The Drummer of Niklashausen

Having spent the last few days blogging about events in England in July 1476 I shall remain in that year to look at, and share, one of the more notable events of that spring and summer, the story of the Drummer of Niklashausen. 

I first encountered these events in the pages of Norman Cohn’s fascinating and stimulating The Pursuit of the Millenium about popular movements with apocalyptic or chiliastic aspirations or claims. 

Some years later I discovered Richard Wunderli’s Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen which I strongly recommend as a piece of history about localised events and their implications. In it Wunderli looks at the events of those months in 1476 when the eponymous drummer, an eighteen year old shepherd called Hans Boehm ( Böhm), attracted a considerable following which, moving from being a religious revival with bonfires of the vanities in no short order to calls for social and religious revolution and alarmed the local seigneurial and ecclesiastical authorities into taking drastic action which culminated in Boehm being arrested, convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in Würzburg on July 19th. Even with his final and fiery end the movement he had initiated retained some life into the next year.

 

Wunderli’s book investigates these events rather like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie did with his study of residual Catharism in Montaillou and allows the reader through such mentalité history to enter into the world of communities in the past.

 

The story of Hans Boehm is set out well with quotations from contemporary or near-contemporary sources on the Executed Today website at 1476: Hans Bohm, the Drummer of Niklashausen

There is another online piece which draws on Cohn’s book and explores the context of these radical movements in Germany which can be read at The Drummer of Niklashausen – Andrew James

There is a review of Wunderli’s book which may also be of interest here

Another article which has a number of sayings made by, or attributed to, Boehm, and which also stresses his illiteracy can be seen at Client Challenge

Hans Boehm was apparently born at Helmstadt, mid-way between Wurzburg and Niklashausen, in 1458. His surname might possibly suggest that his family originated in Bohemia, with its Hussite and Taborite ideas, or that it was a nickname associating him with such radicalism. In 1466-7 a feud between the local landowner, John Count of Wertheim, and the Teutonic Knights had resulted in Helmstadt and two neighbouring villages, Roßbrunn and Uettingen being burned to the ground.

Niklashausen today

Image: Wikipedia 

Boehm worked as a shepherd and as an entertainer playing his pipe and drum at village celebrations in the Necker valley around Niklashausen. That, as the accounts linked to above recount, all changed the cold winter night early in Lent when young Hans, watching over the sheep, had, or claimed to have, a vision of the Virgin Mary.

Hans Boehm has his vision of the Virgin Mary

A woodcut from 1493

Image:jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net

This event set in motion the events at Niklashäusen  when, renouncing his vanities Hans burned his drum and pipe. One suspects this was a real sacrifice as he probably owned very little. 

Visions are unquantifiable. Those who receive than are often disbelieved as we know from seers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We have no way now of establishing whether Boehm’s vision was genuine, an innocent mistake, a delusion or fraudulent.

Nor can we be certain whether he was an innocent abroad, or a victim manipulated by the beghard hermit, or deluded by becoming a popular hero and the centre of attention.

The Beghard’s cave Niklashausen 

Image komoot.com

His increasingly radical message may be a result of whatever his original message was running out of control as he responded to the crowds. He may have been illiterate, but he appears to have been an effective public speaker.

Did he consciously or unconsciously say what the peasants wanted to hear? Why did it also appeal to townspeople, people perhaps more likely to have the vanities, the pointed shoes and the long hair to sacrifice to a bonfire of vanities?

Niklashausen from the Beghard’s cave

Image: komoot.com

His message was in many ways very localised to the Necker valley and its economic and social structure. He may well have never travelled further than the area around Helmstadt, Niklashausen and Wurzburg.

 

The Marianberg castle at Wurzburg where Hans Boehm was imprisoned and interrogated 

Image: Facebook 

The fears of the crowd, and indeed of the executioner, indicate a series of beliefs about the supernatural that probably seem strange to most modern people, but which in the late fifteenth century were very real for the people, peasant and townsfolk alike, of the Main and Necker valleys.

The execution of Boehm and his two companions from The Nuremberg Chronicle

Image: executedtoday.com

There are modern memorials to Boehm in Wurzburg in the site of his execution and in Helmstadt. 

 

There are significant similarities to the events of the Peasants War of 1525 or to the 1514 Hungarian peasant revolt led by Győrgy Dózsa to make the modern observer see more than just peasant disgruntlement. The Wurzburg authorities in 1476 may well have nipped in the bud a much more serious uprising.   

It was also at this time that writers in Germany began to compile and publish works on witchcraft which was increasingly coming to be seen as actively evil and Satanic rather than as something that was not approved of, but which the Church could contain, tolerate and marginalise.

Cohn’s study of such radical movements was in part a response to the events of the twentieth century, notably in Germany. It is perhaps not entirely facetious to wonder if  the German synodical church movement has older roots than Vatican II.

Was Hans Boehm an unrecognised saint, a gullible victim of manipulative people, a proto-social revolutionary, a deluded or dangerous simpleton, a mixture in differing ways of these and other factors? We cannot know, but we can be intrigued by his story.

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - an afterword

As the captains and the kings depart Fotheringhay it is reasonable to ask what happened subsequently.

The interior of the nave at Fotheringhay church

Image: jamesparsons.org

In 1482-3 King Edward IV assigned £100 to build his father’s tomb in the choir of the collegiate church, but nothing survives of that. In 1495 Duchess Cicely died at Berkhamstead Castle having outlived all but two of her children, and was taken to lie beside her husband at Fotheringhay. 

The pulpit in the church given by King Edward IV

Image: Facebook 

The Royal Arms in the pulpit 

Image: Facebook

In 1548 the college was dissolved and the choir abandoned, the parishioners just using the nave. A surviving inventory list remains of the hearse from 1476, and items such as altar frontals of white sarcenet with garters, of white sarcenet with fleur de lys and of red sarcenet with the Yorkist fetterlock badge together with what was described as a herald’s tabard of velvet with gold embroidery, but which may well have been part of the harness offered up at the burial. The altar frontals were probably made from the fabric offered at the funeral ceremonies.

In 1566 Queen Elizabeth I visited Fotheringhay and was shocked at the state of her ancestors’ graves and arranged for their removal to the sides of the parochial altar where the bodies remain in their matching monuments.

A commission appointed by the Queen arranged for the demolition of the remains of the eastern portion of the church in 1573.

Fifteen years later the castle witnessed the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots and thereafter the castle was left to decay. It was demolished in the 1620s and 1630s, leaving only the earthworks of the motte and ditches and one small fragment of exposed walling.

 

The Elizabethan monument to Duke Richard and Duchess Cicely in Fotheringhay Church

Image: warmingtonbenedice.org.uk

If the reburial had been a celebration of the Yorkist dynasty then it was really almost the last opportunity for such an event.

Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy appears nowhere in the records of the reburial - not in person, or proxy, and with no Burgundian ambassador. Her husband Duke Charles, the erstwhile ally of her brother, was busy, and unsuccessfully, fighting the Swiss, being defeated by them at Grandson and Morat, in 1476, and was finally slain by them in the snow at Nancy in January 1477. Much of the remainder of Margaret’s life was to revolve around supporting her stepdaughter Mary and her husband Maximilian in their struggles with the French and with rebellious Burgundians, when she was not supporting or encouraging Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck. Whoever we may think they were, at Fotheringhay in the summer of 1476 such a scenario would have been unthinkable.

In December 1476 the Duchess of Clarence died and the loss of Isabel appears to have tipped George into increasingly irrational and indeed criminal and then treasonous behaviour. In consequence the King had him arrested, tried in Parliament and sentenced to death - according to legend by drowning in a butt of malmsey wine.

King Edward, now guilty of fratricide, remained ever self-indulgent, and angered when King Louis abrogated the deal they had struck in 1475. When King Edward died suddenly early in April 1483 the Yorkist house turned out to be one of cards. Amongst those at Fotheringhay Earl Rivers and Lord Hastings were beheaded as was the Queen’ second son, Richard Grey. One person whom one might have expected at Fotheringhay, the Queen’s almost twenty one year old brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham was not present. By background his family were Lancastrian rather than Yorkist, although his paternal grandmother was one of the sisters of Duchess Cicely, but by the mid 1470s as he achieved adulthood he would have seemed to have accommodated to the new dispensation, although he was by no means close to the King. He too did not survive 1483.

 

Of those at Fotheringhay who not only survived but prospered there was only really the Countess of Richmond and her husband Lord Stanley.

  

At the centre of all the events we have followed were whatever earthly remained of Richard Duke of York and his second son. The Duke has had some academic and some more popular biographers in recent years, but he remains enigmatic.

The epitaph on his hearse is given in Hammond, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs’ splendid compilation, and as a statement of the Yorkist claim and of filial piety is what one would expect. 

  

 The opposite view might be that he was a blundering and not very bright magnate who pitched the country into what we now usually call the Wars of the Roses for his own selfish ends, and that the consequent bloodshed - and there was a lot on battlefields and scaffolds - could well be laid very firmly at his feet. All those requiem masses may well have been very necessary for his eternal salvation.   

