Stone Fidelity: Marriage and Emotion in Medieval Tomb Sculpture 1783272716, 9781783272716

Citation preview

JESSICA BARKER

M

edieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side, and hand in hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Phiilip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb later described as their ‘stone fidelity’. This first full account of the ‘double tomb’ places its rich tradition into dialogue with powerful discourses of gender, marriage, politics and emotion during the Middle Ages. As well as offering new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval tombs, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, it draws attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe, providing an innovative vantage point from which to reconsider the material culture of medieval marriage. Setting these twin effigies alongside wedding rings and dresses as the agents of matrimonial ritual and embodied symbolism, the author presents the ‘double tomb’ as far more than mere romantic sentiment. Rather, it reveals the careful artifice beneath their seductive emotional surfaces: the artistic, religious, political and legal agendas underlying the medieval rhetoric of married love. J ESSIC A BARKER is a Lecturer in Medieval Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London

S T O N E f i d e l i t y

Cover image: Detail of joined hands, monument to Sir John Boteler and Margaret Stanley, 1459/60–c. 1463. Church of St Elphin, Warrington (Cheshire, England). Photo: author. Cover design: www.stay-creative.co.uk

MARRIAGE AND EMOTION IN MEDIEVAL TOMB SCULPTURE

STONE FIDELITY

MARRIAGE AND EMOTION IN MEDIEVAL TOMB SCULPTURE

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BOYDELL STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL ART AND ARCHITECTURE ISSN 2045–4902 Series Editors Professor Julian Luxford Professor Asa Simon Mittman This series aims to provide a forum for debate on the art and architecture of the Middle Ages. It will cover all media, from manuscript illuminations to maps, tapestries, carvings, wall-paintings and stained glass, and all periods and regions, including Byzantine art. Both traditional and more theoretical approaches to the subject are welcome Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below Professor Julian Luxford, School of Art History, University of St Andrews, 79 North Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, UK Professor Asa Simon Mittman, Department of Art and Art History, California State University at Chico, Chico, CA 95929-0820, USA Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

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STONE FIDELITY

MARRIAGE AND EMOTION IN MEDIEVAL TOMB SCULPTURE

Jessica Barker

THE BOYDELL PRESS

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© Jessica Barker 2020 The right of Jessica Barker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2020 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 271 6 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mount Hope Ave, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper

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FOR BRIAN

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

ix xv

Introduction An Arundel Tomb Medieval Marriage Emotion and the “Expressivity” of Gothic Art

1 1 8 11



1



2 Love’s Rhetorical Power: The Royal Tomb

The Double Tomb: Marriage, Symbol and Society The Emergence of the Double Tomb Burial, Monument and the Time of Death Memorialising Marriage and the Image of the Bride Queer Tombs Symbols and Society Corpse and Effigy The King’s Two Bodies Richard II and Anne of Bohemia João I and Philippa of Lancaster Love, Beyond Two Bodies



24 28 49 64 79 86 89 91 105 112 131 152

3 Gender, Agency and the Much-Married Woman 154

The Concept of Bigamy 157 Funerary Schemes of Much-Married Women 161 The Holland Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral 175 Remarriage, Reburial and Resurrection 199 With or Without Men 213

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CONTENTS



4 Holding Hands: Gesture, Sign, Sacrament 216 Gesture as “Figure” A Sacramental Sign Production and Patronage The Legal Dimension Ritual as Image Situation and Spectatorship What Will Survive of Us Is Love?

Epilogue Artifice and Emotion Gender and Convention Bodily Metaphors

224 236 241 254 262 267 273 275 276 277 277

Gazetteer of Hand-Joining Monuments 281 Bibliography 297 Index of Names and Places 327 Thematic Index 334

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ILLUSTRATIONS Unless otherwise stated, all images belong to the author.

1 Monument to a Fitzalan knight and lady. 3 2 Fitzalan monument: detail of joined hands. 4 3 Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, drawing of the Fitzalan effigies, 5 1781. © The British Library Board. 4 Brass memorial to John Browne and Agnes Stokes, c. 1476. 25 © Martin Stuchfield. 5 Incised slab with two crosses, twelfth or early thirteenth 30 century. Image from Cutts, Sepulchral Slabs, plate 5. 6 Plantagenet tombs, late twelfth to mid-thirteenth century. 32 © All rights reserved by blackpuddinonnabike. 7 Tomb slab of a knight and bishop, early thirteenth century. 34 Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0. 8 Statue of a bishop from a buttress on the south side of the nave, 1210–20. Image courtesy of Archives & Special 34 Collections, Pittsburgh University. © Philip Maye. 9 Low-relief slab to an anonymous man and woman, c. 1150–c. 35 1225. © All rights reserved by Natracha. 10 Monument to Henry the Lion and Matilda Plantagenet, c. 37 1235–40. © Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 11 Detail of coronation miniature from the Gospels of Henry the Lion, Helmarshausen Monastery (Hesse, Germany), c. 38 1185–88. Public Domain, Wikimedia. 12 Tomb slab of Adam and Sibile de Franton, c. 1325. © Paul Cockerham. 41 13 Brass memorial to Thomas and Eleanor de Luda, c. 1310. © The Monumental Brasses of Dorsetshire, by William Lack, H. 42 Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore (2001). 14 Brass memorial to John de Leukenore and wife, c. 1335–50. Image from Coales, Earliest English Brasses, fig. 167. 42

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15 Brass memorial to Sir John and Helen Wantone, c. 1347. © Martin Stuchfield. 44 16 Tomb slab of an anonymous couple, first quarter of the fourteenth century. 45 17 Tomb slab of John de Heslerton and Margery de Lowthorpe, c. 1333–50. 46 18 William Sedgwick, drawing of the monument to John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster in St Paul’s Cathedral, June 1641. © The British Library Board. 55 19 Detail of the brass memorial to William Fynderne and Elizabeth de Chelrey, c. 1444. © Martin Stuchfield. 58 20 Table of bigamy from James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, London, c. 1360–c. 1375. © The British Library Board. 66 21 View of the chancel with floor brass (c. 1439) and mural brass (c. 1445) to John Cottusmore and Amice Bruley. By permission of the Rector and Parochial Church Council of Brightwell Baldwin. 70 22 Rubbing of the brass memorial to John Lyndewode and his wife Alice, c. 1419. © The Monumental Brass Society. 71 23 Detail of the brass memorial to Nicholas Kniveton and Joan Mauleverer, c. 1500. © Martin Stuchfield. 74 24 Rubbing of the brass memorial to Sir Robert del Bothe and Douce Venables, c. 1460. © The Monumental Brasses of Cheshire, by William Lack, H. Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore (1996). 76 25 Tomb slab to Sir John Clanvowe and Sir William Neville, c. 1391. 80 26 Brass memorial to Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge, c. 1480. © Martin Stuchfield. 83 27 Embalmed heart in a lead heart-shaped container, twelfth or thirteenth century. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. 94 28 Jean de Liège, effigies from the entrail tomb of Charles IV and Jeanne d’Évreux, 1371. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Thierry Ollivier. 96 29 Bertran Riquer and Petrus de Bonhuyl, monument to Jaume II of Aragon and Blanca of Anjou, 1310–15. 97 30 Monument to Christopher II of Denmark and Euphemia of Pomerania, c. 1332. © All rights reserved by Kenneth Gerlach. 98 31 Louis Boudan, drawing of the monument to Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon in the abbey of Saint Denis, c. 1700. © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. 101

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32 Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le-Blond, plan of the Chapel of St John the Baptist in Saint Denis, 1706. © BNF. 103 33 Funeral effigy of Anne of Bohemia, 1394. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster. 107 34 Henry Yevele, Stephen Lote, Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest, monument to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, 1395– 99. © Slide Library, Courtauld Institute of Art. 110 35 View of the monument to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia from the Confessor’s Chapel. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster. 111 36 Plan of the Confessor’s Chapel. Image from Rodwell, Coronation Chair, 41. Additional details by David S. Neal. 112 37 Detail of initial with Richard II and Anne of Bohemia from a royal charter issued by Richard II to Shrewsbury, 22 November 1389. © Shropshire Archives. 117 38 George Hollis and Thomas Hollis, etching of the effigies of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia indicating pointillé decoration, c. 1840. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. 119 39 Pointillé decoration on the lower section of the dress worn by Anne’s effigy, including knots and chained initials. Image: The Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. © Warburg Institute, London 120 40 Tester over the monument to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. © Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 122 41 View of the monuments to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia and Edward III from the south ambulatory. Image: The Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. © NMR. 129 42 Monument to João I and Philippa of Lancaster, 1434 (begun after 1426). By permission of Pedro Redol. 132 43 Genealogical diagram showing the descendants of Edward III. 133 44 West façade and Founder’s Chapel, Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha, c. 1402–1438. By permission of Pedro Redol. 134 45 Effigy of prince Afonso showing pointillé decoration on his robe, c. 1400. © Teresa Soley. 137 46 West face of the monument to João and Philippa. By permission of Pedro Redol. 138 47 South portal, Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha, c. 1387–1402. By permission of Pedro Redol. 139 48 Coronation of the Virgin and royal heraldry from the apex of the west portal, Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha. By permission of Pedro Redol. 141

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49 Elevated view of the east face of the monument to João and Philippa. By permission of Pedro Redol. 149 50 Reconstruction of the Founder’s Chapel in the reign of Duarte I, with monuments and altars. © Matilde Grimaldi. 151 51 Brass memorial to Robert Ingleton, Margaret Dymoke, Clemens Lister and Isabel Cantilupe, c. 1472. ©Martin Stuchfield. 155 52 Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, monument to Henry IV and Joan of Navarre, 1413–19. 163 53 Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, monument to Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, and Beatrice of Portugal, 1415–c. 1420. 165 54 Monument to Alice Chaucer, duchess of Suffolk, c. 1470–75. By permission of the Rector and Parochial Church Council of Ewelme. 170 55 Monument to Margaret Holland, duchess of Clarence, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset and Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence, 1439. 176 56 Holland Chapel, view towards the east window. 177 57 Genealogical diagram of Margaret Holland, John Beaufort and Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence. 178 58 Floor plan of Canterbury Cathedral, identifying burials belonging to Margaret Holland, John Beaufort and Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence. © Matilde Grimaldi. 181 59 Floor plan of the Holland Chapel with reconstruction of the heraldic scheme in the windows. © Matilde Grimaldi. 182 60 Effigies of Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence, Margaret Holland and John Beaufort. © Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 184 61 Holland Chapel, lierne vault. 187 62 Effigies of Margaret Holland and Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence. 190 63 Monument to Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, Margaret Stafford and Joan Beaufort, c. 1425. © Courtauld Institute of Art, London. 191 64 Reconstruction of the polychromy on the effigies of Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence, Margaret Holland and John Beaufort. © Matilde Grimaldi. 195 65 Greyhound medallion, south east window, Holland Chapel. 196 66 Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple from the Clarence Hours, London, c. 1428, fol. 65v. © Kolumba, Köln Schenkung Renate König III. Foto: Holger Breznik, Foto Mut und Lothar Schnepf, Einband, Details. 204

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67 Last Judgement with arms of Beaufort impaling Holland from the Clarence Hours, fol. 57r. © Kolumba, Köln Schenkung Renate König III. Foto: Holger Breznik, Foto Mut und Lothar Schnepf, Einband, Details. 206 68 Funeral scene with arms of Clarence from the Clarence Hours, fol. 75r. © Kolumba, Köln Schenkung Renate König III. Foto: Holger Breznik, Foto Mut und Lothar Schnepf, Einband, Details. 207 69 Arrest of Christ with arms of Clarence impaling Holland from the Clarence Hours, fol. 33v. © Kolumba, Köln Schenkung Renate König III. Foto: Holger Breznik, Foto Mut und Lothar Schnepf, Einband, Details. 208 70 Commendation of Souls with arms of Beaufort from the Clarence Hours, fol. 106r. © Kolumba, Köln Schenkung Renate König III. Foto: Holger Breznik, Foto Mut und Lothar Schnepf, Einband, Details. 209 71 Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, monument to Ralph Green and Katherine Clifton, 1419–20. 218 72 Lowick monument, details of joined hands. 219 73 Rubbing of the brass memorial to Richard Torryngton and Margaret Incent, c. 1380–c. 1390. © The Monumental Brasses of Hertfordshire, by William Lack, H. Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore (2009). 221 74 Truce between Edward III and David I from a compilation of documents on royal politics, legislation and ceremony, London, c. 1386–99. © The British Library Board. 227 75 Tree of love from a miscellany of philosophical and scientific treatises, Thérouanne or Saint-Omer, 1277. © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. 229 76 Monument to Walter Stewart, earl of Menteith and his wife Mary, c. 1281–96. 230 77 Reconstruction of the Inchmahome monument. © Matilde Grimaldi. 230 78 Wooden casket, eastern Switzerland, c. 1400–c. 1450. © Historisches Museum Basel, Foto: Ph. Emme. 232 79 Interior of wooden casket. © Historisches Museum Basel, Foto: Ph. Emme. 233 80 Gold annular brooch, c. 1350–c. 1400. © Birmingham Museums Trust. CC BY-SA 3.0. 234 81 “Conjugium” from Thomas Netter’s De Sacramentis, England (Oxford or London), 1426–30. By permission of the Rector and Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford. 239

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82 Crucifixion and the sacraments from the Carthusian Miscellany, northern England, c. 1460–c. 1500. © The British Library Board. 240 83 Monument to Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick and Katherine Mortimer, c. 1369– c. 1380. With kind permission from the collegiate church of St Mary, Warwick. 243 84 Monument to Sir John Savage IV and Katherine Stanley, c. 1470–85. 245 85 Monument to Sir John Boteler and Margaret Stanley, 1459/60– c. 1463. With kind permission from the church of St Elphin, Warrington. 250 86 Brass memorial to Sir John Harsick and Katherine Calthorpe, c. 1384. © The late Malcolm Norris. 256 87 Marriage contract between Jean de Berry and Jeanne de Boulogne, 5 June 1389. © Archives nationales, France. 257 88 Seal of Maud Holland affixed to a grant to Peter Kynkenhall, 1408–09. © The National Archives, London. 258 89 Brass memorial to Peter Halle and Elizabeth Waleys, c. 1430. © the late Malcolm Norris. 259 90 Seal impression and matrix, either Melun or Meaulne, thirteenth century. © 2019 Trustees of the British Museum. 262 91 Gold fede ring, England, fifteenth century. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 263 92 Brass memorial to Sir Walter Mauntell and Elizabeth Abbot, c. 1495. © Martin Stuchfield. 265 93 Monument to Thomas, Lord Camoys and Elizabeth Mortimer, c. 1421. 270 94 Detail of inscription on the north face of the monument to João I and Philippa of Lancaster. By permission of Pedro Redol. 272 95 Map of hand-holding monuments, listed alphabetically. © Matilde Grimaldi. 280 The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project that I have lived with for almost a decade has become a kind of archaeology of my life, and particularly of my travels and friendships. It is a great pleasure to look back and be struck anew by the generosity of so many people, without whom this book could never have been written. I could not have hoped for a more encouraging or stimulating environment to pursue my research than the Courtauld Institute. Thanks are due to the friends, colleagues and students with whom I have shared enlightening discussions over the years, in particular Ann Adams, Jocelyn Anderson, Alixe Bovey, Joanna Cannon, Michael Carter, John Lowden, Susie Nash, Tom Nickson, David Park, John Renner and Michaela Zöschg. For their invaluable comments on drafts, I would like to express my gratitude to Sandy Heslop, Jana Gajdošová, Julian Luxford, Maeve O’Donnell-Morales, Joana Ramôa, Christian Steer and Nigel Saul. I am also indebted to my wonderful former colleagues at the University of East Anglia, in particular Joanne Clarke, Simon Dell, Jack Hartnell, Margit Thøfner and Sarah Monks. Many institutions have granted me access to buildings, monuments and archives, with particular thanks due to Heather Newton at Canterbury Cathedral, Susan Jenkins and Diana Heath at Westminster Abbey and Pedro Redol at Batalha. For their invaluable help with creating, sourcing and sharing images, I am indebted to Matilde Grimaldi, Karin Kyburz, Teresa Soley and Martin Stuchfield. Special thanks are due to Tom Hance for his steadfast encouragement and support. My family and friends – Maurice, Nancy and Janet Day, Jo, Toby and Madi Barker, Brian Ruddle, Charlene Upton and Red GibbonsLejeune – were a constant source of kindness and care. Finally, I owe a particular debt to Ed Krčma, for the many hours he spent reading, thinking and talking about this book with me, but most of all for helping me to fathom something of the height, depth, width and breadth of love.

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INTRODUCTION

AN ARUNDEL TOMB

S

Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.1

o ends “An Arundel Tomb”, one of the most famous poems from Philip Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings. It opens with the narrator chancing upon a medieval tomb to an unidentified earl and countess of Arundel. At first the monument appears rather uninteresting (“such plainness of the pre-baroque/Hardly involves the eye”), until he notices “with a sharp, tender shock” that the two effigies are holding hands. This gesture – and the affection it seems to embody – propels the narrator to ruminate on the sculpted couple’s iteration through the six long centuries since their monument was erected. Larkin conjures two parallel and competing processes: on the one hand, the monument’s material persistence, and on the other, the progressive erosion of the identities it was intended to convey. The “endless altered people” who look upon the tomb have become blind to the heraldic blazon and Latin inscriptions that were its raison d’être. As society is remade by changes more profound than the earl and countess could ever have imagined, so the messages they sought to convey through their monument become unintelligible to its viewers; or in Larkin’s words, “how soon succeeding eyes begin to look, not read”. Love lies at the heart of this meditation on the historical contingency of the monument. After all, it is the effigies’ clasped hands that first attract the eye of the narrator, prompting his interest in their tomb. It is tempting to read this gesture as a sign of love’s triumph over death and its bridging Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb”, in The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), 45–46.

