Not Just a Big Church: The Index

  A series of posts looking at large churches as living communities, with a changing history and perhaps deceptive surviving remains.

Caen. Abbaye aux Dames

1. Not Just a Big Church
2. Not Just a Big Church: a Building Site

Not Just a Big Church: a Building Site

  As we visit the great churches of yore, whether they are still in use or exist as mere ruins, we see a distorted image of how these buildings actually functioned in the middle ages. They are serene, eternal somehow, decorously quiet except for the sounds of worship, largely monochromatic. They display tangled threads of chronology, as the work of various eras is knitted together. They reflect the end point of something that has evolved. The potential for anachronism when looking at them historically is enormous.

  Every time I see an article about St Hilda illustrated with an image of the much later Gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey, which didn't have any nuns in it and was massively more huge than its Anglo-Saxon predecessor, I feel a (possibly unreasonable) urge to scream. Yes, it does engender a sense of place, but not a very accurate sense of time or circumstance.
  I intend to write a series of posts about how various kinds of medieval buildings, while being beautiful things to cherish and admire, can give us a distorted idea of what these buildings were about in their heyday, and how they themselves changed during the course of their use. This first episode is about the myth of timeless serenity as these massive monuments were constantly under reconstruction, using slow and laborious building methods that meant that many of them were building sites for years, They reverberated not just to the gentle chanting of the offices of monks or canons, but the ring of hammers and chisels, the groaning of winches, the crash of occasional accidents and no doubt the cursing of workers.

  Take a very famous example, York Minster, which has an early English south transept with narrow lancets and a wheel window.

  Then there is the famous Decorated heart of Yorkshire west window set in a much more elaborated setting.

  The great Perpendicular east window is a massive expanse of glass on the outside and an amazing stained glass picture gallery on the inside. The building has become bigger, brighter, lighter.

  Underneath, the Norman crypt is the only evidence for a whole earlier building of which nothing survives above ground, apart from a couple of little isolated stained glass panels. This does not simply mean that the building had periods of change over time. It also means it had extended periods, years and decades, when there was noise and dust and scaffolding and horses and bullocks all around and lumps of partially carved stone lying all over the place. Masons and painters and gilders and glaziers would have been climbing over everything. Presumably the canons and priests just hung in there and did their best.
  This is not the image we have as we potter respectfully through the building today. Indeed, there have been periods of major repair even in my lifetime's experience of York Minster.

  In 1973, great metal braces held up the southwest tower and there was scaffolding all over the place because of major fears for the foundations. Later the south transept burnt out and was inaccessible for a number of years while they repaired it. These were regarded as aberrations caused by time and circumstance, and were dealt with using modern machinery and building practices. In fact, during the medieval era such disruptions must have been just part of the regular rhythm of life. They did not occur in order to restore the building to some conception of an older ideal state, but to upsize and improve it. The building was not static. It was in a constant state of change and chaos.

  Most major churches have had something of a similar history; building, enlarging, accidental destruction by fire, earthquake or human miscalculation, more building, rebuilding, deliberate destruction due to political or religious strife, reconstruction. They look like big, solid, static things but they are living organisms. One of the most peculiar histories is that of Cologne Cathedral. Please pardon the qualities of the photos here, but they were taken during the winter solstice in the evening because I was actually there to do something else in the brief hours of daylight.
  There are folks who will tell you that Cologne Cathedral is not a medieval church at all, as it was largely built in the 19th century. That is only sort of true. With its strange history, it is as much a symbol of place as Whitby Abbey is of the history of the English church.
  It was a Christian site from the 4th century, and remains of a 6th century freestanding baptistery survive. The old cathedral was completed in 818. It acquired the relics of the Magi in 1164, taken from Milan by Friedrich Barbarossa and given to them as a nice little earner. That was how big churches funded their improvements, by promoting pilgrimage to sacred relics. Never mind any dubious aspect to the provenance. It burned down in 1248. However, unlike Chartres, they didn't manage to use their relics and resources to rebuild rapidly. It actually took until 1880 to finish the job. The sequence in which it happened perhaps gives us a peep at what these massive buildings were like during their phases of reconstruction.

