The very first we hear of the Shroud is in the indignant letter of Bishop Pierre d’Arcis to Pope Clement VII, written around 1390. Curiously, Geoffroy de Charny isn’t mentioned. The Dean of Lirey gets all the blame. This may be because the first public exhibition did not occur until after de Charny had died at the Battle of Poitiers. D’Arcis makes an interesting distinction between the exhibitions forty years apart. Of the earlier, he says:
“The Dean of […] Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud.” (My bolding)
But what made him mad was that, forty years later:
“The cloth was openly exhibited and shown to the people in the church aforesaid on great holidays, and frequently on feasts and at other times, with the utmost solemnity, even more than when the Body of Christ our Lord is exposed; to wit, by two priests vested in albs with stoles and maniples and using the greatest possible reverence, with lighted torches and upon a lofty platform constructed for this special purpose; and although it is not publicly stated to be the true shroud of Christ, nevertheless this is given out and noised abroad in private, and so it is believed by many, the more so, because, as stated above, it was on the previous occasion declared to be the true shroud of Christ, and by a certain ingenious manner of speech it is now in the said church styled not the sudarium but the sanctuarium. which to the ears of the common folk, who are not keen to observe distinctions, sounds much the same thing, and crowds of people resort there as often as it is shown or is expected to be shown, under the belief, or more truly the delusion, that it is the true shroud.” (My bolding)
This time, the Seigneur was very much alive and present, and was careful to inform the papal legate that he was only exhibiting a representation, and not the real thing, whatever the worshipping pilgrims might have understood. According to d’Arcis:
“And now again the present Dean of the said church with fraudulent intent and for the purpose of gain, suggested, as it is reported, to the Lord Geoffrey de Charny, Knight, and the temporal lord of the place, to have the said cloth replaced in the said church, that by a renewal of the pilgrimage the church might be enriched with the offerings made by the faithful. Acting upon the Dean’s suggestion, who was thus treading in the footsteps of his predecessor, the knight went to the Cardinal de Thury, your Holiness’ Nuncio and Legate in French territory, and suppressing the facts that the said cloth at the time above referred to was asserted to be the shroud of our Saviour, […] he represented to the Cardinal that the said cloth was a picture or figure of the shroud, which many people came to visit out of devotion and which had previously been much venerated and resorted to in that church.”
This second Geoffroy de Charny is a bit of a mystery. His birthdate is unknown, but he may have been quite young when his father died. This may have some bearing on the two pilgrim badges identified with the Lirey exhibitions, both of which bear both the de Charny arms (gules three inescutcheons argent) and the de Vergy arms (gules three cinquefoils or) side by side, but one with de iharny on the left (more important) side, and the other with de Charny on the right. Perhaps indicatively, the latter has the words ‘Suaire IHU’ (‘Shroud of Jesus’) on it, while the former has no inscription.
[The two pilgrim badges. The right-hand one is made of lead/tin alloy and was found in Paris in 1855. The left-hand one is a reconstruction based on the rather damaged mould which was found near Lirey in 2012. The remaining (left) portion has been reversed and superimposed, and the shroud from the right-hand badge superimposed overall.]
I’m coming round to Ian Wilson’s idea, expressed in BSTS Newsletter 86, that this one was made for the first exhibition, when the cloth was, according to d’Arcis, unequivocally identified as the true shroud, and the arms of the widow de Vergy were more important than those of her infant son. The other badge would be for the second exhibition, by which time the young Geoffroi had achieved manhood, and his dowager mother was getting old (although she seems to have been remarkably long-lived), and the relic was not formally identified as authentic.
Where I disagree with Wilson is that the brass engraving commemorating a Geoffroy de Charny from the Abbey of Froidmont, in the north of France, is the same as the son of the Seigneur of Lirey.
The knight depicted is wearing a surcoat bearing something like ‘ermine a bend and in the sinister chief an escutcheon’, a design repeated on a small shield above his right shoulder. A second shield, of five horizontal bars, is over his left shoulder and repeated twice on his surcoat. Neither of these is associated with the de Charnys of Lirey. Even his title, Seigneur de Thory, near Beauvais, has no known connection with the owner of the Shroud or his descendents. Consequently, this man’s date of death, given as 1398, is not necessarily relevant.