1

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of historical distance. Yet, while Larkin is susceptible to this interpretation, he also resists it. Commentators have drawn attention to the repetition of “almost” in the poem’s penultimate line as a counterbalance to its finale: “Our almost-instinct almost true/What will survive of us is love”.2 These finely crafted verses challenge readers to pay attention to the artificiality of the monument, just as they need to be sensitive to the constructedness of the poem itself. We are warned not to be seduced into seeing the joined hands as an expression of pure feeling abstracted from historical processes, but rather to attend to the significance (or lack thereof) that the gesture embodied within its own time and culture. Indeed, the “almost-instinct” that compels us to read the monument as a symbol of love is itself a product of historical forces, an aspect of the long shadow cast by Romanticism.3 It is the particularities of their own time – its hierarchies, values, beliefs, literacies and artistic practices – that shaped the way in which the earl and countess chose to express affection on their tomb, and would later come to determine how their monument was interpreted by subsequent generations of viewers. To point to the historical locatedness of the monument is not to deny the existence of an emotional landscape that is unassimilable to historical discourse, operating out of language and therefore out of time. Indeed, the creative tension that propels Larkin’s poem, and the present book, is the riddling enigma of this realm of feeling and its entanglement with tomb sculpture, a shadow cast by the monument whose contours we might sketch but never delineate. “An Arundel Tomb” was inspired by a late fourteenth-century limestone tomb standing in the north aisle at Chichester Cathedral (Fig. 1).4 An armoured knight, his coat armour emblazoned with a lion rampant, rests his head on his helm and feet upon a sleeping lion. He holds a gauntlet in his left hand, placing his uncovered right hand on the belly of the woman to his side; its palm faces upwards to receive her hand placed delicately within his, his thumb pressed over her knuckles (Fig. 2). In contrast to the stiff angularity of her partner, the female effigy is draped in voluminous folds, the contours of her body concealed beneath a long dress, mantle, veil and barbe. Whereas the knight lies flat on his back, she draws her right leg over her left, rotating her hips so as to incline her body towards him. The sleeping dog at her feet attests to her wifely fidelity.

2 To give just one example, see A. Kingsley Weatherhead, “Philip Larkin of England”, ELH 38, no. 4 (1971): 630. 3 For a compelling account of the relationship between Romanticism and the Middle Ages in the context of love lyrics, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 4 H. A. Tummers, “The Medieval Effigial Tombs at Chichester Cathedral”, Church Monuments 3 (1988): 31–36; Tummers, “Church Monuments”, in Chichester Cathedral: An Historical Survey, ed. Mary Hobbs (Chichester: Phillimore, 1994), 211. For further discussion of this monument, see chapter 4.

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Whereas Larkin envisioned a “supine stationary voyage” for the Arundel tomb, in reality this monument’s journey to the present day involved numerous relocations and material interventions. It was probably one of a group of memorials relocated to Chichester Cathedral from Lewes Priory after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536.5 A drawing by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (dating from 1781) shows the effigies resting on separate tomb chests, the woman at the feet of the man (Fig. 3).6 Now a strange mix of blurred outlines and sharp edges, the figures of the knight and lady bear the scars of an extensive restoration in 1843 by the sculptor Edmund Richardson, who apparently used twenty-nine pieces of stone from the tomb 5 6

1 MONUMENT TO A FITZALAN KNIGHT AND LADY, C. 1375— C. 1397. CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL (WEST SUSSEX, ENGLAND).

Tummers, “Medieval Effigial Tombs”, 35–36. British Library MS Additional 5675, fol. 58.

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chest to restore the sculpted figures.7 One of these pieces must have been used to carve the effigies’ clasped hands: an abrupt break at the wrist of the woman and the upper arm of the man marks the join where it has been attached to the effigies. Rather than merely being reinterpreted by subsequent generations, the Arundel tomb has, quite literally, been refashioned. Yet there is more to this monument than nineteenth-century fantasy. Beginning in the thirteenth century, and gathering pace into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a seismic shift occurred in the funerary culture of Western Europe. Whereas earlier monuments always showed the deceased alone, it now became increasingly common for tombs to feature two effigies side by side, either resting on the same stone plinth or (in the case of brasses and low-relief memorials) within the same frame.8 A small group of these memorials, almost all of which were made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, portrayed the effigies holding one another by the hand. Despite its Victorian interventions, the Arundel tomb doubtless belonged to this group; the hands themselves may be replacements, but the position of the stumps of the effigies’ arms in Grimm’s drawing indicates that this gesture must have been original to the monument’s design (Fig.  3).9 Although the identities of the effigies have been the subject of debate, the most likely candidates are Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376), and his second wife, Eleanor of Lancaster (d. 1372).10 Tummers, “Medieval Effigial Tombs”, 33. For a detailed examination of the rise of the double tomb, see chapter one. 9 Tummers, “Medieval Effigial Tombs”, 33. 10 The heraldry carved on the knight’s coat armour (a lion rampant) suggests that the memorial commemorates a member of the Fitzalan family, whose heraldic arms were gules, a lion rampant or. In favour of the identification as Richard Fitzalan and Eleanor of Lancaster is the knight’s armour, which is closely comparable to effigies from the 1370s and 1380s, as well as the fact that both Richard and Eleanor were buried at Lewes Priory. For 7

8

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3  SAMUEL HIERONYMUS GRIMM, DRAWING OF THE FITZALAN EFFIGIES, 1781. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY MS ADDITIONAL 5675, FOL. 58.

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One of the wealthiest couples in England, Richard and Eleanor belonged to a small group of courtiers around Edward III for whom the hand-holding gesture seems to have held particular appeal: for instance, Eleanor’s eldest sister, Blanche of Lancaster (d. 1368), was commemorated holding hands with John of Gaunt (d. 1399) on a magnificent alabaster tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral.11 Richard and Eleanor also followed a broader pattern for monuments celebrating marriages that had been contested or controversial, producing an image of legitimacy in the face of opposition. At the time of his wedding to Eleanor on 5 February 1345, Richard was already married to Isabella Despenser, who had borne him a son (then aged seventeen) and two daughters, meaning that he had to enlist the support of the king and the pope in order to uphold the legitimacy of his second union. Remarkably, Richard’s rather implausible argument that the couple had been “forced by blows to cohabit” was accepted; in March 1345 his second marriage was declared valid and the children of his first marriage cast as bastards and disinherited.12 In Larkin’s poem the significance of the couple’s joined hands to modern viewers is contrasted with its insignificance at the time of its making, characterised as little more than a “sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace”. However, as this book will show, the hand-holding gesture always seems to have been requested by the patrons themselves. It was rooted in a particular social circle, it belonged to a wider funerary phenomenon, and it may even have been a response to challenges made to the legitimacy of the deceased’s union. The Arundel Tomb may not have been a straightforward expression of the couple’s romantic relationship, but the emphasis it placed on marriage was both deliberate and meaningful, pointing to the new status of spousal love as courtly fashion, as well as the ongoing entanglement between funerary memorials and legal anxieties. This brief foray into the Arundel Tomb exposes some of the complexities surrounding memorials to marriage. Larkin was astute in recognising that expressions of love, perhaps uniquely, short-circuit our ability to recognise the artificiality of these images. Whereas heraldry or Latin inscriptions are the problems with this identification, namely that the documentary evidence implies that at one point Richard and Eleanor had two separate monuments side by side, and that Richard typically quartered his arms with those of Warenne, see Philip Lankester, “Notes and Queries on a Medieval Tomb at Chichester”, Newsletter of the Church Monuments Society 5 (1989): 15–18. 11 Other monuments in this group include the brass memorial of Sir Miles de Stapleton (d. 1364) and Joan de Ingham in the Trinitarian Priory in Ingham (Norfolk) and the monument to Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1369) and Katherine Mortimer (d. 1369), in the collegiate church of St Mary’s, Warwick. For a discussion of the tomb of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, see Oliver Harris, “‘Une tresriche sepulture.’ The Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London”, Church Monuments 25 (2010): 7–35. 12 Chris Given-Wilson, “Fitzalan, Richard, third earl of Arundel and eighth earl of Surrey (c. 1313–1376)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, accessed 15 December 2017, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/9534.

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so alien to modern eyes that their historical specificity is taken for granted, expressions of love are enticingly familiar, a seeming recognition that encourages us to treat them as representations of pure feeling, belonging to a place somehow outside of time, as if depictions of private life were any less subject to history than images pertaining to social institutions.13 Indeed the very notion of the “public” and “private” as separate spheres – one for action, the other emotion, one for men, and the other women – is often claimed to be a construct of the early nineteenth century.14 It is perhaps no coincidence that a new fascination with hand-joining monuments emerged in this same period, establishing a pattern of remarkable persistence whereby the memorials are explained entirely in terms of the romantic feeling between the couple commemorated. To give just one example, in 1835 the novelist William Beckford described two medieval effigies as “linked hand in hand in death as fondly as they were in life”.15 Yet such biographical readings treat each monument as if it were an isolated case. If monuments to married couples are first and foremost a sign of an exceptionally loving union, then it is difficult to explain why they cluster in certain places and at particular historical moments. One would have to assume that marriages tended to be more loving – here I am speaking of the feeling rather than its expression – in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and therefore more couples chose to commemorate their union. To avoid this fallacy the personal must be balanced against the structures of social discourse and conventions of representation; the growing popularity of memorials to married couples needs to be situated within a landscape of new ideas in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages regarding when, how and why love might be represented. In foregrounding the artificiality of the double tomb, it is also crucial to pay attention to its craftedness, and thus its crafters. The gesture of joined hands was more than the product of ideas; it was fashioned from materials. It is the skill and subtleties employed in sculpting the gesture, her fingers placed delicately in his palm, the pressure of his thumb on the flesh on the back of her hand, that ultimately evokes a sense of the emotional dynamic between the two figures. This is the first book to explore the phenomenon of the double tomb. While the emphasis on marital love in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century 13 Georges Duby, ed., A History of Private Life. II. Revelations of the Medieval World, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 14 There is a vast literature on the notion of “separate spheres”, which became one of the defining concepts in feminist histories during the late 1980s and 1990s. For an overview of the debates, see Kathryn Gleadle, “Revisiting Family Fortunes: Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Publication of Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850”, Women’s History Review, 16 (2007): 773–82; Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronologies of English Women’s Histories”, The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414. 15 William Beckford, Recollections of an Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcabaça and Batalha (London, 1835), 85.

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funerary sculpture is often noticed in passing, it has yet to be the subject of a sustained analysis, one that examines the fine grain of individual memorials and traces the broader contours of the religious, legal, economic and artistic changes in which they participated.16 In doing so, I draw on strands of scholarship that have yet to be interwoven with tomb sculpture: the histories of marriage, gender and emotion. Given that double tombs represent such a marked shift in memorial culture and pertain to themes as fundamental to human experience as love and death, it is surprising that they have received so little attention. Part of the reason for this neglect lies in the particular character of scholarship on marriage.

MEDIEVAL MARRIAGE One challenge inherent in writing a history of emotion is the yawning gap between lived experience and documentary evidence. While the issue of caesuras in the written record plagues all historical writing, this problem acquires a new pertinence when applied to subjects such as love and sexuality. In The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (1981), the historian Georges Duby bewails three characteristics of the documentary record that frustrate his attempts to write a history of marriage: first, the nature of the written evidence, which is overwhelmingly prescriptive, instructing rituals, defining moral principles and setting out the law; second, the authorship of the sources, which is overwhelmingly clerical, men without experience of marriage and (in Duby’s words) “professionally obligated to express repugnance towards sex and particularly toward women”; and third, himself as the reader of the sources, who must battle the temptation to impose contemporary experiences of love and marriage onto the past, to make medieval marriage a reflection of his own experiences.17 Only the ideological envelope of religious belief and social obligation is accessible to the historian, with no way to access the inner realm of feeling. Yet, according to Duby, it is precisely this framework of rituals, ideas and images enclosing the institution of marriage that forms one of the richest avenues of enquiry

16 For perceptive comments on the phenomenon of the double tomb, see Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum, 1996), 106; Peter Coss, The Lady in Medieval England, 1000–1500 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 84–101; Pamela King, “‘My Image to be Made all Naked’: Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women in Fifteenth-Century England”, The Ricardian, 13 (2003): 296; John C. Parsons, “The Burials and Posthumous Commemorations of English Queens to 1500”, in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), 333; Nigel Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 147; Pamela Tudor-Craig, “Effigies with Attitude”, in Signs and Symbols: Proceedings of the 2006 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. John Cherry and Ann Payne (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2009), 138. 17 Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 20.

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regarding the social structures of the Middle Ages.18 Over a twenty-year period he produced extensive publications on this subject, some of which address the issue of marriage directly, while others approach it through a history of women.19 These works have not been as well received as Duby’s other historical writing, particularly by feminist scholars in the United States who have argued, with some justification, that he makes much of the repression of women in the Middle Ages while lacking a sustained attempt to recover their perspective.20 Without a sense of what spousal relationships may have meant to the women involved in them, a history of marriage is in danger of participating in the repression it purports to expose, becoming merely another means by which women are confined to the domestic sphere, defined in relation to men and described in patriarchal terms. Duby contributed to a broader interest in the history of marriage and the family, a direction of scholarship encouraged by the influence of second-wave feminism and the growing dominance of social history in the 1970s and 1980s. Histories of marriage have tended to bifurcate along these lines, focusing either on the history of marriage as social institution, or on the position of women within marriage. Foremost in the first group is Christopher Brooke’s The Medieval Idea of Marriage (1989), a collection of essays setting out the governing ideas behind marriage in the Middle Ages, particularly the extent to which a Christian understanding of matrimony elevated and dignified the harsh social realities of such unions.21 Brooke’s work has been developed by scholars such as Philip Reynolds, who traced the development of the theology of marriage in the patristic and early medieval periods, and James A. Brundage, who explored the changing notion of sex and marriage as legal concepts from the ancient Middle East to the Council of Trent.22 The other strand of scholarship, pioneered 18 Georges Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, trans. Jane Dunnett (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 4. 19 In addition to the works cited above, see Georges Duby, Medieval Marriage: Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Foster (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Duby, “Affidavits and Confessions”, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in A History of Women in the West, vol. 2 Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 483–94; Duby, Women of the Twelfth Century, trans. Jean Birrell, 3 vols (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997–98). 20 For a scathing feminist critique, see the review essay of The Knight, the Lady and the Priest by Suzanne Fonay Wemple, “Making Matrimony Holy”, The Women’s Review of Books 1, no. 7 (1984): 14. Even a sympathetic reader such as Natalie Zemon Davis noted in her introduction to the English translation of same book (published 1983) that “current American and English research has been giving a slightly different reading to the potentialities of the religious life and to the situation of women in the centuries that concern Duby” (pp. xi–xii). 21 Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 22 Philip L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Leiden: Brill, 1994); James Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For other important examples of this approach, see Bloch, Medieval Misogyny; Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997); Emma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in

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by historians such as Caroline Walker Bynum, David Herlihy, Joan Ferrante and Joel Rosenthal, inclines towards marriage as social practice rather than abstract concept, with a particular focus on the ways in which a history of marriage might shed light on the power structures that both constrained and empowered women in the Middle Ages.23 These writers tend to draw on different bodies of evidence, privileging texts written by the married laity, or at least ones in which their voices are reported second-hand. Records of marriage cases from ecclesiastical courts, for instance, have proved to be a rich source for illuminating the ways in which marriage in practice might transgress clerical ideals.24 The study of material culture has likewise been employed to shed light on marriage from the perspective of its practitioners, notably by Roberta Gilchrist in Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (2012), as well as Michael Camille in The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (1998).25 Although writing from very different perspectives – Gilchrist is an archaeologist, while Camille was an art historian – both sought to uncover material traces of lived experience, presenting objects (such as mirror cases, rings, girdles and manuscript illuminations) as a means by which society structured and represented inner life. As Camille argued in his preface, these works “did not reflect so much as embody medieval amatory experience”, marking the recognised steps in a relationship from courtship to marriage, while at the same time fuelling elaborate fantasies of sexual control, submission and desire.26 These contributions have transformed our understanding of marriage in the Middle Ages, a subject almost unknown in academic departments before the 1970s. Yet there has arisen a problematic division between those histories that focus on marriage as idea versus those that are primarily interested in marriage as practice, a product of disciplinary boundaries (histories of ideas versus feminist histories) rather than a response to the Late-Medieval English Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Conor McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004). 23 Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Joan Ferrante, Women as Image in Medieval Literature: From the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York and London: University of California Press, 1975); David Herlihy, Women, Family and Society in Medieval Europe (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1995); Joel Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). 24 See, for instance, Barbara A. Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law and Economy in Late Medieval London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Richard H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Holmes Beach, FL: William W. Gaunt, 1986); Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Frederik Pederson, Marriage Disputes in Medieval England (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 2000). 25 Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London: Laurence King, 1998); Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000). 26 Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 7.

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shape of the subject itself. This bifurcation of scholarship obscures one of the most significant characteristics of marriage itself: the very fact of its position between concept and experience. While Duby emphasised the separation between these two facets of marriage (describing experience as the concealed interior of the ideological envelope), David d’Avray has addressed the symbiotic relationship between them.27 In Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (2005), d’Avray examines marital symbolism in thirteenth-century sermons as a means of bridging the history of marriage as idea with the history of marriage as social practice. As d’Avray explains: Marriage is a powerful symbol of the union between the human and the divine. Most relationships are superficial compared to marriage. Marriage is one of the strongest experiences in many people’s lives … A symbol or metaphor is capable of generating new ideas about the relationship it describes, whether that relationship is real or imaginary. It can also affect social policy and structures. Marriage is a ‘generative’ metaphor, vivid, full of unexpected possibilities, potentially a powerful influence on thought and action.28

A reciprocal relationship between metaphor and everyday life is proposed: d’Avray suggests that the symbolic dimension of marriage shaped how married men and women understood the lived experience of their union, just as the realities of marriage affected how they interpreted ideas about its symbolism. This book extends d’Avray’s approach into the field of art history, using an analysis of the double tomb to examine the reciprocities between ideas, objects and people, between ideological, artistic and social change. Double tombs were both representations, giving form to new ideas surrounding marriage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and agents of social change, capable of affecting the way in which medieval men and women thought about and behaved in their spousal relationships.

