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Bloody Miracles of a Political Martyr: The Case of Thomas Earl of Lancaster
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
The blood of Thomas, earl of Lancaster, executed in March 1322 under King Edward II, was central to his representation as a political martyr. In this paper I shall discuss the miraculous flow of blood from Lancaster’s tomb, which occurred on two occasions, and shall suggest two interpretations, symbolic and political, of the meaning of these miracles.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2005
References
1 Born c.1277, Thomas was the son of Edmund – Henry III’s son and Edward I’s younger brother – and Blanche of Navarre (mother to Queen Isabella). ‘De ortu et nobilitate Thomae, Comitis Lancastriae’ is given in Johannis de Trokelowe: et Henrici de Blaneforde, monachorum S. Albani…, ed. Henry Thomas Riley, RS 28 (London, 1886), 70–1. The most complete study of Lancaster’s life and activity is John Robert Maddicott’s biography, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307–1322: a Study in the Reign of Edward II (London, 1970).
2 Lancaster inherited the earldoms of Lancaster, Leicester, Derby, Lincoln and Salisbury. Maddicott roughly valuates Lancaster’s yearly income to £11,000: ibid., 9–10, 22.
3 Harcourt, L. W. V., His Grace the Steward and Trial of Peers (London, 1907), 124 Google Scholar. For a Lancastrian tract which defines the office of Stewardship, see ibid., 164–7.
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5 The Ordinances are printed in Rotuli Parliamentorum, ut et petitiones, et placita in Parliamento… (1278–1503), ed. J. Strachy, 7 vols (London, 1767–1832), 1: 281–6; for a discussion of the Ordainers and Ordinances see, for example, James Conway Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II: its Character and Policy. A Study in Administrative History (1 st edn, Cambridge, 1918, repr. London, 1967), 357–93.
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36 Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MS W. 105, fol. 13V (dated to the 1340s), and Cambridge, Clare College, MS 6, fol. 144r (thirteenth-century manuscript, but the memoria to Lancaster was added in a fourteeth-century hand).
37 Norwich, Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, MS 158.926/4f fol. 152r (compiled c.1339).
38 Anecdota ex codicibus hagiographicis Iohannis Gielemans, 94.
39 The Life of Edward, 126; Tristram, E. W., ‘The Wall Painting of South Newington’, Burlington Magazine 62 (1933), 114–29 Google Scholar, with 4 pls, see 123 and detail of Thomas’s head, pl. IV, B.
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42 Ibid., 202,1. 18.
43 Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, MS W. 105, fol. 13v; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS e. mus. 139, fol. 85r (late fourteenth century); BL, MS Royal 12 C XII, fol. 1r.
44 See n. 2 above.
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47 The Brut, 223.
48 ‘O sanguis/regius, sanguis egregius, sanguis generosus, sanguis eciam preciosus, cur tam contemptibiliter/effusus?’: Haskins, George L., ed., ‘A Chronicle of the Civil Wars of Edward II’, Speculum 14 (1939), 73–81, 79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar