Download PDF | Nigel Saul - English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages_ History and Representation-Oxford University Press, USA (2009).
432 Pages
Preface
Church monuments have long been the subject of antiquarian study. From as far back as the 1790s, when Richard Gough published his Sepulchral Monuments, they have attracted the attention of those seeking to reconstruct England’s past from study of her antiquities. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, they have also received the attention of historians of art and sculpture. Prior and Gardner’s great monograph, published in 1912, put monuments at the very heart of research into the medieval plastic arts. More recently, the study of monuments has been undertaken by archaeologists and students of material culture. The specialist discourse of archaeology has crept into more than a few recent discussions of the subject. This monograph approaches monuments from a different perspective again, that of the political, social, and religious historian.
The book focuses, in particular, on the commemorated—on their ambitions and aspirations, on the ways in which they were represented on monuments, and on the uses which they made of their monuments. While it by no means excludes issues of design and production—both are considered in some detail— such matters are approached mainly from the perspective of the social meaning of monuments. The principal aim of the book is to integrate the study of church monuments into the mainstream study of the medieval past. In the course of writing these pages I have incurred a considerable number of debts. The first is to all the incumbents, churchwardens, and keyholders who have arranged access to locked churches for me, sometimes at short notice. I am grateful to them all for giving me such assistance. I am even more grateful to those incumbents who have managed to keep their churches open and accessible.
It is understandable that today a great many churches should be kept locked. Thefts of church treasures have become a serious problem for the Church of England, and brasses often figure among the objects stolen and disposed of abroad. None the less, the locking of churches, a practice becoming increasingly common, is still to be regretted. Not only is it at odds with the Church’s mission of evangelization; it is discouraging to all those who take pleasure in visiting these buildings both to savour their atmosphere— to find God—and to study their architecture and contents.
To the diminishing number of incumbents who make a commitment to keeping their churches open, I pay generous tribute. All with an interest in cherishing this country’s heritage stand in their debt. I would also like to record my appreciation to those who have assisted me on aspects of the subject where my own expertise is sadly limited. Like many who grew up in the 1960s, I became interested in monuments through visiting churches to do brass rubbings. Indeed, it was partly through my early interest in brasses that I developed in interest in medieval history more generally. Later, when I began working professionally on the history of medieval England, I found my interest in monuments extending to sculpted effigies, incised slabs, and the all too easily overlooked cross slab grave covers. Even today, however, I am conscious that I know much less about these other kinds of monuments—and least of all about grave covers— than I do about brasses.
I am also conscious that I know much less about the production of monuments than I do about the lives of those whom they commemorate. Accordingly, I would like to record my thanks to all who have allowed me to draw on their own areas of specialist knowledge. In particular, I would like to thank Sally Badham, Jon Bayliss, Philip Lankester, and Sophie Oosterwijk. I would also like to thank Paul Cockerham for his good-humoured advice on a whole range of matters to do with monuments, most notably Cornish monuments and patterns of commemoration on the Continent. A number of friends and scholars have kindly read parts of the book for me. Jerome Bertram, Anthony Musson, Brian Kemp, Philip Lankester, and John Blair have read drafts of chapters which relate to their own areas of expertise. I am grateful to them all for undertaking this labour on my behalf. I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Sally Badham for reading a draft of the entire book and for commenting on it in detail. Whatever merits the book may have owes much to the range and perceptiveness of her criticism.
Most of the reading for, and some of the writing of, this book has been done in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Without the resources of this magnificent collection I would hardly have been able to delve as deeply as I have into the extensive antiquarian literature in the field. The Society’s library is not only by far the largest and most wide-ranging collection of its kind; it also offers the convenience of having the material available on the open shelves, making it a uniquely attractive place to work. I am very grateful to Bernard Nurse, the recently retired Librarian, and his staff for the assistance they have given on my many visits. In conclusion, may I thank Royal Holloway, University of London, for supporting the cost of research visits and for the award of a year’s sabbatical leave in 2006–2007. The dedication is to those who have been patient with my enthusiasm for monuments, accompanying me on visits to churches and regularly assisting with the downloading of digital photographs.
