Church Monuments Society

Bertrand du Guesclin was one of the great warriors of the Middle Ages. Born into a family of minor nobility in Brittany, he rose through valour and ability to become Constable of France, head of the royal armies. Also dubbed ‘The Black Dog of Brocéliande’ and ‘The Eagle of Brittany’, he died on campaign at around the age of sixty, far from home in the south of France. In the late summer of 1380 a casket containing his heart was interred in the convent of the Jacobins at Dinan, his home town, where du Guesclin had requested burial: it was the last stage of an epic post-mortem journey.

Du Guesclin had intended and requested that his corpse should be interred at Dinan, but a combination of climate, distance and politics resulted in only his heart making it there: the rest of him was interred in three other places, in each case marked with magnificent sepultures, while the Dinan burial was marked with an elaborate ledger. (Fig 1).

Bertrand du Guesclin was born about 1320, and died on 14 July 1380 at Châteauneuf-de-Randon in Languedoc, where he had been besieging the fortress (held by the English), which surrendered shortly afterwards. Since his body would need transporting the approximately 800 kilometres to Dinan, his corpse was eviscerated and stuffed with preservatives[1]. This may not have been done on the spot, since a canopic vessel containing the viscera was interred at the church of St Laurent at Le Puy-en-Velay, some 65 kilometres distance from where he had died. A monument was erected in the choir, with the inscription, “Ci-gît noble et vaillant messire Bertrand du Clairkin, Comte de Longueville, jadis connétable de France qui trépasse en l’an 1380, le quatorzième jour de juillet” (Fig. 2)

Bu the time that the cortege reached Montferrand (now part of Clermont-Ferrand) 133 km further on, it was apparent that the preservation of the body had not been adequate. The body was accordingly subjected to the mos teutonicus (dismembered, then boiled down to extract the bones), the bones presumably sewn up in the customary ox-hide for transportation and the remnant flesh buried in Montferrand in the Convent of the Cordeliers (Friars Minor/Franciscans). Another monument was erected here.

When the cortège reached le Mans, 436 kilometres on, it was met by emissaries of King Charles V, who announced that the king had decided that the great Constable of France should lie with the kings of France in St Denis. They took the bones, and these were accordingly buried in St Denis under another monument.

Finally, 207 kilometres further on, the heart reached Dinan, where the fourth monument was erected.

Remarkably three of the four monuments survive, although not without vicissitudes. That at le Puy-en-Velay was concealed behind later woodwork in the choir of the church, and seems to have escaped revolutionary vandalism because forgotten: in 1802 the remains were retrieved from the monument and placed in a lead urn[2] and moved to the local Préfecture and then placed in the place de la République in a column of a building that was never finished. In 1806 the urn was returned to its original location. The tomb was left behind the woodwork, in which there was made a small door allowing the tomb to be viewed. In 1831 a mausoleum was constructed in the chapel of Ste Anne and the remains moved there. The church was restored between 1955 and 1966, and in the latter year the remains were once more moved back to their original location in the monument in the choir. This is probably the monument which is best preserved and closest to its original form[3]. It was fortunate in being overlooked in the destructive fervour of the revolutionaries, and the two fishings-out of the guts in 1802 and 1831 reflect their political contexts – in 1802 Napoleon, like du Guesclin a French military leader from a family of lower nobility, was a national hero and serving as First Consul of the Republic, so seemingly a defender of the rights of the people. It must have seemed an appropriate moment to publicly celebrate one who might be seen as his predecessor. By 1806 Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor and enthusiasm for the Republic was irrelevant, so it is perhaps unsurprising that the projected public monument was unfinished. The 1831 exhumation may have been prompted by the accession of Louis Philippe (the ‘Citizen-King’) after the July Revolution of 1830.

The monument at Montferrand was destroyed during the Revolution and no trace remains.

That at St-Denis, by Thomas Privé and Robert Loisel, was despoiled, along with the royal tombs, between August 6 and August 8 1793. The bodies were discarded, but the archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir managed to save many of the figurative carvings, including the effigy of du Guesclin, which he exhibited in his Musée des monuments français[4], whence it was returned to the Basilica during the nineteenth-century restoration some twenty years later, being placed on a new base close to its original position (Fig.3 ).

The original site of the monument at Dinan, the convent of the Jacobins, was commandeered during the Revolution, and is now a theatre. In 1810 the remains of du Guesclin and his wife, together with their memorial slabs, were moved to the north transept of the basilica of Saint-Saveur, where du Guesclin’s was set against a wall in a stone frame of 1810, topped by a new urn. The inscription reads

Cy gist le cueur de
messire bertran du gucaqui[n]
en soy viva[n]t conestable de
fra[n]ce qui trespassa le xiii^e
Jour de iullet lan mil iii
iii^xx dont lou corps repose
autrqucs ceulx des Roys
a sainct denis en France

It surmounts two shields with the de Guesclin arms, the lower with a bar sinister, on either side of a heart.

The movement of the heart between churches seems to have been the last major episode in de Guesclin’s post-mortem peregrinations. The great constable of France, despite his modest origins, ended up with more funerary locations than the Hapsburgs. If he now rests in peace, he deserves to.

Jean Wilson, Norman Hammond

[1] For the processes involved in transporting corpses, see Weiss-Krejci, Estella 2001. Restless corpses: ‘secondary burial’ in theBabenberg and Habsburg dynasties. Antiquity 75: 769-780 (2001)

[2] It is not clear whether the lead urn was the original canopic container or a new one made for the occasion.

[3]< http://medieval.mrugala.net/Architecture/France,_Haute-Loire,_Le_Puy-en-Velay,_Eglise_Saint-Laurent> [accessed 19.08.2025];< https://puyenvelay.wordpress.com/2015/02/14/les-quatre-tombeaux-de-bertrand-du-guesclin> [accessed 19.08.2025]

[4] See Louis Réau, revised Michel Fleury & Guy-Michel Leproux, Histoire du Vandalisme: Les Monuments Détruits De L’Art Français (Paris, 1994), 286-290, and <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Trq524xwk8s> for a rather jollier exposition.

Gallery

• Fig. 1a. Dinan, St Saveur Monument to Bertrand du Guesclin (photograph Julian Hammond)
• Fig. 1b Dinan, St Saveur Detail of Monument to Bertrand du Guesclin (photograph Julian Hammond)
• Fig. 2 Le Puy-en-Velay, St Laurent Monument over the viscera of Bertrand du Guesclin (from Adolphe Michel, L'Ancienne Auvergne et le Velay. Histoire, archéologie, moeurs, topographie. 1843-1847)
• Fig. 3 Fig. 3 Paris, St Denis, Remains of monument to Bertrand du Guesclin (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CathedralSaintDenis4.JPG)