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 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.
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