sun in 1476 there wer also hundred poor men who provided an escort. All were clad in the black gowns and carried torches. These may have been like those of linkmen or they may have been the tall tapers which often appear in pictures of the liturgy from the time.

With such a prestigious item as the Duke’s body and the numbers of people involved one wonders if men were sent on ahead to fill in potholes and ruts and effect necessary road repairs in advance of the cortège, or indeed to effect repairs after it had passed on.

King Richard III

Image: Society of Antiquaries / Richard III Society

Leading the procession of mourners was the youngest of York’s sons, the Duke of Gloucester, the future King Richard III. Already battle hardened, having spent time in exile in 1470-71, and increasingly accustomed to exercising delegated royal authority, as well as a married man with both legitimate and illegitimate children, Gloucester was almost three months short of his twenty fourth birthday.

With the Duke were a number of northern nobles who, graded by their rank, had the privilege of joining him within the barriers round the hearse.

Henry, Earl of Northumberland was about twenty seven and related to the York family as is indicated in Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. However his father had died from wounds received at the battle of Towton fighting for the Lancastrian cause. His son had managed to be restored to his attainted inheritance in Northumberland and Yorkshire and contrived to tread a prudent path in his dealings with the Yorkist kings.

Lord Stanley from Lancashire was a man of great influence there and aged about forty one. Not only was he a power in the north-west but was married to the countess of Richmond, Lady Margaret Beaufort, who was to join him at Fotheringhay. There is a biography of him at Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby

Lord Welles held his title jure uxoris He was a younger brother of Lord Hastings, the King’s loyal friend and Chamberlain, but his wife’s family were Lancastrian as is explained at Richard Hastings, Baron Welles. He was in his mid thirties to mid forties.

Lord Greystoke was nearly seventy and another northern Lord who had managed to make skilful political adjustments as can be seen at Ralph Greystoke, 5th Baron Greystoke

Lord Dacre of the North, or of Gilsland, aged about fifty two, was from a Lancastrian family, having fought for King Henryat Towton, but had made his peace with the new situation, as is set out at Humphrey Dacre, 1st Baron Dacre

Lord Mountjoy was about twenty six and his biography is at John Blount, 3rd Baron Mountjoy

Leaving the friary the procession faced the rising ground of Mayors Walk, and the Ackworth and Hardwick roads - the latter being altered in 1820 - before climbing up to Hundhill and then joining the Roman road rising to Barnsdale Bar and turning right along what later centuries would call the Great North Road through Barnsdale towards Doncaster. Leland in the 1530s noted that the area around the town had “good meadowland, corn and some woods.”

Along the way local processions from parishes appear to have joined in. Each priest who had sung Mass for the Duke received twelve pence and each clement four pence. All who came, rich and poor alike received a penny and each woman with a child two pence.. To each parish were given torches, anti sone two, to others less according to need, and four pence to those who rolled bells, as well as the alms distribution at the churches where the body rested, the church itself receiving five or six marks, and the furniture of the hearse. This was to be the pattern all the way to Fotheringhay. Given that the roads taken do not actually pass through many villages it must be assumed that people knew the cortège was going to be in their vicinity and assembled with their parish clergy in advance. This was probably one reason for the fees to bell ringers, the other being that the bells gave a solemn accompaniment to the occasion as the procession moved through the parish.

Doncaster was surrounded by land that comprised part of the York family lordships of Conisbrough and Hatfield. In 1467 King Edward IV had granted it a charter of incorporation. As we shall see along the route he also honoured the town in his own way in 1464 and 1470 by having Lancastrian opponents executed there.

The cortège went to Greyfriars. This was on an island between the river Don and the river Cheswold on a site the Franciscans had partially reclaimed from the rivers. The procession would cross the five arched bridge over the Don and pass through St Mary’s Gate, with its adjacent chantry chapel to the right and the Greyfriars buildings were on the left. A second bridge of three arches led into the town dominated by its fine church of St George - tragically lost in a catastrophic fire in 1853 and replaced by a handsome church by Scott which reproduces some of the features of its predecessor. This would more or less face the Greyfriars across the Cheswold and would have been a recent construction, if not still being worked upon. In the town, described by Leland as built of wood … and are [stone] slated”, was a second friary, that of the Carmelites, which was home to the popular pilgrimage shrine of Our Lady of Doncaster.

St George’s Church Doncaster

An engraving of the church in 1801

Image: Wikimedia / The Tudor Travel Guide

At the Greyfriars the procession was doubtless net by the Mayor, local clergy, with crosses and banners, relics and holy water, plus guilds and fraternities. Alms were distributed to so many people that those recording it lost count. The Franciscan church where the Duke’s remains rested overnight had five altars recorded in 1538, and possessed four bells, which suggests it was larger or more impressive than the Dominican house in Pontefract where the day had started.

