Good heavens, it's the Archbishop! Face of a 14th-century cleric revealed thanks to advanced computer modelling



He died 630 years ago in a grisly death during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, but now Simon of Sudbury's face has been fully revealed thanks to advanced computer modelling.



His skull had resided at St Gregory’s Church at Sudbury in Suffolk for more than six centuries, but was taken to West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds for CT scans, which forensic artist Adrienne Barker used to reconstruct the face.



Ms Barker, from the University of Dundee, spent a year making a series of 3-D bronze-resin casts of the complete head.



Face on: Simon of Sudbury's head has been reconstructed at the University of Dundee

She is now anxious to see what the people of Sudbury make of her work.



'I hope people in Sudbury like what we’ve done but he’s a strange-looking fellow, so it’ll be interesting to see their reactions,’ she said.

'The first thing we had to do was carry out an initial assessment of the skull to determine its age, sex and ancestry. We then sculpted each muscle of the face and built this up on the cast we made of the skull before adding a final layer which represents the skin.



'The only problem we really encountered was that there was still facial tissue attached to the skull, which we managed to remove using a computer modelling software before sending the CT data away for a rapid prototype model of the skull to be made.



'The past year has been the best of my life as I’ve immersed myself in this reconstruction. It has been absolutely fascinating to learn the story behind Simon of Sudbury and to get involved in this work.'



Sudbury was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1375. He became Lord Chancellor in 1380 and crowned King Richard II along the way.



However, he introduced the third Poll Tax, which made him desperately unpopular with rebellious peasants.

Historical town: Simon of Sudbury was born in picturesque Sudbury in Suffolk

A year later, insurgents stormed the Tower of London and seized him, before dragging him to Tower Hill and beheading him.



It is believed his head was placed on a spike on Tower Bridge, where it was spotted by a man from Sudbury, who grabbed it in the middle of the night and brought it back to his home town.



The reconstruction project was the brainchild of Ian Copeman, a local Sudbury schools worker, and the-then curate of St Gregory’s Church Rev Jenny Seggar.



They wanted a more complete picture of their local celebrity, so approached Dundee University.



Ms Barker then carried out the project as part of her MSc at the University's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification, making three heads altogether.