Nigel Saul Royal Holloway, University of London April 2008
Antiquaries and Historians: The Study of Monuments From the earliest times societies have raised monuments to the dead. Among these are some of the most remarkable structures ever created by mankind. In the Ancient World the great pyramid of Khufu in Egypt was accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
At Halicarnassus the tomb which Queen Artemiesia built in honour of her husband Mausoleus gave the world the word ‘mausoleum’. Where the commemoration of the great was concerned, monuments went with monumentality. In the past, as now, monuments have attracted the admiring attentions of the curious. Well before the Reformation visitors flocked to Westminster Abbey to see the tombs of England’s kings. Such, indeed, was the commotion caused at times by these visitors that the monks had to lay down rules governing their proper conduct.¹ Some of those who, over the centuries, have taken an interest in monuments have been attracted to them principally by the fame of those they commemorate.
When looking at monuments, they have felt themselves in some way paying tribute through them to the persons whose memory they honour. Such is in all probability the attitude of many of those who visit Bladon to see the grave of Sir Winston Churchill. Others, however, have been attracted more by the beauty or poignancy of the monument itself. Queen Charlotte is said to have burst into tears when she set eyes on Banks’s famous sculpture of Penelope Boothby at the Royal Academy exhibition.² Whatever may be the main interest of those who take an interest in monuments, however, one thing holds true: the monument must arouse a reaction. Monuments were expected to provoke a reaction from onlookers.
If they failed to provoke such, they had failed in their primary purpose; they were of no value. In the churches of England and Wales there remain many thousands of monuments from the Middle Ages. Some of these are elaborate structures, adorned with canopies or entablatures, depicting the deceased in his or her finery and attended by weepers and angels. Others are smaller, more run-of-the-mill affairs, less obviously pretentious. Those of early date typically take the form of a simple coffin slab, carved or incised on the surface with a cross. The more stylish and opulent of late medieval monuments might comprise an effigy, tomb chest, canopy, and inscriptions; the smaller and cheaper, an effigy and inscription—or just an inscription. Monuments might be fashioned from freestone, Purbeck marble, alabaster, wood, or brass. They might be sculpted or incised, set in the floor or placed against a wall. The sheer variety of medieval monuments attests the wide social range of the patron class. Those commemorated by them embraced both the exalted and the relatively humble in society. It is likely that more monuments of the medieval period survive in England than in any area of equivalent size in Europe.³ On the Continent the hazards of war, revolution, destruction, and rebuilding have all exacted a heavy toll over the centuries.
In England that toll has, relatively speaking, been much lower. Not only have English churches escaped the worst of the ravages of religious, political, and military upheaval; north of the Channel there was much less rebuilding of fabrics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when medieval sculpture was held in low esteem. It is worth remembering, none the less, that a great many monuments have still been lost. In the course of the religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries huge numbers of monuments were defaced or entirely destroyed. As a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, virtually all monuments in the religious houses declared redundant were condemned to the scrap heap. In the towns and cities, constant reordering of church interiors has ensured a lower survival rate of monuments than in country churches. All the same, the corpus of funerary sculpture which has come down to us is still of some size. The study of medieval monuments has a long history. Interest in monuments of the medieval period was already beginning before the period itself had ended. Perhaps the first to record monuments of note—or monuments to persons of note—was William Worcester (d. 1482), sometime secretary of Sir John Fastolf, who sometimes mentioned tombs in his notes of his travels round the realm.
After the Reformation there was a growth of interest in medieval funerary sculpture among the new antiquary class. By the late sixteenth century monuments were attracting the attention of the heralds, who valued their often elaborate armorials as evidence of family pedigrees and entitlement to bear arms. John Philipot (1588/9–1645), Somerset Herald, assembled a rich harvest of notes from the churches of his native Kent. Slightly later, Elias Ashmole (1617–92), Windsor Herald, went on note-taking tours of churches of the Thames Valley.⁴ In the years of tension and instability which preceded the Civil War the recording of monuments was informed by greater urgency. Sir William Dugdale (1605–86), the Garter King of Arms, was one figure concerned to record the country’s more important monuments lest their witness might be lost for ever. Dugdale’s ‘Book of Monuments’, compiled in 1640–1, with drawings by William Sedgwick, is perhaps the most remarkable and beautiful book on monuments ever produced.⁵ Monuments became the subject of more serious scholarly study in the mideighteenth century. For the first time, they were considered worthy of attention in their own right rather than for the genealogical information they carried. The background to this shift of emphasis lay in the rise of gentlemanly antiquarian studies in the early years of the century. The foundation of the Society of Antiquaries in 1707 betokened a new attitude to the past: one which was at once more inquisitive and more respectful.
