Once a fragment of the human body is preserved and kept above ground for any length of time, rather than being returned to the earth in the normal way, it develops an identity of its own and tends to resist its own burial. Interment, once the natural course of things, becomes an ever more remote possibility. Even before Plunkett was canonized, his head had found a place for itself in the community, forming important relationships of its own, whether as a part of convent life or in its more recent public role in the parish of Drogheda. Plunkett’s head became a member of society, demanding continued care and attention from the living. So it is that time and circumstance can transform a severed head, the bloody remains of an individual’s dead body, into a valued player in religious and secular life. People not only accept the presence of heads like Plunkett’s, they seem to be irresistibly drawn to them: when body parts are denied a proper burial and put on display, they can become particularly potent.
Today many thousands of Christians offer prayers to the heads of saints, which are found in churches across Europe and are often kept in richly jewelled reliquaries. Saint Agnes’s head is kept in a silver box in the Sancta Sanctorum in Rome, and the heads of Saint Peter and Saint Paul are allegedly nearby, tucked away in the high altar at the Basilica of St John Lateran. Saint Sebastian’s head is also in Rome, in the Four Crowned Martyrs church; Saint Catherine’s head has become a major tourist attraction in Siena; Saint Lucy’s head is kept in the cathedral at Bourges in central France; Saint Helena’s head is in the crypt of the cathedral in Trier; Saint Ivo’s skull resides in Treguier Cathedral in Brittany. These people’s heads have spent so long outside the grave that it is unlikely they will be returned to the earth any time soon.
The head of Saint Catherine of Siena.
Saint Catherine of Siena’s head is the most famous of all. It was removed from her body in 1384, four years after her death, and taken, along with her index finger, from Rome, where she died, back to her hometown of Siena. It has remained there ever since in the church of San Domenico. The annual festival for Saint Catherine has become more elaborate, not less so, since her proclamation as a patron saint of Italy in 1939 and then of Europe in 1999. As with the festival for Saint Oliver in Drogheda, it includes a procession through the streets of the town attended by civic authorities and ecclesiastical dignitaries, as well as members of the armed forces and government ministers. A mass is then said in the church, where her head is kept in a side chapel. Saint Catherine’s finger is carried through the streets for a blessing, which is bestowed on Siena, Italy and Europe by the visiting cardinal. Occasionally, Catherine’s head is also processed through the town, as it was in 2011 to celebrate the 550th anniversary of her canonization. Meanwhile, visitors from all over the world come to the church of San Domenico to see her mummified head, swathed in a white veil and set inside a silver reliquary.
Relics like this can put a place on the map, because they attract pilgrims, as well as economic and political investment that follows in their wake: sacred body parts inspire everything from cheap taverns to royal visits. And legends tell how the saints themselves decide where they will go, as if underlining the part they have played in the town’s good fortune and the strength of their bond with its people. There are many stories of saints carrying their own heads to their burial place after their beheading. Saint Denis walked six miles from the site of his beheading in Montmartre to the site of his burial, carrying his own head and preaching a sermon on the way. Saint Nicasius of Rheims was said to have continued reciting Psalm 119 despite being beheaded at verse twenty-five. There are more than 150 known cases in which martyrs pick up their own severed heads and walk to chosen spots.
Saint Catherine did not carry her own head to Siena, but one version of events states that she helped the men who did bear it. As Catherine’s followers carried her head, in secret, through the streets of Rome in the 1380s, they were searched by the city guards, but when the guards opened the bag that contained Catherine’s head it appeared only to be full of rose petals and the travellers were allowed to pass. In this way, Catherine was said to have consented to the journey, reinforcing the idea that her head belongs in Siena. Hers is not the only head to decide its own fate. The head of Saint Just of Beauvais was said to have been miraculously rendered immobile beyond the parish boundaries of Flums, in Switzerland, while being transported from Auxerre to Pfäfers in the mid-1030s. Saint Just chose to remain in Flums, and in response, the local church commissioned a reliquary to hold the remains of his head, and hundreds of pilgrims visited the town over the centuries to venerate its famous relic.