  The eastern end, with the apse, was built first in the Gothic style, very French in conception unlike the collection of massive Romanesque churches that adorned Cologne at the time (and still do, despite horrendous circumstances). 

  The vault was one of the tallest in Europe. But this segment sat there detached for centuries. Work on the west front began, but was halted in 1473, with the bottom section of one tower completed. The building was effectively in two bits, with not much connecting them except the lower section of one aisle.

  The building has the French Gothic arrangement of grand portals with narrative sculpture on the tympana, large column figures and smaller figures around the arches, but this one is the only one that was completed in the 15th century. The whole rest of the west end waited for around 400 years to be finished.

From P. Clemen and W. Ewald 1911 Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Köln. Im Auftrage des Provinzialverbandes der Rheinprovinz und mit Unterstützung der Stadt Köln: Düsseldorf, Vol. 3.

  This is an impression of it in the 16th century, almost like two separate skyscrapers overlooking the houses and walls of the town. The diagonal structure on the western tower is a crane that was part of the scenes for centuries.

P. Clemen and W. Ewald 1911 Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Köln. Im Auftrage des Provinzialverbandes der Rheinprovinz und mit Unterstützung der Stadt Köln: Düsseldorf, Vol. 3.

 P. Clemen and W. Ewald 1911 Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Köln. Im Auftrage des Provinzialverbandes der Rheinprovinz und mit Unterstützung der Stadt Köln: Düsseldorf, Vol. 3.

  Before it could be completed, the building was occupied by French Revolutionary troops in 1794, sustaining internal damage. These two early 19th century paintings show the oddness of the building before reconstruction started again in 1842, using a medieval plan of the facade but some modern materials and different stone. I don't know how detailed this medieval plan was, or quite how closely they stuck to it. But the building process lurched into life again.

From F.T. Helmken 1901 The cathedral of Cologne, its history, architecture...legends. A guide for visitors, compiled from historical and descriptive records.. : Cologne.

  This wasn't the end of its troubles, as the use of poor quality stone necessitated repairs and replacements, and then there was the ferocious destruction of the monuments of Cologne in the Second World War. The cathedral was damaged, but it stood. There is a tale that it was deliberately spared, sort of, because Allied bomber pilots used the towers for navigation. If that isn't true, then it makes a good legend. Many stained glass windows and treasures, such as the reliquary of the Magi, had been stashed away for safekeeping and survived.
  See the reliquary here. It's an amazing survival. It is, in fact, the little golden square blob in the picture of the apse above, but I couldn't get any closer because of the Christmas services going on at the time.
  What happened in Cologne Cathedral in the 19th century must have been something of a recapitulation of what went on in other great churches during the multiple rebuildings of the middle ages. We look at those buildings as things complete and try to preserve them. They saw them as aspirational. Many people would not have seen their local great church in any kind of completed state in their lifetime.
  Our concept of how one should behave in a church is also based around its completeness. Lowered voices and respectful behaviour are a response to the enclosure and wholeness of the building as a retreat from everyday life. For great lengths of time, the great churches were busy workplaces, no doubt with their quiet and respectful corners but in other areas buzzing with their connection to the world of work and daily life outside.
  In this sense Cologne Cathedral is very much a medieval church, just displaced by a few centuries. All the great churches have suffered periods of neglect or damage, and times of restoration. None of them is a time capsule.

The historic pictures of Cologne Cathedral here are brought to you courtesy of the wonderful and fabulous Internet Archive.

Visual History: Magnifying Glass or Fun Fair Mirror?

