RIVAL CLERICS were not the only powerful groups with which Æthelwold's circle had to contend. They also dealt extensively with lay elites, as major landowners and as participants in local and royal governance. The circle needed nobles’ support, or at least non-interference. However, gaining this support was complicated, since the circle explicitly sought to redefine churches’ relationships with lay elites. As discussed earlier, they wanted to make their monasteries financially and socially autonomous from wealthy and powerful patrons, and they also wanted to influence lay peoples’ beliefs and behaviours. This situation was further complicated, the following chapter will argue, because the circle's relationships with lay nobles varied between their different houses. Even the same individuals – such as the leading ealdorman, Æthelwine – could be hostile to one of the circle's monasteries and a major patron of another, even though those houses were staffed with some of the same monks from Æthelwold's earlier refoundations. There was no single ‘anti-monastic reaction’ by nobles, nor was opposition to Æthelwold's circle limited to a single segment of the nobility.

Once again, supra-communal veneration seems to have been a key way the circle pursued its goals. As the circle's relationship to some key nobles varied, so their approach to supra-communal veneration also varied, at least during Æthelwold's lifetime.

THE PRECEDING chapters have argued that Æthelwold's circle used supra-communal veneration to interact with groups outside their monasteries, from expelled clerics to farmworkers in the Fens. They modified their venerating practices, and even which saints they venerated, in response to groups outside their monasteries. Since Æthelwold's houses existed in different geographic, social, and political contexts, no two houses within the circle promoted the same set of saints during Æthelwold's lifetime. However, in the years after Æthelwold's death – during ‘the second generation’ (c. 984–c. 1016) of Æthelwold's circle – monks at various monasteries within Æthelwold's circle prominently venerated saints who had been established at other monasteries in the circle. I will suggest this shared veneration was a manifestation of the cooperation between these houses as they supported each other through the turbulent early years of Æthelred's reign. Additionally, the second generation seems to have continued to promote saints from the first generation – as well as new saints – in order to entrench relationships with outside groups. These practices helped the monasteries in Æthelwold's circle establish the basis for their economic, social, and cultural dominance in England in the eleventh century and beyond. This is not to suggest that the circle was unique among late tenth-century ecclesiastics in promoting saints in this way. On the contrary, most of the strategies discussed in this book – from giving property to saints to stealing relics – needed to be comprehensible to groups outside the circle to be effective. However, the circle's continued flexibility in its venerating strategies is notable because it reinforces the arguments in earlier chapters that even these most extreme of reformers adapted to local contexts via saints’ cults.

‘Where there is life, death is a certainty; it's guaranteed’ announced the opening line of a recent advertisement for a ‘worldwide’ funeral insurance policy offering ‘body repatriation’ services for diasporan Zimbabweans. The odd mixture of morbidity and enthusiasm carried by that statement may be common to this peculiar genre of writing, and to the commercial activities it promotes, which have been the subject of a growing body of literature over the last decade or more (Golomski 2018a; Lee 2011). Although I have not focused particular attention here on the emergence of new commercial funerary activities in the context of broader, changing death practices across the region – a fascinating area of research where much remains to be done – the arguments developed in this book do suggest that, contrary to the statement above, there is much that is uncertain and unfinished or incomplete about death in Zimbabwe, and maybe elsewhere.

This book has focused on a particular, but multi-faceted, cultural-political phenomena in Zimbabwe that I call the politics of the dead. It is peculiar to Zimbabwe in so far as it animates, and is animated by, its particular colonial and postcolonial histories; especially the central role that legacies of violence from the liberation war, and from different post-independence periods, continue to play in its politics. But this phenomena is not limited to Zimbabwe's peculiar politics of violence and commemoration. It has both wider and more diverse salience within the country and beyond it; drawing on, feeding and gaining traction in the context of broader trajectories of change and continuity in meanings and practices to do with death. These include the rising significance of ‘liberation heritage’ across neighbouring countries that fought, or supported, struggles for independence, as well as broader patterns in the way that violence and post-violence has political efficacy in diverse contexts across the region. Zimbabwe's politics of the dead also resonates with a wider, revitalised ‘carnal fetishism’ and new (or renewed) concern with bodies and corporeality that scholars like Bernault (2010) and Ranger (2010b) also identified, and which the emergence of innovative funeral and mortuary practices similarly point towards, such as new insurance policies offering repatriation services which I began with above.

