Historic Churches 2020

BCD SPECIAL REPORT ON HISTORIC CHURCHES 27 TH ANNUAL EDITION 31 individuals and their families to build private chantry chapels inside the church, a proposition which subsequently became more popular than indoor monastery interments. Nonetheless, the lower classes continued to be buried in churchyards and lay burial inside a church was still relatively rare in Britain. A fashion for wooden effigies, plastered with gesso and painted in imitation of stone, took hold amongst the highest ranking clergy, aristocrats and gentry in the late 13th and early 14th centuries only to be superseded by the more lustrous alabaster in the mid- 14th century. However, the Black Death caused a significant drop in all monument production during the 1350s–1360s, while burials rapidly increased. 15th CENTURY Despite pressure from influential citizens, most cathedrals and abbeys continued to reserve certain spaces for ecclesiastical burials only, such as the chancel. In particular, a tomb on the north side of the high altar was an exceptional burial location because it could be used as an Easter Sepulchre during Holy Week, attracting huge attention during this important time. Yet, by the mid-15th century the nobility and gentry had gained burial rights in the chancel too and were trying to encroach further on exclusive burial spaces. In contrast, burials of the lower classes were dispersed around guild chapels, nave aisles, near popular devotional images or minor altars in the nave and transepts. Some asked to be interred where they had sat in the nave or near loved ones while others were added to lines of burials along processional pathways inside the church. However, identifying middling and lower class burials in church buildings is difficult. They often commissioned small floor memorials, and many were placed in cramped urban churches where floor space was at a premium. High traffic has eroded the inscriptions, leading to some being mistaken for paving stones and reused as flooring, or the high turnover of burials meant they were replaced with someone else’s. As early as 1427, an anonymous monk at St Alban’s Abbey lamented over precisely these issues. 16th CENTURY The Dissolution of the Shrines under Henry VIII began in the 1520s, dismantling saints’ shrines and reburying or discarding saints’ remains. During the religious turbulence of the Reformation and state enforced iconoclasm of the dead under Elizabeth I, some families privately reburied their ancestors elsewhere for fear of desecration, sometimes leaving empty tombs and memorials behind. Before the 16th century, mortuary monuments were largely horizontal. Now, vertical space was used on an unprecedented scale through wall memorials, upright effigies, busts and memorial windows. This relieved pressure on floor space from accrued tombs and the increased number and size of church pews. Burial locations largely followed the same spatial arrangements as before and defunct chantry chapels were sometimes repurposed as family burial vaults or even storage. Lady Mohun’s chantry chapel built in c 1375 at Canterbury Cathedral was still being used as a lumber store by the 18th century, severely damaging her tomb canopy. Some wall memorials were created out of existing floor memorials to save them from destructive rebuilding work, to relocate them near other family wall memorials or to rescue them from wear and tear. This practice was to continue throughout the following centuries. It is possible to identify these repositioned memorials by the presence of a Lewis hole (a notch for a tool used to lift heavy blocks of stone) or large chips around the edges made by levers and crowbars when it was lifted. Also, secondary features may have been added to transform the floor memorial into a wall feature, such as a tiny plinth to support the base or a loop added to hang it. In contrast, original wall memorials were usually screwed into the wall, not hung from a single point. Another clue may be an inscription referring to the burial ‘Underneath’, ‘Beneath’ or ‘Below’, but confusingly, similar wording can also be found on wall memorials erected in later centuries as they became increasingly distanced from their burials. Although around 4,000 monumental brasses survive in England, they were often stripped from floor memorials in the mid-late 16th century, either to engrave the reverse for a new memorial or for resale as scrap. What may remain is the ‘matrix’ which the brass was fixed to. 17th and 18th CENTURIES By the 17th and 18th centuries, following decades of unrepaired iconoclasm, many churches were suffering from serious neglect and damage but were often too cash poor to pay for repairs. Many cloisters had lost their windows through neglect, vandalism, looting, English Civil War destruction and other local crises. This exposed cloister burials and memorials to weathering and even flooding. Churchyards, most notably at Chester Cathedral, were even used as local rubbish dumps, which can explain butchered animal bones appearing in later churchyard burials. Clergy were also recorded requesting burial at their better preserved parish churches rather than their cathedrals which had endured the harshest treatment. Reflooring was often a priority when money became available because as bodies and wooden grave furniture decayed, surrounding soil collapsed into the void, causing subsidence. Since naves and transepts had the densest burial populations, they often needed immediate attention. This situation had a direct impact on existing memorials. New floors commonly incorporated old grave slabs turned face down. In addition, floor memorials in poor condition were sometimes broken up for gravel and used to line pathways in An unofficial memorial graffitied on a cloister bench in Canterbury Cathedral: graffiti like this on church monuments peaked in the 17th to 19th centuries, but graffiti can also demarcate where monuments have been removed. (Photo: Ruth Nugent)