Posted on 03/07/2004 4:32:03 PM PST by blam
Toe think again... relic of The Bruce
YAKUB QURESHI
A bone, said to be the toe of Robert The Bruce, is the centrepiece of a new exhibit. Picture: Donald MacLeod
HE STOLE into the abbey in the dead of night, intent on stealing a personal memento of Scotland’s greatest king.
Not a thief nor a grave robber but a respected town dignitary and "man of science", Joseph Paton found himself irresistibly drawn to the body of this icon of Scotland’s 14th-century fight for independence.
Reaching forward, he snapped off a toe from the remains of Robert the Bruce and held aloft the trophy before wrapping it in a fragment of the king’s golden shroud. In satisfying his urge to steal the Royal digit, Paton was risking his reputation by defiling the Bruce’s skeleton, which had been uncovered by workmen in 1818 where it lay inside Dunfermline Abbey.
He was supposed to be one of the eminent local worthies ensuring the body was well treated. Now this remarkable story of a man’s urge to keep a piece of history for himself is behind a new exhibition at Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum. There have been many tales, some of them tall, about the so-called remains of the great Scots king, and it could be this is the latest.
What is known, however, is that the toe was bequeathed to the museum by Paton’s grandson, Diarmid, a professor of physiology at Glasgow University, who donated it following his death in 1928. It then gathered dust and only came to light again when a young apprentice was trawling through old bones in a drawer at the Hunterian last year. A label said it was Bruce’s toe, and while 20-year-old Archie Henderson was sceptical, he decided it was worth checking.
Experts have no way of knowing definitively if the toe is genuine. DNA tests cannot be carried out because it is in such a poor condition. But they believe it is the real thing because of historic documents, which also suggest Paton - a wealthy industrialist and pillar of Dunfermline society - was the thief.
The public had been kept clear of the tomb, and it is unclear what level of access there had been to the king’s remains before they were replaced in a new sepulchre.
What is certain is that, as a high-ranking town worthy, Paton would have had few difficulties gaining access to the abbey when no one was around to carry out his plan. As well as stealing the bone, Paton took for himself a piece of the gold-coloured linen shroud that wrapped the body, and fragments from the coffin, including a handle and iron nail.
Dr Sally-Anne Coupar, a Hunterian curator involved in preparing an exhibition about Robert the Bruce, with the toe as its centrepiece, said Paton appeared to have been overcome by his fascination with the king’s remains and had stolen the digit when no one was watching.
"It’s a tradition that stretched back to Robert the Bruce himself. Any medieval church worth its salt would have at least one bone or memento supposedly belonging to a saint," she said. "In Victorian times, people would still have been quite relaxed about pinching bits of human remains as souvenirs. Nobody had any compunction about helping themselves. This man tore off a bit of the shroud and we are probably being too polite when we refer to him as ‘acquiring’ the bone."
Henderson, the student who found the bone and is completing a modern apprenticeship course in cultural heritage, said: "I have to make a presentation on a museum artefact as part of my training and was down in the stores looking for inspiration. I noticed this bone and it had a label saying it belonged to Robert the Bruce. I was a bit dubious because I thought it should be one of Scotland’s most important relics."
But further research uncovered a 1928 report from the University of Glasgow, which describes how the relics were acquired. Documents were discovered detailing Paton’s membership of the Royal Society of Antiquaries - a 19th-century collectors’ club for antiques and curios - and they described how he had amassed several "articles of curiosity", including the Bruce’s toe bone.
Paul Duffy, a human remains specialist at the University of Glasgow’s archaeology department, was then called in to examine the relic.
He was able to identify the bone as coming from the second-biggest toe of the right foot and that it had been ripped off the skeleton. "It was snapped. It has definitely been fractured or broken off from the body after death," Duffy said. However, he was unable to run DNA or carbon-dating tests due to its poor condition.
"It has been varnished, which was a Victorian practice they thought would preserve valuables, but it now means we can’t distinguish the varnish from the bone," he said.
"Essentially the condition of the bone itself means we couldn’t do anything to it."
More evidence that Paton may well have stolen the toe comes from Andrew Douglas Bruce, the 11th Earl of Elgin and Kincardineshire and one of the nearest direct descendents of the Scots king.
"When they discovered the tomb and opened it, they actually had it right out in the open," said Bruce, who is now 80. "It was supposed to be put in an out-of-the-way place, but it sat out for half a year before it was resealed.
"It is very probable that something was taken. It was very much a thing that happened at the time. The authorities probably knew that there was a likelihood of taking relics and it is a pity that it disappeared. It would have been much better if the body had been kept whole."
For decades, the earl’s own family had been in possession of a tooth they thought had belonged to their famous ancestor, but recent DNA tests have disproved this.
However, Bruce said he was not greatly worried by news of the theft and acknowledged that his ancestor would have been a prime target for souvenir hunters.
Several claims of fingers, toes and teeth belonging to the medieval king have been made over the centuries.
Five years ago, the National Museums of Scotland announced it had discovered a finger bone believed to have been taken from Bruce’s body after the 1818 discovery.
But David Caldwell, the museum’s keeper of history and applied art, said that a connection between this digit and the king had now been ruled out, although the museum did hold genuine parts of Bruce’s original tomb.
He said: "We now don’t reckon that it was really from the tomb. The bone has been hollowed down the middle in the way that Victorians would have prepared bones to display skeletons.
"Someone would not have knowingly done this if they thought the bone came from Bruce. It may be that there are other fakes out there."
Reputed bone fragments from the king are held at St Conan’s Kirk in Lochawe, and also in the museum of Dunfermline Abbey.
One body part that is accounted for is Bruce’s heart. One of his final acts before his death on June 7, 1329, was to instruct Sir James Douglas - "the Black Douglas" - to cut out his heart and bury it in Jerusalem.
Douglas was killed in Spain on his way to completing the task, and the cask containing the heart was buried at Melrose Abbey, where it still rests.
Several casts were made of the monarch’s skull, and analysis of these showed he suffered from facial deformity, with a deep furrow in his forehead and a broken cheekbone.
Debate has raged about whether this disfigurement proved that the king spent his final days ravaged by leprosy, and it was hoped that analysis of genuine relics would be able to solve this mystery.
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