This chapter begins to explore the ambiguous or dual agency of bones as both ‘persons’ and ‘objects’ in the politics of heritage and commemoration in Zimbabwe. It discusses the emergence of a new commemorative project known as ‘liberation heritage’ in the 2000s which increasingly focused on the monumentalisation of sites dating to the liberation struggle (1965–1979), and particularly on the identification, reburial, ritual cleansing and memorialisation of human remains of the war dead, within Zimbabwe and across its borders (Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, Angola and Tanzania). Although related to ZANU PF's rhetoric of ‘patriotic history’ (Ranger 2004a), which became a key feature of Zimbabwe's political crisis in the 2000s, and which the new dispensation under Mnangagwa since November 2017 has continued to lay claim to, this liberation heritage project was also positioned awkwardly in the middle of a tension between two related but distinct pre-existing nationalist projects of the past – heritage and commemoration. Exploring the tensions that both commemorative and heritage processes can provoke between the ‘objectifying’ effects of professional practices, the reworkings of contested ‘national’ histories, and the often angry demands of marginalised communities, kin and the dead themselves (for the restoration of sacred sites or for the return of human remains), the argument that this chapter pursues (setting up what follows in later chapters) is that the politics of death is not exhausted by essentially contested accounts or representations of past fatal events. It must also recognise the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bones in themselves. This is picked up in Chapter 2 which engages further with anthropological discussions emergent in the 2000s about materiality, in order to explore how different ways of thinking about the ‘agency’ of objects and particularly the flows and properties of materials are salient to understanding the corporealities of violence and post-violence in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead.

The burial of Gift Tandare

In early March 2007, while the international media was focusing on the highly publicised, brutal beating by soldiers and police of Zimbabwe's main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC and several other well-known political activists including the lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, the dramatic events surrounding the funeral of Gift Tandare – a little-known MDC activist shot by police on the same day – was being reported in the local independent media. The events unfolded as follows.

THE KEY sources for most bishops and abbots from Æthelwold's circle are lists of the Old Minster's alumni and references in Wulfstan Cantor's hagiography and other lists from the New Minster Liber Vitae. The first of these lists claims to record ‘brothers of the Old Minster, Winchester, serving the Lord there under the protection of lord St Peter the apostle’. This is immediately followed by a list of abbots, who also ‘especially devoted themselves’, according to the rubric. Most of these men can be associated with the circle through other sources as well, with two possible exceptions. The list begins by commending Womar, abbot of Ghent. Womar may have visited the Old Minster: as Michael Lapidge has argued, he may even have witnessed Swithun's translation and have been motivated to oversee translations of saints in Ghent. However, he was not trained at the Old Minster, and his stay there would have been relatively brief, so he will not be counted as a member of the circle here. Neither will Germanus, described as abbot of Ramsey. His connections to both the post-reform Old Minster and Ramsey are debatable. According to Byrhtferth of Ramsey, Germanus was a clergyman in Winchester who accompanied Oswald to the continent and was trained at Fleury. When Germanus returned to England, he seems to have remained at houses associated with Oswald and eventually led the community at Winchombe and possibly Ramsey, briefly, and Cholsey. Still, manuscripts associated with him (as identified by Michael Lapidge) show a sympathy with the circle's programme in terms of the Psalter and elements of the script, and Byrhtferth also linked him to an Abbot Ælfheah and an Abbot Foldbriht, both of whom may have been members of the circle.

Many of these people – particularly the bishops – were claimed by other houses in the post-Conquest period. In particular, William of Malmesbury claimed that many of these bishops had been monks of Glastonbury, a claim accepted by David Knowles. William's maximalist picture of Glastonbury's influence, however, seems to have assumed that ecclesiastics who donated altar fittings and other gifts to Glastonbury had been trained there. In the last part of that chapter, William specifies bishops’ death days, implying that he was using calendars or chapter house books, which may have recorded all major figures, not just those with a specific Glastonbury connection.

In August 2011, just as the Chibondo controversies had begun to settle, another event took place that would prove even more contentious. On 16 August 2011 Zimbabwe awoke to the news that retired General Solomon Mujuru, aka Rex Nhongo (his war alias) – former deputy commander of ZANLA and Zimbabwe's first black army commander, husband of the (then) Vice-President, Joice Mujuru, long-term confidante of President Mugabe, and widely regarded as ZANU PF's ‘kingmaker’ – had died in a mysterious fire at his farm (Alamein or Ruzambo), in Beatrice, 60 km south-west of Harare. Only four days later, on 20 August, accompanied by public statements of grief from across the political spectrum, and amid growing speculation about the cause of his death, Mujuru's remains were buried at National Heroes Acre in Harare, attended by tens of thousands of people. After the ‘inexplicable, horrendous fire accident’ – as President Mugabe then described it – there was only a ‘small pile of charred bones and ash’ to be buried, and workers reportedly needed ‘shovels to scrape his remains off the floor’. ‘Burnt beyond recognition’, unconfirmed reports suggested dental records were needed to confirm his identity; and unusually the ‘coffin remained sealed’. But the closed casket could not contain the plethora of rumours of foul play that emerged in the months that followed, which remain unresolved despite police (and later ‘private’) investigations and an official inquest.

