UK Edition
Sacred Mysteries: The brightly burning hearse of Abbot Islip
The only colour image of what worship in Westminster Abbey looked like on the eve of the Reformation has been plucked from the miles of shelving in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and shown to the world, or at least to the readers of that excellent periodical The Westminster Abbey Chorister.
It is a wonderful picture, taken from the mortuary roll of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster, who died in 1532. He was important in the world and also stood for the dignity of the abbey of Benedictine monks. So his funeral was impressive.
The picture shows a part of the Abbey well known from royal weddings: the high altar against the screen that hides any view of the sacred chapel of St Edward the Confessor. On state occasions the altar is usually laid with huge bits of gold plate, like a sideboard.
It is quite otherwise in the Islip picture, being bare but for two candlesticks and a service book. On the wall behind it is a painting of the crucifixion, and above it hangs a strange object, which is explained in The Westminster Abbey Chorister by Matthew Payne, the Keeper of the Muniments at the Abbey. It is a cylindrical rose-coloured veil of silk bound around its upper part by a sort of triple tiara of gold. This is the cover for the hanging pyx, the metal casing in which the Sacrament was reserved.
High above the altar stands an arrangement of painted figures that featured in most churches: the rood. In the centre is Christ on the cross, flanked by his mother Mary and St John. These are in turn flanked here by two angels – the kind with six wings, seraphim, I suppose. Below the rood and above the altar projects a blue-coloured tester functioning like a baldacchino to shelter ritually the sacred altar.
The difference on the May day that the picture depicts was the presence before the altar of the great hearse of Abbot Islip, surrounded by black-habited monks and 24 men carrying torches. By hearse was not meant a thing with wheels, or even a carrying-bier. In this case it was a soaring framework that canopied the draped coffin and acted as a vast chandelier. A “chapelle ardent” was a name Garter King of Arms used for it two centuries later. On four high finials and a central spire (of gilt and painted woodwork) were dozens and dozens of beeswax candles. I can’t imagine how they were lit. Perhaps by taper in a long stick like a fishing-rod.
Inscribed above the altar is: Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi – “We adore thee O Christ and we bless thee.” All present would have known the response: Quia per crucem tuam redemisti mundum – “Because by thy cross thou hast redeemed the world.”
That antiphon was familiar, not from the devotion called the Stations of the Cross, which was widely popular in churches only later. It was known from the solemn liturgy for Good Friday, chanted at the ceremony of the Adoration of the Cross, known in English as Creeping the Cross. Shakespeare knew it, writing anachronistically in Troilus and Cressida of how “they used to creep, to holy aultars”. People would come forward and kneel and kiss the wood of the cross, in worship of Christ who hallowed it.
It would have been quite suitable for the inscription to have been above the altar all the time, since the Masses said below related to the sacrifice of the cross. But it’s possible it was rigged up just for the funeral.
The picture is a copy, carefully made in 1743 by George Vertue, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries, from an original kept by John Anstis, Garter King of Arms. It’s fortunate that Vertue made the copy, for the original has been lost.