The physical remains of the past were now seen as one of the means by which the secrets of that past could be unlocked and explored to tell a story of national origins. A key figure in these developments was Richard Gough (d. 1809), a Hertfordshire landowner, and Director of the Society of Antiquaries. Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments represented a milestone in the study of funerary sculpture in England.⁶ The inspiration for Gough’s work was an ambitious project on which, half a century earlier, the Abbe Montfaucon had ´ embarked in France. Montfaucon, a textual scholar, antiquary and historian, had set himself the task of compiling a history of his native land illustrated by manuscripts, sculptures, seals, and inscriptions—antiquities of any sort which could shed light on the habits of past ages.⁷ To this end, he had employed a remarkable man, the royal equerry Roger de Gaignieres, to gather the necessary source materials for him. ` In the space of a decade or so Gaignieres, with two assistants, had accumulated a ` huge collection of drawings of sculptures, inscriptions, seals but, above all, of church monuments. Gaignieres’ drawings, later worked by Montfaucon’s draughtsmen ` into plates, formed one of the most remarkable records of funerary sculpture ever made. The work of Montfaucon and Gaignieres spurred Gough to undertake a ` comparable project for England with the ambition of describing and illustrating the tombs and effigies of the aristocracy and detailing the lives of those commemorated. Gough went further than Montfaucon in seeking to use monuments as a source for manners broadly defined.
The art of monuments, he believed, could reflect cultural and political change, mirroring in its iconography shifts in social, religious, and sartorial taste. Montfaucon, while assigning dates to monuments and arranging them in chronological order, had not exploited them for illustrations of national modes or attempted to compare monuments with one another; nor had he laid down any rules by which they might be judged. In Gough’s view, monuments repaid examination for their wider meaning because it was from such sources that areas of the nation’s past on which written sources were silent could be opened up for investigation.⁸ Gough went to considerable lengths to procure illustrations for his volumes, begging them from friends, exploiting the resources of the Society of Antiquaries, and commissioning draughtsmen such as John Carter to make drawings for him. A relatively wealthy man, he met all the most substantial costs himself. He saw national honour as requiring the construction of a visual taxonomy of this kind and he was confident of being able to advance beyond the standards set by continental scholars. Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments was rightly judged a remarkable achievement. Quite apart from its scale, which was unprecedented, it set new standards for the description, recording, and illustration of medieval monuments. It was a tribute to its achievement that it attracted a generation of imitators.
In 1817 Charles Stothard embarked on the publishing of what was to become his Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, a work in a similar vein which reaped the benefit of another forty years of scholarship.⁹ Stothard prided himself on the quality of his prints, which were noticeably more accurate than Gough’s. In 1826 Edward Blore published his Monumental Remains of Noble and Eminent Persons, another volume in the same tradition which combined prints of distinguished monuments with accompanying text on those commemorated by them.¹⁰ It was Gough, however, who had paved the way, showing how the systematic comparison of visual media could elicit historical information and demonstrating the contribution which the study of monuments could make to the evaluation of England’s past.
The study of monuments received a further boost in the early nineteenth century from the Catholic revival in the Church of England. The growth of ritualism associated with the Cambridge Movement and the Camden Society stimulated a renewal of enthusiasm for medieval culture and for Gothic as the style most appropriate for the setting of worship; and this, in turn, fed into and encouraged an interest in medieval monuments. In the mid-nineteenth century a number of specialist works dealing with monuments were published. None of these even began to approach Gough’s project in scale or ambition; a few, however, pushed the boundary of inquiry forward into the hitherto largely unexplored areas of early and non- or semi-effigial monuments. The two monographs published by Charles Boutell and E. L. Cutts on early stone sculpture were of particular importance in this respect;¹¹ Boutell was also responsible for a well-received volume of folio plates on brasses.¹² At the same time, articles and notes in local antiquarian periodicals focused attention on the monuments of particular churches or localities.
