VARIABLE FRECUENCIA F REL (%)

Richard, the crusading king o f England, was buried at Fontevrault, where his father Henry II and ancestors, the counts of Anjou, lay. Richard was not only count of Anjou, but also Duke of Normandy and Duke of Aquitaine, and, although his body was buried at

Fontevrault, his heart was buried at Rouen Cathedral, and his entrails in at Charroux in Poitou,"^^^ expressing dynastic and territorial ties to those regions.

In a sermon preached at Sittingboume in 1232 in the presence of the Archbishop o f Canterbury and a large group of clergy and people, the bishop of Rochester announced that it had been revealed to him and to others in visions ‘that on one and the same day lately, Richard, formerly king of England, and Stephen [Langton] late archbishop o f Canterbury in company with a chaplain of the said archbishop, went out o f the places of torture and appeared before the divine majesty, and only those three left purgatory on that day; and you may put sure confidence in my words, for this has been revealed by a vision to me or some one else three times, so plainly that all doubt is removed firom my mind’'*^*

Hallam, ‘Royal burial and the cult of kingship’, 364, 366.

Giles, Flowers o f History, Il.ii. 547; CM, iii. 212: ‘..quod uno et eodem die exierunt de purgatorio rex quondam Anglorum Ricardus et Stephanus Conatuariensis archiepiscopus, cum uno capellano ejusdem archiepiscopi, ad conspectum divinae Majestatis. Et eadem die non nisi tres illi de locis poenalibus exierunt. Et ut his dictis meis fidem adhibeatis plenissimam et certam, quia mihi et cuidam alii tertia jam vice hoc per visionem revelatum est ita manifeste, quod ab animo meo omnis dubitationis ambiguitas removetur’.

Wendover follows the announcement that Richard has left Purgatory for Heaven, with an account of two miracles which occurred during Richard’s life illustrating the king’s goodness. The first concerns Richard’s justice and mercy towards a knight who had been caught poaching deer in the king’s forest. Rather than condemning the man to the usual punishment, putting out his eyes and cutting off his limbs, the merciful king banished the knight instead. Some time later, the knight, wishing to be restored to his lands, entered a church in Normandy where King Richard was about to hear mass. The knight, too frightened and ashamed to approach the king, went before the Crucifix, sobbing and prostrating himself, beseeching ‘the Crucified one, through his unspeakable grace, to make his peace with the king’. Richard was watching the knight, and saw that each time the knight bowed before the image of Christ, the image responded by bowing its head and shoulders towards the knight. After mass, the king questioned the knight, and asked him if he had ever performed an act out of reverence for Christ. The knight replied that he had forgiven his father’s murderer. The knight had come across the man on his way to church on Good Friday. The murderer, seeing that the knight intended to kill him, hugged a cross standing beside the road and promised to appoint a chaplain to perform mass every day for the soul o f the knight’s father, upon which the knight forgave him out of respect for Christ. After seeing the miraculous gestures of the Crucifix and hearing this story. King Richard forgave the knight and reinstated him."*^^ Wendover goes on to describe the goodness of King Richard, his reverence for the clergy and how he did not profit from, or try to force elections to vacant bishoprics etc. but allowed the clergy to hold free elections. The king wanted to die as a martyr for Christ in the Holy Land, and

spent a great deal of his own money financing his struggle to recapture the Holy Land for Christendom. When his money ran out, he arranged a three year truce with Saladin, and gained his consent to allow a chaplain to perform mass in the Holy Sepulchre every day during the truce. He also redeemed four chests worth of saints relics from Saladin, ‘on the understanding that those saints should in his extreme necessity assist him by their

intercessions in gaining God’s favour.’ Clearly, in the view of this monastic chronicler, Richard was an ideal king: he was just to his subjects, reverential to the church and churchmen, patient in adversity (when he was captured and ransomed on his return from the Holy Land), and was willing to lay down his life for Christ. It is this life of goodness, justice and works of mercy which made him worthy of a place in heaven where ‘rejoicing in company with him are those saints whose relics he redeemed.

This view of Richard as a model king seems to have been shared by Henry III. Besides St. Edward the Confessor, Richard I was the only king of England whose image and glorious acts were used as decoration in the palaces of Henry III. Richard’s exploits during the third crusade, described in the writs as ‘the story of Antioch and the duel of King Richard’, were painted on the walls in Antioch chambers at Westminster Palace (1250), the Tower of London (1251) and Clarendon Palace (1251).'^^* Henry himself had taken the cross in March 1250,"^^^ and given the correspondence between the king’s intention to

G'ûqs, Flowers o f History, H.ii. 550-51; CM. iii. 215-7.

Steane, The Archaeology o f the Medieval English Monarchy, 107; Borenius, ‘The Cycle of Images in the Palaces and Castles of Henry HI’, 44, 45; CLR 1245-51: 362 (Clarendon).

Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 106. Matthew Paris records that Henry took his vow to crusade at Westminster in March 1250, and repeated his public vows two years

crusade and the commissions for the representation of the heroic memory of his uncle, it seems safe to assume that Henry was adopting Richard, the paradigm of a holy crusading king, as a role model for his own proposed expedition.

