Our first definite knowledge of the shroud is an event in around AD 1355, when it was put on show in the tiny French village of Lirey, in Champagne. Its owners were the local knight, Geoffrey de Charney, and his wife, Jeanne de Vergy.
Despite the insistence of the conspiracy brigade, there is no known connection between this Geoffrey de Charney (or his son of the same name) and the famous Knight Templar called Geoffrey de Charney, who was preceptor of Normandy and was burned alongside Grand Master Jacques de Molay as a relapsed heretic in 1314, three quarters of a century earlier.
At the time of the 1355 exhibition, Henry de Poitiers, bishop of Troyes, conducted an inquiry into the cloth, concluding that it was a ‘fraud’ which had been ‘cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed’.
Nothing more is known of this episcopal enquiry, but in 1389 one of Henry’s direct successors, Bishop Peter d’Arcis, wrote to Antipope Clement VII in Avignon to tell him of Bishop Henry’s enquiry, and to complain that the linen was being displayed again. It seems that Peter did not succeed in getting the exhibition closed down, as Clement replied that he was happy for the cloth to be shown as ‘an image or representation’ of the true shroud.
After around 60 years of being moved about, in 1453 Geoffrey’s granddaughter, Margaret, finally passed the shroud to the ducal house of Savoy, who took it to their capital at Chambéry in the Alps.
Nothing much happened for almost 80 years, until disaster struck on the night of 4 December 1532, when a fire broke out in the chapel where it was kept behind the high altar in a silver casket housed in a niche sealed with a metal grille. The keyholder could not be found, so a blacksmith and two friars broke open the grille, but part of the casket had already liquefied, and drops of molten silver had fallen onto the shroud, burning holes straight through it, which a team of Poor Clare nuns then repaired with the patching that can still be seen.
The remaining history is uneventful. The linen was eventually moved to Turin, where it has stayed ever since. Then, on 18 March 1983, Umberto II of Savoy died, and in his will, quite unexpectedly, passed the shroud out of his family, gifting it to the pope and his successors.
These, broadly, are the known facts.