EMOTION AND THE “EXPRESSIVITY” OF GOTHIC ART Just as the institution of marriage and the idea of matrimony are historically shaped and determined, so the emotion of marital love also has a history. The history of emotions was first proclaimed as an academic field by Peter and Carol Stearns in a manifesto published in 1985 (under the title “emotionology”),29 albeit invoking earlier historians such as Lucien Febvre, 27 David d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15; Duby, Love and Marriage, 4. 28 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 17. 29 Stearns and Stearns define emotionology as: “the attitudes or standards that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate

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who in 1941 called for scholars to recognise that “the histories of ideas and the history of institutions … are subjects that the historian can neither understand nor make sense of without this primordial interest that I call the psychological”.30 Much of the early discourse on the history of emotion, particularly in the United States, focused on either the social constraint of violence or the rise of the affective family.31 As Barbara H. Rosenwein has shown, both of these trends tended to be located in modernity, and in both cases the Middle Ages was used as a convenient foil: if the story of modernity was one of increasing emotional control, then the Middle Ages was a time of untamed emotional expression; if the story of modernity was the emergence of the loving family unit, then the Middle Ages was a time in which relations within the family were cold, loveless and perfunctory.32 A narrative of emotional “maturity” thereby entailed the creation of a “childlike” past, in which pleasure and pain were experienced in a direct and unmediated way and people were prone to outbursts of unrestrained passions.33 Although the history of emotion is now a more wide-ranging and nuanced field, its organising frameworks are still taken primarily from the modern period.34 expression; ways that institutions reflect and encourage these attitudes in human conduct”. Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards”, American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (1985): 813–36 (quotation from p. 813). 30 Lucien Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois?”, Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (1941): 5–20. Translated into English as “Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Past”, in A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 12–26. For an insightful discussion of Febvre’s article, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotion in History”, The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–24. 31 The following discussion is indebted to Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotion”, 828 and passim. For the history of anger and social constraint, see for instance Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); for the rise of the idea of the affective family, see for instance Laurence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977). 32 Rosenwein points out that specialists in medieval and early modern history tend to merely push back the moment of maturity to the Renaissance, or the twelfth century, or even the Carolingian period, without actually challenging the child/adult paradigm. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”, 823–29, 830, 834. 33 Rosenwein astutely observes that the enduring idea of the “childlike” Middle Ages is strongly influenced by the work of Johan Huizinga, who in 1919 declared that in the medieval period “all experience had yet to the minds of men the directness and absoluteness of the pleasure and pain of child-life”, ideas that were later picked up by the sociologist Norbert Elias among others. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions”, 823–26. See also Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries, trans. Frederik J. Hopman (London: E. Arnold & Co., 1924), quotation from p. 9; Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, 2 vols, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). 34 A summary of the current literature on the history of emotions is beyond the scope of this book. For an overview of the field, see the transcript of a lecture by Piroska Nagy, “Historians and Emotions: New Theories, New Questions”, delivered at an international

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At the same time historians of the Middle Ages often shy away from employing the category of emotion. There has been a tendency, as Sarah McNamer astutely observes, for the study of medieval emotion to be subsumed within the history of religion. Thus, an analysis of devotion to the Crucifixion is rarely framed as a study of compassion, even when that is one of its primary themes.35 Scholars often approach emotion through affective piety: a devotional practice dating back to the twelfth century, which encouraged meditation on the life of Christ as if present in the moment, interacting directly with biblical figures and probing their emotional states.36 As Paul Binski points out, the growing popularity of this form of meditation, along with a rise in more inward, personal religious practices and increasing lay participation, has led some scholars to characterise the last centuries of the Middle Ages in terms of an “affective turn”.37 Also frequently associated with this new emotional emphasis in religious life is the increasing expressivity of Gothic art from the thirteenth century onwards. This trend is often located in sculpture in particular: whereas the figures on Romanesque portals stare back at the viewer impassively, their Gothic counterparts beam with radiant smiles, wipe away bitter tears or grimace and gurney with uncontrolled rage. Art historians such as Jacqueline Jung have cast the unusual expressiveness of such sculpted images as a means of exerting “psychological pressure” on their beholders, prompting an empathetic response.38 This interpretation relies on the idea that viewers would naturally identify with the emotional states of the figures represented, and that such states would provoke their own emotional reaction. Yet, as Elina Gertsman has argued, there is not necessarily a straightforward relationship between expression and emotion.39 We may recognise that a sculpture is more expressive, but what exactly it expresses (and how far this differed according to the viewer and occasion) is much more difficult to discern. conference on the “Cultural History of Emotions in Premodernity” at the University of Umeå on 24 October 2008: (https://emma.hypotheses.org/147). 35 Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 4–7. 36 There is a large literature on affective piety (albeit sometimes not employing this term explicitly). See, for instance, Bynum, Jesus as Mother, passim; Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul (eds), Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Rachel Fulton Brown, “Anselm and Praying with the Saints”, in Studies on Medieval Empathies, ed. K. F. Morrison and R. M. Bell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 115–38; Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 37 For the idea of the “affective turn” and its (debated) connection to artistic expressivity, see Paul Binski, Gothic Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 77–85. 38 Jacqueline Jung, “Dynamic Bodies and the Beholder’s Share: The Wise and Foolish Virgins at Magdeburg Cathedral”, in Bild und Körper im Spätmittelalter, ed. Kristin Marek, Raphaèle Preisinger, Marius Rimmele and Katrin Kärcher (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 125. 39 Elina Gertsman, “The Facial Gesture: (Mis)Reading Emotion in Gothic Art”, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 36, no. 1 (2010): 26–46. See also Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 75.

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Binski highlights the distorting effect of familiarity: we are drawn to what we value most and understand best, and so from our modern standpoint place great importance on the so-called “emotional realism” of Gothic art while underplaying its artificiality.40 He argues that the connection between affective piety and artistic representation has been pushed too far, at the expense of understanding the particular role that emotion played in the sphere of artistic representation, or in other words, the “advantage” a smile conferred to an image.41 Emotion was not understood in the Middle Ages as it is today, and nor were its representations. For medieval thinkers, emotion was defined as a psycho-somatic movement towards or away from an object, modulated by that object’s temporal quality.42 So desire was movement towards an object yet to be attained, whereas joy was the movement towards an object attained in the present. The exception was love, which was understood as the movement towards the good outside of time, whether attained or not.43 Emotions were not set in opposition to the intellect, but were understood to involve the will, thought and belief as well as their bodily effects. Because emotions were defined as responses to objects, they had no inherent moral quality and were educable: one could learn to desire the good and fear evil. Even love could be immoral. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian, distinguishes between “friendly love” (amor amicitiae), which seeks the good of its object, and “covetous love” (amor concupiscentiae), which seeks the object for one’s own good.44 Aquinas is typical of medieval writers in that he seeks to differentiate between the many different shades of feeling that are subsumed into the English word “love”. Chief among the Latin terms are amor (love), caritas (charity), amicitia (friendship) and dilectio (also love, but closer to fondness). While these terms are used interchangeably in the Latin Vulgate and by some medieval authors, other writers set them in hierarchical relationship or even in opposition.45 Aquinas proposed: Amor has the widest reference of the three; every instance of dilectio or caritas is an instance of amor, but not vice versa. Dilectio, as the word suggests, adds to the notion of amor an implicit reference Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 76–77. Binski, “The Angel Choir at Lincoln and the Poetics of the Gothic Smile”, Art History 20, no. 3 (1997): 352. See also Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 84–85. 42 For medieval theories of emotion, see Peter King, “Emotions in Medieval Thought”, in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 167–188; Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 43 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part 1, qu. 20 art. 1, in Claude-Joseph Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 1 (Paris, 1882), 181. 44 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part 2.1, qu. 26 art. 4, in Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 2 (Paris, 1882), 542–43. See also King, “Emotions in Medieval Thought”, 176. 45 See the discussion in McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England, 96–98. 40 41

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to an antecedent electio or choice; it is therefore not seated in the concupiscable power,46 but in the will, and so is confined to the rational natures. Caritas adds to the notion of amor the note of a certain perfection in that amor, the suggestion that the object loved is highly prized: as the very word caritas47 suggests.48

In this model of love, amor is the overarching emotion, with dilectio and caritas as different shades of this feeling; some instances of amor are dilectio, but dilectio does not encompass the entire range of feeling denoted by amor. Marital love was almost always described as dilectio. When St Paul exhorts married men and women to “walk in love” in his letter to the Ephesians, he uses the word “dilectione”.49 Likewise, as we will see, when medieval epitaphs, contracts and wills reference the feeling between husband and wife it is always the word dilectio or one of its derivatives that is employed. In direct contradiction to modern assumptions on the nature of romantic love, dilectio was believed to be the quality of love that resided fully in the will and rational nature – hence Aquinas’ emphasis on the derivation of the word from electio, or choice. This association with choice granted dilectio a specificity that amor did not necessarily possess; the object of amor could be general, while the object of dilectio must be selected.50 As Conor McCarthy points out, writers in the Middle Ages tended to argue that certain types and intensities of love were appropriate to marriage, while others were not.51 While love and affection (maritalis affectio was another term used for feeling within marriage) were agreed to be good, it was also possible to love your spouse excessively, with a passion that should be reserved for God alone.52 46 Aquinas uses the term “concupiscible power” to refer to sensuous desire, belonging to the appetite lower than reason but still a good thing. In his scheme, love (amor) belongs to the category of the “concupiscible emotions” as it involves a response to an object that we desire. The opposite category, “aggressive emotions”, involves a confrontation with the object we desire as difficult or hard to attain – hence both hope and despair belong to this group. See Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 173, 275–76. 47 The Latin word caritas is derived from the word carus, meaning dear, valued or precious. 48 Nam amor communius est inter ea: omnis enim dilectio vel caritas est amor, sed non e converso. Addit enim dilectio supra amorem electionem praecedentem, ut ipsum nomen sonat. Unde dilectio non est in concupiscibili sed in voluntati tantum, et est in sola rationali natura. Caritas autem addit supra amorem, perfectionem quandam amoris, inquantum id quod amator magni pretii aestimatur, ut ipsum nomen designat. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part 2.1, qu. 26 art. 3, in Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 2 (Paris, 1882), 541–42. 49 Ephesians 5: 1. 50 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part 2.1, qu. 26 art. 3, in Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 2 (Paris, 1882), 541. 51 A notable example of the distinction between marital and extra-marital love is found in De Amore, by the twelfth-century writer Andreas Capellanus, in which the author expresses surprise and dismay that some allow “marital affection” (maritalem affectionem) to “appropriate the name of love (amoris)”. McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England, 96–100. 52 McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England, 99.

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Here we return to the problem identified by Duby: the temptation to impose modern experiences of love and marriage onto the past, to make the feeling between medieval spouses a reflection of (or counterpoint for) our own emotions. This book seeks, as far as possible, to treat the rhetoric of love and affection in the Middle Ages within its own terms, while acknowledging that these terms are multiple and sometimes contradictory. When funerary monuments speak of the “love” between husband and wife, the emotion they refer to is distinct from medieval ideas of the love of God, or the love of one’s friend, and remote from the notion of romantic love assumed in modern culture. Likewise, when considering the emotions that may have been engendered by the double tomb, a significant degree of circumspection is required. No surviving medieval text describes the response of a viewer to the amatory gestures on a funerary monument; there was, unfortunately, no Philip Larkin of the fourteenth century. If double tombs did seek to elicit a sense of emotional identification between viewer and the deceased, the purpose of such identification (or, better, compassion) would not have been the mere stirring of feeling. Double tombs employed the rhetoric of spousal love in the service of commemoration; emotional expression was tied to the function of the tomb as an enduring social image of an absent union, a prompt to elicit intercessory prayer from the spectator. In the fifty-five years since Erwin Panofsky published Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini in 1964, there have been few attempts to write a “grand narrative” of funerary monuments.53 Publications typically focus on an individual monument, a group of monuments in the same church or a small cluster of tombs commemorating members of the same family.54 This inclination towards detail over synopsis is driven by both practical difficulties and the prevailing methodological stance of the field.55 Most tomb monuments are scattered in isolated churches, some of which 53 Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, ed. H. W. Janson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964). For a discussion of the genesis of the book, and Panofsky’s own attitudes towards it, see Susie Nash, “Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Creating the Monument”, in Revisiting the Monument: Fifty Years Since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture, ed. Ann Adams and Jessica Barker (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2016), 16–28. 54 The exceptions to this rule are: Kurt Bauch, Das Mittelalterliche Grabbild: Figurliche Grabmaler des 11. bis 15. Jahrhunderts in Europa (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1976); Hans Körner, Grabmonumente des Mittelalters (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Verlag, 1997); Saul, English Church Monuments, passim. Bauch and Körner adopt a broadly classificatory approach, combining chronological chapters with discussion of particular types of funerary sculpture (including altar tombs, standing effigies and mounted effigies), while Saul emphasises the social context of funerary monuments, with chapters dedicated to the memorials commemorating different classes and occupations (ecclesiastics, lawyers, knights, civilians, women). There have also been a handful of regional studies: for instance, Brian and Moira Gittos, Interpreting Medieval Effigies: The Evidence from Yorkshire to 1400 (Barnsley: Oxbow Books, 2019). 55 This problem, along with other issues in the field, are discussed by Nigel Llewellyn in “The State of Play: Reflections into the State of Research into Church Monuments”, Church Monuments 28 (2013): 11.

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are extremely remote, rather than gathered together in museums or private collections, meaning that the scholar of tombs must be either an intrepid traveller or, like Panofsky, rely primarily on photographs.56 Yet reproductions can be seriously misleading. For instance, Panofsky claimed that the effigies of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine at Fontevraud Abbey represent the first instance of “the recumbent images of a married couple [lying] side-by-side on the same tomb base”, whereas they actually lie on separate funerary biers, an error caused by the angle of the photograph.57 The predominance of case studies also reflects the specialist nature of tomb scholarship, a characteristic of the field for more than a century. Particularly in England, the leading writers on funerary sculpture have tended to work on tombs, and tombs alone.  Such focused research has afforded many valuable insights into the production of tomb monuments: the organisation of workshops, the use of artistic techniques such as maquettes and patterns, the identification of quarries, and the commissioning and financing of tombs.58 Yet it has also led to a bifurcation of scholarship on sculpted monuments from those on memorial brasses, with each medium developing its own scholarly literature.59 Another prevailing interest has been the relationship between memorials and biography, with the design of monuments analysed primarily in terms of the particular lineage, identity, priorities and anxieties of the person(s) they commemorate, or alternatively the patron.60 This approach inevitably privileges the moment of creation, 56 This is a long-recognised issue: in the introduction to Charles Stothard’s Monumental Effigies of Great Britain (published posthumously in 1832) the antiquary and draughtsman remarked that the neglect of funerary memorials was due to the fact that they were “scattered in all directions, and very remote from one another.” Charles A. Stothard, The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain (London, 1817–32), 2. 57 Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, 57, fig. 221. For the effigies at Fontevraud, see Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, “La sculpture funéraire vers les années 1200: Les gisants de Fontevrault”, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), 561–77. 58 There is a vast literature on the organisation of brass and tomb workshops in medieval England. For an overview, see Sally Badham, “London Standardisation and Provincial Idiosyncrasy: The Organisation and Working Practices of Brass-Engraving Workshops in Pre-Reformation England”, Church Monuments 5 (1990): 3–25; Sally Badham and Sophie Oosterwijk, eds, Monumental Industry: The Production of Tomb Monuments in England and Wales in the Long Fourteenth Century (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010); John Coales, ed., The Earliest English Brasses: Patronage, Style and Workshops 1270–1350 (London: Monumental Brass Society, 1987); Phillip Lindley, “‘Una Grande Opera Al Mio Re’: Gilt-Bronze Effigies in England from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 143 (1990): 112–30; Saul, English Church Monuments, 60–82. 59 For the problem of specialisation in tomb scholarship, particularly in relation to media, see the discussion in Saul, English Church Monuments, 5–7. 60 Again a topic with a large literature. See, for instance, Sally Badham, “Medieval Monuments to the de la Pole and Wingfield Families”, in Wingfield College and its Patrons: Piety and Prestige in Medieval Suffolk, ed. Peter Bloore and Edward Martin (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), 135–76; Anne M. Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries and England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Nigel Saul, Death, Art and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and Their Monuments, 1300–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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rather than the long lives of funerary monuments, their ongoing material interventions and reinventions, changing audiences and new connotations in the decades after their making.61 Biographical and material readings tend to treat the tomb as a distinct and self-contained object, extracted from its architectural context, the ritual performances that surrounded it, and the multitude of artworks with which it was situated in close proximity: altarpieces, reliquaries, devotional statues, stained glass, textiles.62 Even specialist tomb workshops occasionally turned their hands to different projects, or at the very least drew inspiration from a wide range of objects.63 In defining itself as a separate field, tomb scholarship risks setting up the medieval tomb in its own image: a category of artwork somehow set apart from the rest of medieval culture. This book is a rallying call for a more holistic approach to the study of tomb sculpture, taking seriously Panofsky’s injunction that the scholar of funerary monuments must “trespass” across many different academic fields.64 It seeks to demonstrate how much can be gleaned from memorials whose conventional and generic appearance has often led to them being dismissed by art historians. As sculptures that both contain and represent the body of the deceased, tomb monuments are defined by an intimate relationship between artwork and individual. On the other hand, memorials were situated within ecclesiastical institutions that regulated their form and location, and were often the centrepiece of ritual performances that directed and structured expressions of mourning.65 It is precisely this ten61 This sits uneasily with the monuments themselves, which were often the result of a long process of making, remaking, additions and alterations. For instance, payments for the making of the monument to Philippa of Hainault (d. 1369) stretch over a period of some thirteen years: the earliest, made in late 1364 or early 1365, is found in household accounts of the queen herself and relates to expenses associated with the making of her tomb in Paris; the latest was made by Edward III on 24 January 1377 to purchase iron railings from St Paul’s Cathedral to be repurposed for the tomb of his now-deceased wife. Frederick Devon, ed., Issues of the Exchequer, Being a Collection of Payments out of His Majesty’s Revenue from King Henry III to King Henry VI Inclusive (London, 1837), 199–201; Mark Ormrod, “Queenship, Death and Agency: the Commemoration of Isabella of France and Philippa of Hainault”, in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline Barron and Clive Burgess (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 97. 62 Notable examples of the rewards of looking across object categories for our understanding of tomb sculpture include Binski, Medieval Death; Thomas Dale, “The Individual, the Resurrected Body, and Romanesque Portraiture: The Tomb of Rudolf von Schwaben in Merseburg”, Speculum 77, no. 3 (2002): 707–43; Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 63 André Beauneveu is a famous example of a prominent carver of monuments who also worked on other sculptural projects (and even manuscript illumination). For Beauneveu’s working methods, see Susie Nash, “‘Adrien Biaunevopt … faseur des thombes’: André Beauneveu and Sculptural Practice in Late Fourteenth-Century France and Flanders”, in Susie Nash with Till-Holger Borchert and Jim Harris, André Beauneveu: “No Equal in any Land”: Artist to the Courts of France and Flanders (London: Paul Holberton, 2007), 31–63. 64 Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, 9. 65 For an example of personal and institutional priorities colliding in the location and design of memorials, see James A. Cameron, “Competing for Dextro Cornu Magnum