As at Drogheda, so also at Siena and Flums, people’s heads can generate great wealth. Religious relics energized a community, inspiring religious, economic and artistic enterprise – not least in the form of the extraordinary shrines, clothed in gold, silver and precious gemstones, that were designed to house them and dazzle the faithful. In part, gleaming reliquaries denied the bodily decomposition that threatened the very relics they contained. When you are an ancient wrinkly brown ball of decayed organic matter, it helps to be installed inside a golden box studded with jewels and placed inside a sacred public building, where people are expected to behave respectfully and quietly. Like the one in Drogheda, these works of art set the tone for the moment the pilgrims came face to face with a holy being from another, more glorious world.
In some cases, the corpse was literally encased in a replacement golden body, as though revealed from heaven above. In the Middle Ages, many saintly heads were enshrined in sculpted ‘bust reliquaries’. Saint Just’s reliquary bust, made of gilded silver and copper in Switzerland in the late fifteenth century, is one of the most extraordinary of all because it depicts the saint holding his own head. Saint Just was only nine years old when he was beheaded by Roman guards. His father found him holding his own head. The story tells how the boy gave his severed head to his father and told him to take it to his mother, Felicia, so that she might kiss it. When she received and kissed the head of her son, Felicia became the first person to venerate the relic of Saint Just.
The reliquary bust of Saint Just.
Intriguingly, the reliquary does not depict Saint Just clutching his head. Instead, his head seems to float in front of his chest with its own energy. Saint Just’s hands merely frame his head, so there is little doubt that this is where his miraculous power is concentrated. His eyes are half-closed, and it is the saint’s partial absence, the other-worldliness of this severed part, that generates his power. His severed head is dynamic and remote, like a glittering vision from the afterlife. Reliquaries transformed human remains into works of art, and shaped a culture of display that defied the boundaries of life and death (as fine artists working in the secular domain have done in more recent times).
The design of Saint Just’s reliquary bust ensured that, just as the saint had offered his own head to his mother for veneration, so he would continue to command such attention in Flums. The reliquary drew pilgrims into Saint Just’s narrative, guiding their veneration, desiring their kisses, so that they could complete his identity and confirm his power over death. There were practical considerations too, because kissing the reliquary was safer, and more pleasant, than kissing the mummified head itself. Since the twelfth century, the withered body parts of countless saints have been spruced up with the most ornate containers to protect their fragile constitutions – so much so that the quality of the reliquary can appear to be in inverse proportion to the aesthetic appeal of the relic it contains.
When the Dutch priest Desiderius Erasmus visited Thomas Becket’s bones at Canterbury in the early sixteenth century, he wrote about the hypnotic effect of the golden shrine. ‘Everything shone and dazzled with rare and surpassingly large jewels, some bigger than a goose egg. Some monks stood about reverently. When the cover was removed, we all adored.’ Erasmus was captivated, but one of his travelling companions found Becket’s relics, which included the remains of a human arm and some dirty linen rags, so revolt
ing that he could not bring himself to kiss them when they were offered to him, and recoiled ‘looking rather disgusted’. It is easy to see how a shrine’s opulence could create an atmosphere of hushed reverence around what was, essentially, an unsightly mishmash of decaying human remains. The gold was meant to dazzle, and pilgrims must have left these places rubbing their eyes in astonishment at the heavenly treasure they had seen.
Opulent shrines had the power to move people and stir their emotions. They could almost stupefy visitors, as though they, too, had seen into heaven and been touched by its mysterious force. Glittering shrines, and the relics they contained, blurred the boundaries between life and death. These body parts were not altogether dead, because something of their vital spirit lingered on and shaped the lives of the living.
Saints were not the only people who exerted their influence after death. Sinners, too, had the power to heal. Holy bodies and criminal bodies were more likely than most to be dismembered and traded across long distances in the Middle Ages, as people tried to harness the life force of the dead.