  Some weeks ago I got into a slightly testy (but polite) Twitter exchange with somebody from the humanities area of academia who was wanting to know whether anybody out there was doing research on the purely visual aspects of humanities subjects. I pointed out that there were whole disciplines in this area, such as archaeology and art history. These, I was informed, didn't count because people just wrote words about them and critiqued each other's words and didn't actually read the visuals. Er, no. Could I provide some references? Well, every excavation report ever written would make a start.
  Perhaps we had just got our wires crossed and were misreading each other's arguments. That can happen when you break up a discussion into 140 character spasms sent asynchronously across different global time zones. We all read the visuals of our subjects and draw conclusions, or at least cement impressions, from the way we process them. We can look at stuff, we can reinterpret through drawing or photography or computer modelling or re-enactment. We incorporate interpretations based on our previous reading of words on a page or try to interpret the visuals based on other experience. Is this hollow bone with holes in it a prehistoric flute or a bone that a carnivore has chewed? All manner of observations and experiences can be drawn in.

    We all know what this scene, here painted on the rood screen of Hexham Abbey, represents: the Annunciation of course. It's a story from a book; a much read, much reproduced, much studied book. It's a book that was systematically translated, corrected and edited so it could be presented in a standardised form. We know what it is because we know the written story. There are also elements of this picture which are not derived from the book, but we recognise as visual conventions of medieval art: the Virgin kneeling at a desk reading a book, turning her head coyly towards the angel behind her; the haloes; the pot of lilies; the bent over respectful posture of the angel. They not only inform what we see, but how we see it.

  On the other hand, this misericord from St Werburgh's Abbey in Chester has no book to tell us exactly what it means. We are left with a jumble of folklore, reassembled and recast over centuries, and similar images from many other places to inform us that it is not unique or even particularly weird for its location, just not what we were expecting. We can speculate about the psychology of the wild places of the mind and invent symbolic meanings, like the priests quashing the forces of evil with their butts, or something like that.
  How things, tiny or enormous, present themselves, or are presented, influence the way we mentally process them. No historical object is in its original position or condition. We have to fill in from our knowledge and imagination, hopefully in an informed way, but with an open mind  to other than the standard possibilities. We also need to fill in the absences. Sometimes an empty space can tell us something.

  Conwy Castle in Wales, with its massive forbidding presence, had such a profound effect on my four year old son at the time that he claimed he wished we had never called him Edward. "Edward I was a big pig!" he pronounced, and has insisted unto this day that he would be called Eddy. The fact that it was bleak and freezing and snowy only added to the atmosphere. It was an entirely different conception of a castle to that perpetuated by the modern craze of bodies like English Heritage dressing small children up as faux Vikings or soldiers or knights and let them pretend to bash the bejiminies out of each other in the name of good clean medieval fun. On the other hand, a raucous re-enactment of a guard chopping off a prisoner's ear in Lincoln Castle some years later sent my small nephew into the abdabs. He took some convincing that it was just pretend. The places can speak for themselves, with a bit of subtle guidance. Let's not hit the public over the head with a brick.

  Looking out from the top of Clifford's Tower in York, it is not so hard to imagine what an imposing and dominant presence the mighty minster would have been. Just mentally erase the multistory buildings, the fire station across the road and assorted other distractions, sketch in a few animals and aromas and you can see this monolithic building as the commanding presence in a small community by today's standards. You can make out two other church towers in this picture (look carefully), but there were other prominent features that you can't see, because they are not there. York had four friaries, a major hospital, several hospitals outside the walls, a number of parish churches now departed and various buildings adjunct to the minster. A network of religious buildings enmeshed the town. This is the concept we have to work a bit to see.

   This gatehouse in York led into a complex known as the Bedern, where the vicars choral of the minster lived when they weren't attending to their choral duties. Two small restored buildings, including the chapel on the left of the picture, are all that survives above ground, but the space still exists, albeit now occupied by modern housing. The past hasn't gone away.

  St Leonard's hospital was a very large institution, but now represented by just a fragment of ruin. The imposing building behind it is the public library, built on part of the site. Some hospital foundations are under a nearby theatre. New urban institutions have replaced the old, but the space is still defined. You are looking at something that isn't there. The medieval town is not defined simply by its standing ruins, but by its spaces and replacements. 
  Maps are one way of refining the seeing of history. Ancient historical maps may not conform to modern cartographical standards, but they are a conception of a place. They define what features and what spaces were seen as important at the time.