Periodically reports were published of the discovery, or rediscovery, of monuments buried or cast aside in less respectful times.¹³ It was around this time that a development occurred which was to have baneful long-term consequences for the study of medieval church monuments. This was the separation of the study of brasses from the study of other types of monument. The reason for the turn of events was simple: it was possible to ‘rub’ brasses— that is, to take tracings of them with heelball. The growth in popularity of brass rubbing in the nineteenth century led to a concentration of interest on brasses relative to other types of monument. Societies of brass rubbing ‘collectors’ were established in the two ancient universities. Collections of rubbings were built up by enthusiasts such as A. W. Franks and Herbert Haines. In the years from 1860 a series of textbooks on brasses of varying quality were published. Macklin’s Monumental Brasses, which appeared in 1890, was to prove the most popular and most enduring: it was to remain in print for well over half a century.¹⁴
The most substantial and penetrating study, however, was Haines’s Manual of Monumental Brasses of 1861, a remarkable work which broke new ground in its originality and rigour of method.¹⁵ Haines not only placed the study of brasses in an art-historical context; he also, crucially, attempted to identify styles of engraving and to speculate on workshop origins. The seminal quality of Haines’s insights has long been acknowledged. At the time, however, those insights fell on stony ground, attracting little interest from the authors of textbooks whose approach remained resolutely costume-driven. In a succession of studies for the general reader brasses were classified and described purely by reference to the costume of the commemorated; the possibility that there might be alternative lines of inquiry was all but ignored. The costume methodology was also followed in the study of incised slabs. Greenhill’s Incised Effigial Slabs, comprehensive as it was in recording, was unoriginal in matters of interpretation.¹⁶ In the first half of the twentieth century, when brass rubbing was in decline, writing on brasses got stuck in a methodological rut.
A seminal article by J. P. C. Kent on style, which took up and developed some of Haines’s ideas, was virtually ignored by specialists in the field.¹⁷ Only in the 1970s, in the wake of a renewed brass rubbing boom, were new advances in understanding of the subject made. On the initiative of a younger generation of scholars, stylistic analysis was taken up with vigour and made the means to a systematic classification of preReformation brasses.¹⁸ At the same time, a series of innovative studies was made of other aspects of the subject. John Page-Phillips devoted a major monograph to palimpsests— that is, to brasses taken up and reused—while Paul Binski, Nicholas Rogers, and John Blair looked afresh at the earliest brasses, arguing for their origins in the early fourteenth rather than the thirteenth century.¹⁹ Much of this revisionist work received appropriately magisterial summation in Malcolm Norris’s Monumental Brasses: The Memorials and The Craft, published in 1977 and 1978 respectively.²⁰ While brasses thus emerged as the subject of detailed scholarly attention in their own right, the study of sculpted effigies was absorbed into the history of sculpture. For the most part, those who wrote about stone and alabaster effigies were those who wrote about the medieval carved stonework more generally.
In 1912 E. S. Prior and A. Gardner published a massive illustrated textbook on medieval sculpture which treated tomb effigies alongside statuary on church fac¸ades, figurative carving on reredoses, and other major examples of the carver’s art.²¹ For purposes of classification Prior and Gardner grouped tomb effigies into ‘schools’ associated with the workshops called into being by building programmes at cathedrals and greater churches. Methodologically, there was much to be said for treating effigial funerary sculpture alongside related effigial art: funerary and ‘fac¸ade’ figures were not infrequently the work of the same carvers. None the less, it was unfortunate that the study of sculpted monuments should have become separated from the study of brasses and—for that matter—from that of incised and cross slabs. Not only was little or no distinction made by contemporaries between the various forms of monument; for us today it makes excellent sense to treat the different types of monuments together, for only in that way can an overall view of the subject be gained. In contexts where the intellectual approach is purely art historical, there may well be a case for assimilating monuments to the broader study of sculpture. But where the social and cultural significance of monuments becomes the centre of attention, it makes far better sense to look at all types of monument together.
