Last Name 1
Student Name
English Literature 1
Professor Mulready
DATE
“The blood of Crist that is in Hailes”: An Annotation of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale
360 And fertherover, I wol thee tell al plat
That vengeance shal nat parten from his hous
That of his othes is too outrageous.
“By Goddes precious herte!” and “By his nailes!”
And “By the blood of Crist that is in Hailes*,
365 Sevene is my chaunce, and thyn is cink and traye!”
The Abbey of Hailes, in Gloucester, was famed for its holy “relick:” a vial of Christ’s blood (Levy 1). ‘The blood of Hailes’ was given to the abbey by Edmund of Cornwall, son of Richard, King of the Romans, upon Edmund’s return from Germany, circa 1270 (Stacey 1). According to Thomas Tyrwhitt, eighteenth-century critic and Chaucer canonist, Edmund of Cornwall “bestowed a third part of it upon his father’s Abbey of Hailes,” while saving the final two parts for “an Abbey of his own foundation at Ashburg” (qtd. in Skeat 5: 284). Carl Horstmann relates the “Legend” of the blood in his 1878 work Altenglische Legenden: Joseph of Arimathea gave a sample of Christ’s blood to Titus, who enshrined it at the temple of Peace, in Rome. There the holy blood was claimed by Charlemagne and brought to Germany, where it would eventually be discovered by Edmund of Cornwall (qtd. in Skeat 5: 284-85).
The legitimacy of the religious artifact was ever a matter for debate, even in the “credulous Middle Ages” (Storm 5). The controversy which typically surrounded religious relics, upon which Chaucer plays in his portrayal of the charlatan Pardoner, placed the local population of Hailes in a difficult position: they received the pride and profit of a steady flow of pilgrims, but also faced the risk of theological disgrace (Shagan 166). One of the first major figures to question the validity of blood relics was the Roman Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas, who denounced the idea that Christ’s blood could be found on earth, as “all of the blood which poured forth from Christ’s body also rose with it” (qtd. in Shagan: 166), though Thomas did not wholly decry blood relics, rather, he explained the blood had likely “poured forth from an image of Christ when it was struck” (qtd. in Shagan: 166), in support of the Middle Age belief that miraculous, bleeding images of Christ were commonplace (Shagan 166).
In time, the truth of Hailes’ holy relic was revealed; Robert Southy, in his 1824 Book of the Church, explains the mystery behind the blood, which was reportedly only visible to those free of sin: “It was now discovered that this was performed by keeping blood, which was renewed every week, in a vial, one side of which was thick and opaque, the other transparent, and turning it by a secret hand as the case required” (qtd. in Skeat 5: 285). The relic had bolstered the abbey’s reputation for centuries, before being definitively exposed as a fraud (Shagan 195). By way of explanation to the disillusioned population, Evangelical preachers claimed they had been “duped by both the monks and the bishop of Rome” (Shagan 195).
During the reign of King Henry VIII, as the power shifted from Rome to the Crown, the abbey itself passed into royal hands for redistribution; however, in the interim, the grounds were “systematically looted.” Shagan notes that some of the theft may have been to “preserve” abbey property in the event of reestablishment, though the predominate motivation is believed to have been profit (qtd. in Levy: 2).
Works Cited
Levy, Frizt. Rev. of Popular Politics and the English Reformation, by Ethan H. Shagan.
Renaissance Quarterly 57.3 (2004): 1117-1119. Print.
Shagan, Ethan H. Popular Politics and the English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2003. Print.
Skeat, Walter W. The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: Notes to The Canterbury Tales.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1894. Print.
Stacey, Robert. Rev. of The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic, by
Nicholas Vincent. Albion 35.2 (2003): 265-266. Print.
Storm, Melvin. “The Pardoner’s Invitation: Quaestor’s bag or Becket’s Shrine?” PMLA 97.5
(1982): 810-818. Print.