  William Stukeley's map of Leicester shows us how an 18th century antiquarian saw the shape and organisation of the town. You would be hard pressed to untangle that plan from a modern map. Nevertheless topographical maps, Ordnance Survey maps and Google satellite images can all combine to help us image the past and fit it into the present. There is even a space archaeologist working with NASA these days.

  Here are the massive ruins of the huge and stately medieval bishop's palace at Wells. You don't need a literal medieval banquet re-enactment to imagine the lavish doings that must have gone on here.

  Here is an empty space, now filled with a modern cemetery at Northallerton in Yorkshire. You are looking at something that isn't there; a palace of the bishop of Durham. The ditch and bank surrounding the site survives, defining a space from which the material content has been removed. You have to imagine the ceremonies, the banquets, the consultations and plottings that might have gone on here. Their shadows are still lurking.

  This is the site of the church of St Paul in the Bail in Lincoln, possibly the oldest Christian church in the north of England. It has been excavated and several subsequent versions of the church have been discovered on the site. You are looking at chronological layers of things that are not there. I was standing here once when a stranger approached and asked me where Roman Lincoln was. I told him we were standing in it. He didn't believe me. Admittedly you have to go down a lane to see a bit of wall, and another lane to see a turret, another to see the main upper gateway and another way to see the foundations of the lower town gates. I gave him directions and he pottered off bemused. Perhaps he was expecting something like the forum in Rome, but Lincoln has seen a lot of life since those days. Would it have helped if there had been explainers wandering around in metal breastplates and sandals? It might please some, but it makes more sense if you train yourself to see. 

  Bolingbroke Castle might not exactly be the best preserved medieval fortress in Britain but it was the birthplace of one Henry, part of the ever ongoing murderous struggles to determine the monarchy of England. It still sits in a landscape. Far better than banquets and jousts is to sit and contemplate how such a peaceful spot played a role in the gore and splatter of competitive English kingship.

  Does anything epitomise the struggles for control of land, people and wealth like the stark and bleak ruins of the fortified houses, or pele towers, dotted across the Scottish borders? Nothing to be seen for miles but hills and sheep but you locked yourself up in a stone tower before you went to bed. The one above is at Bewcastle, but there are many others, visual reminders of troubled times at least as eloquent as the chronicles that described them.

  "Why" said the family medievalist "are we standing in the middle of a field looking at a small pile of rocks stuck together on top of one another?" Well, Leland described it as a large manor house of the Percies. "But it's not here!" Nope. It is not. The manor house of Seamer is not there. But you can still see it if you try.

Heritage Sites: Trendy and Not Trendy

  
  During the course of sorting and optimising hundreds of old photographs in order to be able to use them online, I am beginning to see through some of the filters which we put on our interpretation of the past. This was part of the point of the exercise. The way we see medieval sites today is mediated through hundreds of years of history, and yet what we see in front of our eyes, tidied and explained by the heritage industry, defines our perception of people, societies, communities and events.
  The above is an engraving of Rievaulx Abbey in beautiful North Yorkshire, derived from a drawing by Turner. It practically defines our image of a Cistercian abbey, even though it was utterly dead and ruinous at the time of its depiction. We imagine something isolated and silent in a wild landscape of unpopulated hills. We imagine the monks walking solemnly, without chatter, no sound echoing off the hills but the melodic singing of the offices. It's a kind of comforting image in today's frantic world.
  The engraving conforms to what we know about the practicalities of Cistercian monasteries. They did build in isolated sites away from towns. The location in the bottom of the valley and the romantic little stone bridge in the foreground indicate their relationship with running water, for sanitation and for rural production.