The appropriation of the study of sculpted effigies to art history could have had the highly beneficial effect of encouraging a more sophisticated methodology than that employed at the time in the study of brasses. In some ways, however, this was not to be the case. As Harry Tummers has pointed out, the concept of ‘schools’ as used by Prior and Gardner was actually a highly problematical one. From much of the medieval period quite simply too few effigies survive to allow firm identification of particular ‘schools’ or workshops. Only from the end of the fourteenth century does analysis by workshop begin to carry conviction. To this criticism could be added the secondary charge that the co-authors’ hypothesis of such workshops being urban-based and associated with building programmes atthe big cathedrals and abbeys is itself open to question. There are good grounds for thinking that for long production was based at or near quarries.²² The ill-founded notion of ‘schools’ of sculptured effigies may have sent generations of researchers on the wrong track in their search for the men who carved the effigies. Prior and Gardner’s work, like that of other contemporary writers, also suffered from the drawback of adopting a somewhat old-fashioned approach to dating. In common with the writers on brasses, Prior and Gardner relied principally on the details of armour and costume in assigning dates to effigies.
These details, however, were often insecurely dated, and an element of circularity entered into the whole business of dating as one ill-documented monument was dated by reference to another. Surprisingly for art historians, Prior and Gardner paid little or no attention to the possibility of style as an aid to deciding date. When they addressed matters of artistic style, their remarks were generally vague and unconvincing. Only after the Second World War was the costume-based approach, with its roots in the work of the antiquaries, replaced by a more methodologically rigorous one which recognized a place for style. The turning-point was represented by the publication in 1955 of Laurence Stone’s Sculpture in Britain: The Middle Ages, the first work by an English author to attempt to ‘evolve a detailed chronological classification on the basis of stylistic development’.²³ Although only a small part of Stone’s book was devoted to funerary monuments, Stone offered an exemplary discussion of the evolution of medieval figure sculpture from the point of view of attitude and treatment of the body and representation of drapery folds. Stone’s methodological assumption was clear: details of armour and fashion changed too slowly or irregularly to be of use as tools of analysis or guides to date; consideration of style and attitude must come first. Stone’s pioneering work ushered in a new approach to the study of medieval tomb sculpture, one more firmly rooted in the techniques of art history. It was the sort of approach which, outside England, was to find its grandest expression in Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini.²⁴
It would be wrong to suggest that Stone’s work was accorded the immediate compliment of flattery by imitation; it was not. In the 1960s and 1970s the monuments of the post-Reformation period benefited from a far greater degree of attention than those of the Middle Ages. Not until 1980 was a monograph published which applied Stone’s methodology to the study of a discrete body of medieval sculpture. This was Tummers’s Early Secular Effigies in England: The Thirteenth Century.²⁵ Since then, Phillip Lindley’s work has applied art historical techniques to the study of funerary sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, most notably to the monuments at Abergavenny.²⁶ At the same time, asuccession of articles in Church Monuments, the journal of the Church Monuments Society, has adopted broadly similar methodologies. As a result, the study of sculpted monuments has found itself much more firmly rooted in the discipline of art history than has the parallel study of brasses. The medieval sculpted effigy, sprung from the same stock as the niche figure, has made it the natural object of appreciation of those whose primary interest lies in the history of sculpture as a form of art. One of the most urgent tasks facing students of medieval commemoration is to achieve the reintegration of the two branches of the subject.
There is no intellectual justification for the separate study of brasses and sculpted monuments. The distinction between the two made its unfortunate appearance 150 years ago in the wake of the first brass rubbing ‘boom’. Antiquaries such as Richard Gough and the other pioneers in the field of monuments gave equal and ready attention to all forms of commemoration; they did not divide into specialists concentrating on one form or another. The market in funerary sculpture was one which evolved rapidly in the Middle Ages, showing remarkable sensitivity to changes in taste and fashion. Types of monument popular in one century might be less popular—or, at least, less popular with the elite—in the next.
Types of stone popular in one century might be less popular much later. Purbeck marble was fashionable in the thirteenth century, but less so in the fourteenth; alabaster swept all before it in the fifteenth. The rise of brasses was one phase or episode in the constant evolution of taste. To focus attention on only one type of monument is to gain a picture of only part of the overall market in commemorative sculpture. A lead in the direction of reintegration has already been given by Jonathan Finch in his study of church monuments in Norfolk before 1850.²⁷ Finch’s approach has been to examine the totality of monuments in four areas of the county, establishing the chronology of their distribution and evaluating the sample against social background to achieve an understanding of the development of commemoration and the motives behind it. Finch looks at cross slabs, wall monuments, brasses, incised slabs, and ledger stones; he also takes note of lost monuments recorded by antiquaries. He does not, however, consider churchyard monuments. His method is that of the archaeologist. He pays little attention to matters of style and design except to the extent that these are indicative of social norms.