Executed criminals were killed suddenly, while in full health, and often when they were relatively young and vigorous, so their bodies were thought to retain more power than people who had wasted away gradually from disease or old age. Bits of bone, hair and flesh were so sought after that there are numerous stories of spectators scrabbling around under the scaffold in their efforts to procure a little piece of the warm, dead body that had just breathed its last on the boards above. Fingertips, teeth and ears, scraps of clothing, even threads from the hangman’s rope or a thimbleful of ash from the execution pyre retained a little of the life force of the departed.
Like churches, apothecaries’ shops usually stocked some human bones and mummified remains, which were believed to restore well-being. Any body part could do the trick – even a tiny shred of fingernail or a drop of blood could perform miracles – but the remains of people’s heads were associated with particularly potent powers. Human skulls were profoundly efficacious, and were used as ‘a specific medicine in the cure of … most diseases of the head’, as one apothecary noted in 1657. Paracelsus, the famous sixteenth-century physician, believed that when a man was hanged, his ‘vital spirits’ would ‘burst forth to the circumference’ of his skull. As long as death came suddenly, these spirits would be trapped inside the bone, as though they had been caught by surprise and had no time to escape.
Paracelsus prescribed the blood from a decapitated man as a remedy for epilepsy, and heads and skulls became closely associated with curing seizures. A German physician, Johann Schroeder, recommended pounding up the brains, skin, arteries, nerves and whole spinal column of a young man who had met a violent end, and steeping the mixture in water and flowers, such as lavender and peony, before distilling it several times for use against epilepsy. Christian IV of Denmark, who died in 1648, was said to have taken powders partly composed of the skulls of criminals as a cure for epilepsy. These remedies were common for centuries, and executioners had to deal with the eager demands of the sick waiting to collect their prescriptions. Even in the 1860s there were reports of Danish ‘epileptics stand[ing] around the scaffold in crowds, cup in hand, ready to quaff the red blood as it flows from the still quivering body’.
A popular belief in ‘sympathetic action’ meant that heads were often used to heal illnesses of the head, such as headaches and madness. In parts of France in the late eighteenth century, pills made from a hanged man’s head were thought to cure ‘the bite of a mad dog’. Drinking from skulls was also meant to restore health. In the 1560s some of the traitors’ heads from London Bridge were reused as medicinal cups for a group of men working at the Royal Mint who were suffering from arsenic poisoning, the symptoms of which include headaches and lightheadedness. The ailing men drank their medicine out of the cleaned skulls, but many of them died anyway.
Paracelsus recommended the ‘moss’, or lichen, that grew on a dead man’s skull for seizures and ‘disorders of the head’, and to bind wounds, on the basis that the ‘vital spirit’ released at death would be transferred from the skull into the lichen that started to grow on its surface. The fact that these skull-grown lichens were quite rare only increased the value of the cure. Skull moss seems to have been a particularly popular remedy in England and Ireland, perhaps because in these countries dead criminals were often left on public display until their flesh started to rot away and things began to grow on their bones. In 1694 it was reported that London druggists sold suitably mossy skulls for 8 to 11 shillings each, depending on the size and the amount of growth on them.
Skull moss could be used both internally and externally, carried around as an amulet, or mixed with other ingredients (honey, animal fat, human blood, linseed oil, even manure or cooked worms might be thrown into the mix). Edward Taylor, a physician in New England in the late 1600s, wrote, ‘The moss in the skull of dead man exposed to the air binds much. Stops bleeding. Some say if it be held in the hand it stops it like an enchantment. Moss bred in other bones doth the same but not so powerfully.’ Francis Bacon, writing at a similar time in London, also thought this skull moss was good for staunching the flow of blood. There were reports of people growing moss on stones and then spreading it onto the skulls of criminals, as a way of harvesting the tiny green plants for sale. In practice, apothecaries probably used anything that grew on skulls, and some things that did not grow on skulls, to maintain their supplies.