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sion – the personal and familial versus the communal and institutional – that supplied much of the creative friction driving innovations in funerary monuments at the close of the Middle Ages. Focusing on its broader surroundings also highlights the need for a more expansive definition of the “monument” itself, which comprised not only the stone or brass memorial, but also the chapel in which it was housed (with attendant glass, textiles and altarpieces), as well as the masses performed on behalf of the deceased. The medieval tomb was an ensemble, not a single, discrete object, combining as it did sculpture, painting, architecture, choreographed movement, ephemera and sound. Funerary monuments speak to more than the priorities of their patron(s) and the practices of their makers. We might also see these memorials from an outsider’s perspective: for instance, the priests who often prayed in close proximity to the tomb; the laymen and women who might encounter them every week when attending their parish church; or pilgrims who passed by an unknown memorial on their way to a shrine. Although such encounters rarely leave a trace in the historical record, they must have been vastly different from a maker or patron’s engagement with the tomb, being characterised perhaps by familiarity to the point of boredom, or else happenstance and distraction. Memorials also need to be considered within a longer span of time, both historical and theological. Rather than a single “moment of creation”, tomb monuments belong to multiple temporalities: the time of death (or times of death if a double tomb); the potentially lengthy time of commissioning, making, remaking and embellishment; the cyclical time of anniversaries and intercessions; the duration of Purgatory; the instant of the Resurrection. Tombs may purport to be first and foremost “about” the deceased, but they also offer broader insights into the interpenetrating forces of art, individual and society. Stone Fidelity takes as its starting point a straightforward question: why did spousal love become such a popular theme on funerary monuments across Western Europe in the second half of the fourteenth and the fifteenth century? Whereas the earliest funerary monuments always represented the deceased alone, in the later Middle Ages it became increasingly common for the effigies of husband and wife to be displayed on the same tomb chest, despite the fact that one of the spouses was usually still alive at the time the memorial was erected. It is no exaggeration to say that double tombs transformed the “tomb” as ontological category, changing its material role as a marker for a body and its temporal role as the record of the moment of death. The first aim of this book, therefore, is to unravel the implications of the double tomb for changing notions of tomb itself, both as idea and

Altaris: Funerary Monuments and Liturgical Seating in English Churches”, in Revisiting the Monument: Fifty Years Since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture, ed. Ann Adams and Jessica Barker (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2016), 137–53.

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as object, drawing these memorials into dialogue with other changes in funerary culture. Of equal importance is a concern with the relationship between double tombs and shifting attitudes to love, identity and gender. As representations of spousal love usually commissioned by the married laity themselves, these memorials allow us to examine the ways in which ideas about marriage promulgated by the Church were appropriated and adapted by its practitioners. They offer a new stance from which to consider some of the most significant themes in the social history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the changing status of women, who experienced new legal and economic freedoms in northern Europe; the increasing “domestication” of religion, which was brought into the sphere of the home and the family; a new interest in the particularities of the individual, both in terms of external appearance and inner feeling. Broader still, this book will consider the implications of double tombs for the relationship between emotion and its representation. Rather than seeking merely to penetrate the carapace of social conventions to the lived experience beneath, my interest lies in delineating their mutual entanglement, exploring the reciprocal relationships between love as object, love as idea and love as feeling. One of the difficulties in a wide-ranging study is balancing the need to be comprehensive against the insights that can only be gleaned from the detailed study of individual monuments. This book does not attempt to provide a survey of double tombs. Instead, each chapter adopts a distinct perspective on the relationship between monument and marriage, tackling different bodies of material, time periods, geographical areas and discursive themes. As far as possible the scope of this book aims to reflect the shape of the material itself, but the pattern of loss and survival has also inevitably dictated the areas that receive most attention. England is the geographical centre of this study, since it is the area with the highest proportion of surviving double tombs and where the monuments themselves tend to feature the most prominent references to love and marriage. However, geographical borders have only been respected insofar as they make historical sense: it is impossible to properly account for the origins of double tombs without reference to French and German examples, nor can tombs abroad with important connections to England, such as the monument to João I and Philippa of Lancaster in Portugal, be overlooked. The most detailed case studies all relate to royal monuments; these are the best-documented examples, whose rich textual and visual record allows the most ambitious questions to be posed. However, memorials to the mercantile and administrative elites feature prominently in discussions of the language of affection, bridal imagery and the hand-holding gesture. While they may not have been able to match the scale or material opulence of royal memorials, tombs of the middling sorts often demonstrate impressive conceptual sophistication, placing particular emphasis on the rhetoric of spousal love. Without title or lineage, these new elites were forced to

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celebrate other forms of achievement on their memorials; the sacralisation of spousal love meant that the affection, longevity and fecundity of their marriage became evidence of their worthy character. Chapter one, “The Double Tomb”, has the broadest remit. It begins by charting the origins of the double tomb in thirteenth-century France and Germany and its diffusion across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I argue against a single, cohesive genealogy of the double tomb; the development of this memorial type was patchwork and piecemeal, arising in different places at different times among diverse social groups. In England the growing popularity of double tombs seems to have been closely related to new ideas regarding the relationship between the body and identity, specifically the extent to which the particularities of a person (both corporeal and emotional) could be said to “represent” them. From here I go on to establish the two principles that will guide the rest of this study: that the double tomb profoundly changed the notion of the “tomb” itself, shifting its relationship to the body, time and the viewer; and the idea that the double tomb reveals new attitudes to marriage, in particular the sacralisation of marital love, that gained widespread currency in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. While the first chapter is broad in chronological and thematic scope, the second and third chapters are structured around the detailed analysis of individual monuments. Chapter two, “Love’s Rhetorical Power”, examines the particular significance of double tombs for anointed monarchs and their wives. Central to this chapter are extended studies of two near-contemporaneous monuments to royal cousins, both of which place extraordinary emphasis on the love between the king and queen: the memorial to Richard II (d. 1400), king of England, and Anne of Bohemia (d. 1394) in Westminster Abbey, and the tomb of João I (d. 1433), king of Portugal, and Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415) at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha. These monuments are considered in the context of medieval ideas regarding the two-fold character of the royal body, as outlined by the historian Ernst Kantorowicz, containing within itself both the institution of the Crown and the individual person of the king.66 I argue that the phenomenon of the royal double tomb complicates and disrupts this binary, marking a moment when the institution becomes grounded in the specificities of the person. No longer was person of the king an arbitrary sign for “kingship”; in this period his particularities as an individual and the emotional texture of his relationships had begun to define the office of the Crown. As I will show, this shift in royal rhetoric played out in diverse and often surprising ways, including João’s reported penchant for matchmaking, as well as the promotion of Anne as a midwife for any pregnant woman in need.

66 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, 7th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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This concern with the relationship between symbols and society, representation and lived experience, develops in a different direction in chapter three, “Gender, Agency and the Much-Married Woman”. Here the focus is set squarely on the implications of the double tomb for the history of gender, in terms of elucidating changing notions of wifehood and widowhood, as well as offering new insights into women as patrons and viewers of memorials. Studies of female patronage in the medieval period tend to emphasise small-scale, private commissions; double tombs allow us to explore the representation of female identity in public space. I place particular emphasis on the commemorative programmes of women who had been married more than once, a group to which a sizeable proportion of women in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have belonged, as these marriages were believed to deface the symbolic character of spousal union as an image of the communion between Christ and the Church. Caught between the social pressure to remarry and the religious imperative to conform to a sacred exemplar, how did women negotiate multiple marriages in their commemorative programmes? The focus of this chapter is Margaret Holland, duchess of Clarence (d. 1439), who commissioned an extraordinary monument, housed in its own funerary chapel at Canterbury Cathedral, which depicts her flanked by her two royal husbands. This was more than just an image of female power: Margaret assumed ownership of her husbands’ bodies, ordering them to be exhumed from their chosen resting places to be reburied beside her. Whereas scholars interested in female commemoration have tended to focus on monuments that depict women alone, I argue that double tombs actually constitute a more promising avenue for exploring gender in this period, revealing how women might direct the representation of men, as well as how they chose to be depicted themselves. Chapter four, “Holding Hands”, broadens again to consider the intersection of monuments and marriage through the gesture of joined hands. It explores the forty-five (thirty-six surviving and a further nine recorded) monuments that depict the effigies of husband and wife holding one another by the right hand, a memorial type that first appeared in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. Setting this gesture within its artistic, legal, economic and religious context, I return to and draw together some of the key thematic threads of this book: the relationship between emotion and its representation; the monument as the embodiment of the tension between individual and social structures; the two-fold status of marriage as symbol and lived experience. I argue that the joining of hands was not a spontaneous expression of feeling, but rather a means of communicating the exchange of consent. Akin to a modern handshake, it both symbolised and effected an agreement between two parties. This can be seen in the fact that many hand-joining monuments commemorate couples whose marriages were subject to legal disputes, or whose union effected a significant transfer of property to the husband.

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However, none of this precludes the possibility, even probability, that in some cases the motivation for commissioning a hand-joining tomb was an affective relationship of unusual force. Whether love lies behind hand-joining tombs is ultimately unknowable: historians are only able to study the emotional dimension of lives past insofar as they were put into language, either visual or textual. But this is not merely a question of lived experience translated into artistic conventions; we understand our own emotional experience in relation to the ways in which that emotion is represented. Such depictions shape our perception of a given emotion’s social value, its relationship to religious ideals, and its associations with class and gender. These ideas in turn provide the co-ordinates for how that emotion should be expressed, by whom and in which situations. Or, to put it another way, one might say that part of the reason why romantic love holds a pre-­ eminent status in many people’s lives today is the prevalence of its imagery in advertising and social media. I end by proposing that hand-joining tombs not only provided a new means of depicting marital love, but also affected the ways in which married men and women understood their own relationships. Together the chapters journey across two centuries, touching on places as diverse as Bohemia, Portugal, Aragon, France, the Low Countries and Scotland. I consider the marriages of royalty, merchants, administrators, lawyers, knights and nobles, exploring the traces these couples left behind in the documentary and material record. Over the course of the book, double tombs emerge as a dense sedimentation of historical forces, including artistic innovation, symbolic conventions, theological ideas and lived experience: a stratigraphy as complicated and compact as the stone from which they were so often carved.

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THE DOUBLE TOMB: MARRIAGE, SYMBOL AND SOCIETY Huc ades, o coniux, Agnes, mea cara fuisti. Dum mundo vixi; post me sis sponsaque Christi.

T

Come hither, o my wife, Agnes! My beloved you were, While I lived in this world, and after me may you be a bride of Christ.

his emotive plea from a deceased husband to his surviving wife is inscribed on the memorial to John Browne (d. 1476) and his wife Agnes Stokes (d. 1484) at the church of All Saints, Stamford (Lincs.).1 Rather than celebrating John’s status as a wealthy wool merchant, the Latin epitaph is entirely concerned with securing heavenly companionship for himself and his spouse: another verse even goes so far as to reason with God that He would save Himself “effort” (labor) to admit husband and wife to heaven at the same time. Two incised copper-alloy effigies stand above the inscription: John wears an alderman’s mantle over a fur-lined gown with a purse hanging from his belt in reference to his mercantile career, while Agnes is shown in the veil, barbe and mantle of a widow (Fig. 4). The two effigies figure the longed-for unity described in the epitaph; the depiction of John and Agnes standing side by side collapses the spatial and temporal boundaries between the deceased and living spouse. Yet, paradoxically, the portrayal of Agnes in widow’s garb also draws attention to her separation from her husband. Her costume seems to correspond with the appeal in the epitaph for Agnes to become a sponsa Christi, a phrase that implies celibacy and possibility even entry into a convent.2 Agnes remains a bride even 1 Reinhard Lamp, “The Browne Brothers, All Saints, Stamford, Lincolnshire”, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift 10, no. 1 (2010): 199-205; Richard Marks and Paul Williamson, eds, Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547, exh. cat. (London: V&A Publications, 2003), 277, no. 139; Alan Rogers, “Browne, William (d. 1489)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (Oxford University Press, 2008), accessed 14 September 2014, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/94940. 2 Lamp, “Browne Brothers”, 204.

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4 BRASS MEMORIAL TO JOHN BROWNE AND AGNES STOKES, C. 1476. CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS, STAMFORD (LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND).

after the death of her husband, her bridegroom merely shifting from John to Christ. Here the personal, particular qualities of marriage and its status as a symbol for the sacred union of Christ and the Church intersect. This two-fold nature of marriage – social contract and image of divine union – was often used to justify the subordination of wife to husband. If, as seems likely, the patron of the memorial was either John or his brother William, a declaration of perpetual affection may also have been an injunction to

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Agnes against the possibility of remarriage: an enduring public reminder of the fidelity expected by a husband after his demise.3 The Stamford brass is notable for being unremarkable. While its Latin verse epitaph is much more sophisticated than the average memorial, the crude faces of its effigies are inferior, even to those representing other members of the Browne family in the same church.4 It is attributed to a group of brasses termed “Sub-B”, made by a workshop whose output has been described as “a strange mixture of new influences and sheer incompetence”.5 When considered alongside many other memorials from the second half of the fifteenth century, the brass to John and Agnes Browne is modest in materials, inexpensive in craftsmanship and unimaginative in design. Yet the mode of commemoration it represents was almost unheard of two hundred years previously. The brass to John and Agnes is a double tomb (also referred to as a joint memorial), a form of funerary monument in which two or more effigies are placed side by side on the same tomb chest or, in the case of brasses and other two-dimensional monuments, inlaid into the same stone slab. At its most basic level, therefore, the double tomb should be understood as a framing device. Their defining feature lay neither in the materials or techniques of their making, nor in the social class or devotional tastes of their patrons, but rather in the framing of two effigies within a single pictorial space. In Western Europe the fashion for commissioning double tombs began in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Their frequency rose gradually until the middle of the fourteenth century, after which it remains fairly constant. This trend is related to, but distinct from, the situation in England. Very few double tombs were commissioned here until the second quarter of the fourteenth century, after which they experienced a more dramatic rise in popularity.6 By the time that the Stamford brass was erected, most monuments commissioned in England commemorated two or more people.7 Double tombs had moved from a niche choice to the default option; 3 Agnes did, in fact, remain single until her death in 1484. Robin Emmerson has argued that John’s brother, William Browne, commissioned the brass to John and Agnes along with others to himself and his family in All Saint’s Church. See Robin Emmerson, “William Browne’s Taste in Brasses”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 12, no. 4 (1978): 322–25; Rogers, “Browne, William”. 4 See, for instance, the brass to William Browne (d. c. 1460) and his wife Margaret. 5 Emmerson, “Browne’s Taste in Brasses”, 323. 6 These observations are based in part on my statistical analysis of tombs dated before 1500 in two major collections. The first is a collection of 1,415 engravings of funerary monuments from the west of France, Burgundy, Paris and the Parisian region, commissioned by Roger de Gaignières between 1695 and 1715, and later to be published in three articles by Jean Adhémar in the Gazette des Beaux Arts in 1974, 1976 and 1977. The second is a collection of 1,240 rubbings of English brasses and incised slabs donated by the Society of Antiquaries to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1911 and subsequently published in a revised catalogue by Muriel Clayton in 1929. 7 The contrast between France and England can also be seen in the overall number of double tombs: the Gaignières collection includes 217 double tombs made before 1500 (15

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it was the decision to erect a single memorial that now signalled a specific preference on the part of the patron. This was a seismic shift in funerary culture. Doubling the effigies implied a concurrent doubling in the bodies within the grave, creating an image of corporeal unity in death that also implied the enduring nature of spousal ties. Given the competitive marital politics of the late-medieval nobility, it is hardly surprising that this fuelled rivalries: husbands and wives each sought to co-opt their spouse into a commemorative scheme that emphasised their ancestry, while those who married multiple times could be left to choose between several different offers of post-mortem unity. For those whose husband or wife was already represented alongside an earlier spouse, there arose a dilemma between commissioning a single tomb and persuading their spouse to abandon their current monument, leading to scenarios in which a single individual might accumulate multiple memorials over the course of his or her lifetime. In both temporal and referential terms, double tombs radically complicated the unity of the medieval monument. Some were commissioned for the reburial of two bodies initially interred in separate graves, while others only ever contained one corpse. In most cases, the double tomb initially marked a single burial, with the second body added later. An increasing number of medieval men and women would thus have known the uncanny experience of gazing at their own effigy in the knowledge that it marked the eventual resting place of their corpse. Such interaction between living bodies, sculpted bodies and dead bodies has been compared by Paul Binski to “a mise-en-abyme worthy of Hitchcock’s Vertigo”, with the individual fragmented and multiplied into their present, past and future selves.8 The inclusion of an additional effigy thus entailed far more than the mere expansion of an existing memorial design; the growing popularity of the double tomb had profound implications for the “monument” as idea and object, a reorientation that involved its relationship to the bodies of those it commemorated and to the moment of death itself. This chapter examines the development of the double tomb from three different perspectives: artistic innovation, funerary practices and the theology of marriage. Such a multiplicity of approaches is a response to the nature of the material itself; the deep integration of these memorials into the spaces, rituals and ideologies of medieval society means that art-historical narratives can only ever supply a partial understanding. I open by considering the double tomb in relation to artistic developments in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in particular the shift from marking the deceased through symbolic attributes to the use of the effigy. In the second part I explore the relationship between the double tomb and per cent of all monuments from this period), whereas the V&A catalogue lists 446 double tombs made before 1500 (36 per cent of all monuments from this period). 8 Binski, Medieval Death, 144.

