Good morning, Swansea!

Every day, shoppers and office workers stroll past Swansea Castle, a site now surrounded by a city that grew up around it on all sides.

Most wouldn't guess that this ruin was once the scene of one of the strangest events in Welsh history: a man hanged twice within sight of its walls, declared dead by nine separate witnesses - and walking around town again within weeks.

To understand how that story ended up being investigated by the Pope himself, you have to go back more than 700 years, to a rebellion, a botched execution, and a lord's wife on her knees praying over a corpse.

This week, we share the story of William Cragh - the man who was hanged twice, and lived.

His name was William Cragh. On a grey morning in late November 1290, guards led him out of the dungeons beneath Swansea Castle and up the hill to the gallows. By the end of that day, nine people would swear under oath that they'd watched him die. Within a few weeks, he was walking around Swansea as if nothing had happened.

Cragh had spent years fighting English rule in Wales alongside the rebel leader Rhys ap Maredudd. Three years earlier he'd helped burn down Oystermouth Castle, just along the coast. When the rebellion finally collapsed, the lord of Gower's men caught up with him, and he was sentenced to hang for the deaths of thirteen men.

The execution itself went wrong before it even worked. Cragh was strung up alongside a fellow rebel, but the wooden beam snapped under their combined weight and both men crashed to the ground mid-hanging.

So the guards simply tried again, and this time the rope held. A crowd gathered at the foot of the gallows to watch him die, and by every account they gave later, he did: the blackened tongue, the bulging eyes, all the grim, unmistakable signs of a hanged man.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, his body was cut down and carried into town, to the house of a Swansea man named Thomas Mathews.

And there, kneeling beside the corpse, was Lady Mary de Briouze - wife of the very lord who'd just had Cragh executed. She began praying, not to God directly but to Thomas de Cantilupe, a bishop who'd died a few years before and was already gaining a reputation as a miracle-worker from beyond the grave.

Her household measured Cragh's body with a length of string, an old custom for promising a candle the same size as whoever you were asking a saint to save.

It seemed to work. A servant sent to check on the body came back saying a foot had twitched.

Over the following days, Cragh started breathing again. His eyes settled back into their sockets. Slowly, he regained the strength to stand.

Eventually he was well enough to be brought before Lord and Lady de Briouze at Swansea Castle itself, to explain, in the chaplain's words, "with great fear and apprehension," exactly what had happened to him. Understandably so - a man who'd survived one hanging couldn't be entirely sure he wouldn't be sent up for a second.

Cragh's case wasn't quite as freakish as it sounds, either. Legal historians have since found 23 similar cases of "hanged" men and women surviving their executions across England between 1234 and 1381. Only six were ever put down to miracles - the rest were just seen as botched hangings, and the officials in charge sometimes got fined for letting the condemned escape.

What made Cragh's case different was the Pope.

In 1307, seventeen years after the hanging, the Vatican opened a formal investigation into whether Thomas de Cantilupe deserved to be made a saint. Cragh's resurrection was put forward as one of thirty-eight miracles credited to him. Officials travelled out to interview witnesses under oath, Cragh among them, and every word of that testimony still survives today in the Vatican Library - sworn statements, in French, English and Welsh, from ordinary Swansea people describing the day a man came back from the dead.

The witnesses didn't all agree. Cragh himself changed his own account of what he'd seen while dying, and others disagreed on how long his recovery took. Historians studying the case since reckon it says less about miracles and more about how unreliable memory can be, even when people are telling the truth as best they remember it.

It didn't save Cragh's miracle in the end - it was one of twelve rejected by the Vatican's investigators, no reason given. Thomas de Cantilupe was made a saint anyway, in 1320.

But before that verdict came down, Cragh's story got one last, strange scene. Once Lord de Briouze accepted it as a genuine miracle, he had Cragh walk the three days to Hereford Cathedral to give thanks at the bishop's shrine - the actual rope from his hanging still around his neck the entire way. It was left there as an offering, alongside a specially made wax model of a man on a gallows.

That pilgrimage route is still walkable today, marked out as the St Thomas Way. Which means, seven hundred years on, you could follow the exact path of a man from Swansea who survived his own hanging - twice.

Thanks for reading the Swansea Scoop. If you enjoyed it, share it with a friend who would find it useful.

Catch you on Wednesday!

Andrew.

Sources: Wikipedia; Swansea University's City Witness project (medievalswansea.ac.uk); Maurice Keen, London Review of Books; Journal of Medieval History; Robert Bartlett, "The Hanged Man" (Princeton University Press); legalhistorymiscellany.com; historypoints.org; Cadw.