Medieval Tombs And The Public Scene Of Pre-reformation Churches: 1300–1517

This was an essay I submitted in my third year of my BA at Southampton. I received 78% for it, and I hope it`s useful as an example of essay structure. Unfortunately Tutor Hunt`s system was unable to process my footnotes, but I am able to provide references on request.

The medieval church was more than a place of worship: it was a public stage for both the living and the dead.  As the centre of many communities, it was a potent space for the public scene that individuals and families sought to use and exploit.  The most permanent way of doing so was through the erection of a tomb.  Far from being a simple burial marker, the tomb was a highly sophisticated form of display.  Often designed more to benefit the living than the dead, it was a social structure that expressed the ties of family, region and political allegiance, and this essay will examine its impact on the public scene.  To do so it will consider the different motivating forces behind tomb building and, crucially, how this is reflected in the spectator experience.  The possibilities of such a topic are vast, and in order to produce a valuable study this essay will have a limited scope.  The focus on the tomb in itself is restrictive as it excludes all but the very richest in society.  The period focus, meanwhile, covers a time of shifting attitudes towards the dead, but draws back before the Reformation, when drastic religious change significantly altered tomb display.

     ‘If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps.’  For Shakespeare’s Benedick, the tomb was a vital method of remembrance because of its permanence.  His Pre-Reformation equivalents would have felt this even more strongly, as remembrance at this time was not just vainglorious display: it was an assurance of salvation.  The late middle ages was a period when attitudes towards death were being changed by a shift in Christian doctrine, one that put more emphasis on purgatory.  Prayer for the dead, it was believed, would hasten the soul’s entrance into heaven.  This idea gradually increased in importance over this period, to the point where by the fifteenth century ‘Purgatory dominated the theology, teaching, pastoral practice and the beliefs of ordinary people.’  Tombs had this religious purpose of encouraging prayers, making their location within the church vital.  Yet their role was not confined to solely benefiting the dead, as the living were also meant to profit through reflection and consideration of their own mortality.

     Tombs, then, were a medium through which the living and the dead could derive mutual benefit.  Paul Binski has examined this relationship, writing of ‘a transactional system of mutual obligation’ that was very real for people of the time.  The dead occupied a more prominent, active position than in modern day.  This was partly because there was no divide between space for the dead and space for the living: the church and the graveyard were communal areas that were shared by both, and this encouraged interaction.  Primarily tombs spoke to the living visually, and tomb designers attempted to make as much of a visual impact on the public scene as possible.  They would have been extremely colourful, often with banners displaying the family’s coat of arms and candles paid for by the dead to provide illumination.  At the centre was the effigy.

     The effigy was the stone representation of the dead, indicating their continued presence.  It is significant, then, that the vast majority of these effigies present a simple falsehood: they depict the dead as living.  Decked in full array, often with eyes open and in active positions (hands in prayer, or ready to unsheathe their swords), they were made to seem – and were probably perceived – as active participants of society.  The significance of this depended on the perspective of the observer: for the educated Christian, they could be seen as representing the deceased’s half-dead state before the resurrection for the family, they would have reminded them of their ancestors and the glories that they must live up to for the common people, it was an impressive display of the power of local nobility.

     The transi tomb was a form of funerary art that purposely contradicted this traditional living depiction.  Developing from the beginning of the fifteenth century, these showed the dead truthfully, as rotting corpses.  They emphasised the belief that all are equal in death and that the display of material possessions and earthly glory was a sin.  In reality, transi tombs were far from humble.  Only affordable for the very rich, they were a particularly effective form of display.  Such shocking iconography, though always in a minority, became fashionable among the rich and those keen to demonstrate their piety.  The benefits in terms of the public scene are obvious: by reversing the motif of ‘alive’ effigies that was common at the time they stood out from the crowd, while at the same time purporting to be more religious.  Bishop Richard Foxe, buried in Winchester Cathedral, is a local example: his chantry is highly elaborate, the imposing, decorated wall of which looms into view long before his small effigy is to be seen.  This draws the spectator in, and is far more effective in shaping the public scene than any other tomb at Winchester.  This was intentional by the designers this conscious attempt to attract notice does not, therefore, demonstrate humility.

     These visual forms of display were central to the effect tombs had, but epitaphs were also used. By inviting the spectator to read, the tomb draws them into closer observation and reflection.  These epitaphs often speak directly to the spectator, demanding their attention by offering words of caution and reminders of mortality.  Common phrases such as ‘as I am now, you too shall be’ play on the levelling nature of death, yet it is interesting that many – such as Henry Chichele’s epitaph in Canterbury – are in Latin, limiting its audience to the well-educated.  Paul Binski concludes that because of this ‘they are forms of self-reflection, not public address’, but I do not agree that they are personal and not intended for an audience.  Rather, these Latin epitaphs are trying to address a very particular type of audience – the rich and educated – and are therefore a public assertion of class and status.  Other tombs incorporate both Latin and English to ensure the greatest possible readership.  John Baret of Bury St Edmunds is one such example: English verses go round the base, while the cadaver corpse is literally surrounded by the Latin epitaph, symbolising his faith and combining the visual and the textual in an extremely powerful way.