  This romantic imaging was perpetuated by post-medieval owners of the site. From the Rievaulx Terraces, now managed by the National Trust, there were gaps cut through the trees and shrubbery to provide a series of picturesque views of the simple but grand and stately remains. You can imagine the matin bell tolling across the peaceful valley.
  In fact, this would have been a busy community. While the monks said their offices, an army of lay brothers carried out the practical duties around the place. There were rural estates providing income and provisions for the community, with the necessary comings and goings. There were important visitors staying in the guest house. There were masons and builders continually adding and renovating. Those massive churches and cloisters were not just deposited there by the angels. There were mills grinding flour and breweries making beer and armies of cooks toiling away in large kitchens. It was probably busier and noisier then than it is now, even on a bank holiday.

  Fountains Abbey (above) and Rievaulx Abbey are visited by thousands of people taking in the medieval Cistercian experience. The completeness of their remains and the delightfulness of their surrounds convince us we are immersing ourselves in that world. Other Cistercian remains in Yorkshire like Byland Abbey, Jervaulx Abbey or Roche Abbey are pleasant ruins, but perhaps a bit harder to comprehend in their incompleteness. Then there is Kirkstall Abbey.

  Situated in the middle of suburban West Yorkshire sprawl where Leeds and Bradford have kind of oozed together, it lacks the romantic charm of being marooned in a country estate. The walls are blackened with West Yorkshire industrial muck. When the Cistercians built there it was a rural site like the others, sited in a valley bottom by a river in standard form. Even by the late 18th century it appears to have still been farming land. William Bray in his Sketch of a Tour into Derbyshire ... etc etc, of 1783, decries the attitude of the owner of the Kirkstall estate, the Duke of Mountague, for allowing his cattle to wander through the church ruins.

  It is, however, as complete a ruin as either Fountains or Rievaulx and conveys the complexity of a Cistercian community just as well, albeit with an added layer of urban grime. Yet somehow, because it is in a place whose fame depends on later industrialisation, we let that override the medieval past. Medieval events and processes did not happen outside areas of industrial revolution growth. These happened over the top of them, but not all traces were obliterated.
  I recently undertook, with my good mate Sjoerd Levelt whom I have never met, the task of reading Camden's Britannia in English translation from beginning to end. We egged each other along by tweeting the experience with the hashtag #DoomBritain. It was notable that Camden had as many murderous tales of the medieval aristocracy, dodgy etymologies and mythological historical events for Doncaster and Halifax, Pontefract and Leeds, as he did for the more romantically preserved medieval places.

  The family medievalist grew up in the industrial towns of the West Riding and was amazed to discover that there are fine medieval alabaster tombs, albeit a little browned by their environment, in Batley, for example. He lived there at one time and didn't imagine such things were to be found in the townscape of dreary terraces and housing estates which characterise parts of West Yorkshire.

  Thornhill, now practically a suburb of Leeds, also has a share of fine medieval tomb monuments, just as elegant as those on the Harewood estate but less romantically situated.

  It also has some fine 15th century stained glass, of the York school but showing that you don't have to be surrounded by lovely white wedding cake walls in order to have some treasures.

  A similar mindset applies to older remains. Hadrian's Wall is typified in our thoughts as a lonely set of outposts stretching across empty bits of Britain. I took the same photographs as everybody else does. In fact, for the one above there could be a little platform with footmarks in it to show you how to get that same shot.

  Things do keep changing though. There have been ongoing excavations at Vindolanda to reveal more about the settlement history. Bits of the wall in other areas have been repaired. But even more interesting, the foundations of the end of the wall at Wallsend have been discovered, not in the remote wastes of Northumberland or Cumbria but under the cleared remains of a now defunct shipyard by the river Tyne. The industrial drama of the 19th and 20th centuries has had its time upon the stage and exited, leaving traces of the earlier history still there. This keeps happening all over Britain. Our perception of medieval and earlier heritage cannot be constrained by post-medieval romanticism. To get a true picture we must look for the traces in our more modern landscapes as well.
  I remember once getting slightly lost in the middle of the city of London. I was doing the revolving lighthouse thing trying to get my bearings amid a forest of steel and glass towers with no reference points except the street names like Pudding Lane and Bread Street, harking right back to the Great Fire and beyond. It doesn't go away, it's just hiding.

