Monthly Archives: October 2019

Agincourt, Oxford, and All Souls’ Day

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Martyrdom of SS. Crispin and Crispinian

The battle of Agincort, made famous in Shakespeare’s play Henry V, took place on October 25, 1415 the commemoration of St. Crispin. See clips of the famous “Band of brothers” speech with reference to St. Crispin’s Day here.

Born to a noble Roman family in the 3rd century AD, Crispin and his brother Crispinian fled persecution for their faith, ending up at Soissons, where they preached Christianity to the Gauls while working as shoemakers and cobblers at night. They earned enough by their trade to support themselves and also to aid the poor. Their success attracted the ire of the governor of Gaul, who had them tortured and thrown into the river with millstones around their necks. They survived but were beheaded by the Emperor c. 285–286.

The college dedicated to All Souls in Oxford received its foundation charter in 1438 from King Henry VI. It is the only Oxford college to have only graduate students, no undergraduates. It was founded by Henry VI with the religious duty–in addition to academic research–to pray for those who had died at Agincort or in other battles during the Hundred Years War that England fought to control the crown of France. The number of the dead to be prayed for was overwhelming and the religious dedication was broadened to include all the departed, not just those slain in battle with the French. The college marks November 2, All Souls’ Day, as its name’s day; the commemoration of All Souls is 9 days after the commemoration of St. Crispin and his brother, thus including an allusion to the battle fought at Agincort which was the source the college’s original dedication..

All Souls has had many famous students, including Christopher Wren, William Blackstone, William Gladstone, and Lawrence of Arabia. British forces which fought at the Battle of Mons in August 1944 were said to have been protected by the ghosts of archers slain at Agincort.

All Souls College, Oxford with the dome of the Radcliffe Camera behind.

St. Ursula and the Virgin Martyrs of Cologne

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Statue of St. Ursula and her companions (clustered together beneath her cloak) in the church of St. Ursula in Cologne.

St. Ursula (Latin for “little bear”) was among the most popular saints of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. She and her companions–later versions of her life story report that she had 11,000 women with her although there were doubtless a much smaller group of women actually with her, probably 11 that was later expanded by a error in transcription–travelled to Cologne from Wales and were martyred in Cologne; there are records indicating that the women were executed AD 400.

The church of St. Ursula in Cologne is Romanesque, built in the 11th century atop the ancient ruins of a Roman cemetery, where the virgins associated with Saint Ursula are said to have been buried. The church has an impressive reliquary created from the bones of the former occupants of the cemetery. It is one of the twelve Romanesque churches of Cologne and was designated a basilica in the canonical, if not architectural, sense in June 1920.

The “Golden Chamber” of the church contains the remains of St. Ursula and her companions who are said to have been killed by the Huns. The walls of the Golden Chamber are covered in bones arranged in designs and letters along with relic-skulls. The exact number of people whose remains are in the Golden Chamber remains ambiguous but the number of skulls in the reliquary is greater than 11 and less than the 11,000. These remains were found in 1106 in a mass grave and were assumed to be those of the legend of St. Ursula and the virgins. Therefore, the church constructed the Golden Chamber to house the bones.

The small village of Llangwyryfon, near Aberystwyth in west Wales, has a church dedicated to St. Ursula. The village name translates as ‘Church of the Virgins’. She is believed to have come from this area. The Order of Ursulines, founded in 1535 by Angela Merici, and devoted to the education of young girls, has also helped to spread Ursula’s name throughout the world. St. Ursula was named the patron saint of school girls.

It has been theorized that the character of St. Ursula is a Christianized form of the Norse goddess Freya, who welcomed the souls of dead maidens. Other 19th-century scholars have referred to the goddesses Nehalennia, Nerthus and Mother Holda.

Walsingham and Prague and Loreto… and Nazareth

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Detail from the marble chapel built around the Prague replica of the Holy House from Nazareth. Construction started in 1626 and the Holy House was blessed on 25 March 1631.

The marble facade of the Holy House in Loreto, Italy is very similar to the marble facade of the Holy House in Prague.

Everyone agrees that Jesus grew up in Nazareth. He lived there with the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph. So how can so many places in Europe claim to have the Holy House of the Virgin Mary?

There was a chapel of the Virgin in Loreto, Italy since the late AD 1200s. It contained a small replica of the house in Nazareth for the faithful to visit if they could not go on pilgrimage to the Middle East. Monks (often referred to as “angels”) brought a few stones from Nazareth to add to the Holy House in Loreto. During the Renaissance, an elaborate marble façade was built around the Holy House to protect it and then a large church was built around the marble chapel. “Our Lady of Loreto” is the title of the Virgin Mary with respect to the Holy House of Loreto and her statue, carved from Cedar of Lebanon, is a “Black Madonna” (owing to centuries of lamp smoke).

Other replicas of the Holy House were constructed in many places. The most famous are in Prague and Walsingham. (The Holy House in Walsingham was destroyed by order of King Henry VIII but new shrines of the Mother of God were built there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.) The original statue of the Mother of God was thought to be destroyed when the Holy House–often called “England’s Nazareth”–was destroyed but it might have been cleverly hidden instead. A statue of the Virgin in the Victoria and Albert Museum might be the original; read about it here.