The body royal

HENRY II was not a great lover of the ceremonial side of kingship, but he was interested in his own genealogy and in honouring the remains of his forbears. The canonization of Edward the Confessor in 1161, a triumph for the monks at Westminster where he was buried, was achieved with Henry's help. But the king had no ambition to build himself a great burial church. When was seriously ill in 1170 he announced, to the horror of his courtiers, that he intended to be buried in the tiny church of Grandmont, the mother-house of the Grandmontine order which carried asceticism to its furthest extremes. His barons retorted that this would be against the dignity of the realm, and when Henry eventually died at Chinon nearly 20 years later, his entourage made sure he was given as suitably regal funeral. His body was placed on an open bier and, wearing his regalia and with his face exposed, he was carried the ten miles to Fontevrault Abbey, the favourite monastery of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This resting-place was almost certainly chosed for him by his courtiers.

Some 12th-century kings died far from the churches which they had selected as their burial places. Henry I, for example, had founded

Reading Abbey as his mausoleum, but in 1135 he died in Lyons-la-Forêt in Normandy. Contrary winds prevented the funeral party from crossing the channel, and decomposition set in while the body was still in the duchy -- an attendant died after coming into contact with the putrid corpse before it could be buried. Henry had been disembowelled and his entrails presented to a nunnery he had founded in Rouen. The practice spread: in 1199 Richard I was split three ways -- his body went to Fontevrault, his heart to Rouen Cathedral and his entrails to Charroux in Poitou.

Monks, canons and the communities they served were as anxious to obtain royal remains as were kings to gain intercession from suitably holy monks after death. Although the Young King had been violent and unruly, after his death the citizens of Le Mans considered that his body would bring them honour and prestige. They kidnapped his cortège on its way through their town and buried him in their cathedral. The citizens of Rouen, where he had promised to be interred, threatened to raze Le Mans to the ground; in the end, Henry II had to intervene. On his ruling, his son was moved to Rouen and buried in the cathedral he had originally chosen.

Below Effigy of Richard I at Rouen, where
his heart is buried