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - Funeral and Funeral Feast

 

Bishop Rotherham leads King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth and their court in prayer to the Holy Trinity 

From the frontispiece to the Luton Guild Book circa 1475

Image: Instagram - Natalie Grueninger

The funeral ceremonies were held on the Tuesday. 

Liturgically this began with three High Masses, those of Our Lady, of the Trinity,  and of Requiem. According to the herald’s description all three were offered by Bishop Rotherham, which seems unusual. It may mean that he presided in pontificals from the throne and that others actually offered the Mass. Bishop Rotherham also preached “a very noble” sermon. Meanwhile the service for Rutland was held in the Lady Chapel “as befitted his estate”.

At the offertory King offered the Mass penny for his father, making an obeisance as he passed the coffin. The Queen, not wearing a high headdress, offered next making “a great obeisance and reverence” and then similarly her two daughters. They were followed by the 

Countess of Richmond who had presumably joined her husband Lord Stanley from her castle at Bourne in Lincolnshire. It is tempting to speculate what she was thinking, other than as a pious woman fulfilling her Christian duty to pray for the dead.

The two French ambassadors, representing King Louis XI were escorted by two unnamed earls to make their offerings and two barons similarly escorted the two Danish ambassadors representing King Christian I. A single baron escorted the Portuguese ambassador representing King Afonso V to make his.

Following this Norroy King of Arms presented the Duke’s coat of arms which was received by an unnamed earl. March King of Arms presented the Duke’s shield, which was also received by an unnamed earl.Whether this was the same peer is not specified, nor the form of the arms, that is, whether they were his arms as Duke of York or the undifferentiated Royal arms as rightful king. Ireland King of Arms offered the sword and two heralds, Windsor and Snowdon, the helmet

Lord Ferrers presented the harness [the suit of armour] and the courser by riding it into the church escorted by barons, knights and two heralds. In his hand he carried a axe with the point downwards. The courser was black and richly trapped to the ground “with the whole anrms” and was led to the gate of the choir where the animal was received by the deacon. After this the sermon was delivered and more cloths were laid on the coffin. According to one of the descriptions the King offered to the body and coffin seven pieces of cloth of gold five yards long, by the hand of his Chamberlain, Hastings, and the Queen through her Chamberlain six pieces five yards long. Each Duke offered five, each earl three, and each baron and  “the lowest esquire” one.

Following the funeral there was, as custom demanded, a feast. The surging accounts only really cover this aspect of the reburial - there is nothing to indicate the costs of  the cortège from Pontefract or of the alms distributed. However Chester Herald recorded that at the end of the ceremonies in addition to their robes, hoods, and expenses the Office of Arms received £20. What does survive, and it is detailed, is given in Hammond, Sutton and Visser-Fuchs’ study. 

Over the four days from July 28th to 31st something like two thousand people were fed each day. By contrast the population of Fotheringhay in the sixteenth century is estimated at about three hundred, and in the 2011 census was 119. 

The King’s pavilioner had been busy erecting ‘halls of canvas’ for mourners to rest, wheat and sleep as well as an open air cooking site set up with ‘rakkes’. Four crates were required for ‘tentes’. Carpenters were employed to make tables, forms and trestles in ‘hales’ and ‘tentes’ and other places in the castle. Linen for table cloths was bought.

Goods were brought from, and later returned to London. 31 tuns and 180 gallons of ale, 40 pipes of wine from the royal cellars, 2000 wooden bowls, 1088 clay pots, 49 beef cattle, 210 sheep, 90 calves, 200 pig, plus fish and poultry, and 182 quarters of charcoal were all purchased .

 

The fish included two fresh salmon and 100 salt fish. The poultry included capons, cygnets, hens, partridges, pheasants, herons, ‘wypes ’[ lapwings or peewits, known in eastern England as piewypes] coneys, ‘rabettes’, chicken, plus milk, ‘creme’, ‘butir’ and eggs. William Strode was paid for transporting the poultry for thirty one days with his five horses £10.6.8, including 6.8d as a reward.

Pewter vessels cost £6.18s, and ‘disces and plates’ of wood £7.19.4.

The spicery cost £8.15s, and 10.8d carriage from London. Mustard, vinegar and verjuice were also bought and a barrel of honey cost 26.8d and 14 gallons more was bought at 14d a gallon

Bread was brought from Stamford and carriage paid for it, which doubtless kept the bakers of the town very busy.