     The paramount importance of Christianity in medieval thought is undeniable, and the belief in purgatory increased the need for remembrance.  Many tombs, however, were very secular in their nature, and secular in their goals.  Lorraine C. Attreed argues that some funerary monuments are ‘indicative less of their fear of death and judgement than of an apprehension of perpetual social obscurity.’  There was no conflict here: a medieval nobleman could be pious and ascend to heaven whilst coveting material wealth and social standing.  Tombs, indeed, often celebrate their secular life more than their religious piety, and this created a conflict in a church space that was theoretically a house of God. 

     Burial in the church was not a recent phenomenon, but it had been increasing in popularity to the point where by the late middle ages there was ‘a veritable invasion of churches by the secular.’  These tombs were often highly imposing, and they purposely altered the public space around them.  This sometimes affected parishioners adversely, as monuments ‘blocked access to parts of the church and obscured their view of the alter and the Host’.  By no means was this accidental: religiously, they hoped to gain prayers by the prominence of their monuments, while socially their personal fame and the prestige of their family increased.  The purpose, therefore, was to alter this public space as effectively as possible, and to draw attention away from other forms of display.  This became increasingly more difficult as churches quickly became crowded, leading to a more competitive environment in which tombs had to fight for space.  In Paul Binski’s words:

“As churches began to fill with tombs, the placement and design of the tomb had to take into account the regard of the onlooker with ever greater efficiency.  And in their distribution within a church, tombs could reflect the social hierarchy of the living as well as the dead.”

Being buried (or having a memorial) in the church was a mark of wealth and influence and an assurance of remembrance, but within that religious space there were areas of greater prominence.  The chancel was the most prestigious place, followed by the nave, the aisle, and the chantries the writers of wills often specified to be near the high alter, or to be buried near their family.  The church they chose was also important: this expressed regional identity, and was a significant statement.  D. M. Hadley argued that tombs were one of the ways in which families ‘reinforced their associations with a particular place’, to the point where a family could dominate their church with memorials.  The opposite could also take place: a particularly wealthy person might choose to have their body divided, in order to ensure the greatest amount of presence and influence after their death.  

     It was common to desire locations that were strategically prominent.  The Black Prince, son and heir of Edward III, is an excellent example: his tomb was positioned opposite the Shrine of St Thomas – one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations – and would therefore have received a great deal of reflected glory.  His effigy and its location provide an interesting reflection on the spectator experience of the time.  Pilgrims would have come to Thomas Becket’s shrine on purely religious grounds, yet next to their destination, purposely located and highly noticeable, was a monument that expressed secular concerns.  The Prince is depicted praying, but his religious pose is secondary to his appearance as a warrior and a member of the royal house (he is decked out in full knightly armour, resting on a crowned lion with twelve coats of arms surrounding him).  His impact on the public scene is to emphasise the majesty of the Plantagenet House and its military victories.

     The Black Prince died young and made his will the day before his death, and so was probably not involved in the detailed planning of his tomb.  Indeed, the tomb’s current location was not as it stipulated in the will – the executors perhaps felt a more prominent location was more suitable.  It is impossible to guess what the Black Prince would have wished, but tombs could very often reflect the desires of the living rather than the dead.  This was clearly not always the case, as individuals were sometimes very specific about the form they wanted their tombs to take.  William Fitz-Harry of Cosin Lane, for example, desires ‘that on my body be laide a faire stone of Marble with my creste, myn armes, my vanturs, in blewe, reede, and white, and my word̛ "mercy and ioie", to whicℏ word̛ I take me fully for euermore.’  Like many others, lineage and ancestry was of prime importance.  Heraldry is the dominant motif for many medieval tombs: coats of arms were coupled with weeping figures of relatives or banners displaying their colours.  The detail Fitz-Harry goes into demonstrates the importance he saw in the appearance and impact of his tomb.

     For whatever reason, however, such detailed requests often did not exist.  Deaths could be sudden and unprepared for, and it could take years for memorials to be planned and built.  In such cases, the living dictated the memorial, and adapted them to their own uses.  Funerary monuments, clearly, were used to maintain a memory of the dead, but often this memory is purposely distorted, so that only one aspect of the dead person is remembered.  The widowed husband will memorialise his spouse as his wife, rather than as a separate person.  By placing her tomb in their local church, the husband gains through her an architectural presence that is usually denied to the living.  If he were to choose to commemorate himself alongside her, it could also serve as a place of personal reflection.  Pamela King, examining these issues, concluded that ‘the occasion of the death of a wife allows the tomb to become an expression of social, political, and aesthetic affiliation, as well as decorous pity, by her husband.’  