This chapter uses Mujuru's death as way into discussing what I call ‘political accidents’ in Zimbabwe's recent history, in order to further explore the efficacies of rumours and the politics of uncertainty (begun in the previous chapter) in relation to what I term the unfinished nature of death. My purpose is not to offer any kind of determination or commentary about what might actually have happened, or who might have been responsible, but rather to explore the political salience and efficacies of the rumours, conspiracy theories and uncertainties this unresolved death provoked. I am not interested (nor could I claim any such competence) in trying to offer an explanation for what actually might have happened, or in ascertaining responsibility.

‘In the year of our Lord 1318 the feast of Corpus Christi was first celebrated by the whole English Church.’ This extract from documents relating to the Abbey of St Peter in Gloucestershire records the earliest known celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi in England. Just eight years later, in 1326, Louth in Lincolnshire became home to one of the earliest known Corpus Christi guild foundations in the country, and just two years after that, the Tailors’ Guild in Lincoln also decided to dedicate themselves to the cult. Lincolnshire continued to lead the way in Corpus Christi guild dedications in the late Middle Ages; the evidence for this can be seen clearly in the 1389 guild enquiry ordered by Richard II's government. For Lincolnshire, the surviving documents point to a particularly strong connection in the county with the cult of Corpus Christi from a very early stage in its transmission.

This chapter is not concerned with the wealthy and prominent Corpus Christi guilds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, such as those seen at York, Coventry, and Norwich, and about which there is already much scholarship. Rather, it explores the earlier associations within the first few generations of the feast being celebrated in England. This chapter investigates the emergence of Corpus Christi as a popular guild dedication in Lincolnshire, reflecting on the form and function of these early Corpus Christi guilds, their links to processional modes and early pageantry, and the European influences that helped to form their identities.

The feast of Corpus Christi is a celebration of the Eucharist, honouring the process of the wafer and wine transforming into the blood and body of Christ. On the feast day itself, the mass was heard first and then followed by a procession in which the consecrated host was carried through the town; after this, there would be a ceremonial feast. The reception of the feast and its institution across the diocese and parishes of Europe had halted with the death of Pope Urban IV in October 1264. It took another half a century before its cause was taken up again by Pope John XXII, when the feast was incorporated into the Clementines in 1317; it was after the publication of the Clementines that the feast was fully integrated into the Church.

Unfortunately, Bishop Merke of Carlisle was all too prophetic when he denounced the deposition of Richard II and the accession of Henry IV in 1399. His bold and ringing denunciation, as shaped by Shakespeare in Richard II, is perhaps not too far from what he actually said in his bitter view of both what was taking place and its probable consequences:

That Merke was prophetic is not of issue here, as our writ ends long before the woes he envisioned. Rather, in looking at the deposition of Richard of Bordeaux in 1399, our concern is with the stance taken and the roles played by the bishops of the seventeen English and the four Welsh sees. And within the episcopate, the stance of that ring of courtier bishops who had been so close to the king and who owed their appointments to this special relationship is our real point of focus. From the perspective of on-stage drama, it would be quite satisfying to posit the head-on confrontation of the two parties, one led by Thomas Merke for the Ricardians and the other by Thomas Arundel for Henry Bolingbroke and the Lancastrians, with some poetic license by our later-day playwright helping bring matters to a head. This narrow interpretation or perspective allows us to offer the about-to-be restored Archbishop Arundel as the brains behind Henry's evolving views of his claims and ambitions and that this scenario is too simple is not one we will be called upon to unravel.

A little reflection about Richard's bishops in a collective sense before we turn to a more individualised treatment. As indicated, our special attention will be on those courtier bishops who had risen to the episcopate through intimate friendship with the king. These were – or might well have been – those ‘fair weather friends’ of our title and of our investigation into the role – or the lack thereof – that they, other than Merke, played when Richard's crown toppled and fell.