ABSTRACT
The public ritual occasioned by a royal death accorded with views about death held throughout medieval western society (Ariès 1976, 12). Death became a ceremony, and the dying man’s bedchamber a public place to be entered freely by parents, friends and neighbours. Cemeteries, too, were public places but the remains of the more wealthy dead were placed in mausolea near the saints, or in churches close to altars. The practice of sepulture by division (dividing up the body and burying the parts in different places) is linked with this concern for public participation. Monks, canons and the communities they served vied with one another to obtain royal
bones (Hallam 1991, 11). The desire to profit from prayers by any means, at all times, and in a number of places led to the ready willingness on the part of royal defuncts to arrange in advance for the dismemberment of their corpses; the heart might be deposited in one church, the entrails in another and the body elsewhere (Brown 1981).