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late-medieval funerary culture, considering how the growing popularity of this type of monument complicated and destabilised the very notion of the “tomb” itself. The third section shifts focus to the history of marriage, questioning how far the growing popularity of double tombs can be related to new ideas and practices surrounding marriage. If the tomb represents a particular version of identity – how you wish to be remembered and, more importantly in this period, the parts of yourself you hope will persist for eternity – then the increasing emphasis on spousal ties on late-medieval monuments implies a profound change in the significance that individuals ascribed to their romantic relationships. Despite the fact that the wedding rite explicitly declared that marital bonds endured only “tyl dethe vs departe”, men and women in the Middle Ages declared the persistence of their marriage in the grave and even on into the afterlife.9 Finally, I turn this problem around to consider how the growing popularity of double tombs affected the commemoration of relationships between two men or two women, examining the ways in which these “queer tombs” appropriated and adapted marital symbolism to convey the intimacy of homosocial bonds.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE DOUBLE TOMB Given its ubiquity in the fifteenth century, it is easy to frame the development of the double tomb as inevitable. After all, joint burial had long been practised, so it makes sense that memorials would eventually reflect the contents of the graves beneath.10 Yet, when looking back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the emergence of the double tomb seems far less predictable. It depended upon two major developments in funerary art: first, the representation of the deceased by means of an effigy, and second, the commemoration of two or more individuals on the same memorial. Each was the product of particular historical and artistic circumstances, and neither should be seen as neutral or necessary. While striving to avoid the construction of convenient teleological narratives, this section explores a variety of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century examples from England, France, Germany and the Low Countries, revealing a broad spectrum of possible reasons why the patrons of these memorials took the unusual decision to commission a double tomb. If there is a common thread uniting these early experiments it is an engagement with new ideas about what 9 For the wedding rite, see A. J. Collins (ed.), Manuale ad usum percelebris Ecclesie Sarisburiensis, Henry Bradshaw Society 91 (n. p., 1960), 48. 10 For the long-standing practice of joint burial, see Gratian’s Decretum, compiled in the mid-twelfth century, which ordered that those who are coupled in matrimony should also be coupled in the grave (unless they had expressed a contrary desire in their lifetime), citing in support an instruction from Tobias to his son in the book of Tobit, 4: 5: cum autem et ipsa conpleverit tempus vitae suae sepelies eam circa me. See Tomas Kotrly, “The Lawful Selection of a Grave according to the Gratianus Decree”, Church Law Review 49, no. 2 (2011): 37–48.

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constituted personal identity and how this might be represented most effectively, meaning that the emergence and growing popularity of the double tomb was closely connected – in a complex way – with the so-called origins of portraiture. At a basic level an effigy is a surrogate, an artificial body that substitutes for the person it represents.11 Figures of this type often appear on funerary monuments from the Etruscan and Roman periods.12 For most of the Middle Ages, however, tomb monuments tended to evoke the body of the deceased through their size and shape rather than represent it mimetically. Some of the most lavish examples are the porphyry sarcophagi to the Norman kings of Sicily in Monreale and Palermo Cathedrals, dating from the middle to the end of the twelfth century, which convey the royal identity of the deceased through the colour and rarity of the porphyry from which they are carved, as well as symbols such as lions, imperial crowns and crosses.13 A more modest memorial design was popular in northern England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, consisting of a stone slab incised with a large ornamental cross and a symbol indicating the status of the deceased: typically a sword for men, shears for women and a chalice or book for clerics (Fig. 5).14 Although the porphyry sarcophagi of Norman Sicily and the cross slabs of Norman England sit at very different ends of 11 The word “effigy” is derived from the Latin ex fingere, meaning to form or fashion out of, with associations of falsehood and pretence. In the Middle Ages, this term and its Middle French derivations were occasionally used to designate the sculpted body on tomb monuments, albeit coexisting alongside words such as “ymage”, “representacion” and “simulacre”. See Helen J. Swift, Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 24–25. 12 For double tombs from the Roman and Etruscan periods, see Glenys Davies, “The Significance of the Handshake Motif in Classical Funerary Art”, American Journal of Archaeology 89, no. 4 (1985): 627–40; Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet: Images of Conviviality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 104–08; Ingrid Rowland, “Marriage and Mortality in the Tetnies Sarcophagi”, Etruscan Studies 11 (2008): 151–64; Paul Zanker and Björn C. Ewald, Living with Myths: The Imagery of Roman Sarcophagi, trans. Julia Slater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 176–77, 186, 189–90. 13 The sarcophagus of William I (d. 1166) is in Monreale; the sarcophagi now housing the remains of Frederick II (d. 1250), Henry VI (d. 1197) and the empress Constance (d. 1198) are now in Palermo Cathedral. Two were originally commissioned by Roger II (d. 1154) and housed in the cathedral at Cefalù. Josef Deér, The Dynastic Porphyry Tombs of the Norman Period in Sicily, trans. G. A. Gilhof, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). 14 Peter Ryder has recorded 660 cross slabs in Northumberland, 517 in County Durham, 300 in Cumbria and 180 in West Yorkshire. See Ryder, The Medieval Cross Slab Grave Cover in County Durham (Durham: Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland, 1985); Ryder, Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers in Cumbria (Kendal: Cumbria and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 2005); Ryder, “Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers in Northumberland, 1: South West Northumberland”, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., 28 (2000): 51–100; Ryder, “Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers in Northumberland, 2: Newcastle and South East Northumberland”, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., 30 (2002): 75137; Ryder, “Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers in Northumberland, 3: North Northumberland”, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., 32 (2003): 91–136; Ryder, Medieval Cross Slab Grave Covers in West Yorkshire (Wakefield: West Yorkshire Archaeological Services, 1991), especially 61–63.

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5  INCISED SLAB WITH TWO CROSSES, TWELFTH OR EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY. CHURCH OF ST ANDREW, AYCLIFFE (COUNTY DURHAM, ENGLAND).

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the social spectrum, both memorial types eschew figural imagery, instead representing the deceased through conventional and metonymic signs of gender, occupation, status and religious affiliation.15 Explanations for the re-emergence of the funeral effigy are bound up in broader debates surrounding the apparent “rebirth” of monumental sculpture in Western Europe, a narrative which posits that the sculptural traditions of the classical world were lost in late antiquity, only to be rediscovered by sculptors during the eleventh century.16 Yet, as Shirin Fozi points out, such teleological accounts focus far too narrowly on stone sculpture and neglect the issue of survival; when artworks in plaster, wood and bronze are also considered, it becomes clear that the making of monumental sculpture never ceased entirely.17 Neither of the two earliest surviving effigies from post-classical Europe is made from stone: the first is a copper-alloy effigy commemorating Rudolf of Swabia in Merseburg Cathedral (Saxony, Germany), made sometime between 1080 and 1084; the second is a stucco figure of Widukind of Saxony in the church of St Dionysius in Enger (Westphalia, Germany), dating from around 1100 to 1130.18 15 For the meaning of the symbols on cross slabs, see Sally Badham, “Status and Salvation: The Design of Medieval English Brasses and Incised Slabs”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 15, no. 5 (1996): 423; Saul, English Church Monuments, 27 –28. 16 This is the narrative propounded by Panofsky, who writes: “that a demand for funerary portraits in three rather than two dimensions should have arisen about eight hundred years after the disappearance of the recumbent or reclining effigy in the round is understandable in view of the general resurgence of major sculpture, integrated with architecture, in the eleventh century.” Tomb Sculpture, 51. 17 Shirin Fozi, “From the ‘Pictorial’ to the ‘Statuesque’: Two Romanesque Effigies and the Problem of Plastic Form”, in Barker and Adams, Revisiting the Monument, 34–35. For studies that revise the notion of the purported “gap” in the sculptural record in this period, see Beate Fricke, Fallen Idols: Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015); Ittai Weinryb, The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 18 For the effigies of Rudolf of Swabia and Widukind of Saxony, see Thomas Dale, “The Individual, the Resurrected Body, and Romanesque Portraiture: The Tomb of Rudolf von Schwaben in Merseburg”, Speculum 77, no. 3 (2002): 707–43; Fozi, “From the ‘Pictorial’ to the ‘Statuesque’”, 30–48.

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Fozi draws attention to the fact that both are retrospective monuments representing opposition leaders who had suffered bitter defeats in disastrous wars, indicating that “the first effigies for kingly men were made not merely to reflect individual identities, but rather to refashion past events in the eyes of their publics”.19 The appearance of these early effigies cannot be explained with reference to funerary sculpture alone. The bronze effigy of Rudolf is particularly redolent of figural reliquaries such as the famous Sainte Foy in Conques (Occitan, France), made in the late tenth century, a material and formal resonance that was surely intended to cast the defeated king in a quasi-saintly light.20 Such porous boundaries between different categories of object do not, however, detract from the particular potency that the sculpted body acquires when incorporated into a funerary monument. Rather than evoking the shape of body they contain (as in the sarcophagus) or abstracting the dead person into a series of metonymic markers (as in the cross slab), effigial tombs “double” the dead, purporting to make visible that which death has rendered inaccessible and invisible. The effigy transforms the natural body into an artificial body, inverting its condition in the grave: the corpse is buried, while the effigy is elevated; the corpse is hidden from sight, while the effigy is exposed to the viewer’s gaze; the corpse decays, while the effigy endures. The emergence of the effigy did not coincide with the development of the double tomb: it was to be another 150 years before the figures of husband and wife were placed together on the same memorial. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, individuals typically had separate monuments, even when part of a commemorative scheme that emphasised their shared identity. This is exemplified in the four memorials to members of the Plantagenet royal family at Fontevraud Abbey (Anjou, France) (Fig. 6).21 Although the tombs now appear to be as a cohesive group, the development of the mausoleum was in fact piecemeal: the monuments to King Henry II of England and Richard the Lionheart were commissioned together at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century; the monument to Eleanor of Aquitaine probably dates from the early thirteenth century; that of Isabelle Fozi, “From the ‘Pictorial’ to the ‘Statuesque’”, 32–33. Dale, “Romanesque Portraiture”, 730 and passim; Fozi, “From the ‘Pictorial’ to the ‘Statuesque’”, 39–40. 21 For the Fontevraud effigies, see Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, “La sculpture funéraire vers les années 1200: Les gisants de Fontevrault”, in The Year 1200: A Symposium (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975), 561–77; Kathleen Nolan, “The Queen’s Choice: Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Tombs at Fontevraud”, in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 377–406; Daniel Prigent, “Das Grab von Richard Löwenherz in Fontevraud”, in Richard Löwenherz: König, Ritter, Gefangener, ed. Alexander Schubert (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2017), 348–49; Charles T. Wood, “Fontevraud, Dynasticism, and Eleanor of Aquitaine”, in Wheeler and Parsons, Eleanor of Aquitaine, 407–22. For the relationship of the tombs to the Abbey, see Daniel Prigent, “L’organisation spatiale à Fontevraud vers la fin du XIIe siècle”, in Monastères et espace social, Collection d’Études Médiévales de Nice 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 411–12. 19

20

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6 PLANTAGENET TOMBS, LATE TWELFTH TO MID THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

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of Angoulême was added in 1256.22 When Henry III visited the abbey in 1254 and 1256 he found the memorials to his family grouped together in the nun’s choir, with those of Eleanor and Henry placed side by side closest to the altar.23 As we saw earlier, Panofsky claimed that the effigies of Henry II and Eleanor represented the first instance of “the recumbent images of

FONTEVRAUD ABBEY (ANJOU, FRANCE).

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22 Eleanor, resident at Fontevraud until her death in 1204, was almost certainly responsible for commissioning the memorials to her husband and children. Erlande-Brandenburg, “Les gisants de Fontevrault”, 561–77; Nolan, “The Queen’s Choice”, 377–78, 391–95; Wood, “Fontevraud, Dynasticism and Eleanor of Aquitaine”, 417. 23 At the time of Henry’s visits the monuments of Isabelle of Angoulême, his mother, and Raymond of Toulouse, his cousin, were not yet part of this grouping. In 1256, Henry asked that the body of his mother be moved into the choir and an effigy to surmount her grave. Wood, “Fontevraud, Dynasticism and Eleanor of Aquitaine”, 414, 417.

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a married couple [lying] side-by-side on the same tomb base”, but this was a misunderstanding caused by the angle of the photograph from which he was working.24 Despite their near-identical appearance and close proximity, the Fontevraud tombs remain a collection of individual monuments; each royal effigy rests upon its own funerary bier, which frames the sculpted body and separates it from its companions. Poised between unity and separation, the group and the individual, the scheme at Fontevraud anticipates the dynastic mausoleum created at the basilica of Saint Denis during the reign of Eleanor’s great-grandson, King Louis IX of France (d. 1270). Sixteen memorials, eight commemorating members of the Carolingian and Merovingian dynasties, and eight commemorating the Capetians, were arranged in pairs along the north and south sides of the crossing.25 Unlike Fontevraud, these effigies were placed side-by-side on the same tomb chest, with short inscriptions at the upper edge identifying the deceased. Although two pairs of spouses were included in the programme – Pepin (d. 768) and Bertha of Laon (d. 783), as well as Constance of Arles (d. 1032) and Robert the Pious (d. 1031) – the other couples shared looser dynastic ties, meaning that in two cases a royal wife shared a tomb with a king who had not been her husband.26 The funerary scheme at Saint Denis is best understood as a kind of monumental genealogy projected through the space of the church, with sculpted figures of near-identical design arranged in formations that expressed the line of succession that culminated in Louis IX.27 At Fontevraud each effigy is a divisible part of a composite whole. The double tombs at Saint Denis are constructed in a fundamentally different way. By placing the figures on the same tomb chest, these memorials make two effigies into a single object, the sculpted bodies being joined together in such a way that separating them would require disassembling the memorial itself. As double tombs became more closely associated with spouses, this material dependence would come to signal the enduring and essential connection between the couple: just as their effigies cannot be separated, so the deceased are inextricably joined in the grave and, by implication, the afterlife. Despite this intention to be united in perpetuity, centuries of war and iconoclasm, as well as the more routine refashioning and updating of church interiors, have meant that a high proportion of early effigies were separated Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, 57, fig. 221. Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, Le roi est mort: Etude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des rois de France jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1975); Georgia Sommers Wright, “A Royal Tomb Program in the Reign of St Louis”, Art Bulletin 56, no. 2 (1974): 224–42. 26 For evidence of the earlier arrangements of the effigies, see Michel Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Denys en France (Paris, 1706); A. Vidier, “Inventaire des reliques et liste des sépultures des rois de France qui se trouvaient dans l’Abbaye de Saint-Denis au XIVe siècle”, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France (1901): 145–48. 27 Joan A. Holladay, Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 79–81, 234–36.. 24 25

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7  TOMB SLAB OF A KNIGHT AND BISHOP, EARLY

8  STATUE OF A BISHOP FROM A BUTTRESS ON THE

THIRTEENTH CENTURY. FOUND NEAR TRÉZAN,

SOUTH SIDE OF THE NAVE, 1210—20. CHARTRES

NOW HOUSED IN THE CHURCH OF SAINT MARTIN,

CATHEDRAL (EURE-ET-LOIR, FRANCE).

MALESHERBES (LOIRET, FRANCE).

from their tomb chest.28 Without antiquarian drawings or descriptions, it is extremely difficult to determine whether any of these orphan effigies might once have formed part of a double tomb. It is therefore unsurprising that the earliest extant double tombs tend to be made from a single piece of stone, either incised slabs or low-relief memorials. For instance, a memorial found near Trézan and now housed in the nearby church of St Martin, Malesherbes (Loiret, France) features two male effigies carved on the same stone slab: the figure to the right wears episcopal robes and pierces a serpent with his crozier; on the left, the figure is dressed as a knight and has a 28 Philip Lankester identified only ten effigies from thirteenth-century England still resting on their original chest, five of which are located at Westminster Abbey. See “The Thirteenth-Century Military Effigies in the Temple Church”, in The Temple Church in London: History, Architecture, Art, ed. David Park and Robin Griffith-Jones (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 110–11.