Henry continued alms to Fontevrault to maintain the ‘year’s mind’ or annual anniversary of Richard and other relatives buried there (see below). The king also fed the poor in England for the soul of king Richard. Despite Richard’s well-publicised release from Purgatory in 1232, in 1248 Henry spent £14.11s. 8d [3,500d] feeding the poor on two successive days for Richard’s soul.'*^^

I. a) ii. King John, died 1216

King John died on campaign in the midst of the barons’ war against him. Shortly before his death, John had crossed the Wash and lost much o f his baggage and part o f the royal regalia. In Paris’ account, it is the king’s anxiety over the property he lost which leads to his initial illness, which, he apparently deeply aggravated by his ‘pernicious gluttony, for that night he surfeited himself with peaches and drinking new cider’. He struggled on, and managed to reach Newark on the second day, by which time he was in excruciating pain, and so ‘confessed and received the Eucharist from the abbot of Croxton.’ The abbot asked him where he would wish to be buried if he died, and the king replied ‘To God and

later in the presence of the citizens o f London {CM, v. 101, 196 (1250), 281-2 (1252); Vincent, The Holy Blood, 16 n. 32). A letter to the archbishop of Dublin, tested 16 June

1250, records that Henry was wearing the cross on his shoulder {Close Rolls 1247-5T. 358). In 1252, Henry promised to leave for the Holy Land in June 1256, but in 1255 pope Alexander IV commuted this vow to crusade to a vow to aid the church in Sicily, that is to say to take Sicily with papal benediction on behalf o f his second son Edmund.

St Wulfstan I commend my body and soul.’ On his death, the abbot, who was ‘a man well skilled in medicine...opened the king’s body that it might be better carried to the grave, and having well salted his entrails had them carried to his abbey [Croxton], and honourably buried t h e r e . T h e chronicle reports that John left Croxton lands worth ten pounds. Following his stated choice of burial site, his body ‘dressed in royal robes’ and carried to Worcester Cathedral, where he was buried between the shrines of St Wulfstan and St. Oswald."*^^ Sixty years later, John’s heart was removed from his tomb at

Worcester and carried to Fontevrault,'*^^ the traditional burial house of the dukes of Anjou, where his father and mother, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, his brother, Richard I, and his own wife Isabella of Angouleme, were buried. Although it was evidently impossible for John to be buried at Fontevrault, since the nunnery was in Touraine, one of the territories he had lost to Philip Augustus, John’s choice o f Worcester Cathedral as his burial site seems to have been something of a surprise. John had

founded a house of Cistercian monks at Beaulieu, and, in 1228, with the support of Henry III who had just declared his majority and begun his personal rule, the house petitioned the pope in vain asking that John’s body be transferred from Worcester and buried with them. ■

CLR 1245-51: 168 -9.

Giles, Flowers o f History, H.ii. 378; CM, ii. 667-8.

Giles, Flowers o f History, H.ii. 379; CM, ii. 668 (addition to Wendover by Paris). Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward, 1. For a discussion of the different types of royal robes used in Plantagenet burials and their significance see Carpenter, ‘The Burial of King Henry HI, the Regalia and Royal Ideology’.

Steane, The Archaeology o f the Medieval English Monarchy, 44. Hallam, ‘Royal burial and the cult of kingship’, 363-4.

King John’s grant of land worth ten pounds to the canons of Croxton (whose abbot had heard his final confession and where his entrails were buried) was no doubt intended to support liturgical service for his soul and probably some kind of death anniversary celebration. In the late 1220s, the Exchequer was paying 100 shillings (£5) a year to Croxton ‘in place of 100s. yearly of land that were assigned to them in the manor of Thingden for the soul of King John, until the king shall assign to them land o f this value e l s e w h e r e . I n 1244, the king ordered a chasuble (a sleeveless vestment worn by a priest celebrating mass) ‘adorned with a good wide orphrey’ (a richly embroidered border) to be sent to the abbot of Croxton ‘to celebrate the anniversary of King John in the church of Croxton’"'^® Although it was not until after the death of Henry III that King John’s heart was sent to Fontevrault, and so there was no actual burial site o f any kind at the nunnery, John was commemorated throughout Henry’s reign at Fontevrault with his Angevin ancestors. In 1234, Henry confirmed by charter that Fontevrault was to receive forty pounds Tours each year, twenty at Christmas and twenty in the summer at the feast of St John the Baptist to carry out anniversarium regis et anniversahum domini J. regis, patris suV.^^^ It is not clear what is meant by ‘the anniversary o f the king’ but this may have been a celebration marking Henry’s regnal year. It would seem likely that, given this explicit reference to an armiversary for King John at Fontevrault, John was included in the group of ‘the king’s ancestors and predecessors’ whose commemoration at Fontevrault was funded by Henry Ill’s fixed alms to the nunnery (see below). In 1236,

CLR 1226-40'. 24, 109. CLR 1240-45: 250. Close Rolls 1231-34: 470.

Henry made a gift to Worcester for the soul of King John (whose body was buried there) and in 1242 the king’s almoner fed 1,000 poor on the anniversary of his death

I. a) iii. Those buried at Fontevrault: Henry I I (d. 1189), Richard I (d. 1199),