Though it is not recorded in the paymentsthere would also have been fodder for the animals that brought mourners and goods to Fotheringhay.

Such a funeral cost a great deal. That of the Earl of Northumberland, who had accompanied the body from the north band was at Fotheringhay, at Beverley in 1489 following his murder, cost over a thousand pounds. If the catering seems striking, it was as nothing compared with the late Archbishop George Neville’s gargantuan enthronement feast at Cawood in 1465. This was a time when prodigality was in indicator of status and grandeur.

It was also an opportunity to share with not only those attending but to also use why was left over for charitable gifts to the less well-off and the poor. They turned up to grand funerals to receive basic necessities and occasional treats in return for their prayers.

 

As Thomas Whiting, Chester herald recorded  “during Mass and afterwards all who came each had a penny and each woman with child two and on the said day up to five thousand people who came to receive alms were counted; and there were also tents and pavilions and halls of canvas where people could sit and rest and there were as many as 1500 places where they could sit and eat, beside other, reserved places and apart from the court of the King were counted as many as twenty thousand [sic] people; there was enough to drink and eat of wine and meat for everybody.”

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1475 - Stamford to Fotheringhay

The usual morning routine was repeated for the last time as the bodies began the last stage of their journey and left the Stamford Greyfriars. Passing once again through the town to St Mary’s church the procession would have turned in the shadow of the church tower and spire to the left and down the slope to cross the bridge over the Welland and then climb up through the Stamford Baron parish of St Martin to the open road south towards Fotheringhay

One of the accounts in French records that on  “the 29 day of the said month the said body was moved from Stamford to Fotheringhay ... it was received very honourably by the said town of Stamford and by all the houses of religion and all the parishes. And it was received on the way by all the local processions and again torches and alms were given to all who came.”

 

The houses of religion would have been the Austin, Carmelite, Dominican and Franciscan friaries, and also the Benedictine St Leonard’s Priory, which was a cell of Durham Cathesral priory, but which in 1440 only two monks.

Stamford today has five surviving medieval parish churches, and the remains of two others but there were fourteen parishes in the medieval town together with that of St Martin in Stamford Baron, south of the river Welland, which was part of the fief of Peterborough Abbey. Those in the borough were consolidated into five under an Act of Parliament in 1548. 

So if the monastic houses and the parishes all turned out as the account seems to imply the Stamford element in this stage of the procession must have been quite considerable.

 

  

Fotheringhay Collegiate Church of St Mary and All Saints

Image: The Tudor Travel Guide

There is a good illustrated account of the church together with a plan and picture of the reconstruction model at Fotheringhay

A reconstruction model of the church and college at Fotheringhay

Image: Wikimedia 

When the procession arrived at Fotheringhay it looks as if the leading figures who has escorted the bodies now took their places alongside other nobles and bishops.

The first group to meet the procession “with great reverence” was the collegiate body of clergy accompanied by the bishops, both those who had travelled from Pontefract with the remains, although the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield has disappeared from the list, so he may have dropped out at some point, and those who had travelled directly to Fotheringhay, together with the Dean of the King’s Chapel.

At the entrance to the churchyard the body was removed from the carriage and borne by twelve knights, with the banners borne by six others.

King Edward had awaited the arrival of the remains of his father and brother at the gate of the churchyard. Clad in mourning dark blue with the hood furred with miniver the handsome auburn haired six foot four Yorkist “golden boy”, noted for his accessibility and affability, but also ruthless with his most of his opponents, might still appear splendid on a public occasion, but he was already showing signs of too much good living. The Burgundian-French chronicler Philippe de Commynes had been awed by the King’s physical presence when in exile in 1470-71, recalling that “he was young and more handsome than any man then alive”, but when he saw him again in 1475 he noted that the English king might look splendid but was starting to get fat. The King was “already by then accustomed … to more luxuries and pleasures than any prince of his day because he thought of nothing else but women ( far more than is reasonable ), hunting and looking after himself… later be became very fat” and in later life he was “a ponderous man who was much addicted to his pleasures.”

  

 The Continuator of the Croyland Chronicle wrote that the King “stood out because of his elegant figure” yet “was thought to have indulged too intemperately his own passion and desire for luxury” “Men of every rank marvelled that such a gross man so addicted to conviviality, vanity, drunkenness, extravagance and passion could have such a wide memory of the names and circumstances of almost all men, scattered across the counties of the kingdom, were known to him just as if they were daily within his sight, even if … they were reckoned of somewhat inferior status.”

