Elizabeth Woodville and the Chapel of St Erasmus at Westminster Abbey

Abstract

In 1502 the 13th-century Lady Chapel at the east end of Westminster Abbey was demolished to make way for its new incarnation. Clearance of the site also required the destruction of a chapel dedicated to St Erasmus, which had stood on the south side of the Lady Chapel for only a quarter of a century. This article explores the documentary evidence for the short-lived St Erasmus chapel, from its construction at the behest of Elizabeth Woodville in the late 1470s, to its use for royal burials and to house the abbey’s relics of St Erasmus, and ultimately its fate at the beginning of the 16th century.

Keywords:

• chantry
• chapel
• Westminster Abbey
• alabaster
• St Erasmus
• Lady Chapel
• reredos

Acknowledgements

The reconstruction of Westminster Abbey’s east end was made possible through the generous sponsorship of the British Archaeological Association’s Foxon bequest.

Notes

1 J. Goodall, ‘The Jesus Chapel or Islip’s Chantry at Westminster Abbey’, JBAA, 164 (2011), 260–76, at 262, described the reredos as ‘An object of extraordinarily high quality’.

2 J. Neale and E. Brayley, The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St Peter Westminster, 2 vols (London 1823), II, 187. Neale did not know the origin of the tabernacle, and erroneously believed the chapel of Our Lady of the Pew to be the St Erasmus chapel.

3 The only physical details of the 13th-century Lady Chapel previously identified are two small sections of excavated wall foundation. These indicate the width of the chapel (with the walls lying just inside the line of the present Henry VII Chapel arcade) and demonstrate that it possessed a polygonal east end. In this drawing it has been assumed that the internal wall passage in the radiating chapels of the choir connected with a wall passage at the same level in the Lady Chapel. That detail is both implied by the truncation of these passages in the existing fabric and - crucially - the discovery in the present antechapel roof space of small fragments of the westernmost bay of the 13th-century Lady Chapel at the level of the vault springing to both the north and south sides. These show that the Lady Chapel resembled the other radiating chapels: it rose to the same level as the aisle vault and that its first bay was blind and ornamented with blind tracery of two lights and an oculus above. Such identical treatment would accord with French High Gothic precedents and explain the wording of Henry III’s instruction on 6 June 1256, that the chapel ‘to the east of the new works at Westminster’ (i.e. the Lady Chapel begun in 1220) be partially dismantled and ‘the stone of the same chapel proportionately heightened in similitude of the aforesaid new works’. It should be said that the elevation of the 1220 chapel might have resembled that of the Temple Church in Middle Temple. If that is the case, then in 1256 the elevations of that building must have been truncated at least to the level of the dado. The bay widths of the original and 1250s building, therefore, could have been different. In this drawing the triforium is shown as opening into a large space above the vault of the Lady Chapel. This arrangement can be inferred from the fact that the present east triforium wall is infill. In 1244 there is record of the altars of St Michael and St Adrian ‘over the vault in the new chapel’; in other words over the vault of the 1220 Lady Chapel. Perhaps the intention was to recreate this arrangement in the new building (though there is no evidence that this ever actually happened). The fittings of the Lady Chapel are educated guess work and - in the case of the candle beam, lectern, altar curtains, tombs, south porch and sacristy - based on documentary reference. It is clear from the mouldings of Henry V’s Chapel that this structure, designed in 1438, extended eastwards into the Lady Chapel but the organ loft and arrangement of grills is speculative and based partly on the fabric and the pulpitum at Exeter Cathedral. In the body of the church, the position of the altars in the radiating chapels is inferred from extant fittings and decoration, likewise the existence of the elevated chapel or closet in the bay now occupied by the 1524–30 Jesus or Islip Chapel. From the form of the original tomb grill to Edward I’s monument it seems likely that there was late medieval access to the shrine from the north aisle. Overall, the drawing illustrates the way in which colour - in glass, paintings and furnishings - was used to focus attention on liturgically important spaces in what was otherwise a cool, two-tone interior of Reigate stone and Purbeck marble.