  Hull, washed up old port and fishing town, bombed to bits in the Second World War, is a bit of a daggy elderly place. I don't know where discussions are up to right now but they were contemplating burying a bit of their history, the Beverley gate foundations, to save the bother of looking after it. You can't imagine that happening in York. They would be having a re-enactment every year of the citizens telling the king to "booger off", all wearing funny hats and big 17th century boots.
  I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, except that heritage should not just be about romanticism, but about history. Help people to find it in the places where it is not so easily seen.

What's With Medieval Tombs? Part 14 What Happened to Them During the Middle Ages?

  We have a mental concept of tomb memorials as being forever: an eternal reminder of those we have lost and perhaps a reminder to the world of who we are on the basis of who our ancestors were. Medieval tombs seem to have been part of a process; aids to passing from this world to the next and not necessarily designed for eternity. I have been flogging the concept of liminality in this series, and how the doctrine of purgatory gave a formal church structure to this concept, which is found in some form in practically every culture.
  Certainly tombs were destroyed through accidents of history, but there are some cliches lurking around on this subject. Yes, Henry VIII  dissolved and repossessed the monasteries, destroying many church structures and their contents in the process. Nasty bastard that he was, nevertheless it doesn't seem that he set about attempting to destroy every tomb in the land, just the ones that were in the way. The Reformation put an end to purgatory, but there were ways of modifying the memorial to the family ancestors without destroying it utterly. More on that another day. Puritans knocked medieval religious art around, but tombs have survived where stained glass or wall paintings have been demolished.
  There are clues that in the medieval period itself, tombs were destroyed, removed or re-used. First let's contemplate the logistics. Churches were for saying mass and the office, and for the congregation to worship. The most prestigious place for burial and commemoration was in the chancel near the altar. Over the centuries, how many people vied for that coveted spot, especially in a small village church? And how many times were they replaced?

  The tiny church of Coates-by-Stow in Lincolnshire. Not much room for competitive mortuary commemoration in a minute space like this.
  Spending a bit of the family fortune on building a mortuary chapel might ensure continuity by claiming a bit of real estate in the church, but it is intriguing how often these chapels contain tombs from a limited period of time, somehow just representing the salad days of a local dynasty.

  The St Quentin chapel in Harpham church on the East Yorkshire wolds contains tombs from a range of dates and styles; stone, incised slab and brasses from the 14th and 15th centuries as well as post-medieval wall monuments. Symbolic of family significance over centuries in a small rural village.

  On the other hand, the alabaster tombs of Harewood in Yorkshire represent a more limited time span. They were originally located in a family chapel, but have been moved around the church over time. I wrote about these in a previous post.

  Churches got added to and altered over the course of the middle ages, as evidenced by the changes to architectural styles within individual buildings. Fittings and furnishings and monuments would have got moved around. The mortal remains of those buried there got moved around. There was probably a time after which these things had served their religious, spiritual and ceremonial usefulness. The reasons for preserving the tomb of a family ancestor may have shifted into the social sphere, where they were always grounded in the first place, but vigilance of surviving family would have been required to conserve the relics of family honour.

  In Eastrington church, Yorkshire, a couple of stone effigies have been roughly squared off and used to patch a gap in the wall. Heaven knows when this was done, but these objects were clearly only valued for their raw materials by this time.
  Before effigy tombs became the big thing, those buried inside the church were commemorated with flat or low relief slabs set into the floor. Sometimes these bore identifying inscriptions, and sometimes not. Often they were inscribed with symbols such as a sword, keys, shears, chalice to identify the profession or status of the individual commemorated, as well as a variant on the crucifix, often in the elaborated form known as a floriated cross. These have been moved around the churches, often to sites unrelated to places of burial.

  A floriated cross slab in the church of Sproatley, East Yorkshire, with a depiction of a chalice and paten, indicating that it commemorated a priest. It has an inscription, which is far from universal with these slabs. It leans against the wall, which is often where these things got parked when discovered in odd places during the course of church restorations.
  Such tomb slabs are also easy material for reappropriation. All that is needed is to carve a new inscription, or simply place it in a new setting.