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - Preparations at Pontefract

We start today in Pontefract, and with my correction to what is often written these days about the initial burial place of the Duke of York, his son the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Salisbury and Sir Thomas Neville. When Hammond, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs wrote their excellent study in 1996 of the 1476 reburial they were unfortunately advised that the likely burial place was the Cluniac priory of St John, close to the castle.

In fact evidence has long been in print that the burials were at the Dominican friary of St Richard. In 1882 the text of a herald’s list of burials in the Pontefract Blackfriars compiled in 1534 which records the heart burials of the Duke, the two Earls and of Sir Thomas. This would also suggest some attempt at embalming of these ‘celebrity corpses’.

The near-contemporary Croyland Chronicle writing of the 1476 reburial states that 

In the meantime, and while the king was, for some years, as we have already stated, intent upon accumulating these vast quantities of wealth, he expended a considerable part of them in a solemn repetition of the funeral rites of his father, Richard, the late duke of York. For this most wise monarch, recalling to mind the very humble place of his father’s burial (the house of the Mendicant Friars at Pomfret, where the body of that great prince had been interred, amid the disturbances of the time at which he perished), translated the bones of his father, as well as those of his brother Edmund, earl of Rutland, to the fine college of Fodringham,which he had founded, in the diocese of Lincoln, attended by two processions, which consisted both of persons distinguished by birth and high rank : the one being of ecclesiastics, and consisting of the prelates, the other of various peers and lords temporal. This solemnity was performed on certain days in the month of July, in the sixteenth year of the said king, being the year of our Lord, 1476

Source: thewarsoftheroses.co.uk

Two further factors to be borne in mind are firstly that the Cluniac priory in Pontefract was very much under the patronage of the house of Lancaster, housing the shrine of Earl Thomas ‘St Thomas of Pontefract’, beheaded there in 1322, and the recipient of support and gifts from John of Gaunt and the Lancastrian kings. It was therefore an unlikely community to offer burial to the man who sought to dethrone the family. Admittedly it is thought that Earl Rivers and Sir Richard Grey were buried there after their execution at Pontefract in 1483, but that was after a generation of Yorkist rule.

Secondly during the period from the reign of King Richard II until the Boleyn executions of 1536 noble victims of the battlefield or the scaffold were usually interred in friaries. Only when there was not one available, as after the battles of St Albans, Hexham and Tewkesbury, were victims buried in other monastic churches unless there was a specific choice elsewhere such as Humphrey Stafford at Glastonbury or the Salisbury branch of the Nevilles at Bisham. Both the Dominicans and the Franciscan have a particular charism of prayer for the departed.

The Pontefract Blackfriars had been founded in 1256 and lay between the ridge on which most of the town was situated to the west and north and with the road what was, until the early nineteenth century, the main route towards the south on its eastern side. A new cutting in 1820  through the hill to the south west diverted traffic away from the site and the road is now av side street known as Friarwood Lane leading south into Mayor’s Walk. 

There are no remains above ground of the friary, whose site now lies within the precincts of Pontefract Hospital. Excavations in 1963 and in 2011 and 2012 revealed something of the plan but many questions remain unanswered. The site is however protected.

The suppression records from 1538 suggest it was not especially well provided with vestments or plate, but it had two bells and three altars, with ones dedicated to the Virgin and the Dominican St Peter Martyr in addition to the High Altar under the patronage of St Richard of Chichester, the tutor to the founder.

The number of people attending must have been considerable, as no great man, ecclesiastical or lay travelled without a retinue, and the more important the man the larger the retinue. 

Pontefract Castle

A painting of circa 1630

Image: Medieval Histories / Wakefield Council

Some of the principals, such as the chief mourner, the Duke of Gloucester, and his entourage may have stayed at the castle and some of the bishops with the Cluniacs or the Dominicans. The town would have had inns, but I wonder if tented accommodation was a feature, being easily dismantled and sent on ahead to the next stop. This was, for example used in 1541 on King Henry VIII’s progress to the north. All these people needed feeding, probably, or possibly, at the King’s expense or that of their lord.

There would also have been a lot of animals, draught animals for the funeral carriage and for wagons, as well as horses for many of the mourners and their attendants, and all needing food and bedding.

 

Even for a town fairly used to royal and military visits the events leading up to the removal of the bodies must have attracted the interest of the townspeople and offered the opportunity to turn an honest, or dishonest, penny or two. 