4 J. T. Micklethwaite, ‘A Description of the Chapel of St Erasmus in Westminster Abbey’, Archaeologia, 44 (1873), 93–99.

5 Westminster Abbey Muniments (henceforth WAM), 19693; J. Harvey, ‘The masons of Westminster Abbey’, Archaeol. J., 113 (1956), 82–101, at 91.

6 See, for example, F. Cheetham, English Medieval Alabasters (Woodbridge 2005), 20–27.

7 C. Wilson et al., Westminster Abbey (London 1986), 83–84; J. Harvey, The Perpendicular Style (London 1978), 54.

8 J. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme (Ashgate 2001), 181–91.

9 Most recently in J. Spooner, ‘The Virgin Mary and White Harts Great and Small: The 14th-century wall-paintings in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Pew and the Muniment Room’, in Westminster, The Art, Architecture, and Archaeology of the Royal Abbey and Palace, ed. W. Rodwell and T. Tatton-Brown, BAA Trans., xxxix, 2 vols (London 2015), I, 262–90.

10 W. Rodwell and D. Neal, The Cosmatesque Mosaics of Westminster Abbey: II The Royal Tombs (Oxford 2019), 481–503.

11 Spooner, ‘The Virgin Mary’, 275, argued that these are late insertions within the fabric.

12 The original letters patent survive as WAM LXX. They were duly enrolled in the patent rolls, Calendar Patent Rolls, 53 vols (London 1819–1916) (hereafter CPR), 1476–85, 133–34.

13 CPR, 1461–67, 178, 223; VCH, A History of the County of Worcestershire, 4 vols (London 1901–24), III, 130–32; C. Given-Wilson et al. ed., Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 16 vols (Woodbridge 2005), V, 480–81. The earl was beheaded after the battle, his head ‘smete of, and send unto London to be sette upon London Brygge’: J. Gairdner, The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, Camden Record Society, Old Series, vol. 17 (London 1876), 217.

14 WAM 5254.

15 T. Tatton-Brown, ‘The Building of the New Chapel: the First Phase’, in St George’s Chapel Windsor: History and Heritage, ed. N. Saul and T. Tatton-Brown (Wimborne Minster 2010), 69–80, at 70.

16 F. Sandford, A Genealogical History of the Kings of England (London 1677), 393–94.

17 D. MacGibbon, Elizabeth Woodville (London 1938), 94–97; C. Scofield, ‘Elizabeth Wydevile in the Sanctuary at Westminster, 1470’, The English Historical Review, 24 (1909), 90–91. The abbey’s sacrist paid 6s. 8d. for the door-keeper (janitor) who was guarding her: WAM 19717. Abbot Millyng was one of those who stood godfather to Prince Edward who was born during her stay.

18 WAM 9485, an inventory of relics dated 1520, transcribed in H. Westlake, Westminster Abbey, 2 vols (London 1923), II, 499–501. This relic is not listed in the relic list of 1479: WAM 9478. However, it is possible that the relic was kept in the Lady Chapel or St Erasmus chapel and so not listed in the 1479 inventory of the shrine relics, and only transferred to the shrine on the destruction of the chapels in 1502. In the 1479 inventory, a Sarum breviary was said to have been lost by Elizabeth’s father, Sir Richard Woodville. Given his death in 1469, this must have occurred at some point between 1467 (when it is listed) and 1469. On the relics, see J. Luxford, ‘Recording and curating relics at Westminster Abbey in the late Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History, 45 (2019), 204–30.

19 B. Harvey, ‘The monks of Westminster and the old Lady Chapel’, in Westminster Abbey: The Lady Chapel of Henry VII, ed. T. Tatton-Brown and R. Mortimer (Woodbridge 2003), 5–32, at 27.

20 R. Rackham, ‘The Nave at Westminster’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 4 (1912), 35–96, at 68–69.

21 These are recorded in the annual accounts of the Warden of the New Work, WAM 23537–58.

22 WAM 23551. Stidolf had been appointed to the role on 11 February 1472: A. Myers, ‘The Household of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, 1466–7’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 50/i (1967), 443–81 and 50/ii (1968), 207–35. Isabella Stidolf, the wife of Thomas Stidolf (or Stedolfe), had been nurse to Elizabeth’s daughter Cecily: CPR, 1476–85, 226. For Hulcote and Stidolf as servants of the queen, see CPR, 1476–85, 52.

