Reburial of Richard duke of York
In 1476 Edward IV instigated the reburial of Richard duke of York and Edmund earl of Rutland. His father had been buried in the grounds of the Mendicant Friars in Pontefract after his death in the battle of Wakefield. It was a humble burial site. More suitable, and with significant propaganda opportunities, was a final resting place for the Duke of York and Earl of Rutland at the House of York’s castle at Fotheringhay.
The bodies were therefore exhumed and amid great pomp and ceremony translated for burial within the grounds of the college there.
Reburial of Richard duke of York
In the meantime, and while the king was, for some years, as we have already stated, intent upon accumulating these vast quantities of wealth, he expended a considerable part of them in a solemn repetition of the funeral rites of his father, Richard, the late duke of York. For this most wise monarch, recalling to mind the very humble place of his father’s burial (the house of the Mendicant Friars at Pomfret, where the body of that great prince had been interred, amid the disturbances of the time at which he perished), translated the bones of his father, as well as those of his brother Edmund, earl of Rutland, to the fine college of Fotheringham, which he had founded, in the diocese of Lincoln, attended by two processions, which consisted both of persons distinguished by birth and high rank: the one being of ecclesiastics, and consisting of the preates, the other of various peers and lords temporal. This solemnity was performed on certain days in the month of July, in the sixteenth year of the said king, being the year of our Lord, 1476.
Croyland Chronicle
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Image Credits
The motte of Fotheringhay Castle. – P1020062. CC BY-SA 2.0 Via Wikipedia