The precedents for a royal burial on this scale were few.As far as the Yorkists were concerned the Duke had been king by right if not in fact, and was due appropriate honours. Since the death of King Edward III almost a century earlier there had been the two, highly sensitive, burials of King Richard II and that of King Henry IV had been a probably deliberately understated funeral at his request. The spectacular funeral procession of King Henry V from Vincennes to Westminster in 1422 may have served as an exemplar. I wrote about that in 2012 in The death and obsequies of King Henry V

Meanwhile in the friary church the preparations must have proceeded apace, and possibly been completed on Saturday July 19th to allow for Sunday observances.

The heralds records from 1476 state that the church had been hung in black, decorated with escutcheons of arms. This was standard practice for requiem liturgies, and the mid-sixteenth century London diary of Henry Machyn records his business in hiring out such hangings for funerals in the churches of the capital.

The remains of the Duke and his son were exhumed and coffined or re-coffined and placed in the hearse that had been erected in the church. This was an elaborate superstructure decorated with candles, images, and heraldic pennants. In the middle [ of the choir?] stood a candelabra with branches and four similar smaller ones, one at each corner of the hearse. The hearse decoration  included the arms of the Duke enclosed within the garter borne by angels made out of gold. The whole structure was doubly railed off, and the barriers covered in black cloth. Only close family or the select were admitted into this space.

A modern copy of the drawing of the hearse of Abbot John Islip of Westminster in 1532

The church is hung with what was presumably black hangings as a sign of mourning

Image:Dean and Chapter of Westminster /

 Wakefield Historical Society

The coffin was covered with a pall of blue cloth of gold decorated with a white satin cross and was surmounted by a life-size effigy of Duke Richard, its face uncovered and life-like. His eyes were open to look up at the image of Christ in Judgement, seated on the rainbow. This feature was sometimes included in completed tombs as at Ewelme and Exeter cathedral, and often ‘visible’ only to the person who had been buried. The hands of the effigy were folded in prayer and the figure itself dressed in a gown of dark blue, the mourning colour of kings, with ermine trim.  On its head he wore a purple cap of maintenance also furred with ermine. Behind his head a white angel held a golden crown over it, symbolising that Richard was King by right. There was also a written epitaph or poem celebrating Richard’s life, his achievements and knightly deeds, which was hung on the hearse for all to read and some to copy. We should not underestimate the literacy of the later medieval age. This proclaimed his right to the crowns of England and France. Once the bodies had departed any of the churches at which the procession stopped overnight the hearse decorations, cloths, valances and candelabra were left to the churches as alms.  These materials would have been reused as hangings and altar frontals and used for years hence.  

The funeral of King Ferdinand I of Portugal in 1385 from

Jean Waurin Chroniques d’Angleterre late fifteenth century

The use of heraldic devices is clear, as are the unbleached wax candles 

Image: Wikipedia 

On Sunday night Dirige - the anticipated offices of Matins and Lauds from the Office of the Dead - was sung. This was attended by many bishops, abbots and clergy, as well, no doubt, by many of the laity, doubtless in their black mourning attire,  who would be part of the ceremonial of the coming days. The leading figure of this group was the chief mourner, the twenty three year old Duke of Gloucester, who had presumably travelled from his base at either Middleham or Sheriff Hutton.

The bishops included Laurence Bothe of Durham, where he had been bishop since 1457 and was now Archbishop-elect of York. Until 1461 he had been associated with the Lancastrian court, but rapidly and adroitly repositioned himself under the new regime.Thomas Mylling OSB was a quite recent appointment to the see of Hereford, and formerly abbot of Westminster. As such he had accommodated Queen Elizabeth and her children in sanctuary there during the Re-adeption, and was godfather to the Prince of Wales who had been born there during those months. Also present was the fairly elderly Bishop of ‘Chester’ i.e. Coventry and Lichfield. John Hals had been born about 1400 and had served as Keeper of the Privy Seal twice under King Henry VI. He was to live until 1490. The Bishop of Bangor, Richard Edenham OFM, was also to accompany the bodies to Fotheringhay, as were the Benedictine abbots William Ramsey of Peterborough, John Wardboys of Ramsey and the Cistercian Abbot of Sawtry. These last may reflect the patronage network that looked to the lords of Fotheringhay.

Several choirs provided the music, including that of the Chapel Royal, which later accompanied the bodies on the route and sang at every service on the journey.

The Office of the Dead

From the Llangattock Hours

Flemish 1450-60

Image: Instagram 

After that maybe those involved had a light collation and retired to bed to get a good night’s sleep before the next day’s journey.

Meanwhile in the friary church we may assume the sixty men assigned to watch with torches one the cataphalque for each night of the journey had begun their first such vigil.