23 See Rackham, ‘The Nave at Westminster’.

24 This is usually in cart loads (carata), and this is the figure given here unless stated otherwise. Occasionally it is given in tons or tonne-tites (doliata), see L. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540, 3rd edn (Oxford 1997), 122.

25 Plus another 12 doles of Caen stone this year.

26 Salzman, Building in England, chapter 7.

27 E. Pearce, Monks of Westminster (Cambridge 1916), 148. His birthdate can be deduced from a supplication he sent to the apostolic penitentiary in 1492, when, aged seventy-four and infirm, he sought (unsuccessfully) to relinquish the abbacy. His application to the same body on his appointment in 1474 explained that he required special dispensation because he was born of unmarried parents: P. Clarke and P. Zutshi ed., Supplications from England and Wales in the Registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 3 vols (Woodbridge 2013–15), II, 219, no. 2309 and III, 35 no. 3562.

28 The statues are shown in the mortuary roll of his successor (and formerly his chaplain) John Islip, drawn in 1532. See M. T. W. Payne, ‘The Islip Roll Re-Examined’, The Antiquaries Journal, 97 (2017), 231–60. Abbot Esteney’s role in their creation is made clear in a short biography of him compiled by Fr John Felix, monk of Westminster, in c. 1530: London, British Library (henceforth BL), MS Cotton, Claudius A viii, fols 70v–71r.

29 Rackham, ‘The Nave of Westminster’, 39–40.

30 WAM 23253.

31 See Harvey, ‘The Monks of Westminster’, 25.

32 In 1298–99 the Warden of the Lady Chapel paid 22d. for ironwork for a painted door in the chapel leading to the ‘curtilage’: WAM 23179. In 1369–70 3s. was paid for mending the door of the chapel to the garden: WAM 23185.

33 No record of such a construction exists, but the accounts of the Warden are extremely patchy. During Harwedon’s twenty-year abbacy, for example, only eight annual rolls survive.

34 BL, MS Egerton 2642, fol. 323r, followed by WAM 53318. For these burial lists, see B. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford 1977), 365–72. The missing source of all of these lists appears to have been compiled c. 1500. The order of the entries in the lists is consistent with its compiler proceeding clockwise around the Lady Chapel from north to south, reaching the chapel of St Erasmus before Harwedon’s burial spot, and then continuing into the abbey church itself. Curiously, the entry for Harwedon has been interpreted to mean a site in the south ambulatory of the main church (e.g. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and its Estates, 381).

35 See Harvey, ‘The Monks of Westminster’, 22–27.

36 In 1454–55 a sink was installed: WAM 23227.

37 WAM 23225, WAM 23234.

38 In 1489–90, for example, repairs were made to the inner vestry door: WAM 23262. Works on the roof in the south-west corner of the chapel in this year appear to have caused problems with the chapel of St Nicholas, knocking a hole in its walls, and causing water to run down to the St Albans tenement for eleven days.

39 See G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster (Oxford 1989), 68–69. In 1399, Geoffrey Chaucer had rented one of the tenements in this area: WAM LVII.

40 WAM 19727. His rent was 13s. 4d., suggesting a sizeable house. For St Albans, see L. Tanner, ‘William Caxton’s Houses at Westminster’, The Library, 5th ser., 12 (1957), 153–66, at 153–58; H. Nixon, ‘Caxton, his Contemporaries and Successors in the Book Trade’, The Library, 5th series, 31 (1976), 305–26, at 308, which is slightly countered by T. Tatton-Brown, ‘The Medieval and Early Tudor Topography of Westminster’, in Westminster, The Art Architecture and Archaeology of the Royal Abbey, I, 4.

41 J. Harvey, English Medieval Architects (Gloucester 1987), 286–87; E. Roberts, ‘Robert Stowell’, JBAA, 35 (1972), 24–38; Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 400–01.

