It is tempting to think of the increasingly monumentally congested church or chapel as symbolic of the entire families commemorated therein. Had the wheel turned full circle therefore? Did the meaning of such a chapel resonate in a medieval monument such as Bishop Stafford’s, which although personalised for himself, was also, through the heraldry, intended to represent his wider family? The medieval monument was chiefly an artefact commissioned to encourage intercessory prayer for the soul of the departed and his family. The location of the monument was pivotal in encouraging such activity and a profitable mutuality between locus, imagery and liturgy was employed to maximal effect.The abandonment of the doctrine of Purgatory and the need for intercessory prayers necessitated a change in the meaning of post-Reformation monuments by which they became almost exclusively social tools, crucial in enhancing the family status and continuity of the dynasty at a time of a succession crisis. The imagery and locus of a monument remained critical, but liturgy was reduced to funeral ceremonies and the transitory effects of a funeral sermon. Far from just representing the dead, monuments were now reminiscent of the living and the didactic qualities of their virtuous lives, encouraging prayer not for the souls of the departed but for the well-being of the living. Monuments had become part of the social fabric, shifting from the emotionalism of the death of the commemorated to a celebration of the heroic virtuousness of their life, all combined with the concept of family memoria.Their liturgical context, however paramount prior to the Reformation, rapidly became superfluous thereafter, assuredly replaced by a family’s sense of confidence, landed security, and eventually a complete belief in itself.
Notes
1 J.Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), unpaginated ‘Epistle to the reader’. 2 B. Kemp, English Church Monuments (1980).
3 B. Cherry, ‘Some cathedral tombs’, in M. Swanton (ed.), Exeter Cathedral: A
Celebration (Exeter, 1991), 156–67.
4 E. F. Jacob (ed.), The Register of Henry Chichele,Archbishop of Canterbury 1414–1443, II (Oxford, 1938), 154.
5 N. Orme, ‘The medieval chantries of Exeter cathedral – III’, Devon and Cornwall
Notes and Queries [DCNQ] 35 (1982), 67–71, (p. 68).
6 N. Orme, Exeter Cathedral:The First Thousand Years, 400–1550 (Exeter, 2009), 67. I am most grateful to Professor Orme for discussing the Exeter bishops’ tombs with me.
7 Orme, ‘Medieval chantries’, DCNQ 34 (1981), 319–26, (pp. 320–22).
8 A. M. Morganstern, Gothic tombs of kinship (Pennsylvania, 2000), passim, provides similar models for this rationale of intercessory recall.
9 D. Lepine and N. Orme (eds.), Death and Memory in Medieval Exeter (Exeter, 2003), 30–31.
10 Orme, Exeter Cathedral, 67.
11 W. Lack, H. M. Stuchfield and P.Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Devonshire (2000), 112, 116.
12.N. Rogers,‘“Et expectis resurrectionem mortuorum”: Images and texts relating to the Resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement on English brasses and incised slabs’, in N. Morgan (ed.), Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom (Donington, 2004), 342–55, (p. 350).
13 F. C. Hingeston-Randolph, The Register of Edmund Stafford (1886), 404–05. 14 Langeton bequeathed 20s to John Wylle, chaplain, to pray for his soul, which sum,
while not sufficient to maintain a chantry, would have ensured ceremonies of remembrance were enacted; see Hingeston-Randolph, Stafford, 405.
15 N. Orme, ‘Sir John Speke and his chapel in Exeter Cathedral’, Transactions of the
Devonshire Association 118 (1986), 25–41.
16 F.W.Weaver (ed.), Somerset Medieval Wills 1383–1500 (1901), 145, translation from the Latin original now The National Archives [TNA], PROB11/3/195, will proved 27 January 1439.
17 TNA, PROB11/5/223v, will proved 22 January 1469. 18 Lepine and Orme (eds.), Death and Memory, 239–40. 19 Weaver (ed.), Somerset Medieval Wills, 92.
20 N. Rogers, ‘Hic Iacet…: the location of monuments in late medieval parish churches’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds.), The Parish in Late Medieval England (Donington 2006), 261–81, (p. 264).
21 Weaver (ed.), Somerset Medieval Wills, 290.
22 R. Marks, Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Stroud, 2004), 173–81. 23 L. L. Duncan, Testamenta Cantiana:West Kent (1906), 26, 28, 31.
24 S. Badham,‘Status and Salvation: the design of medieval English brasses and incised slabs’, The Monumental Brass Society, XV (1997), 412–65.
25 Rogers, ‘Images and Texts’, 346–7.
26 J. J. Howard (ed.), The Visitation of Suffolke 2 vols (1866), I, 166–70.
27 J. R. Greenwood,‘Wills and brasses: some conclusions from a Norfolk study’, in J. Bertram (ed.), Monumental Brasses as Art and History (Stroud, 1996), 82–102. 28 R. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford,
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29. Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments, 52.
30 N. Llewellyn, ‘Honour in life, death and in the memory: funeral monuments in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 6 (1996), 179–200.
31 C. J. M. Faunch, ‘Church monuments and commemoration in Devon
c.1530–c.1660’, (doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 1998), 398–403.
32 N. Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000), 373.
33 TNA, PROB11/68/269v–270r, will proved 30 June 1585. 34 N. Llewellyn, The Art of Death (1991), 100–29.
35 K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious
Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), 59.
36 S. Roffey, Chantry Chapels and Medieval Strategies for the Afterlife (Stroud, 2008), 167–76.
37 S. E. Lehmberg, Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (Exeter, 1996), 228.
38 Faunch, ‘Church monuments’, 413–18, 427–31.
39 C. Brooks, ‘Exeter Cathedral’, Archaeological Journal Supplement 147 (1990), 24–34. 40 V. Harding, ‘Choices and changes: death, burial and the English Reformation’ in D. Gaimster and R. Gilchrist (eds.), The Archaeology of Reformation1480–1580 (Leeds, 2003), 386–98.
41 F. G. Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Essex Gentry’s Wills (Chelmsford, 1978), 242. 42 M. E. Allen (ed.), Wills of the Archdeaconry of Suffolk 1620–1624 (Woodbridge,
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43 Emmison, Elizabethan Life, 114.
44 J. Finch, ‘A reformation of meaning: commemoration and remembering the dead in the parish church, 1450–1640’, in Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds.), Archaeology of
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45 J. Guillim, A Display of Heraldry:The Sixth Edition (1724), 8–9.
46 N. Cuddy, ‘Dynasty and display: politics and painting in England’, in K. Hearn (ed.), Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630 (1995), 11–20. 47 R. Tittler, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern
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48 J. Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to
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49 M. Baker, Figured in Marble:The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (2000), 50–60.
50 D. Bindman and M. Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture
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51 C.S. Gilbert, Historical and Topographical Survey of the County of Cornwall 2 vols (Plymouth Dock, 1817–20), II, 832.
52 J.Whetter, Cornish People in the 18th Century (Gorran, 2000), 102–03.
53 M. Craske, The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and
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54 P. Cockerham, Continuity and Change: Memorialisation and the Cornish Funeral
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55 Gilbert, Cornwall, II, 833.
56 M. I.Webb, Michael Rysbrack, Sculptor (1954), 183.