 

King Edward IV

A painting of circa 1510, taken from a lost original. Note the developing double chin

Image: Society of Antiquaries 

The King made his obeisance to the coffin, laid his hand on the effigy, kissed it and wept. He then, with his brothers the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, brother-in-law the Duke of Suffolk, stepson the Marquess of Dorset, the Earls of Lincoln, Northumberland, Essex, Kent and Rivers, and Lords Stanley, Hastings, Audley, Dacres, Greystoke and Welles escorted the body to the choir where it was immediately placed in the hearse that had been commissioned. The King entered his closet - his private, enclosed pew - the princes went into the hearse and the officers of arms, their tabards worn over their mourning habits, stood on each side. According to one account the body of the Earl of Rutland remained with his father whilst the other states that it was taken to the Lady Chapel at the east end of the church. Also present were the Queen and two of her daughters - presumably the eldest, Elizabeth and Mary - and many ladies, both married and unmarried, and all in mourning attire. 

Following a sermon Placebo and Dirige were started and at the Magnificat at the King’s command his Chamberlain Lord Hastings laid seven five yard lengths of cloth of gold on the effigy and the Queen’s Chamberlain, Lord Dacre of the South, offered one five yard length which were laid in the form of a cross. Assuming these were pieces of hand-woven Italian silk they would have been quite narrow because of the nature of the looms.

 

George Duke of Clarence

A late sixteenth century probably based on a lost original 

Image: Daily Express / Philip Mould & Co

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

Whilst the remains of the Duke of York and his son rested in the Greyfriars church in Stamford preparations for their reception, and that of the Royal family and other noble mourners, together with many more ecclesiastics, were no doubt gathering apace a few miles down the road at Fotheringhay.  

The castle at Fotheringhay had been given to the first Duke, Edmund of Langley, who was still only Earl of Buckingham, by his father King Edward III in 1377. When Duke Edmund died in 1402 he was buried at his birthplace of King’s Langley, but his son, Duke Edward, who was killed at Agincourt in 1415 after a politically adventurous life, was buried at Fotheringhay in the collegiate church he had founded in 1411, and in whose construction Duke Richard had been a prime mover from 1434, just after he came of age and was in charge of his estates.

A reconstruction of Fotheringhay Castle

The collegiate church can be seen in the background 

Image: Facebook 

 

Reconstruction of the entrance to Fotheringhay Castle

Image: englandexplore.com

 

At Fotheringhay awaiting the procession were King Edward IV, Queen Elizabeth, some at least of their daughters, the King’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, their brother-in-law the politically ineffectual John, Duke of Suffolk, who was married to their sister Elizabeth, bd their eldest son the Earl of Lincoln.

 

    

The effigies of the  Duke and Duchess of Suffolk on their tomb in Wingield church in Suffolk

Image: the historyjar.com

Their eldest sister Anne, Duchess of Exeter, had died earlier in the year and their youngest sister Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy does not appear in the record. Their mother Cecily Duchess of York does not appear to have been present.

Also present were the Queen’s son from her first marriage, the Marquess of Dorset, and her eldest brother, Earl Rivers. 

Anthony, Earl Rivers

Images: discogs.com

Duke Richard’s brother-in-law the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Kent were also present. Essex was descended from King Edward III and his siblings married well or, the case of his brother Thomas Bourchier, became Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury. Like Essex Kent owed his earldom to King Edward, and his son was to marry one of Queen Elizabeth’s sisters.

Also present were King Edward’s close friend and Chamberlain Lord Hastings, Lord Dacre of the South, the Queen’s Chamberlain, and Lord Audley. These peers were basically, or had become, staunch supporters of the house of York, but not a few had fathers who had fought for the Lancastrians. The regime might look impressive on occasions like this, but it lacked depth.

In addition to the bishops and abbots who had journeyed from Pontefract there now gathered at Fotheringhay the diocesan bishop and Chancellor of the realm, Bishop Thomas Rotherham of Lincoln.

The Bishop of Ely, William Grey, was a scholar and a peacemaker, and the son of Sir Thomas Grey who had been a co-conspirator with Duke Richard’s father, the Earl of Cambridge in the Southampton Plot of 1415, which cost them both their heads.

The Bishop of Norwich, James Goldwell, had served as secretary to the King, and as a diplomat at the Holy See and in negotiations with Denmark and France, before becoming a bishop in 1472. He was notable as a benefactor, including completing rebuilding the spire and adding the presbytery vault in Norwich cathedral following a fire in 1463.  