42 WAM 23551.

43 See Tanner, ‘William Caxton’s Houses’, 153–66; Nixon, ‘Caxton, his Contemporaries and Successors’, 305–26. Caxton’s proximity to the St Erasmus building project, almost from the moment he returned to England, has rarely been recognized. This shopa was evidently a relatively small affair, as its rent was only 10s., compared to the 13s. 4d. Stowell paid for St Albans, and 26s. or 28s. other tenants were paying for their rents.

44 In 1488–89 the two shops on either side of Caxton’s are specifically stated as having been rented out only ‘in the time of parliament’, with much reduced rents as a result (2s. and 4d. respectively), WAM 19736.

45 WAM Muniment Book I, fol. 93r. These supplies were not for the construction of the chapel itself, as stated by Westlake, Westminster Abbey, II, 350. This manuscript (known as the Liber Niger) calls the building ‘the chapel of Queen Elizabeth’, but a copy of the same manuscript in the College of Arms refers instead to ‘Sti Herasmi’, London, College of Arms, MS Young 72.

46 In 1496 Prior Fascet ordered 400,000 bricks of these dimensions, costing 18d. per thousand, for use at his manor of Belsize (WAM 16470). At these rates, the St Erasmus wall brickwork would have cost £1 11s. 6d.

47 If one imagines the wall to have been double brick thickness, and a height of twenty bricks, this would give a length of approximately 390 feet; at thirty bricks high, this reduces to a little over 260 feet.

48 T. Tatton-Brown, ‘The Building History’, 193, n. 18.

49 Although this is hardly unique: at Gloucester, for example, the chapels of abbots Richard Hanley (r. 1458–72) and William Farley (r. 1472–98) were similarly attached to the newly built Lady Chapel.

50 For this chapel, see C. Oakes, ‘In Pursuit of Heaven: The Two Chantry Chapels of Bishop Edmund Audley at Hereford and Salisbury Cathedrals’, JBAA, 164 (2010), 196–220.

51 J. Goodall, ‘The Aerary Porch and Its Influence on Late Medieval English Vaulting’, in St George’s Chapel Windsor in the Fourteenth Century, ed. N Saul (Woodbridge 2005), 165–202.

52 For this roll, see Payne, ‘Islip Roll’.

53 D. Farmer, Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford 1978), 133.

54 Caxton’s edition is Incunabula Short Title Catalogue no. ij00148000.

55 ‘Images of the saint, or altars dedicated to him, are recorded in no fewer than sixty-eight Kentish churches’: J. Franklin, B. Nurse and P. Tudor-Craig ed., Catalogue of Paintings in the Collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London (London 2015), 251.

56 Now SAL 318. See Catalogue of Paintings, 245–51.

57 TNA, PROB/11/9/101. We are grateful to Dr Richard Foster for this reference.

58 Thomas Bough, a gentleman usher of the exchequer, acquired a licence ‘for the ground near St Erasmus’, on which he had a pew built: Westminster Archive Centre (henceforth WAC), E1, fol. 336. In his will in 1515 he asked to be buried in the chapel of St Erasmus: WAC, Wykes, fols 109v–111v. After Bough’s death, his executor Anthony Leigh paid the parish 13s. 4d. for ‘the grounde of Saynt Erasmus chapel’ belonging to the church. The church was not formally reconsecrated until 1523.

59 TNA, PROB 11/11/674. Hunt himself asked to be buried within the Lady Chapel in the abbey church, providing another connection between the two sites.

60 CPR, 1467–77, 304.

61 CPR, 1467–77, 543.

62 BL, Add. MS 54782, fol. 53v. For this manuscript, see J. Backhouse, The Hastings Hours (London 1996); T. Kren and S. McKendrick ed., Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscripts Painting in Europe (London and Los Angeles 2003), 192–94.

63 Elizabeth’s son, George, died aged two in March 1479, possibly of plague.

64 I. Thomas, ‘The Cult of Saints: Relics in Medieval England’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1974), 394. The other house was Hyde, which also listed a tooth of the saint in its 12th–century relic lists.

