Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson

Author:Frances Larson [Larson, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780871404541
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2014-11-06T08:00:00+00:00

In Sudbury, in the county of Suffolk, a man’s head is kept in a church as a relic, but he is not a saint. Simon Sudbury’s head may well have been kept by his supporters in the hope that he would one day be canonized, and although it never happened, his head has survived and today it can be found in a niche in the vestry of St Gregory’s Church. This is simply the head of a dead man, and tourists come to see it as a historical curiosity rather than a divine relic. Schoolchildren visit as part of their history lessons, because Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England, was beheaded by an angry mob during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 for the part he played in instituting an unpopular poll tax on the people. Sudbury was neither a saint nor a criminal, and his head is a relic in that other, broader sense of the word, by bearing witness to an important moment in history. Because of that, it has come to embody a shift, rooted in the sixteenth century, but flourishing over the next two hundred years, which saw the term ‘relic’ gradually lose its aura of holiness.

Simon Sudbury was beheaded in 1381, during the heyday of the medieval trade in religious relics. According to local legend, Sudbury’s head was taken from its perch on London Bridge by supporters, who returned it to his home church of St Gregory in secret. Perhaps they thought their memento would one day prove to be the incorruptible flesh of a saint, but unlike Oliver Plunkett, Sudbury’s head has never formed part of an organized campaign for his canonization. Instead, it became part of local folklore, part of the church’s heritage, and part of the furniture. Then, after sitting in the church for more than six hundred years, Sudbury’s head offered up its secrets to science instead.

In 2011, a local Christian charity called Future Vision that works in schools around Sudbury asked forensic anthropologists at the University of Dundee to produce a facial reconstruction of Simon Sudbury from the remains of his head. The head was taken to a hospital in Bury St Edmunds, where it underwent a series of CT scans. Then computer modelling software was used to deflesh the skull in cyberspace. This virtual skull was converted into an exact 3D replica of Sudbury’s skull, which was used as the basis for the clay reconstruction of his head. As a result, three bronze resin casts of Sudbury’s head were made. One was given to Canterbury City Council, one to St Gregory’s Church, where it is displayed alongside his actual head, and one to Future Vision, who use it to teach local children about Simon’s life, the history of the parish church and the science of facial reconstruction.

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