800 years ago, on 14 June 1226, an extraordinary event took place at the heart of the post-Conquest, still-new Diocese of Salisbury. The bodies of three of its early bishops (Osmund, Roger, and Jocelin) were removed from their tombs in the cathedral of Old Sarum. They were brought down the hill, and reinterred in the cathedral of New Sarum, then in its seventh year of construction.
It was a sign that the cathedral community’s centre of gravity had shifted decisively. Its principal place of worship and prayer was no longer the windswept hilltop, under the watchful eye of the royal garrison. The community had moved, and it was important that the remains of its former leaders should move too. In life and in death, God’s people belonged together.
It was not a custom peculiar to mediaeval England. Scripture records moments when the bones of the elders are moved as the community moves. On his deathbed, the patriarch Joseph prophesies that God will deliver his people from Egypt. He asks that when that day comes his bones should be reburied in the Promised Land.
We could debate the theology of such removals at length. Presumably the unity in Christ of the living and the dead is not contingent on the place where the remains of the dead are located (or, indeed, on the place where the living are resident!) But the care with which such remains were treated, and the importance attached to their being close at hand tells us something. It suggests that our forebears were prepared to view those who had led them with respect and generosity.
Roger, Jocelin, and Osmund were all Norman aristocrats heavily embroiled in the politics of the new regime. Despite Osmund’s later canonization all must have made enemies (indeed, Jocelin was twice excommunicated by Archbishop Thomas Becket, martyred in 1170, while Roger’s predilection for castle-building earned him the perpetual enmity of King Stephen). Yet the community honoured them; honoured the office they had held as Bishops of the Church; honoured (perhaps) whatever good they had seen in them as they exercised that office; and continued to pray for them as brothers in the Lord’s family as they were laid to rest in the new cathedral.
Many commentators have observed that these are difficult times for leaders: I write this wondering who will be our Prime Minister by the time you read it. The scrutiny leaders are under is intense and the expectations of them are high - understandably, and necessarily so. Perhaps the strange rite of 800 years ago – that solemn procession from Old Sarum to New – has something to teach us. Something about our common origin in God’s loving purposes, which puts our differences into perspective; something about the roles leaders hold which transcends the qualities or defects that they bring to them; and something about our vocation to pray constantly – and to learn to pray for those we find hard to love.
- Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