His prime concern is to examine the full range of monuments as a measure of the place of commemoration in the structures and material culture of society. Finch’s approach attests a welcome development in the recent study of church monuments: namely, the appearance of a methodological diversity, which has helped weaken traditional barriers and open up new avenues of research. No longer are methodologies confined principally to analysis of costume or workshops in the case of brasses, or the history of sculpture in the case of other types of monument. Alternative ways of approaching and understanding monuments are being pursued and explored. The organization of production, for example, has been studied by numerous scholars, notably Phillip Lindley and Sally Badham.²⁸ Regional studies focusing on monuments of the medieval period have been undertaken by B. and M. Gittos and A. McClain (as well as by Finch himself ).²⁹ The role of monuments in the creation and sustaining of family dynastic strategies has been analysed by historians of late medieval gentry society, including the present author.³⁰
The monuments of children and cadaver effigies are genres which have received the attention of Sophie Oosterwijk.³¹ Growing interest has been shown in the recording and study of early cross slabs, with Peter Ryder building on the important work of Laurence Butler.³² Behind this welcome diversity lies an increasing interest in monuments by scholars who have developed methodologies in other disciplines and are applying these to studies of funerary sculpture. A key aim of the present study is to offer an account of medieval church monuments which recognizes and accepts the current diversity of studies in the field. Rejecting the assumption that brasses should be considered apart from other types of monument, it will subject all commemorative forms used in the Middle Ages to review—cross slabs, relief effigies, incised slabs as well as brasses— the particular emphasis on each varying according to the period and the subject under discussion. Methodologically, the approach will be that of the historian. The corpus of monuments will be examined less as examples of fine art than as expressions of the social, cultural, and religious assumptions of the age in which they were produced. Particular attention will be given to the ways in which those commemorated represented themselves on their monuments, either through their effigies or textually in epitaphs.
A strong emphasis will be placed on the roles which monuments played in the social and religious strategies of those who commissioned them. Monuments were conceived as performing principally two functions— those of engaging the living in aid of the dead and providing evidence of the standing of the deceased and his family in the local community. It is anticipated that by paying attention to the rich secular and religious discourses on monuments the kind of socio-historical contextualization will be achieved which has so successfully been developed in their own period by the early modernists.³³ For the medievalist, monuments provide an important, and yet a strangely neglected, source for the reconstruction of past lives. For more than a few among the commemorated, the monument may be the only historical source to have come down to us. This is most likely to be the case in respect of such groups as the rural freeholders, lesser gentry, merchants, and minor clergy, for whom there is otherwise little or no evidence of interiority and personal taste. For these groups, the witness provided by the monument will be of especial value in opening a window onto a world of social and religious belief otherwise largely hidden. For the better born, and thus the better documented, there is likely to be at least some other source material, either documentary or physical. In these cases the witness of the monument will be of use in supplementing that from other sources—offering either an original perspective or, at the very least, a perspective different from that offered by the documentary corpus. Whatever evidence the monument may afford will be interrogated in the same way as that of any other source or ‘text’.
