The Archbishop's Head That Still Survives

Simon of Sudbury is the subject of one of the most brutal and astonishing execution stories in all of medieval English history: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most powerful churchman in England, hacked to death by a raging mob, whose severed head survives, mummified and kept in a Suffolk church, to this very day, six and a half centuries later.

To understand it, you have to understand the fury that killed him. By 1381, England was a powder keg. The population had been devastated by the Black Death decades earlier; the peasants and labourers who survived wanted higher wages and an end to serfdom, the system that bound them like property to the land. And then the government, desperate for money to fund its wars with France, imposed a deeply hated new tax: the poll tax, a flat charge levied on every single person regardless of whether they were rich or poor. It was the final insult. And the man most closely associated with it, the man who, as Lord Chancellor of England, was seen as its architect, was Simon of Sudbury. Sudbury had climbed to the very top of medieval society: Bishop of London, then Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest church office in the land, and the man who had personally crowned the boy-king Richard II. He was, at once, the head of the English Church and the head of the King’s government. And to the furious poor of England, he was the face of everything they hated.

In June 1381, that fury exploded into the Peasants’ Revolt, the Great Rising. A massive rebel army, led by figures like Wat Tyler, marched on London, and the city, poorly defended with most of the King’s troops away fighting in France and the north, fell into their hands. They burned palaces and opened prisons. And the young King Richard II, along with his most senior ministers, took refuge behind the great walls of the Tower of London, including Simon of Sudbury, who knew, better than anyone, that the mob wanted his head.

The Horror

On 14th June 1381, it all came apart. While the fourteen-year-old King rode out to negotiate with the rebels at Mile End, the crowd surged against the Tower of London, and, incredibly, the guards, either sympathetic to the rebels or simply terrified, opened the gates and let them pour in. The rebels stormed through the fortress hunting for the men they blamed. Simon of Sudbury, knowing what was coming, is said to have been at prayer, saying Mass in the chapel of St John within the Tower, making his peace with God. The mob found him. They seized him, along with Sir Robert Hales, the Lord High Treasurer, the two ministers most tied to the poll tax, roaring, according to the chronicles, “Where is the traitor of the kingdom? Where is the despoiler of the commons?” Sudbury, with remarkable dignity, is said to have answered them: “I am no traitor and no despoiler, but your Archbishop.” It made no difference. They dragged the Archbishop of England out of the Tower and up onto Tower Hill, the traditional execution ground, to kill him.

But there was no executioner. No trained headsman, no proper block, just a screaming mob and an untrained man with a blade, and a victim who was to be butchered by amateurs. What followed was appalling. According to a later account by the chronicler John Stow, it took eight blows to the neck to finally sever Simon of Sudbury’s head from his body. Eight. The first blow, the tradition tells, cut deep into his neck but did not kill him, and as he instinctively raised his hand to the terrible wound, one of the following strokes hacked into his fingers. Blow after blow rained down on the kneeling Archbishop until, at last, his head came free. It was a death of pure, chaotic savagery. His head was then carried in grisly triumph through the streets and jammed onto a pole above the gatehouse of London Bridge, and in a final act of mockery, because he was an archbishop, his cap was said to have been nailed to the skull so everyone would know whose head it was. It stayed there for days, until the revolt was crushed and the head of the rebel leader Wat Tyler eventually took its place.

The Modern Relic

Simon of Sudbury’s headless body was buried with honour in Canterbury Cathedral, where he had been Archbishop, and because his actual head was gone, stuck on a spike in London, tradition holds they buried his body with a ball of lead in place of the missing head, reportedly still there in his tomb to this day. But his real head did not stay on London Bridge. The legend tells that a man from Sudbury’s Suffolk hometown, unable to bear the sight of his townsman’s head rotting on a pike, crept up to London Bridge under cover of darkness, took the head down, and secretly carried it all the way back home to the town of Sudbury.

And that is the astonishing relic. Because that head is still there. In St Gregory’s Church in Sudbury, Suffolk, the church Simon himself helped to endow, the partially mummified, six-hundred-and-forty-year-old skull of Archbishop Simon of Sudbury rests in a niche in the vestry wall, and can still be seen today. It is one of the most extraordinary and macabre relics in all of England: the genuine, preserved head of a man murdered by a mob in 1381, sitting quietly in a small English parish church. And in 2011, modern science reached back across the centuries to meet him. The skull was carefully removed and given a CT scan, and a forensic artist used it to reconstruct Simon of Sudbury’s actual face, building up the muscle and skin over the digital model of his skull. For the first time in over six hundred years, people could look upon the face of the archbishop the mob tore apart: a heavy-set, jowly man, his features rebuilt from the very bone that took eight blows to sever. You can visit him now: the ambitious churchman who crowned a king and helped tax a nation to breaking point, whose head was hacked off by his own people and paraded on London Bridge, and who has been quietly resting in a Suffolk church, in the form of a mummified skull, for the better part of seven centuries.

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