Nor, it seems, are the Geoffroys de Charny of Lirey closely related to the Templar Geoffroy de Charney, who was put to death in 1314. The elder Geoffroy of Lirey was the son of Jean de Charny (died c.1320), son of Hugues de Charny (died c.1270), son of Pons de Mont Saint Jean (died c.1230). None of these forebears had another Geoffroy as a brother, brother-in-law, or son.
Although the first Geoffroy de Charny of Lirey was probably dead by the time the Shroud was first exhibited, it seems likely that he was the first owner, and much inconclusive inquiry has been made as to where he got it from.
(Andrea Nicolotti, author of the most carefully researched book on the Shroud yet written, queries whether de Charney was in fact the person who brought the Shroud to Lirey; he is not mentioned in Bishop d’Arcy’s memorandum. It may be that its acquisition was entirely the responsibility of the Dean.)
Unfortunately, such written evidence as exists comes from much later, and is more in the nature of a post hoc attempt to give a holy relic provenance than a historical record. Even so, they do little more than say de Charny was given it, but never by whom. Almost all the first class relics from the life of Christ, particularly his birth and death, were derived from the sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204 and the subsequent indigence of its later emperors. Apart from Rome, many were housed in the Sainte Chapelle of Louis IX in Paris, and others were distributed around the abbeys of Christian Europe. The occasional ‘translation’ of a relic from one place to another, usually as gesture of magnanimity, was a major PR event for both donor and recipient, and the fact that nothing was recorded about de Charny’s ‘Shroud’ is a serious objection to its claim of authenticity.
As a simple object of veneration, on the other hand, it could have been traded or passed on from place to place with little comment. De Charny’s new ‘collegiate church’, consecrated to the Virgin Mary in about 1353, needed as much materiel as it could muster to attract sufficient pilgrimage to maintain its upkeep, and a large – and unusual – depiction of the shroud would have been a significant accompaniment to his meagre collection of relics (principally a single hair of the Virgin Mary and a piece of the true cross).
Between them, Père André-Marie Dubarle and Daniel Scavone have unravelled some of the history of the church at Lirey, deriving their information from earlier, and less accessible, scholarship. The first we hear of it is in June 1343, in an act of King Philip VI, granting de Charny relief from taxes to pay for it. This must have been shortly after de Charny’s return from captivity in England, where he was taken after being captured at the Battle of Morlaix in September 1342. It seems that his fame for chivalry enabled him to secure a release before his ransom was fully paid, as he was back in France in a few months to raise funds. One cannot but wonder if the permitted tax relief went in some part to assist in paying the ransom, or if the payment was commuted by his captors. In a later article I will explore whether the Shroud might have been a gift from the English, and a stimulus for the new church.
De Charny fought in Brittany at the end of 1342, and during a lull in the Hundred Years War took part in a minor and somewhat abortive crusade to Smyrna in September 1345, but was back the following summer, when Edward III’s invasion of Normandy required a full mobilisation of French forces. It is not impossible that he may have acquired the Shroud in Turkey, although neither the weave not the image speak powerfully for a Middle Eastern source.
During the Crécy campaign de Charny was defending the northern border of France against Flemish incursion, and after a period at court took part in an attempt to capture Calais from the English in 1349. There he was captured again, probably by trickery on the part of the English commander, and this time remained in captivity until 1351 when he was ransomed by the French King himself. For the next few years he led the French efforts to displace the English from Picardy, was promoted to Captain-General of the Armies of Picardy and Normandy, and given the honour of Bearer of the Oriflamme, the King’s personal battle standard. For a few years this was a largely honorary appointment, but it led to his death at the Battle of Poitiers, on 19 September 1356.
If de Charny came into possession of the Shroud sometime between 1342 and 1356, there were two opportunities for it to have come from England, a remote chance that it could be Turkish, and numerous, if unspecific possibilities that he could have been given it by admirers from the north-west coast of France or its borders with Flanders or Germany. It could have been presented by the Royal Court in Paris or the Papal court at Avignon, or, more remotely, from Italy, but to my mind, an informal gift is more probable than a royal or papal award, which is much more likely to have been recorded.