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lion at his feet (Fig. 7). Angels in the spandrels swing censers over their heads, while in the centre the small, naked figure representing a soul is carried to heaven. Kurt Bauch dated the Trézan memorial to the beginning of the thirteenth century, drawing attention to the close similarities between the effigy of the bishop and the episcopal figures on the buttresses at Chartres Cathedral, carved sometime between 1210 and 1220 (Fig. 8).29 A comparable double tomb with low-relief effigies was discovered in 1965 buried near the church of St Stephen in Holwierde (Groningen, Netherlands).30 The eroded condition of the sandstone means all that can now be discerned is the outline of a man and woman embracing, along with angels carrying a soul in the upper compartment (Fig. 9).31 The dual compartments, wide ornamental border and downwards-pointing feet of the effigies place this memorial within a group of sarcophagus lids from the Netherlands, probably dating to the latter half of the twelfth or first half of the thirteenth century.32 These two early double tombs are also remarkable for the way in which they frame the image of the soul. At Trézan, a single soul is positioned in the space between the trefoil-headed arches that frame the effigies of knight and bishop, while at Holwierde, the soul is depicted within a rectangular compartment directly above that of the two effigies.33 In each instance the

9 LOW-RELIEF SLAB TO AN ANONYMOUS MAN AND WOMAN, C. 1150— C. 1225. CHURCH OF ST STEPHEN, HOLWIERDE (GRONINGEN, NETHERLANDS).

Bauch, Das Mittelalterliche Grabbild, 106. See the online database of Netherlandish monuments, Medieval Memoria Online (MeMO) http://memodatabase.hum.uu.nl, MeMO ID 28. 31 The knee-length tunic of the effigy on the left, compared to the ankle-length dress of the figure on the right, is the only discernible indication of their respective genders. 32 For these sarcophagus lids, see the MeMO database: Kerkmuseum Janum (MeMO ID 1348), Nederlands Hervormde Kerk, Westergeest (MeMO ID 1293), Church of St Martin, Roodkerk (MeMO ID 1366), Church of St Nicholas, Vollenhove (MeMO ID 1604). 33 Similar framing devices are found in manuscript illuminations representing the moment of death, such as the opening of the mortuary roll to abbess Lucy de Vere (London, British 29

30

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soul is positioned within an intermediary zone to which it alone belongs, exterior to the frame that unites the effigies but nestled within the larger marginal border, expressing the Thomistic conception of the soul as connected to, but subsistent from, the body of the deceased.34 At Holwierde the soul has no identifying attributes, meaning that it could represent either effigy, or else stand as a generic symbol for the couple’s salvation. At Trézan the soul is shown with a mitre, identifying it with the episcopal figure on the right. This suggests that the two effigies had different functions; the episcopal effigy was most likely the intercessory focus and the knight an auxiliary figure, perhaps acting as a sign of the monument’s patronage or the bishop’s distinguished lineage. Such a distinction underlines the fact that double tombs do not necessarily imply equivalence between the two effigies, either in their relationship to one another or in their connection to the tomb. Not all early double tombs were modest affairs commemorating now-anonymous couples. The monument to Matilda Plantagenet (d. 1189), the eldest daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her husband Henry the Lion (d. 1195), duke of Saxony and Bavaria, located in the collegiate church of St Blaise in Brunswick (Lower Saxony, Germany), comprises a stone chest surmounted by two effigies on separate slabs placed side by side (Fig. 10).35 Although its dating has been disputed, most scholars argue that it was made sometime between 1235 and 1240 and commissioned by the couple’s grandson, Otto the Child, as a means of consolidating his hold on the city, a dynastic claim that had been contested by Emperor Frederick II.36 Each effigy stands upon a corbel but rests their head on a pillow; the deep, jagged folds of their drapery correspond neither to a standing nor recumbent position, an axial ambiguity that expresses the couple’s liminal status between life and death. The spouses are portrayed as youthful, idealised figures: Matilda clasps her hands in prayer, while Henry holds an

Library MS Egerton 2894), made in England c. 1225–30. For a discussion of soul imagery in manuscript illumination, see Maria Grasso, Illuminating Sanctity: The Body, Soul and Glorification of Saint Amand in the Miniature Cycle in Valenciennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 500 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 34 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part 1, qu. 76, in Claude-Joseph Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 2 (Paris, 1882), 12–32. See also the discussion in Denys Turner, “The Human Person”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae, ed. Philip McCosker and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 168–80. 35 The granite chest is a modern copy, ordered in 1935 by the Nazi government. Bauch, Das Mittelalterliche Grabbild, 107; Luckhardt, “Grabmal”, 283. 36 Advocates of an earlier dating include Kurt Bauch, who suggested the tomb was commissioned in the 1220s, Das Mittelalterliche Grabbild, 107–10. The later dating is suggested by Emanuel S. Klinkenberg, Compressed Meanings: The Donor’s Model in Medieval Art to around 1300 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 199–201; Jochen Luckhardt, “Grabmal und Totengedächtnis Heinrichs des Löwen”, in Heinrich der Löwe und seine Zeit: Herrschaft und Repräsentation der Welfen, 1125–1235, ed. Jochen Luckhardt and Franz Niehoff (Munich: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, 1995), 2: 290–91.

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upturned sword in his left hand and cradles a model of the church with his right arm, commemorating his role in the rebuilding of St Blaise.37 It has been suggested that the memorials to Matilda’s parents at Fontevraud Abbey might have inspired Otto to commission the double tomb at

10  MONUMENT TO HENRY THE LION AND MATILDA PLANTAGENET, C. 1235—40.

In 1173 Henry ordered the older church to be pulled down and the construction of a larger, cruciform basilica to house his costly collection of relics. The nave must have been virtually complete by the time of Henry’s death in 1195. Karl Jordan, Henry the Lion: A Biography, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 200–01. See also Williamson, Gothic Sculpture, 88–89. 37

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BRUNSWICK CATHEDRAL (LOWER SAXONY, GERMANY).

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11  DETAIL OF CORONATION MINIATURE FROM THE GOSPELS OF HENRY THE LION, HELMARSHAUSEN MONASTERY (HESSE, GERMANY), C. 1185—88.

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Brunswick.38 An alternative context within which to consider the innovative design of Henry and Matilda’s memorial is the double ruler portrait, a genre that had long been popular in manuscript illumination.39 The Gospels of Henry the Lion, commissioned by Henry and Matilda sometime between their marriage in 1168 and Matilda’s death in 1189, includes a full-page miniature of Henry and Matilda being crowned by God (Fig. 11).40 Kneeling in the centre of the scene, the couple are flanked by their respective ancestors; the crowned man and woman behind Matilda represent her parents, a sign of the prestige that his wife’s royal lineage had bestowed upon Henry.41 Each spouse holds a

WOLFENBÜTTEL, HERZOG AUGUST BIBLIOTHEK, COD. GUELF. 105 NOVISS. 2°, FOL. 171V.

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38 The Brunswick monument itself inspired the double tomb of Dedo von Wettin (d. 1190) and his wife Mechthild (d. 1189) in the collegiate church at Wechselburg (Saxony), most likely dating from the 1240s. Emanuel Klinkenberg argues that the Wechselburg monument was commissioned by the couple’s granddaughter, Mathilda (d. 1255), whose own daughter had married Otto the Child – the probable patron of the Brunswick double tomb – in 1228. Klinkenberg, Compressed Meanings, 199, 204, 211n13; Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, 57. 39 For the tradition of double ruler portraits in illuminated manuscripts, see Erin G. Barrett, “Art and the Construction of Early Medieval Queenship: The Iconography of the Joint Ruler/Imperial Portrait and the Representation of the Ruler’s Consort” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 1997). 40 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 105 Noviss. 2°, fol. 171v. The dating of the manuscript has been debated; some have linked it to the dedication of the altar of the Virgin at St Blaise in c. 1188, whereas Jitske Japerse has dated it to 1172 to 1176 as part of a broader argument that sees the manuscript as an offering to beseech the birth of an heir. See Jitske Jasperse, “Visualizing Dynastic Desire: The Twelfth-Century Gospel Book of Henry and Matilda”, Studies in Iconography 39 (2018): 135–66, and especially 159n5 for the dating debate and bibliography. 41 The standing figures can be identified as: Empress Richenza and Emperor Lothar (Henry’s maternal grandparents), Duchess Gertrud and Duke Henry (Henry’s parents), King Henry II and Queen Matilda (Matilda’s father and maternal grandmother), and an

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bejewelled cross in one hand and raises the other with palms facing outwards, the edges of their outstretched fingers just touching one another. As Jitske Jasperse has pointed out, this carefully curated genealogy places particular emphasis on Henry and Matilda’s union, a spousal theme echoed in the busts of the Bride and Bridegroom in the upper corners of the folio, accompanied by biblical verses that speak of being crowned by their beloved.42 Indeed, the dedication poem at the start of the manuscript refers to the book as a work that “united the loving spouses.”43 Double portraits, particularly for monarchs, already had a long history by the thirteenth century; the innovation of Henry and Matilda’s tomb lay less in the representation of husband and wife side by side than in translating this image into the medium of funerary sculpture, thereby giving the union between Henry the Lion and Matilda Plantagenet monumental proportions. The ducal couple donated the Gospels to the altar of the Virgin at St Blaise, an altar that was itself said to have been founded by Matilda, “in devout commemoration of her soul and those of her loved ones”.44 Another full-page miniature shows the duke and duchess presenting the book to the Virgin and Christ Child.45 Two painted portraits of Henry and Matilda, the donation miniature and the coronation miniature, were therefore situated in close proximity to their double tomb. Interceding for the souls of their eminent founders, the canons at St Blaise would have turned from images of the couple’s pious donations and divine sanction for their rule, to the hoped-for resurrected bodies represented in their sculpted effigies.46 This encapsulates the intimate connection between double tombs and prayer.47 unidentified female figure. Jasperse, “Visualizing Dynastic Desire”, 156–57; Jitske Jasperse, “Matilda, Leonor and Joanna: The Plantagenet Sisters and the Display of Dynastic Connections through Material Culture”, Journal of Medieval History 43, no. 4 (2017): 527 –30. 42 Sponsus: coronaberis de capite amana de v(ertice) s(anir) (Song of Songs 4: 8); Sponsa: quasi sponsum deco[ra]vit me corona et qu[asi] (Isaiah 61: 10). Jasperse, “Visualizing Dynastic Desire”, 155–58. 43 Hoc opus auctoris par nobile iunxit amoris. Jasperse, “Visualizing Dynastic Desire”, 144. 44 Notum esse volumus universis fidelibus, tam presentibus quam futuris, quod karissima mater nostra Mehthildis felicis memorie Anglorum regis filia ducissa Saxonie pie devotionis spiritu inducta obsequium deo prestare volens altare sancte Marie, quod est in medio choro beati Blasii, ob salutarem et piam anime eius et carorum suorum memoriam instituit. Matilda’s role in the founding of the altar is suggested in a charter of 1223, issued by Henry and Matilda’s eldest son, which confirms earlier agreements about the use of the altar by a priest. Jitske Jasperse, “Matilda, Leonor and Joanna”, 531. 45 Jasperse, “Visualising Dynastic Desire”, 147–51; Luckhardt and Niehoff, Heinrich der Löwe, 1: 206–10. 46 Henry and Matilda are honoured in memorial registers as the fundator/fundatrix of St Blaise. Although the registers in question date from c. 1400, they almost certainly reflect older traditions. Luckhardt, “Grabmal”, 289. 47 Nigel Saul has argued that the main factor in bringing about the development of the double tomb was the desire to elicit intercessory prayers for two people, stating that, “if prayers were sought not only for the founder, but also for the spouse, it was only natural for the spouse to be shown on the tomb too”. The problem with drawing such a direct connection between tomb and chantry is that most double tombs represent spouses, whereas chantries were typically founded to intercede for a much wider social circle, including parents, children, friends and political allies. See English Church Monuments, 147.

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As churches filled with memorials, competition over the most prominent locations became ever more fierce. The most sought-after positions were in close proximity to altars, devotional images or relics, placing memorials at the intersection of prayers said by both priests and the faithful.48 Since founders were typically granted the honour of burial directly in front of the high altar, memorials like that belonging to Henry and Matilda allowed both effigies to occupy the same prestigious position. Beyond their role as a space-saving device, double tombs also encouraged particular forms of prayer. By presenting husband and wife side by side, these memorials prompted their audience to name both in their intercessions, giving voice to the relationship depicted before them. There was thus a connection between the framing of the effigies and the framing of intercessory prayer; to be commemorated together on earth was also to bind together the fates of two souls in Purgatory. In England the development of the double tomb followed a distinct trajectory. It was not until the 1370s, when the monument to Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1369), and his wife Katherine Mortimer (d. 1369) was erected at the church of St Mary in Warwick that the highest strata of the English nobility began to be commemorated by way of the double tomb.49 The earliest examples, dating from the start of the fourteenth century, are relatively modest monuments, either brasses or incised slabs, many of which were imported into the eastern counties of England from workshops in Bruges or Tournai.50 A significant proportion commemorate merchants (both English and foreign), almost certainly involved in the Hanseatic trade linking England, Flanders, Scandinavia and northern Germany, whose occupation would have exposed them to foreign fashions as well as providing them with the contacts necessary to source their memorial from further afield.51 One of the earliest examples is an incised slab of Tournai marble in the church of St Leodegar, Wyberton (Lincs.), commemorating the merchant Adam de Franton (d. 1325) and his wife Sibile: the effigies stand side by side with their hands clasped in prayer, their bodies framed by a double-arched canopy with four shields bearing merchants’ marks (Fig. 48 Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), 95–96. An instance of intense competition for burial before the high altar is discussed by James A. Cameron in “Competing for Dextro Cornu Magnum Altaris: Funerary Monuments and Liturgical Seating in English Churches”, in Adams and Barker, Revisiting the Monument, 137–54. 49 For a discussion of this monument, see chapter four. 50 Frank Greenhill recorded thirty-four surviving incised slabs of foreign manufacture in England (the majority dated c. 1325), of which twenty-two were joint memorials. H. K. Cameron lists eleven brasses in England that were imported from Tournai, made between c. 1349 and c. 1415. Aside from the five memorials to ecclesiastics, all are double tombs. See H. K. Cameron, “The Fourteenth-Century School of Flemish Brasses”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 11 (1970): 50–81; Frank A. Greenhill, Incised Effigial Slabs: A Study of Engraved Stone Memorials in Latin Christendom, 2 vols (London: Faber, 1976), 2: 1–29. 51 The only identifiable incised slab at Boston commemorates Wessel de Smalenburgh, citizen and merchant of Munster. Cockerham, “Incised Slab Commissions”, 79 –89, 97.

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12).52 Moreover, the church of St Botolph in Boston (Lincs.), one of England’s most important ports in the wool and cloth trade, houses a remarkable collection of twenty Tournai marble incised slabs (the majority dated to the second quarter of the fourteenth century), including fifteen double tombs.53 The cumulative visual impact of these monuments, clustered in the nave and almost identical in size, material and design, suggests that the merchants were seeking to define themselves as a distinctive social group. The unusual decision to be depicted alongside their wives was another marker of their shared identity.54 It would be misleading, however, to characterise the appearance of double tombs in England solely as a Continental import. Another cluster of early examples featured a cross (or multiple crosses), a design that was indebted to the cross slabs common to northern England in previous centuries. For instance, an early fourteenth-century brass, once located at Abbotsbury Abbey (Dorset), but now divided between Askerswell and Whitchurch Canonicorum, originally comprised two foliate (or “living”) crosses placed side by side to form a single monument, framed by an Anglo-Norman inscription in Lombardic lettering

12  TOMB SLAB OF ADAM AND SIBILE DE FRANTON, C.

52

1325, CHURCH OF

53

ST LEODEGAR,

Cockerham, “Incised Slab Commissions”, 75. Although Greenhill recorded twenty-three slabs in St Botolph, the most recent study by Cockerham identifies only twenty. Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham, “Catalogue of the Pre-Reformation Monuments of St Botolph’s Boston”, in “The Beste and Fayrest of al Lincolnshire”: The Church of St Botolph, Boston, Linconshire, and its Medieval Monuments, ed. Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham, BAR British Series 554 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), 198–219; Paul Cockerham, “Incised Slab Commissions in Fourteenth-Century Boston”, in Badham and Cockerham, “The Beste and Fayrest of al Lincolnshire”, 74 n4; Stephen Rigby, “Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration”, in Badham and Cockerham, “The Fayrest of al Lincolnshire”, 8–12. 54 See Cockerham, “Incised Slab Commissions”, 95.

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WYBERTON (LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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13  BRASS MEMORIAL TO THOMAS AND ELEANOR DE LUDA, C. 1310.

14  BRASS MEMORIAL TO JOHN

ORIGINALLY IN ABBOTSBURY ABBEY, DEXTER SLAB NOW IN THE TOWER AT

DE LEUKENORE AND WIFE, C.

ASKERSWELL AND SINISTER SLAB IN THE SOUTH AISLE AT WHITCHURCH

1335—50. DORCHESTER ABBEY

CANONICORUM (DORSET, ENGLAND).

(OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND).

commemorating Thomas de Luda and his wife Eleanor (Fig. 13).55 Although they are similar in appearance to the cross slabs previously mentioned, the treatment of the crosses on the Abbotsbury memorial is far closer to that of an effigy. The crosses on earlier slabs tend to sit on stepped bases, encouraging the viewer to understand them as perpendicular to the ground, whereas the Abbotsbury crosses oscillate between horizontality and verticality: the crosses terminate in bursts of foliage, suggesting their recumbence, while the micro-architectural canopies mimic those that crowned standing sculptures (compare to Fig. 5). Such axial ambiguity was a defining feature of effigies north of the Alps, which typically rested their head on a pillow but wore clothes that fell to their feet in vertical folds as if they were standing 55 Paul Binski, “The Stylistic Sequence of London Figure Brasses”, in Coales, Earliest English Brasses, 80; John Blair, “English Monumental Brasses Before 1350: Types, Patterns and Workshops”, in Coales, Earliest English Brasses, 145; Blair, “Summary List”, 185–86; William Lack, H. Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Dorsetshire (London: Monumental Brass Society, 2001), 1.

