Note 276 — PART III.

Froissart (Berners’ translation), vol. i. p. 29. Shortly afterwards Froissart states, “And thus, soone after thys noble Robert de Brouse, Kyng of Scotland, trespassed out of thys incertayne worlde, and his hart was taken owte of his body and embawmed, and honourably he was entred in the Abbey of Donfremlyne.” When the grave of the Bruce was opened at Dunfermline in 1818, the anatomical appearances of the skeleton showed that the king’s will had been so far obeyed, the bones of the chest being found divided in such a way as to have allowed the removal of the heart. This piece of dissection seems, at the time at which it was made, to have drawn down the dreaded vengeance of the Vatican upon Randolph, Earl of Moray, the king’s nephew, and apparently the operator in this case, in such a way as forms a strange and startling contrast with the medical usages observed towards the dead at the present day. I quote the account, as a curious point in the march of necroscopic anatomy, from the Appendix to the Chronicon de Lanercost (p. 428)—“It appears that, by a constitution of Pope Boniface, the mutilation of a dead body subjected those by whom it was mutilated to heavy ecclesiastical censures. To free himself from these censures, Randolph, two years after the death of King Robert, presented a petition to the Pope, setting forth that the deceased king had intended to undertake a crusade against the Saracens, but was prevented by death, and that in his last will he expressly ordered his heart to be taken out of his body and carried in such an expedition, which was done by James de Douglas, who conveyed it into Spain. The Bishop of Moray was employed to obtain from the Pope a remission for the crime, dated 8th before the Ides of August, in the fifteenth year of Pope John’s pontificate.” Raynald, in his Annal. Ecclest., gives the extract A.D. 1329. § 81.