A hanged man resurrected, a noble lady pleading for mercy for a Welsh rebel, papal inquisitors and dishes of almond sorbet are all part of a colourful medieval tale revealed to the Guardian Hay festival yesterday.
Professor Robert Bartlett of St Andrew's University has unearthed previously unknown records in the Vatican to tell the extraordinary, forgotten story of the canonisation of an English saint.
Thomas de Cantilupe was a Bishop of Hereford - just up the road from Hay-on-Wye - who died in 1282. Five years later his successor upgraded his tomb, frequently a sign that a bid for canonisation was in the offing.
The canons of Hereford began recording miracles posthumously performed by De Cantilupe and only a cynic would suggest that the bishopric needed the cash that would be brought by pilgrims visiting the shrine of a new saint.
Finally, in 1307, a papal canonisation inquiry began and the extraordinarily detailed records from this process shed vivid light on medieval religion, politics, and relationships.
Evidence was shown at the inquiry of the late bishop's virtue, but the most striking claim was that, back in about 1290, he had posthumously brought back to life a Welsh rebel who had been hanged for his part in an attack on a castle near Swansea.
The castle belonged to an important Anglo-Norman aristocrat, William de Briouze, whose much younger wife, Lady Mary, had begged for the life of the rebel, William Cragh, to be spared. Her husband refused and, after news came of Cragh's death, taunted her, saying, "Now you can have him, such as he is."
A wistful Prof Bartlett said yesterday: "If I were writing a novel Cragh and Lady Mary would have had a previous romantic entanglement but I had to rule that out on austere historical grounds."
Undaunted, Lady Mary prayed to De Cantilupe. She also undertook one of the more peculiar practices of medieval Christianity: "measuring out the body". The dead man's body was measured out with a cord and a candle of the same height offered to De Cantilupe. "Medieval saints were very keen on candles," Prof Bartlett said. "In fact they regularly appeared in visions and demanded them."
Lo, the long candle apparently did the trick: Cragh was revived, and a relieved Lady Mary sent him some almond sorbet.
Much energy in the inquiry was devoted to establishing that Cragh really had been dead, leading to a lurid account of the "corpse" by Lady Mary's stepson. According to him, Cragh's "eyes had come out of their sockets and hung outside the eyelids and the sockets were filled with blood ... his tongue hung out of his mouth, the length of man's finger, and it was completely black and swollen."
In fact, Prof Bartlett said, condemned men regularly survived the noose.
The story ended well for De Cantilupe, who was duly canonised in 1320. Cragh lived on at least until the canonisation inquiry, in which he gave evidence, but had lost his property when condemned to death and had to live with relatives.
William de Briouze died shortly after Cragh's resurrection. Lady Mary, on the other hand, inherited a third of her husband's property and became a grand landowner in Sussex.