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upright.56 There was thus a functional correspondence between cross and effigy; the Abbotsbury crosses evoke the position, proportions and presence of the body of the deceased. This movement from symbolic to figural representation is taken a step further in a group of early fourteenth-century brass memorials that combine the cross with an image of the deceased. One of the earliest surviving examples is the memorial to John de Leukenore and his wife at Dorchester Abbey (Oxon.), probably made by the same London-based workshop responsible for the Abbotsbury brass (Fig. 14).57 It features near-identical foliate crosses and a marginal inscription in Lombardic lettering, but differs in its inclusion of two bust-length effigies, one male and one female, positioned directly above the crosses.58 Tilting the balance still further towards the image of the body, an early fourteenth-century brass commemorating Sir John and Helen Wantone in Wimbish (Essex) depicts the octofoil head of the cross enclosing the full-length, albeit miniature, effigies of a knight and lady (Fig. 15).59 By placing partial or diminutive effigies alongside the cross, these memorials make explicit what the Abbotsbury brass merely implies: that the cross itself should be understood as a marker for the presence of the body in the grave beneath. This sequence of memorial brasses speaks to the artistic innovation that characterised workshops producing funerary monuments in England prior to the Black Death. During the first half of the fourteenth century they copied, compiled and recombined motifs to produce a rich variety of memorial designs, including a number of striking and unusual double tombs. One unique example is a memorial slab in Bredon (Worcs.), carved with the bust-length figures of a man and woman resting on the arms of a Crucifix. Two doves ascend from Christ’s head to the effigies above (Fig. 16).60 The overall scheme thus recalls – albeit in radically different form – the iconography of the “Throne of Mercy” Trinity (or Gnadenstuhl), a

56 This orientational ambiguity is a theme Panofsky returns to repeatedly in Tomb Sculpture, 56–57 and passim. 57 Binski, “Stylistic Sequence”, 78–83; Blair, “Types, Patterns and Workshops”, 144–49; Blair, “Summary List”, 185–86, 205. On the basis of its canopies (unusual in that they spring from shafts forming the inside frame of the inscription course), Binski attributed the Abbotsbury brass to the “Camoys school”, a London-based workshop active between c. 1305 and c. 1335. He suggested that the Dorchester brass was made by a later iteration of the same workshop, or by competitors in London imitating the Camoys designs. 58 Binski, “Stylistic Sequence”, 80; Blair, “Types, Patterns and Workshops”, 145–46. It is notable that the Camoys workshop manufactured both cross brasses and effigial brasses (such as the memorial to Margaret de Camoys in Trotton, Sussex, c. 1310). 59 Binski, “Stylistic Sequence”, 119–21; Saul, “Commemoration of the War-Dead in Late Medieval England”, Monumental Brass Society 29, no. 5 (2018): 389–90. 60 Nigel Saul proposes that the memorial may have been commissioned for Sir Nicholas de Mitton, a local knight and administrator who died in c. 1290. “The Early 14th-Century Semi-Effigial Monument at Bredon (Worcestershire): Its Character, Affinities and Attribution”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 170 (2017): 73–79.

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15  BRASS MEMORIAL TO SIR JOHN AND HELEN WANTONE, C. 1347. CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS, WIMBISH (ESSEX, ENGLAND).

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16  TOMB SLAB OF AN ANONYMOUS COUPLE, FIRST QUARTER OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. CHURCH OF ST GILES, BREDON (WORCESTERSHIRE, ENGLAND.).

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17  TOMB SLAB OF JOHN DE HESLERTON AND MARGERY DE LOWTHORPE, C. 1333—50. CHURCH OF ST MARTIN, LOWTHORPE (YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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popular form of Trinitarian iconography in fourteenth-century England.61 Although in Trinitarian iconography the dove signifies the Holy Spirit, in other contexts it was sometimes used to represent the souls of the blessed, a symbolism that may explain the strange inclusion of the twin doves on the Bredon monument.62 These visual parallels between tomb and Trinity can be understood as part of a wider practice of appropriating compositional and iconographic devices from sacred subjects for the tombs of laymen. Another striking example from the same period is a double tomb from Lowthorpe (Yorks.), which adapts the iconography of the Tree of Jesse to present the recumbent effigies of husband and wife as the roots of a vine sprouting with the heads of their thirteen children (Fig. 17).63 There may have been more to these sacred appropriations than the acquisitive eye of the artist, however. As Isabel Davis has pointed out, the relationship between the Trinity and the conjugal family emerged as a prominent theme in the devotional and pastoral literature of fourteenth-century England: the union of husband, wife and child was described as a kind of “earthly Trinity”.64 Davis argues that the married laity enthusiastically 61 For a near-contemporary image of the Throne of Mercy, see the Neville of Hornby Hours, probably made in London in the second decade of the fourteenth century (London, British Library, MS Egerton 2781, fol. 72v). 62 Maria Grasso, “Imaging the Souls of the Blessed: Valenciennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 500, Saint Amand, and the Parable of Dives and Lazarus, c. 835–1275” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 2014), 142–48. 63 Jessica Barker, “Invention and Commemoration in Fourteenth-Century England: A Monumental ‘Family Tree’ at the Collegiate Church of St Martin, Lowthorpe”, Gesta 56, no. 1 (2017): 105–28. 64 See, for instance, a sermon for Trinity Sunday by the Augustinian canon John Mirk: “Adam was formed from the earth, the first person, and Eve of Adam, the second person, and from them both came a man, who was the third person. Thus the Trinity was found in man through the working of the high Trinity of Heaven. So that man might remember the

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adopted Trinitarian imagery because it offered a means of expressing the idea that their conjugal bond was part of their Christian faith, citing as evidence the prevalence of illuminations in Books of Hours that depict couples kneeling before the Throne of Mercy, as well as brass memorials that include images of the Trinity in the canopy framing the effigy.65 The monument at Bredon takes the Trinitarian analogy much further, however. Here the effigies are not merely juxtaposed with the Trinity but amalgamated with it to producing a literal image of the “earthly Trinity”. Innovative memorial designs were needed to picture new ideas surrounding marriage; the strange Trinitarian echoes at Bredon express the idea that the conjugal bond was an image of divine love. This unique monument highlights the inadequacy of positing a single explanation or grand narrative of teleological development to explain the emergence of the double tomb. Even taking the pattern of loss and destruction into account, it is impossible to fit the surviving memorials into a conventional pattern of artistic innovation, one in which new designs originate at courtly centres and then disperse outwards to the regions and downwards through the social spectrum. While some early double tombs did commemorate noblemen and their wives, such as Henry the Lion and Matilda Plantagenet, most belonged to members of the knightly class or the mercantile elite. There were a variety of reasons why a patron might decide to commission a double tomb. As we have seen, double tombs could be a means of prompting intercessory prayer for two people together, a way to express the deceased’s membership of a particular social group, a fashionable and aesthetically appealing funerary design, as well as an expression of new ideas regarding the sacred status of the conjugal bond. Neither was the production of double tombs ever the preserve of a single workshop, medium or artistic technique. In England, a number of the earliest double tombs were produced by the London-based brass workshops, whose output prior to the Black Death was characterised by innovative designs. Nevertheless, there were also a sizeable number of double tombs imported from the Low Countries, as well as outliers like the Bredon monument, carved from oolitic limestone and therefore probably a product of an undocumented workshop based at the Painswick quarries in Gloucestershire.66 Furthermore, the conjoining of two or more figures was a motif far more widespread than funerary sculpture. Double tombs were closely linked to images in other media, such as double ruler portraits in

Trinity, the Holy Church ordains that at the wedding of a man and a woman the mass of the Trinity should be sung.” John Mirk’s Festial, ed. Susan Powell, Early English Text Society O.S. 334 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009), 1: 151, lines 16–22; Isabel Davis “‘The Trinite is our Everlasting Lover’: Marriage and Trinitarian Love in the Later Middle Ages”, Speculum 86, no. 4 (2011): 914–63. 65 Davis, “Marriage and Trinitarian Love”, 935–36, 953–59. 66 Saul, “Early 14th-Century Semi-Effigial Monument at Bredon”, 63.

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illuminated manuscripts, while their designs sometimes drew inspiration from sacred iconographies, such as the Throne of Mercy and Tree of Jesse. What, then, are the broader tendencies that can be associated with emergence and growing popularity of the double tomb? As the cross slabs considered at the start of this section reveal, memorials commemorating more than one person were not an invention of the thirteenth century; rather, the novelty of the double tomb lay in placing two or more effigies side by side, an idealised reflection of their bodies lying together within the grave. Instead of being evoked through a human-sized cross, the man and woman were now represented through the image of two bodies. One way of understanding the development of the double tomb, therefore, is as a confluence of the fashion for effigies with the long-standing practice of joint burial, a form of interment that had hitherto been marked only by memorials with symbolic attributes. This is not to cast such a convergence as inevitable; the centuries-long gap between the first funerary effigies and the first memorials that place the figures of husband and wife side by side implies that the development and rapid popularity of double tombs was driven by religious, social and artistic shifts specific to the late thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth century. Prominent among these changes was the growing attention on the image of the body as signifier of selfhood. The so-called “origins of portraiture” tend to be located in the latter part of the fourteenth century. Indeed, this period saw a new interest in facial mimesis in court circles across Europe, a fashion in which funerary effigies, especially of kings and aristocrats, were among the first pioneers.67 While much debate has surrounded the significance of these veristic images as an expression of new notions of individual identity, less attention has been paid to the relationship between a desire to depict the particularities of exterior appearance and a concurrent interest in the texture of inner feeling. As we will see in chapter two, some of the earliest tomb monuments to exhibit an interest in facial mimesis also placed particular emphasis on the bond of affection between the deceased and their spouse. In this sense, a new specificity in bodily representation and a new interest in emotional and psychological character both sprang from the same impulse: as the commemoration of the deceased began to move away from representing them purely as members of their social and religious group and towards more particularised characteristics, so their physical

67 There is a vast literature on the origins of portraiture. For an overview and bibliography, see Mateusz Grzęda and Marek Walczak, “Reconsidering the Origins of Portraiture: Instead of an Introduction”, Journal of Art Historiography 17 (2017): 1–35; Stephen Perkinson, “Rethinking the Origins of Portraiture”, Gesta 46, no. 2 (2007): 135–58. For the impact of the new interest in physiognomy on tomb sculpture specifically, see Perkinson, Likeness of the King, passim.

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appearance and affective relationships became increasingly central to the tomb.68 Although this shift can be traced throughout the art and literature of this period, it acquired a particular potency in the context of funerary monuments, objects that defined the aspects of the person that were believed to hold enduring social and religious value. The emergence of the double tomb was entangled with the increasing personalisation of the funerary monument.69

BURIAL, MONUMENT AND THE TIME OF DEATH Double tombs are more than representations. The framing of the sculpted figures reflects – or purports to reflect – the framing of the two corpses, interred within the same tomb chest or the same vault beneath the monument. Their development was thus dependent on a relationship between burial, monument and church setting that was particular to Western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over the course of the Middle Ages, churches, monasteries and cathedrals filled with tombs as the wealthy increasingly chose to be buried inside the church, close to altars and the shrines of saints.70 Towards the end of the medieval period the corpse was relocated again, this time moving from burial within the monument itself to a vault nearby. Together these two changes put memorials in competition with an array of other images in the church interior, while also liberating them from the need to house a body, thereby encouraging patrons to commission monuments that were ever larger, more ornate and more performative. They also constituted the two essential characteristics of the funerary culture from which the double tomb emerged, and to which it was to contribute significantly. Intra-mural burial transformed both the design of funerary monuments and the interior of the church. Compared to the cemetery, interment within the church was expensive and potentially destructive; even small pavement memorials altered the fabric of the building. Obtaining the most prestigious places of burial was thus an onerous endeavour, requiring the patron or their executors to secure the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities and the labour of skilled masons. One of the best-documented examples is the 68 For an overview of the wider cultural phenomenon sometimes termed “the birth of the individual”, see Georges Duby and Philippe Braunstein, “The Emergence of the Individual”, in A History of Private Life, vol. 2 Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 507–632. 69 Binski picks up on this connection in Medieval Death (105–06), when he notes that tomb monuments became more “personalised” during the fourteenth century, a trend that he attributes to “a confluence of various elements – portraiture, devotional imagery, and ‘affective’ elements tied to the idea of the family”. 70 Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 97–101; Binski, Medieval Death, 11; Nigel Saul, Lordship and Faith: The English Gentry and the Parish Church in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 161–83.

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interment of Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence on 25 September 1421, which was preceded by prolonged negotiations between his servants and the archbishop regarding the location of his burial in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral. Even with an agreement having been reached, it took the London mason John Warlowe and five assistants two days to complete the delicate task of excavating Clarence’s grave out of the fill above the vault of the Trinity Chapel crypt.71 Adjacent to the shrine of St Thomas Becket, Clarence’s tomb occupied one of the most sacred spaces in Western Christendom.72 As this example reveals, the influx of memorials lent the laity an enduring presence in areas of the church where access was usually controlled, and at times denied altogether.73 For instance, Cistercian legislation from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries relaxed the general rule against the burial of laywomen in their cemeteries to allow two “friends” of each monastery to be interred with their wives.74 Double tombs later contributed to the increasing prominence of female effigies within the church itself, enabling women to secure the most prestigious areas for burial alongside their husbands. As well as increasing the visibility of images of women in the space of the church, double tombs displayed images of men and women side by side within areas of the building where the genders may typically have been segregated. Although a paucity of documentary evidence, along with the problem of knowing how far prescriptions were followed in practice, makes it difficult to recover the usual procedures regarding gender segregation within ecclesiastical space during the Middle Ages, longitudinal segregation (north for women, south for men) or latitudinal segregation (west for women, east for men) often structured the arrangement of the laity in the nave, in liturgical processions and in the representation of

71 Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 627–28, 679–80. See also Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 95–96; Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 504n232. 72 Clarence asked to be buried at the feet of his father, Henry IV, meaning that his grave must have occupied the northeast bay of the Trinity Chapel. For a detailed discussion of the location of Clarence’s grave, see chapter three. 73 The question of lay access to the chancel is complicated both by the gulf between regulation and practice, and by the variation between different churches. As James Cameron points out, the decretals of Gregory IX (compiled 1291) legislate against lay access to the chancel during Mass, but not at other times. Exceptions seem to have been made routinely for founders and holders of the advowson. Yet there were clearly those who wanted to enter the east end and were prevented from doing so: episcopal visitations (such as one made to Chichester Cathedral in 1481) attest to the (almost violent) desire of the laity to gain access to the choir during Mass, which necessitated the barring of the doors in the pulpitum. See James A. Cameron, “Sedilia in Medieval England” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 2015), 191–92; Statutes and Constitutions of the Cathedral Church of Chichester, ed. by F. G. Bennett, R. H. Codrington and C. Deedes (Chichester: Charles Knight, 1904), 18. 74 Jackie Hall, “The Legislative Background to Lay Burial”, in Sepulturae Cistercienses: Burial, Memorial and Patronage in Medieval Cistercian Monasteries, ed. Jackie Hall and Christine Kratzke, Special Issue, Cîteaux, 56 (2005): 365–66.

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donors on altarpieces and other artworks within the church building.75 In a space, therefore, where married men and women might expect to be separated, double tombs carried a counter-image, proclaiming the corporeal unity of husband and wife. Once monuments moved inside the church, the issue also arose as to whether the body should be interred inside the memorial itself, or in a vault excavated below the pavement. In his account of the development of the tomb as a sculptural category, Panofsky characterised the relationship between tomb and body as one of the definitive distinctions between Classical sarcophagi and medieval monuments: whereas the shape of sarcophagi was ultimately derived from their function as a container for the body, Panofsky claimed that medieval tomb chests (or tumba) were conceived as plinths for displaying the effigy, their shape resulting from “the spontaneous expansion of a figure originally flat and flush with the pavement, and its subsequent elevation”.76 As Panofsky points out, the apparent visual similarity between classical and medieval monuments belies their very different constructions: sarcophagi were made from a single block of stone hollowed out to receive a body (with a separate lid), while tomb chests were typically assembled from several thin panels of stone, the centre filled with rubble to support the effigy above.77 Yet these differences did not mean that medieval tomb chests never housed a body; the process by which the tomb was emptied of its corpse was longer and more piecemeal than Panofsky suggests.78 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it remained common for the corpse to be interred within the tomb chest itself. For instance, the lead-shrouded corpse of Blanche Mortimer (d. 1347) is interred within the tomb chest of her memorial at Much Marcle, Herefordshire, resting above the pavement of the church on a rough shelf of rubble and earth.79 This arrangement accords with the records of excavations of medieval tombs carried out in the eight75 Corine Schlief, “Men on the Left, Women on the Right: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places”, in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place, and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 225–26. 76 Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, 24, 53. 77 Jane Crease, “‘Not Commonly Reputed or Taken for a Saincte’: The Output of a Northern Workshop in the Late Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries”, in Sally Badham and Sophie Oosterwijk, eds, Monumental Industry: The Production of Tomb Monuments in England and Wales in the Long Fourteenth Century (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 137. See also Pauline Routh and Richard Knowles, The Medieval Monuments at Harewood (Wakefield: Wakefield Historical Publications, 1983), 62–66. 78 For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the corpse and tomb chest, see Jessica Barker, “Stone and Bone: The Corpse, the Effigy and the Viewer in Late-Medieval Tomb Sculpture”, in Revisiting the Monument: Fifty Years Since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture, ed. Jessica Barker and Ann Adams (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2016), 113–36. 79 Blanche’s corpse was discovered unexpectedly during conservation work on the monument, carried out between 2012 and 2014. Sally Badham, “‘What Lies Beneath’: A Discovery at Much Marcle (Herefordshire)”, Newsletter of the Church Monuments Society 29, no. 2 (2014): 16–18.