No particular theoretical claim is made here for the unique character of monuments as a source; and certainly no attempt will be made to privilege them over all other sources. It may be the case, as sometimes suggested, that direct communication with the artefacts of a past society brings insights which other classes of evidence cannot: it is naturally tempting for students of monuments to suppose that that is so. Yet it would be wrong to deny that such artefacts raise problems of interpretation just as much as any other material deposit from the past. Monuments may in some cases be fictions, deliberately designed to mislead. It has been suggested that this is so with a few very spectacular series of monuments, such as those at Cobham (Kent).³⁴ The intention here is simply to place the evidence of monuments alongside that from other sources in such a way as to ensure a dialogue between the different classes of evidential deposit. As the late R. Allen Brown said, the past is a seamless web, and the study of material objects is just one of the techniques by which it may be explored.³⁵
An important question raised by a study of this kind is the relationship between the monuments and the society or culture which produced them. Are monuments to be seen principally as products and expressions of the structures of society; or are they, rather, to be seen playing a role in shaping and constituting those structures? Should monuments, in other words, be seen as shedding light on the general history of society, or is the relationship actually inverse: to understand monuments, do we need to understand society first? The problem can be illustrated by a consideration of the brass of John Mersdon (d. 1426), rector of Thurcaston, at Thurcaston (Leics.) (Fig. 46). This is a brass of considerable grandeur and complexity: certainly grander than most memorials to parochial clergy of the late Middle Ages. Its size and ambition tell us that Mersdon must have been someone of more than local importance. Are we, in that case, entitled to use the brass as evidence of Mersdon’s worldly and material success?
There is good reason to suppose that we are, particularly since the inscription tells us that he was a canon of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Yet the evidence of the brass only takes us so far. A case could be argued that the real key to an understanding of Mersdon’s career is held not by the brass but by the documentary sources for his life. Without an analysis of the body of sources which tells us about Mersdon’s further appointments and connections, the picture given by the brass is incomplete. The brass, for example, tells us nothing about his connections with the long-lived Elizabeth of Juliers, countess of Kent, evidently a patron. There is no wholly satisfactory solution to the problem of methodology, for the precise balance between monument and context will vary from case to case. There is no doubt that a knowledge of the social and cultural context of a monument can enrich our understanding of that monument and assist in locating sources of tension and contradiction within it. What is usually more difficult to establish is the performative role of the monument— that is, its role in the construction and structuring of social and religious relationships.
One possible solution is to think in terms of a relationship of mutuality, of a complex interplay of ideas and influences between the monument and society, with monuments playing a role in shaping contemporary realities while at the same time being shaped by them. We can take, for example, the great heraldic displays on some late medieval knightly tombs, such as that of Reginald, Lord Cobham (d. 1361) at Lingfield (Fig. 52). These displays, consisting of the blazons of men who forged ties of brotherhood on the battlefields of France, afford evidence both of the strength of contemporary chivalric feeling and of the role which that sentiment played in shaping commemorative taste. Yet the creation and assembling of the armorials also attests something else: the role which the monuments themselves played in affirming and legitimizing status—in other words, in structuring social relationships.
The armorials on the tomb chests are illustrative of the monument’s function as both a bearer and creator of social realities. Yet there are very different contexts in which the monument can be seen more clearly as just the bearer of truth. An obvious instance is provided by the grisly transi or cadaver monuments of the late Middle Ages. The only way of explaining these extraordinary creations is by looking at developments in contemporary religious and artistic expression to see how these could have influenced and encouraged the cult of the macabre. There is no simple or mechanistic solution to the problem of the relationship between monuments and social reality.
The problem here is not, of course, one unique to the study of monuments; it is encountered in the contextual study of any art form, whether visual or otherwise. The approach adopted in this book will be to emphasize the variety of interaction afforded by monuments. The precise form of the interactions, it will be shown, is apt to vary according to circumstance and time. The structure and arrangement of the book are both reasonably straightforward. The book opens with a discussion of the monuments of the pre-Conquest period, an era whose monuments have generally been overlooked in synoptic treatments of the subject. It then proceeds to a consideration of the chronological and geographical distribution of monuments and an assessment of the scale of postmedieval losses. The next two chapters consider the organization of monument production and the operation of the market in bringing patron and producer together. A discussion of the main functions of monuments then follows, with the emphasis placed on the role of the monument in assisting strategies for salvation and proclaiming and attesting the deceased’s status.
After this, an analysis of the visual qualities of monuments identifies the principal components of the monument and indicates how these helped to articulate its messages to the beholder. A series of three chapters examines the main classes of effigial monument as defined by rank—clerical, knightly, and civilian— showing how each incorporated and reflected the self-image of the commemorated while at the same time performing a role in promoting worldly aspirations. The monuments of women and men of law, and transi or cadaver monuments are each accorded attention in a series of later chapters. A final chapter looks at the textual discourse on monuments, exploring its character and meaning, and suggesting what can be learned about the construction of the social identity of the commemorated.
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