The Bishop of Salisbury, Richard Beauchamp had started his episcopal career in 1448-9 under King Henry VI but was now closely associated with the King’s project to rebuild St George’s Chapel at Windsor 

    

King Edward IV and Bishop Richard Beauchamp kneel before the Cros Gneth, which was kept at Windsor.

A boss in the south choir aisle of St George’s Chapel

Image: The Review

Bishop Edward Story of Carlisle was Queen Elizabeth’s confessor and was later to be translated to Chichester

The effigy of Bishop Edward Story 

in Chichester Cathedral

Image:Facebook

Bishop Richard Redman of St Asaph was a distinguished Premonstratensian who was to be translated to the much more prestigious sees of Exeter and Ely under King Henry VII.

Meanwhile as these dignitaries, and their travelling households, arrived and were given accommodation at the castle, in the inns in Fotheringhay, or in temporary accommodation, elsewhere the royal kitchen staff were doubtless already well advanced in preparing the funeral feast. They would have a lot of mouths to feed.

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - Grantham to Stamford

 

Following the morning’s main requiem and the celebration of many other Masses, as one of the two accounts written in French records, “the said body was moved from the side town of Grantham and was escorted and received honourably by the whole town and the county around it as far as Stamford and there was received by the lords of the neighbourhood and the citizens of the dais town, all dressed in black and by all the archers of the crown.”

 

The cortège would have moved through the town from 
west to east and finally leaving the walled area came to the Greyfriars, who alongside the Dominicans and the Carmelites had their monastery outside the north-eastern town wall. Here the hearse was again set up as at the previous stations “and large gifts were given there especially to the churches and to all who came great and small.” There the body remained for the rest of Saturday and through Sunday until it was removed to Fotheringhay on the Monday. 

 

Stamford

John Speed’s map of 1610

The Greyfriars was to the east of the town with, according to the traditional identification the Carmelites to the north and the Dominicans, the ruins of whose buildings are shown, to the south

Image: Wikimedia 

The main buildings of the friary are lost but it is recorded that Joan, Princess of Wales, mother of King Richard II, was buried with her first husband Sir Thomas Holland in a “sumptuous chapel …next the choir”

What used to be identified as the gateway of the Whitefriars is now thought to have been that of the Greyfriars, and that the locations of the two monastic houses have been transposed since the end of the sixteenth century.

 

 

The late fourteenth century friary gateway

 

Image: stamfordsecretstours.com

As the procession approached Stamford from the north it would have passed the site of the battle of Losecote Field in March 1470 when King Edward having had two hostages, Lord Willoughby and Welles, father of the rebel leader Sir Robert Welles, and Sir Thomas Dymoke, the King’s Champion, beheaded in front of both his army and that of the rebels, went on to scatter his opponents. For survivors from the Yorkist army this was doubtless a time for reflection on the events of that day.

Stamford itself was a town with strong ties to the house of York and in 1461 had experienced the wrath of the Lancastrian army. At one time it was claimed the town had been devastated but a more likely interpretation is that as at Ludlow in 1459 after the stand-off at Ludford Bridge the town was pillaged for alcohol and provisions.

   

Some months later in 1461-2 King Edward IV granted Stamford a charter of incorporation. 

Later fifteenth and early sixteenth century Stamford was clearly a prosperous town as evidenced by the churches of All Saints, St John, and St Martin as well as Browne’s Hospital, which was initially founded in 1475. There is more about it at History and buildings | Browne's Hospital, Stamford

 

All Saints Church Stamford

The south wall above the thirteenth century arcading, the clerestory and the tower and spire were rebuilt after 1470 in an initiative funded by the wealthy wool merchant Browne family

Image: britainexpress.com

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1475 - Newark to Grantham

Presumably following the established daily pattern, the cortège now moved south-east from Newark into the gently rolling landscape of Kesteven in Lincolnshire.

Here just before arriving at their destination the participants encountered probably the most formidable obstacle on their route in what is today known as Gonerby Hill, but would then have probably been Gunwardby, before evolving into Gunnerby. The correct pronunciation is still “Gun” not “Gone”.

The hill rises up before descending again to Grantham. In the coaching era on the Great North Road it was considered the steepest climb on the journey and attempts were made to improve the gradient in the 1820s and later. However it remains a considerable haul to the top, and was not by-passed until the 1960s by what is now the A1. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was a haunt of highwaymen and the White Hart at Newark reputedly had a notice advising travellers that if they could not get over “Gunnerbi” by nightfall they had better spend the night in Newark.