65 J. A. Robinson, The History of Westminster Abbey by John Flete (Cambridge 1909), 70–71.

66 The relic is not mentioned in the relic list drawn up in 1479 on the handover of shrine keepers (WAM 9478), which may indicate the item had already been removed from the shrine, but neither is it included in the very similar list drawn up in 1467 (WAM 9477), nor again in 1520 (WAM 9485), suggesting it may never have been stored at the shrine. See Luxford, ‘Relics’, 225–30. The two relic lists include mention of items kept at the tomb of Henry V, on the eastern side of the Confessor’s chapel, where the relics had previously been stored. Among these were ‘ij tethe of gold hangyng by a wire apon the handed of ye ymage of Kyng Harry ye Vth’; presumably these teeth were more saintly relics, of unsure origin. See W. H. St John Hope, ‘The Funeral, Monument, and Chantry Chapel of King Henry the Fifth’, Archaeologia, 65 (1914), 151.

67 The date of her death is given on the discovered coffin plate. On 26 November, Richard Cely reported news of her recent death in a letter: TNA, SC 1/53/88.

68 The location of her burial is not recorded contemporarily, but is included in the various early tomb lists for the abbey (see note 32 above). The earliest surviving list, now College of Arms, MS A 17, includes under ‘St Erasmus Chapel’ ‘first and […] daughter and heir of the Duke of Norfolk’. A slightly later list (probably compiled at the end of the 16th century, but copied from an original of the 1530s), which also includes details of burials in the earlier Lady Chapel, lists ‘item in capella sancti Erasmi corpus domine Anne filie ducis Norfolk maritate domino Richarde duci Eboraci filio predicte Edwardi 4’: WAM 53318.

69 P. Jones, ‘Anne Mowbray’, The Ricardian, 4/lxi (1978), 17–20.

70 BL, MS Lansdowne 205, fol. 21, is a list of the most important burials in the church of the Minories. It was compiled c. 1534, and states ‘Dame Anne Duchess of Yorke doughter to lord Moumbray Duke of Norfolke ys buryed yn the sayd Quere’. The list also includes Anne’s mother Elizabeth, who died in 1506. See also B. Watson and W. White, ‘Anne Mowbray, Duchess of York: a 15th-century child burial from the abbey of St Clare, in the London borough of Tower Hamlets’, London and Middlesex Archaeological Society Transactions, 67 (2016), 227–60.

71 WAM 66947. See R. Warwick, ‘Anne Mowbray: skeletal remains of a medieval child’, London Archaeologist, 5/vii (1986), 176–79; T. Molleson, ‘Anne Mowbray and the Princes in the Tower: a study in identity’, London Archaeologist, 5/x (1987), 258–62.

72 Her coffin was kept by the Museum of London.

73 His identity is made clear in BL, MS Add. 38133, fol. 99r, which may be in the hand of either Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King of Arms, or one of his assistants, and copied from an exemplar of about 1500. He is there described as ‘Sir Thomas Hungerforde knight father to George Hungerforde of Downe ampney knight’. As Wriothesley’s sister Barbara was married to Hungerford’s son Anthony, and in addition Wriothesley’s wife Jane Hall was the niece of Hungerford’s wife Christina Hall, Wriothesley is likely to have been well informed as to the burial place (and more interested in including it in his list). Although it is curious that he then makes a mistake over his brother-in-law’s name; Thomas Hungerford had two sons (John and Anthony), but none called George. In his copy of the burial lists, Stow corrects this name to John: BL, MS Harleian 544, fol. 65v.

74 BL, MS Add. 38133, fol. 99v. See Harvey, Westminster Abbey, 383, which incorrectly gives Walter’s death as 1464. But he was certainly still alive in 1484, when, together with his brothers Thomas and Edmond, he drew a bond on the king, Calendar of the Close Rolls, 47 vols (London 1900–63), 1476–85, 366; he is not mentioned in the will of his mother, Lady Margery Hungerford, proved in 1486: TNA, PROB 11/7/357. Walter Hungerford’s widow, Margaret (née St Leger), subsequently married Sir John Heveningham, but may have been buried with Walter in the abbey at her death on 1 February 1496.