     Tombs, then, did not simply provide religious reflection for the living: they gave them power and influence.  They could be used as such to the point where the commemorated in question was of secondary importance.  Funereal depictions of monarchs – to consider this issue on a much larger scale – can be seen as less effigies of the individual than an ‘official body’ that represents their office.  Henry VII’s chapel, which took sixteen years to complete, has been interpreted as ‘as much a tribute to the Tudor dynasty as to the individual who commissioned it.’

     It could be argued that such viewpoints are due to our limited modern perspective: as observers of tombs today we are detached from the individual in question.  It is easier to consider the tomb’s political or religious role or its philosophical significance.  Contemporaries and local parishioners, however, who may well have known the person, would have identified with them on an individual level.  It is a difficult historical challenge to speculate on the experiences of a medieval audience, and assumptions about the meaning they took from tombs may simply be an imposition of modern impressions that have no meaning in a medieval context.

     It is certainly true that a prime role of the tomb was to maintain memory of the individual.  This memory, however, could be intentionally altered permanently by the tomb.  Given their role in preserving the individual’s memory after their death, the generic nature of many tombs is surprising.  While there are certainly examples of individuation, artisans effectively mass produced tomb effigies at this time and many display social norms rather than individual characteristics.  Women are depicted in the classic beauty of the time, while men are dressed as knights, often regardless of their occupation and often anachronistically (on horseback, for example, when such forms of fighting had ceased to be practiced).  They are also always represented as devout: praying, or gazing up at heaven, or surrounded by angels.  It would be wrong to claim that all such depictions are false – zealous faith certainly existed – but such images became so uniform that they represent collective rather than personal faith: by affirming the belief of the dead they encourage belief in the living.  In this respect they are seen more as social ideals than individuals, and this is affirmed by the spectator experience: they ‘are apprehended by the church-goes as contributors to a collective order of the dead.’

     Late medieval nobility aspired to a certain image, one of archetypal chivalry, piety and social class.  Their tomb was a device with which to apply this image to themselves, and preserve it indefinitely.  In Philippe Ariés’ words, ‘the deceased lays claim to a glory that men denied him during his lifetime’.  This often entirely conflicted with reality: Katherine Greene, for example, commissioned a marital tomb for both herself and her recently dead husband, complete with effigies of them side by side for eternity, even though she seemed to have no intention of being buried there herself.  She quickly remarried and was buried with her new husband.  Thus preserved in stone, akin to Larkin’s Arundel equivalents, is a falsehood, a myth of marriage as an eternal un ion that had no relation to reality.  One wonders whether Katherine, observing her own effigy, would have perceived herself or simply an idyllic image of the perfect wife.

     Tombs, therefore, could not only change the public scene: they could alter the memory of the deceased.  Rather than personal traits, the spectator is left with that which the dead deemed most important to preserve.  This was often a falsehood.

     These tombs contributed a plethora of meanings to the public scene of churches at this time.  Often these meanings were conflicting: their secular aspects attempted to wrest attention away from the clergy in their own church, while at the same time they were religiously desirable because of their role in saving souls from purgatory and in encouraging greater piety from the living.  They were designed to remember the dead, and yet that memory was purposely altered.  In a sense tombs benefitted all participants: they promised the dying continued influence and remembrance, while they gave the living a medium through which they could express their power and affiliations in a public space usually barred to them.  Their impact on the public scene, meanwhile, is undeniable they still have a significant effect on the public scene of churches today.  The form of display of this period, however, was not to last: the Reformation fundamentally altered attitudes toward funereal display.  Many tombs were deemed irreligious in their iconography and destroyed the landscape of Post-Reformation churches, meanwhile, was solemn, one in which the display of tombs was more understated, and therefore less dominant in the public scene.  In observing the tombs that remain today, the impression we receive from them is a mere shadow of the power they once had, in a medieval world that was far closer to the dead and far more concerned with imagery and symbolic power.

 

 Bibliography

 

Ariés, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, trans. by Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Attreed, Lorraine C., ‘Preparation for death in sixteenth century Northern England’ The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Autumn 1982), pp. 37-66

Badham, S. and S. Oosterwijk, eds, Monumental Industry: The Production of Tomb Monuments in England and Wales in the Long Fourteenth Century (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010)

Barber, Richard, ‘Edward , prince of Wales and of Aquitaine (1330–1376)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 online edn, Jan 2008 [accessed 11 January 2012]

Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: Museum Press, 1996)

Daniell, Christopher, Death and Burial in Medieval England: 1066-1550 (London: Routledge, 1997)

Furnivall, Frederick J., Fifty earliest English wills in the Court of Probate, London: A.D. 1387-1439: with a priest’s of 1454 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative, 1999) [accessed 11 January 2012]

Hadley, D. M., Death in Medieval England (Stroud: Tempus, 2001)

King, Pamela, ‘My Image to be made all naked: cadaver tombs and the commemoration of women in fifteenth-century England’, in The Ricardian: journal of the Richard III society, vol. 13 (2003), pp. 294-314

Shakespeare, William, Much Ado About Nothing, V. 3. 10, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)