These medicines were used throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the sale of ‘mummy’ – the remains of embalmed human corpses prepared and prescribed as remedies – thrived across Europe. Every part of the human body had a medicinal use, from the bones and blood to the skin and fat. There were various recipes for making ‘mummy’, which was described as a hard, black, resinous substance that smelled fragrant but tasted bitter. The flesh was repeatedly dried, and might be soaked in wine or sprinkled with myrrh until it darkened and ceased to smell. Whole, young bodies were recommended, preferably those that had been executed and were free from disease. Some people recommended men who had red hair, because they were thought to have better blood. Mummy became so widespread that medieval shoppers were warned to avoid counterfeits and select only samples that were shiny black and smelled good, not pieces that were full of bits of bone and dirt. A few early anatomists even found that trading in human fat and body parts could bring them useful extra income to fund their dissections.
Not everyone took to ‘medicinal cannibalism’ though. One commentator thought eating human flesh was an abomination and wanted all mummy to be removed from shops and buried respectfully. ‘For I take a man’s skull,’ he wrote, ‘to be not only a mere dry bone, void of all virtue, but also a nasty, mortified, putrid, carrionish piece of our own species, and to take it inwardly seems an execrable fact that even the Anthropophagi [a mythical race of cannibals] would shiver at.’ Nevertheless, ‘mummy’ could still be found in some European pharmacies in the twentieth century. German pharmaceutical handbooks and catalogues listed mummy for sale in the early 1900s priced at 17 marks and 50 pfennigs per kilogram, although most of it was probably fake, perhaps mixed in with some bone fragments for good measure.
It should not be surprising that for most of our history the living have turned to the dead in search of a little magic, because dead bodies are intoxicating things. Left alone, they stiffen and smell and breed disease. From the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries graveyards were very potent places. The poor were usually interred in large pits, many of which were barely covered with earth. Graves were regularly reopened and bodies were left to decay in the open air, so it is little wonder that the soil in graveyards was believed to be ‘flesh-eating’ and to have supernatural powers.
What is more, the boundaries between life and death were not clear-cut, and it was often genuinely hard to tell when someone had passed away: listening for a heartbeat or testing for breath on a piece of glass were hardly foolproof procedures.
People might appear dead as they slipped into unconsciousness, but then ‘miraculously’ return to life. The ambiguous frontier between this world and the next made the period between death and burial particularly fraught and full of latent power. Stories abounded of the dead awakening from their sleep, and mourners often put out food and drink in case their loved ones came back to life. A ‘limber’ corpse – one that failed to show the signs of rigor mortis – was an object of particular fear. Since it was unclear exactly when a person’s soul departed their body – was it at the moment of death, or not until the Last Judgement? – there was always the possibility that it might remain to haunt the living. Add to this the strange physical changes brought on by death and the toxic effects of decomposition, and it is not hard to see why dead bodies that for one reason or another circulated amongst the living were able to exert their influence accordingly.
The intense atmosphere that surrounded a fresh corpse may explain why the most potent body parts were those that appeared to defy decay, because they occupied that charged state between life and death perpetually. It was as though they were resisting death and holding on to the powers of life. Today, people still comment on the remarkable condition of Oliver Plunkett’s head, and of Catherine of Siena’s head. Stories of strange supernatural powers grew up around the traitors’ heads that were displayed on bridges and gates around the country because they, too, were slow to rot.
In London, traitors’ heads were routinely parboiled, which gave some heads an apparently miraculous ability to defy decay. When Saint John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was executed in June 1535, his head was parboiled at Newgate Prison and ‘pricked upon a pole’ on London Bridge. The head perched there for two weeks, in the summer heat, but it did not seem to decay at all. On the contrary, it ‘grew daily fresher and fresher, so that in his lifetime he had never looked so well’. Fisher’s cheeks were rosy, and as he watched Londoners come and go beneath him it looked as though he might start speaking to them. People thought Fisher’s extraordinary posthumous health was a sign from God, a reflection of his innocence and holiness and his willingness to sacrifice his life for his faith. Fisher’s head attracted so much attention that it caused chaos on the busy bridge below – horses and carts simply could not get through the crowds – and the Keeper of the Heads was ordered to throw the offending article into the Thames to ease the flow.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 15