75 For Christina’s will, see TNA, PROB 11/14/263.

76 Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries, 6 (1898–99), 193. The window was recorded by John Aubrey.

77 P. Jorgenson, W. Rodwell and J. Butler, ‘Chapels and Coffins at Westminster Abbey’, Medieval Archaeology, 60 (2016), 374–77.

78 John Welles was the half-brother of Lady Margaret Beaufort, and therefore an uncle of Henry VII. His widow, Cecily of York, the queen’s sister, sought the decision of Henry VII as to his place of burial, who chose the Lady Chapel. For a description of his funeral, see BL, MS Add. 45131, fols 60v–61v; BL, MS Arundel 26, fol. 34v, and College of Arms, MS I.iii, fols 32–33.

79 BL, MS Add. 38133, fol. 99r. Other royal burials in the Lady Chapel included Katherine de Valois, but her coffin and body were removed in 1502 to sit alongside the tomb of Henry V.

80 C. Given-Wilson et al. ed., Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 16 vols (Woodbridge 2005), VI, 296–97.

81 W. Campbell, Materials for a History of the Reign of Henry VII, 2 vols (London 1873–77), I, 480–81; CPR, 1485–94, 76–78. His restoration to favour was cemented by his appointment as the queen’s chamberlain by February 1486: Campbell, Materials, I, 295. On 30 November 1487 the earl leased from prime lessee, Cecily Radcliffe, a large property belonging to the abbey in the Sanctuary, ‘situated next to the Elms’ (that is, in the area to the west of the precincts now Dean’s Yard) (WAM 17880), a lease he took on directly in 1489 (WAM 17890).

82 WAM Register Book I, fol. 9, printed in J. A. Robinson, The Abbot’s House at Westminster (Cambridge 1911), 22–23. The abbey granted her the lease ‘remembering her gifts to the edifying and reparation of the fabric’.

83 MacGibbon, Elizabeth Woodville, 190.

84 WAM 19732.

85 WAM 19741. In 1495–96 they were 22d.; 1496–97, 11d.; 1497–98, 19d.; 1498–99, 15d.; 1499–1500, 11d.; 1500–01, 5d.; and 1501–02, 4.5d.: WAM 19747–19757.

86 See, for example, H. Colvin, The History of the King’s Works: 1485–1660, 6 vols (London 1963–75), III(i), 210–11; A. P. Stanley, Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (London 1869), 600–17.

87 A. Thomas and I. Thornley, The Great Chronicle of London (London 1938), 321.

88 See M. T. W. Payne, ‘The first chantry chapel of Lady Margaret Beaufort at Westminster Abbey’, in Performance, Ceremony and Display in Late Medieval Britain: Proceedings of the 2018 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. J. Boffey (Donington 2020), 273–83.

89 WAM 23581. This payment was not for actually taking down the old chapel itself (which would not have been the work of carpenters), and so does not mean that it was ‘a timber-framed structure’: Tatton-Brown, ‘Building History’, 193.

90 For Richard Russell and William Buxton, see Harvey, English Medieval Architects, 42–43, 262–63.

91 WAM 23582. For Tyler, see Colvin, The History of the King’s Works, III(i), 5–7, 213.

92 WAM 66947(6).

93 W. Camden, Reges, Reginae, Nobiles et alii in Ecclesia Collegiata B Petri Westmonasteri, (London 1606), 60. It is possible, as the Westminster Abbey catalogue entry for WAM 53318 states, that the list was compiled for Camden in preparation of his work. However, the suggestion that it is in Camden’s hand is incorrect.

94 In 1924, the niche housed the remains of a statue of the Virgin and Child, ‘mutilated and headless’, along with two fragments of draped figures, probably of the 14th century: Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London, Volume I: Westminster Abbey (London 1924), 73b.

95 See L. Voigts, ‘Plague Saints, Henry VII and St Armel’, in Saints and Cults in Medieval England, ed. S Powell, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 26 (Donington 2017), 101–23.