Perhaps you were looking to refresh your memory about Philippa Walcote. You can find her story in the first Crispin book, Veil of Lies.
And if you were looking for the church mentioned in this story, be at peace. There is no St Modwen’s Church in All Hallows Barking (and isn’t that a great name?). There never was one in London. I added it. There is only one parish in England devoted to St Modwen, and that is in Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, part of the Diocese of Lichfield, where she founded her monastery. It was the only liberty I took … besides walking corpses and murdering people who didn’t exist, of course.
St Modwen or Modwenna was an Irish noblewoman who made a pilgrimage to Rome and became an abbess of some repute, performing miracles of various kinds. You won’t find any images of her, or much of a surviving cult. Henry VIII’s men, led by Thomas Cromwell, who went about the country dissolving monasteries and setting the monks and nuns adrift, made sure the relics, statues, and portraits of saints were destroyed so ‘that there should no more idolatry and superstition be there used’. So said Sir William Bassett in 1538, when he was instructed to remove the image of St Modwen. ‘I did not only deface the tabernacles and places where they stand,’ said Sir William, ‘but also did take away the crutches, shirts and sheets with wax offered, being things that did allure and intice the ignorant people to the said offerings, also giving the keepers of both places admonition and charge that no more offerings should be made in those places till the King’s pleasure and your lordships be further known in that behalf.’ The statue of the saint was said to stand with a red cow and was equipped with a staff that could be removed, which was supposedly helpful to women suffering labor pains when they leaned on it. I suppose Isabel could have used that.
Also, a word about walking corpses and blood on their faces. There were reported incidents in the Middle Ages and in slightly more recent times of such fears, when freshly interred corpses’ graves appeared to be disturbed. Animals, certainly, dug into turned earth, but more likely the culprits were grave robbers, looking for easy pickings. People would bury loved ones with their prized possessions, such as daggers and swords as well as jewelry, to take with them to the afterlife. After all, they’ve been doing that since ancient Egypt and before. But when grave robbers opened coffins they’d find that face cloths around the mouth were bloodied, and instantly ascribed it to the late-night wandering of the corpse. Of course, we know now that once any kind of animal dies, it can no longer rely on living enzymes and circulating blood to prevent the bacteria from breaking down the body, and some of that putrefaction of decay creates liquid waste, some of it being blood and plasma, which excretes where it can. Some of that results in gases that expand the body and split it open. But, not to put too fine a point on it, there are other openings of the body. One is the mouth. It’s naturally occurring, this appearance of what seems to be blood on the mouth. But they didn’t know that then, and all sorts of fanciful tales emerged, like those of vampires.
You might have noticed that I skipped a year from the last book, Season of Blood, to this. I was interested in moving Crispin’s story along. We might be skipping another year in the next book, Traitor’s Codex, to 1394, involving Crispin with a mysterious manuscript that the Church is willing to kill to get their hands on. See all about Crispin’s books, including discussion guides and the series listed in order, at JeriWesterson.com.