Assuming that the procession did not wind its way through the villages to the west all those involved must have taken a deep breath and braced themselves for the climb to the village of Great Gunwardby/Gonerby. Maybe they paused by the church with its rare dedication to St Sebastian, and whose clergy and parishioners may have joined in, and then made the descent to the market town of Grantham, clustered to the west of the towering spire of the parish church of St Wulfram. This very handsome church is again an indicator of the wealth of the parish, particularly in the fourteenth century with its great array of windows notable for their tracery. It is perhaps unusual in not having a clerestory, which in consequence gives it a rather tunnel-like interior.

Grantham Church

Image: Tripadvisor

The west front of Grantham Church 

Image: Wikipedia 

However this was not the destination for the bodies in the carriage(s) at the heart of the procession. The bodies were received by the people of the town all dressed in black, together with the local processions, and alms were once again distributed. 

The bodies were then conveyed to the Franciscan friary at the west end of the Market Place. There Placebo and Dirige were celebrated and another requiem the following morning.

Today nothing remains above ground of the Grantham Greyfriars and excavations on the site have yielded little so far. The church had at least four altars and the friary was able to accommodate a meeting of the Premonstratensian Provincial Chapter in 1492. It was well provided for with a water supply carried in lead pipes from Gonerby which had been created in the early fourteenth century.

Some of those involved in the procession may have stayed at the Greyfriars but otherwise the various inns of Grantham would have provided accommodation. As a town it was doubtless used to travellers and traders coming or going to the great port of Boston to the east or spreading out to the midland towns and noble estates. Just over two centuries later, when the overall population had increased considerably, a War Office report in 1686 records 285 guest beds as being available and stabling for 351 horses in Grantham.

One of those inns still survives as a hotel, its Perpendicular stone facade facing the market place being a notable feature of the High Street. The Angel and Royal apparently originated as a Templar hostel established in 1203, but which subsequently became an inn as the Angel. It there that King Richard III was staying in 1483 when he was apprised of the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion. It only gained the appellation “and Royal” in 1866 following a visit by the future King Edward VII.

 

The Angel and Royal in Grantham

Image: angelandroyal.co.uk

Interior of one of the oriel windows 

in the ‘chamber de’ roi’ or King’s Room in the Angel and Royal and which extends the length of the frontage

Image: thegreatnorthroad.co.uk/Rex Gibson

 

 Grantham was a town with Yorkist affiliations and may have suffered in consequence when the Lancastrian army passed through in 1461. King Edward IV gave it a charter of incorporation in 1463 and further honoured it staging the beheading of two Lancastrian prisoners in the town after the Lincolnshire Rising of 1470. One of the victims, Sir Thomas de la Launde, was a local Lincolnshire landowner and well-known jouster, and was buried in the Greyfriars.

For those accompanying the cortège the next day’s journey to Stamford was to be the penultimate day of travelling, followed by a rest day in Stamford before the final journey to Fotheringhay.

The reburial of Richard Duke of York 1476 - Tuxford to Newark

Having spent the night at Tuxford those involved in the conveyance of the bodies would have started the ceremonial of the day with the day’s requiem Mass in the church at Tuxford, as well as many others, before moving off south-eastwards in the direction of Newark and the next break in the journey. Once again the procession was joined along the way by those from local parishes.

 

The spire of Newark parish church would have become visible across the gentle landscape long before the sombre procession made its way along the causeway over the flood plain of the Trent towards the bridge into the town.

Newark is the lowest bridging point of the Trent and the town had grown up on the east bank of the river in the shadow of the castle of the lord of the area, the bishops of Lincoln. It had been Bishop Alexander the Magnificent, 1123-1148, who had built the castle and later the bridge which drew travellers and trade to he town. The current Bishop of Lincoln, whom we shall meet at Fotheringhay, Thomas Rotherham was engaged in these years in making improvements to the castle and his arms are to be found on one of the new windows he installed facing the river.

Newark Castle

Image: Nottingham World / Richard Nevell

Crossing the bridge the procession made its way through the streets of the town to the market place and thence to the parish church.

 

Newark had seen something of the conflicts of recent years. The Lancastrian army must have passed through the town twice in 1461 and then the Yorkists before and after Towton. In the early summer of 1464 in going north to deal with the aftermath of the Lancastrian insurgency in the north and again in March 1470 King Edward IV would have been there following the Lincolnshire Rising. Early in 1471 during the Readeption, presumably because of its strategic position, the Lancastrian Duke of Exeter and Earl of Oxford were stationed at the town but then marched south to the battle of Barnet. It is an indicator of the complicated familial politics of these years that these two die-hard Lancastrians were closely tied by marriage to the Yorkists. Exeter was married, very unhappily, to Anne, one of the daughters of Richard Duke of York, and sister to King Edward IV and the future King Richard III, and he was probably murdered on the return from the 1475 invasion of France by being pushed overboard mid-Channel. Oxford was married to one of Warwick the Kingmaker’s sisters and had more lives than the proverbial cat in the dangerous times in which he lived, losing his father and elder brother to the headsman in 1462. He eventually fought for Henry of Richmond at Bosworth, living on to 1514 as an elder statesman.

