Welcome to new subscribers! In addition to free posts every Friday and at other times on a random schedule, I also offer special posts for paid subscribers on a Wednesday.
Every other week I focus on a particular aspect of church architecture, art or practice, using my own photos as illustrations. I have seen many, many memorials in churches, so I have split this subject into two posts - pre-Reformation and Post-Reformation.
This post is too long for email, so please view it online.
I should start with a disclaimer - defining an exact date for the English Reformation is notoriously tricky. You can’t pin it down to an exact date as it was a long process, and Catholic practices continued for quite some time in some areas. Not to mention the reign of Queen Mary, who restored the Catholic church (until her death). For the purposes of this post I’m going to use 1536 as the start of the Reformation period since this covers the dissolution of the monasteries and the accompanying turbulence.
The memorial to Sir Godfrey Foljambe (died 1376) and his wife Avena (died 1382) high on the wall of All Saints, Bakewell (Derbyshire). Relatively undamaged, it shows the dead in the classic prayerful pose, as though lying on their beds. Godfrey wears the chainmail associated with his status as a knight.
Tombs of people other than saints were not permitted in churches in the early centuries. This slowly changed, with prominent people being buried in porticos on the edge of the church nave - see this post on St Augustine’s monastery at Canterbury for an example. At Canterbury, local kings were buried on one side of the church, and Archbishops of Canterbury on the other. Gradually the practice of burying local worthies inside churches developed. Over time they started to be put into the nave, but on the edges. They were often buried in the floor and covered with simple carved stones.
Why did this happen? Nobody wrote down a clear explanation but there seem to be two reasons in the pre-Reformation period: firstly, to ask for prayers for their souls (sometimes the memorials explicitly state this), as a religious motive; and secondly to emphasise their status I suppose - perhaps they made significant donations to the fabric and mission of the church. In the 13th and 14th centuries the concept of the “Knight” grew in myth, literature and government, with all its associations which remain with us today. Most of the surviving memorials are of Knights or their family members.
Church congregations certainly wanted to remain close to people they had regarded as holy in their lifetimes, and it was therefore not uncommon for priests to be buried in the church. Their graves were usually marked by a chalice and paten and often they were buried with a pewter chalice and paten as grave goods. But during the 13th and 14th centuries they most often ended up outside the chancel, near the priest’s door, rather than inside the church itself. The inside became the domain of noblemen.
Grave cover of a priest, St Bees Priory, Cumbria.
The grave cover below at St Bees looks to be for a 14th century unmarried woman with Princess Leia styled hair. Someone has done some detective work based on the inscription still visible:
Hic iacet Jhna Lucy - Propitetur Deus. Amen.
Here lies Johanna [Joan] Lucy - may God have mercy on her. Amen.
She was the daughter of the most prominent local nobleman and died in the mid 14th century as a child, despite the adult style of grave decoration. This grave cover demonstrates quite clearly the point - to remember and pray for the deceased.