Pagina:Annales monastici Vol IV.djvu/56

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xlviii PREFACE. V. I'.iial of li. Toche. had been long closely connected with the priory/) who died in 1298, was induced, in the absence of his friends, by the ?dvice of a certain friar, John of Olney, to choose to be buried among the Franciscans.^ He mentions what a scene the friars made of the funeral, carrying the corpse rourd the city, like conquerors with a captured prey, and at length burying it in a place where no burials had taken place before, and where in winter t'me it was rather immersed than buried, the spot having been a cabbage garden within the author's memory ^ (p. 537). This did not prevent his son from bringing his mother's body afterwards to the same spot, although she here elf had intended otherwise (p. 549). But the most remarkable instance of this was the affair of a certain H. Poche a citizen of Worcester, who died in 1289. The sacrist of the priory carried off the body by force, and buried it in the cemetery of the priory in spite of the Franciscans (pj). 499, 500). The Franciscans com- plained to the archbishop (viendaciter, the annalist says) that they had been beaten and wounded by the monks ; the affair came even to the king's ears. (The question was fairly settled about the same time, — that after mass said in the cathedral for the dead, provided that the church lost nothing, if the fiiars could legally prove that the bodies we^-e ^eft to them they should freely carry them away to their place of burin i.) The archbishop, John Peccham, a Franciscan himself,^ wrote very strongly ' See pp. 382, 528, 544. - He had had a fancy that his father, who had been buried in the cathedral, had been taken oat of his grave ; and actually had the body exhumed to see (p. 471). This was in 1276. It may have had some- thing to do with his choosing his own burial place elsewhere. ^ An instance this of the poor places in the towns the Franciscans had for their churches and dwell- ings. See Brewer's Preface to the Monumenta Franciscana, pp. xvii, xviii. That it was the church is clear from p. 549. ■* This was a proud time for the English Franciscans, who boasted they had at this time the Sun and Moon (i.e. the Pope, Nicholas IV., and the archbishop) in their order See pp. 509, 511. The chronicler