St Mary Magdalene Newark

Image: Tripadvisor 

The wealth of the town was made manifest in the parish church of St Mary Magdalene. It is one unquestionably of the most impressive urban parish churches of later medieval England. The tower and spire were built in stages in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the nave during the fifteenth century. The rebuilding of the chancel was completed in 1498, with the retro-choir, transepts and chantries being added in the early sixteenth century The church had a sizeable clerical community of chantry priests and it was to the ‘great church’ that the mourners moved with the bodies. Newark had no houses of friars until King Henry VII established a house of Observant Franciscans there in 1499. 

The interior of the nave

Image: Newark guide.co.uk

Newark could offer more accommodation than Tuxford for those accompanying the cortège. It is quite likely that some were given rooms at the castle, and the town had a number of inns. One of these, the Old White Hart, though no longer a hostelry, still stands in the market place.

It is thought that this was a substantial merchant or craftsman’s house that in the last decade of the fourteenth century was converted into an inn. In the 1460s a new and impressive frontage was built on to the market pkace

The Old White Hart Newark

Image:nottshistory.org.uk

Some of the applied plaster figures of saints on the facade

Inage: nottshistory.orh.uk

The view from the former yard of the Inn.

On the left are the old hall converted into bedrooms and the staircase is on the right

Image: nottshistory.org.uk

 

There is more about the building at Transactions of the Thoroton Society > The Old White Hart Inn, Newark-on-Trent

Not only is the Old White Hart a remarkable survival but in its restored state gives an idea of the colourful decoration of buildings in medieval towns.

I think it reasonable to assume that some of those involved in the reburial would have spent the night here after attending the evening Office for the Dead in the church.

Unlike the other towns visited by the cortège which were or about to become self-governing boroughs

Newark did receive a charter of incorporation until 154, after the bishops of Lincoln had lost control of the town to the Crown.

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

Following the daily requiem Mass in Blyth Priory the procession would have formed up to convey the Ducal remains south-east along the line of the later Great North Road to the next stop at Tuxford - or to give it its full name, Tuxford-le-Clay.

The gently rolling countryside of north Nottinghamshire was probably relatively easy going unless the clay soils around Tuxford impeded animals, vehicles, and individuals as they made their way along the roads.

Tuxford itself, like Blyth, had developed in part as a staging post on the north-south route and in later centuries boasted a decent number of inns. In default of that, and not having a religious house to offer hospitality I imagine tented accommodation would have been required.

The church of St Nicholas in the centre of the town was undergoing a major programme of rebuilding in the years around 1476. The nave clerestory is usually dated to about 1475, so it may have been brand new, or yet to be built. It is difficult to think that if the nave was a building site the cortège would have stopped at the church at all. The chancel was to be rebuilt in 1495. As a result we can safely say that the tower and spire and the nave aisles are all that certainly survive from what the mourners saw in 1476.

Tuxford Church

Image: Wikipedia / Richard Croft

The nave of Tuxford Church

Image: Wikipedia / Tikkat3

After the usual Dirige maybe the mourners got something to eat and found somewhere to sleep, and anticipated a wider variety of lodgings the following night in Newark.

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 at Greyfriars the following morning. It must have passed along Frenchgate, High Street, and past the Carmelite friary One wonders if Lord Welles as he rode by spared a thought for his wife’s brother who was buried there after being beheaded at Doncaster in 1470 for his actions as leader of that year’s Lincolnshire Rising against King Edward. The ground rose as the solemn cavalcade passed out of the gateway 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 whilst the Bishop of Hereford who preached.m a ‘notable’ sermon. Meanwhile to Dominicans celebrated Dirige and requiem masses at an altar ‘beneath’ the choir - presumably a nave altar.

This pattern of the evening Placebo and 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. Beneath was a valence of black sarcenet fringed half a yard deep with four beaten gold angels holding the arms of the Duke.

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 revenues of the Principality of Wales. Scales pursuivant suggests the involvement of Queen Elizabeth’s brother Anthony Earl Rivers 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.