  This floriated cross slab from Aldborough, North Yorkshire, has been reappropriated with a later inscription carved over the base of the cross, upside down to the original. The incised heraldic shield has been given a modern coat of paint.
  The porch of Bakewell church in Derbyshire contains numerous tomb slabs of this type, propped against the wall, no longer where they were placed for the death ceremonies of those they were commemorating. The church of Brancepeth in county Durham suffered a disastrous fire in 1998, after which it was discovered that numbers of these tomb lids had been hidden in the walls. These are preserved, but no longer in their place of honour.

    This is just a sample of the slabs at Bakewell, representing more tombs than you could imagine artfully arranged on the floor at any one time and highly suggestive that they had a limited life in their original position.

  The reappropriation of effigy tombs is at its most unequivocal in the case of some brasses.The earliest brasses in England were large, hefty things containing much metal. Some of them were big rectagonal plates imported from Flanders. Sometimes when later medieval brasses have been lifted from the floor for restoration or whatever, it has been discovered that they have been made from these larger, older sheets, turned over and cut up. These are referred to as palimpsests, a term appropriated somewhat inaccurately from manuscript studies, where a palimpsest refers to a sheet of parchment which has been scraped down and written over the top.

  Rubbing of a rather sweet little 16th century brass, just post-Reformation but in medieval tradition, from Ossington in Nottinghamshire. The date is 1551, just before the succession of Queen Mary, but the brass has an inscription invoking prayers for the souls of the departed, just showing that everything was not as simple as some folks would like to believe.

  Photograph of a rubbing of the reverse of the brass, showing that it is made of buts cut out of a larger and bolder composition. Some bits look like the mass vestments of a priest and there is a little dog at the feet of a figure.

  The above represent two sides of the same plate, which has simply been flipped and a new image engraved on the reverse, from Halvergate in Norfolk. The earlier figure is a friar, Frater William Jernmuth and the later one is identified as the wife of Robard Swane (d.1540). You might be forgiven for thinking that the lady is no improvement on the original composition.

  In many cases it is clear that tomb effigies have been moved around the church, sometimes placed on tombs where they don't fit, or the tombs themselves have been moved into smaller spaces with the loss of some of their panelling. Sections of panelling don't always match. It may be quite unclear when this has actually happened, but I am sure it is not all post-Reformation vandalism. The builders of the royal tombs of Westminster Abbey were quite unfazed about hacking into and damaging those of previous monarchs. There is a previous post about this too.

  A tomb in Eastrington, Yorkshire, which appears to be made up from a miscellany of ill assorted panels.

  The ceremonies of death had a range of time cycles, as mentioned in a previous post. Some of these were in the period leading up to actual interment and others continued after death. Just how much depended on wealth and status. The most wealthy and elevated might acquire a chantry chapel where a priest was employed to say continuous masses for years, or until the endowment ran out.

  An elaborate chantry chapel in Exeter cathedral. These things tend to be found in large major churches, I guess for obvious reasons.

  For lesser mortals the priest might be paid to say mass on various commemoration dates and anniversaries, while the poorest and simplest had to make do with an annual prayer for the souls of all who had no other conduit to the almighty. By the late middle ages the access to church rituals had gone a long way from the teachings of Jesus.
  The artistic effort of these rituals included the use of expensive but ephemeral materials; banners, hangings, fabric drapery and quantities of fancy beeswax candles. Possibly rough freestone tomb effigies covered with fragile and delicate gesso designs and painted in a riot of colours may have been regarded as expensive ephemera. Ritual destruction of wealth has been a feature of funerary commemoration in many cultures of the past. Spend a bucketload of money on an expensive effigy which might only last until the one for the next generation replaces it and you are a rich and powerful person indeed.
  Perhaps that is why so many battered effigies are found in tiny little country churches. They may simply represent the last person in the village to be able to afford such extravagance.