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.
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 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
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.
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 of Peterborough, 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.
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