Medieval Treasure Found in Lancashire

A lucky metal detectorist from Lancashire has unearthed a medieval pilgrimage relic which will take its place amongst some of the most rare and revered Medieval Relics in an Exhibition at the British Museum.

The exhibition 'Treasures of Heaven' which opened last week and is on until 9th October, will for the first time bring into context, these sacred and mystical treasures from the Middle Ages.

The Guardian's Maev Kennedy reports;

The badge made of silver found by Paul King, a retired logistics expert, is a humble object to earn a place in an exhibition called Treasures of Heaven, but it is unique. It will sit among gold and silver reliquaries studded with gems the size of thumbnails – or the sockets from which they were wrenched by thieves – once owned by emperors, popes and princes.The badge, the only one of its kind ever found in Britain, provides a link 500 years ago between this corner of rural Lancashire and the great pilgrimage sites of mainland Europe. It shows one of the companions of St Ursula, one of the most popular mystical legends of medieval Europe...

King, a member of the South Ribble metal detecting club, found the silver plaque at the end of April in a field some miles from his home in Walton-le-Dale, where he had already found several hundred Victorian coins, but returned with the blessing of the landowner for a sweep with his new more high-powered metal detector.

"I knew immediately she was something special," he said. "I think she was hidden deliberately – she was folded over, not damaged by a plough strike in any way. It is extraordinary and moving to think how much history is locked up in this little piece of metal."

Though there are many variations, the story of St Ursula which was recorded by Jacobus de Voragine’s in his Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend) of 1266, is that Ursula was a British Princess who was offered her hand in marriage by a pegan king. It is said that Ursula managed to delay the betrothal for 3 years during which time she had pleaded with her father to let her go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Ursula was accompanied by 10 ladies in waiting and each lady had 1,000 virgins who accompanied them on their Holy pilgrimage across Europe.

After meeting Pope Cyriacus in Rome the ladies returned home and in Cologne, were stopped, besieged and eventually beheaded by the Huns. The Legend says that St Ursula was shot with an arrow, which is why most depictions of the Saint portray her holding a single arrow in one hand to demonstrate her means of Martyrdom.

The Legend says that some date this event to 238 but that the year 452 is more likely.

The story originated in a local tradition in Cologne that some number of Christian virgins had been martyred by the Romans in the early years of the city. The earliest testimony to these virgins is a stone inscription from the fourth century, now in the choir of the Church of St. Ursula in Cologne. It speaks only of an unspecified number of virgin martyrs "from the East." But in the ninth century a number of liturgical sources mention these Colognese virgins, reporting their number variously as five, eight, or eleven. Scholars are uncertain as to how the number eleven was chosen and then multiplied by a thousand.

Maev Kennedy writes further;

Although a church in Cologne holds her shrine and a whole chapel still decorated with the supposed bones of her companions, there were so many bones that the relics spread across Europe and beyond. Some of the most beautiful reliquaries, life sized busts of fashionably dressed young women, were made to hold the bones. The badge from Lancashire is a representation of just such a shrine - and so close in style and early 16th century date that it may come from the same Bruges workshop as the one in the exhibition on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The Metropolitan reliquary, of a gently smiling young woman with her hair in a modish plaited style, is so alluring it has become the exhibition poster. The badge would have been bought as a souvenir by the Lancashire pilgrim from just such a shrine.

British Museum curator James Robinson said he was "beside myself with excitement" when he saw an image of the find. "To be honest if I hadn't been working on the exhibition it might have taken me a while to clock it – as it is I recognised her immediately as one of the companions of St Ursula. I hesitate to call it a miracle, but it is a most extraordinary coincidence that this should turn up just at this time."

He believes it is even possible that a similar reliquary may have been the centre of a shrine in Britain, destroyed as the cult of relics was condemned as idolatrous and blasphemous by religious reformers.

"The badge may be the only fragile, ephemeral piece of evidence for a cult of St Ursula in the north of England, that might have had at its centre a bust reliquary of continental manufacture."

The exhibition will include reliquaries which the faithful believed once held the breast milk of the Virgin Mary, the umbilical cord of the baby Jesus, the arm of Saint Luke - holding a golden pen to symbolise the gospels he wrote - and many still containing fragments of wood claimed to come from the cross on which Christ died. A carved icon of the Virgin which according to tradition was taken from the neck of the dead emperor Charlemagne, was one of the treasures of Aachen cathedral until it was given as present to Napoleon's Josephine. Some of the loans have never before left the churches or villages where they have been venerated for centuries. Many were believed to have miraculous powers, and made the places that held them wealthy pilgrimage sites - as Canterbury cathedral was for the relics of the martyred Thomas a Becket, and Santiago de Compostela in Spain remains to this day.

King, who has always been interested in history and spends days researching his finds in museums and archives, reported it under the Portable Antiquities scheme which encourages metal detectors to report all their archaeological finds, but she proved to be silver and so legally treasure which must be reported. When valued - the price will be shared between King and the landowner - Robinson hopes the British Museum will acquire her to find a permanent resting place in its medieval galleries

The Lancashire St Ursula badge and the Exhibition 'Treasures of Heaven' can be seen at the British Museum. For further information please see the below links:-

http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/treasures_of_heaven/introduction.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Ursula

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jun/20/badge-dug-field-medieval-treasure?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.aug.edu/augusta/iconography/ursula.html

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/online/exhibitions/faith/stursula.asp

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/index.htm