King Henry expected it to become a great money-maker for the abbey, but it never turned out to be as popular as Hailes’ relic, for some reason.
Fast forward to 1538. King Henry VIII’s commissioners on the abuses of monasteries started making the rounds in the country. The original mission of the investigators was to find ‘abuses’ – that is, misbehaving monks wasting monastery funds on wine, women and song, and idolatry (the veneration of relics that, heretofore, Henry VIII seemed to love). But the not-so-secret intent was to shutter the monasteries and seize the land for the crown. And so, systematically, the commissioners set about turning out the monks and nuns, dissolving the monasteries, seizing the lands and destroying shrines. No relic or shrine was spared, from Canterbury’s bones of St Thomas Becket to the Holy Blood of Hailes. Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, reported to the Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, the devisor of the commissions, that the relic of the Holy Blood seemed to consist of ‘an unctuous gum and a compound of many things.’ Once it was sent to London, Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester, pronounced that the Blood of Hailes was made of ‘honey clarified and coloured with saffron.’ And so the word came down from on high to not only destroy the relic but the shrine that housed it ‘lest it should minister occasion for stumbling to the weak.’ The Monastery of Hailes was dissolved, its relic destroyed, its shrine no more.
Westminster Abbey didn’t fare much better. Because it was the king’s church of high estate (and even deemed a cathedral for a brief period), it was spared destruction. But the monks – as happened in all the other monasteries and convents in the country – were chucked out. The blood relic of Westminster Abbey suffered the same fate as the Holy Blood of Hailes. Thus the relics that so abused Crispin’s life were run out of the now-Protestant country.
A word about John Rykener, one of the real people of Crispin’s London. All we know of him comes down to us through one document about his arrest. He wasn’t arrested for being gay or for committing homosexual acts, but for dressing in women’s clothing as well as for prostitution.
I enjoyed bringing Simon Wynchecombe back into the story. When I started researching Hailes and saw the town of Winchecombe nearby on the map, I thought, ‘Why not?’ Sometimes things just fall together that way.
Be sure to check my website JeriWesterson.com for interesting medieval facts, book discussion guides and other novels I’ve written, including one about the dissolution of the monasteries. And look for Crispin and Jack to return in THE DEEPEST GRAVE. Could it be the dead are rising and walking the streets of London? It’s another medieval mystery involving murder, the sacrilege of grave tampering, the return of an old flame, and a venerated relic.
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