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eenth and nineteenth centuries.80 An article published in Archaeologia in 1880 describes how the monument to Henry III (d. 1272) in the Confessor’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey was found to contain an oak coffin covered with cloth of gold, its lid approximately 1 foot (30.5 centimetres) below the marble bed supporting the gilt-bronze effigy.81 Furthermore, in his Notes on Holbeach Church, written in 1890, the antiquary Henry Peet referred to the opening of the tomb of Sir Humphrey de Littlebury (d. 1339) “some years ago”, insisting that the knight “was not buried beneath the floor of the church, but within this tomb, and his bones still repose beneath his effigy”.82 Since only a handful of intra-mural tombs from the Middle Ages have been opened (or at least only a handful of openings of intra-mural tombs have been recorded), evidence for burial practices is limited.83 Yet, in cases where the imperatives of conservation or the interests of antiquaries have prompted such investigations, a broad pattern emerges: monuments from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are frequently found to contain bodies, whereas those made after this date usually do not. In England the growing popularity of the double tomb and the emptying of the tomb chest both occurred towards the end of the fourteenth century. This coincidence was far from accidental. Double tombs added another layer of complexity to the process of interment; it was common for these monuments to be erected following the death of the first spouse, meaning that the vault or tomb chest would need to be reopened at a later date to accommodate their husband or wife. Some testators even designed their memorials in anticipation of the interment of additional bodies. In a codicil to his will dated 20 May 1427, Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, ordered 80 An initial survey revealed ten excavation accounts related to surviving medieval tombs in England, of which eight record the presence of a body within the tomb chest. These excavation accounts relate to: the memorial of John Fitzalan, seventh earl of Arundel at the Fitzalan Chapel in Arundel; the monument to Henry IV and Joan of Navarre at Canterbury Cathedral; the monument to Hugh III Despenser and Elizabeth Montacute at Tewkesbury Abbey; the monument to Edward I at Westminster Abbey; the monument of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia at Westminster Abbey; an anonymous late thirteenth-century tomb chest at Westminster Abbey; and the tomb of King John at Worcester Cathedral. The two exceptions are the Arundel and Tewkesbury monuments. The excavation documents for the Canterbury monument record a mixed burial, one body within the tomb chest (Joan of Navarre) and one in a vault (Henry IV). 81 Arthur P. Stanley, “On an Examination of the Tombs of Richard II and Henry III”, Archaeologia 45 (1880): 318–21. See also Mark Duffy, Royal Tombs of Medieval England (Stroud: Tempus, 2003), 74–79. 82 Julian Luxford suggests the opening of the tomb occurred in c. 1870, when the incumbent of the church paid for the monument to be reoriented. Henry Peet, Notes on Holbeach Church (Holbeach, 1890), 24. See also Julian Luxford, “The Tomb of Sir Humphrey de Littlebury at All Saints, Holbeach”, in King’s Lynn and the Fens” Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology, ed. John McNeill. British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 31 (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2008), 152, 164, 168 nn. 21, 23. 83 New technologies offer the opportunity to gain a broader view of burial practices in the Middle Ages. For instance, recent endoscopic investigations revealed that the tomb of Frederick III (d. 1493) in St Stephansdom, Vienna (Austria) housed the body of the emperor – dressed in his imperial finery – inside its Salzburg-marble tomb chest.

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a monument within a newly built chapel at Bisham Priory (Berkshire), instructing that the tomb should contain three separate compartments: one for himself, one for his deceased wife, Eleanor Holland (d. 1418), and one for his “beloved” widow Alice Chaucer (d. 1475), “if she so chooses”.84 The need to reopen the tomb at a later date altered the material relationship between effigy and corpse. For single tombs, erected soon after the death of the commemorated, building the tomb chest around the coffin was a fairly straightforward endeavour. For double tombs, interring another body within the tomb chest required disassembling the memorial, with all the attendant risks to both monument and corpse. A contract for a memorial to an unknown earl and countess, also at Bisham Priory, hints at the patron’s anxieties regarding the possible harm inflicted on the corpse during interment, instructing the mason Robert Broun to make a “fosse” [grave or pit] for two bodies, complete with stone arches to support the monument above: And the said grave shall be nine foot long, four and a half foot wide and five foot deep, for placing and interring therein two bodies when the need shall arise, without damage or harm from the same tomb.85

Burial in a vault, as described in the Bisham contract, allowed another body to be interred with minimal alteration to the monument, while also avoiding the need to manoeuvre the corpse into the relatively small cavity within the tomb chest. All that was required was for the pavement adjacent to the memorial to be lifted and the second corpse simply lowered into place. The practical requirements of double monuments thus encouraged burial in a vault rather than the tomb chest. This shift did not necessarily affect the appearance of the tomb, but it did involve a fundamental rethinking of its purpose. As Panofsky points out, when the tomb chest no longer houses the corpse but instead acts as a plinth for the effigy, the emphasis of 84 In cuius medio tumbam fieri volumus de quatuor pedum altitudine continentem tria loca distincta, quorum medius locus altior erit aliis duobus per medietatem unius pedis in quo corpus nostrum volumus inhumari. Et ex uno latere nostro reponi volumus corpus domine Alianore quondam predilecte consortis nostre defuncte. Ex altero vero latere nostro sepelliri volumus, si voluerit, corpus domine Alicie dilectissime uxoris nostre. London, Lambeth Palace Library, Register Chichele, 1, fols 406–408v. Printed in E. F. Jacob, ed., The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1414–1443, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 397. See also Mark Duffy, “Two Fifteenth-Century Effigies in Burghfield Church and the Montagu Mausoleum at Bisham (Berkshire)”, Church Monuments 25 (2010): 72. 85 Et le dit Robert ferra la fosse en la terre la foute & les costes de pere sette ove les arches de pere pur suys metre la dite tumbe. Et serra la dite fosse de longure noef pees & de lacure quatre pees demi et en profund v pees pur dedeins mettre & enceveller deux corps quant mestier serra saunz bruyser ou empeirement de mesme la tumbe. “Contract for a Tomb Chest at Bisham Abbey, 1421”, London, The National Archives: PRO CP 40/729 m. 287d. Transcribed and translated in Sally Badham and Sophie Oosterwijk, “‘Cest Endenture Fait Parentre’: English Tomb Contracts of the Long Fourteenth Century”, in Badham and Oosterwijk, eds, Monumental Industry, 229–31.

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the monument moves away from concealment and towards display, away from the corpse of the deceased and towards its sculptural counterpart.86 As well as encouraging a material distancing of corpse and effigy, double tombs also prompted an increasingly complex relationship between the monument and the moment of death. It was not uncommon for double tombs commissioned after the demise of the first spouse to stand in the church for decades before the internment of their husband or wife. In such cases, the surviving spouse would have been able to look upon their own effigy lying next to that of their husband or wife in the knowledge that their body would one day be interred alongside theirs. As well as substituting for an absent person, the effigy became a double for the living: in the words of Nigel Saul, “while the dead person was made to look alive, the living person was made to look dead”.87 By telescoping the distance between the living and the dead, double tombs allowed husband and wife to be “present” together. They became the focal point for a continuing relationship between the spouses: an image of past unity and a future reunion in the grave. One of the best-documented examples of the relationship between monument and bereaved spouse is the tomb of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399) and his first wife Blanche (d. 1368) in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, made between 1374 and 1380.88 Although the cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, seventeenth-century drawings and descriptions reveal that the memorial originally stood on the north side of the choir next to the high altar and featured alabaster effigies of the duke and duchess holding hands (Fig. 18).89 In the nineteen years between the completion of his tomb and his death, Gaunt encountered the effigies of himself and his wife many times. The duke would almost certainly have attended the anniversary observances for Blanche at St Paul’s in the years when he was in England, celebrations on which he spent significant, albeit declining, sums throughout his lifetime.90 Gaunt also visited the cathedral in 1381, attending a special mass to mark his reconciliation with the citizens of London during which the mayor and aldermen of the city joined him in prayers for Blanche’s soul.91 The duke again demonstrated his allegiance to Blanche on 13 December 1389, when his ceremonial welcome at Westminster Abbey after three years overseas Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture, 24, 53. Saul, English Church Monuments, 147. 88 Oliver Harris, “‘Une tresriche sepulture’: The Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster in Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London”, Church Monuments 25 (2010): 7–35. 89 Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 13–16. 90 The cost of Blanche’s anniversary celebrations were £38 18s 0d in 1371; £37 9s 8¾d in 1372; £45 4s 10½d in 1374; £27 14s 8d in 1377; £19 19s 6d in 1380; and £10 in 1392 and 1394. N. B. Lewis, “The Anniversary Service for Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, 12th September, 1374”, Bulletin of John Rylands Library 21 (1937): 178. 91 The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333–1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), 156. See also Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 10. 86 87

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18  WILLIAM SEDGWICK, DRAWING OF THE MONUMENT TO JOHN OF GAUNT AND BLANCHE OF LANCASTER IN ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, JUNE 1641. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY ADDITIONAL MS 71474, FOL. 183.

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was immediately followed by more private observances at St Paul’s.92 During these visits Gaunt was able to contemplate his own effigy alongside that of his long-deceased wife, collapsing the boundary between the living and dead spouse. It was also an image of corporeal unity that seemingly denied his two subsequent marriages, the first of which, to Constanza of Castile (d. 1394), was contracted before work on his tomb with Blanche had even begun. During these anniversary services the canons of St Paul’s, the paupers paid to stand around the tomb and the noble guests of the duke would have been confronted with the uncanny sight of Gaunt approaching his own alabaster effigy.93 In the words of Binski, the duke would have “emerged eerily as his own revenant”.94 This doubling of Gaunt – body and effigy – as he stood beside his monument would have drawn further attention to Blanche’s absence; the presence of the duchess next to her husband now existed only in sculpted representation. After standing in St Paul’s for almost two decades, the function of this monument shifted following Gaunt’s death on 3 February 1399. The tomb now marked the burial of the duke as well as the duchess: in his will, dated 3 February 1398,95 Gaunt requests to be interred “near the high altar … beside my beloved former consort Blanche [who is] buried there”.96 There was a lavish funeral to mark the duke’s interment, during which his corpse was surrounded by twenty-five large candles, the hearse standing overnight in close proximity to his monument.97 Now commemorating two burials rather than one, the interment of the duke allowed a familiar monument to acquire new resonances. This shift is described by the chronicler Jean Creton in his account of the usurpation of Richard II, written between 1399

92 The Westminster Chronicle, ed. and trans. L. F. Hector and Barbara Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 408–09. See also Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 10. 93 Records of payments for the anniversary service in September 1374 include gowns for the twenty-four poor men paid to stand around the tomb with torches, as well as a boatman’s fee for Lord Poynings and his wife, who attended the ceremonies at the duke’s expense. Sydney Armitage-Smith, ed., John of Gaunt’s Register, vol. 2 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1911), 1585, pp. 269–71; Lewis, “Anniversary Service”, 187, 190. 94 Binski uses this phrase to describe the experience of witnessing Archbishop Henry Chichele contemplate his own tomb at Canterbury Cathedral. Binski, Medieval Death, 144. 95 In the will the date is recorded as le tierz jour de Feverer l’an du grace mil trois centz quatre vintz dis et eyt. However, J. B. Post points out that the notarial subscription indicates that the date was actually 3 February 1399. J. B. Post, “The Obsequies of John of Gaunt”, Guildhall Studies in London History 5 (1981): 2. 96 En primes je devise ma alme a Dieu, et a sa tre douce mere Sainte Marie a la joi du ciel, et mon corps a estre ensevelez en l’esglise Cathedrale de Saint Poal de Londres, pres de l’autier principals de mesme l’esglise, juxte ma treschere jadis compaigne Blanche illocques enterree. Testamenta Eboracensia: A Selection of Wills From the Registry at York, vol. 1 (London: J. B. Nichols and Sons, 1836), 224. See also Post, “Obsequies”, 2. 97 The duke stipulated that these candles were to be arranged in symbolic numbers: ten for the broken commandments, seven for the neglected works of charity and the seven deadly sins, five for the wounds of Christ and the five abused senses, and three for the Trinity. Testamenta Eboracensia, 224–25; Post, “Obsequies”, 4.

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and 1402.98 Recounting Henry IV’s first visit to St Paul’s after returning from exile to seize the throne of England, Creton notes that Henry approached the high altar to pray and afterwards passed by the monument to his parents, Gaunt and Blanche.99 The sight of the tomb, which Creton terms une très riche sépulture (a very rich monument), provoked a tearful response from the soon-to-be king: “He wept very much, for he had never seen it [the monument] since his father had been laid there.”100 Regardless of whether Creton (a member of Richard II’s entourage at this point) witnessed the encounter or it was merely an imaginative embellishment to his account, the description offers an intriguing insight into how the knowledge of a recent interment might reshape the way in which relatives, friends and other onlookers responded to tombs. The passage makes it clear that Henry’s tearful reaction was prompted by the sight of the tomb (as indicated by the verb veue), yet there would have been almost no visible sign that the tomb now marked Gaunt’s burial, save for the duke’s armorial achievements hanging on the north side of one of the piers flanking the monument and his date of death added to the inscription.101 Exiled in France, Henry had also been prevented from attending his father’s funeral obsequies and so had not witnessed Gaunt’s corpse enshrined within its magnificent hearse in the centre of the choir. Creton’s account thus describes a purely imaginative connection between effigy and corpse: Henry IV saw the sculpted figures of his parents with the knowledge that they now marked the burial of his father as well as his mother, prompting a new outpouring of grief in the presence of the tomb. Women also commissioned double tombs, meaning that they too could be both patron and viewer of their own monument. A brass memorial at the church of St Mary, Childrey (Berks.) commemorates the heiress Elizabeth de Chelrey (d. 1463–64) and her second husband William Fynderne (d. 1444) (Fig. 19).102 Its heraldry and inscriptions suggest that Elizabeth was the patron.103 Particularly revealing in this regard are the references to her first 98 J. J. N. Palmer, “Creton, Jean (fl. 1386–1420)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/50197. 99 A. L. Brown and Henry Summerson, “Henry IV [known as Henry Bolingbroke] (1367–1413)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/12951. 100 Après retorna par le tumbel de son père, qui est assez près dudit autel. Et sachiez que c’est une très riche sépulture. Là ploura-il moult fort, car il ne l’avoit veue depuis que son père y avoit esté mis. Jean Creton, “Histoire du roy d’Angleterre Richard”, in J. A. C. Buchon, ed., Collection des chroniques nationales françaises, vol. 14 (Paris: Verdière, 1826), 418. For a translation see John Webb, “Translation of a French Metrical History of the Deposition of King Richard the Second”, Archaeologia 20 (1824): 181. 101 See Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 17–18, 20–21. 102 Reinhard Lamp, “William Fynderne, d. 1444 & Wife Elizabeth Kyngeston – Childrey, St Mary’s, Berkshire”, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift 11, no. 1 (2011): 157–71; William H. Lack, Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Berkshire (London: Monumental Brass Society, 1993), 34. 103 Another sign of Elizabeth’s involvement is the decision to locate the brass at Childrey, where she had held share of the advowson of the parish church since the death of her father

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19  DETAIL OF THE BRASS MEMORIAL TO WILLIAM FYNDERNE AND ELIZABETH DE CHELREY, C. 1444. CHURCH OF ST MARY, CHILDREY (OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND).

husband, Sir John Kyngeston: the central escutcheon bears the arms of Fynderne impaling Kyngeston and Chelrey quarterly; Elizabeth’s effigy wears a gown emblazoned with Kyngeston impaling Chelrey; and the inscription at the feet of the figures describes her as “Dame Elizabeth, his [Fynderne’s] wife, and formerly wife to Sir John Kyngeston”.104 The horned headdress of the female effigy and the bowl crop hairstyle of the knight belong to the in 1407. William Page and P. H. Ditchfield (eds), assisted by John Hautenwille Cope, The Victoria History of the County of Berkshire, vol. 4 (London: St Catherine Press, 1924), 279. 104 Domina Elizabeth, uxor eius, et quondam uxor domini Johannis Kyng[eston]. Lamp, “Childrey, St Mary’s”, 162.

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1440s, soon after John’s death.105 This means that for almost twenty years Elizabeth de Chelrey would have been able to gaze upon her effigy lying next to that of her deceased husband in the knowledge that the memorial would one day mark her own grave. Like the tomb of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, the brass at Childrey collapsed the boundary between the past and future, telescoping time in order to show the living and dead spouse side by side. A second inscription in Latin verse, running around the margin of the memorial slab, dwells on the companionship of Elizabeth and William’s corpses in the tomb: What an outstanding, learned and also truthful wife had Fate looked out for him / Elizabeth Kyngeston; here she has her ultimate low abode / One and the same armoured cavern has admitted them both, this stone has pushed them down / This huge marble … May God have pity on them / The slab covers their bones – which may be a daily / Reminder here of their souls now and forever.106

The unusual poeticism of this inscription relies on the evocation of the grave to prompt the sympathies – and prayers – of passers-by: the bones of Elizabeth and William are “covered” (tegit) and “pressed down” (relisit) by the stone covering their grave. As Reinhard Lamp has pointed out, the use of the word thorax to describe the tomb is particularly evocative: a word that usually denotes an armoured breastplate, with all its protective associations, instead becomes a means of conjuring the claustrophobia of interment.107 It is the union of the couple’s bodies in the grave that the epitaph is primarily concerned with, not the companionship of the past marriage, nor even a hoped-for reunion in heaven.108 Yet at the time these verses were engraved Elizabeth was still alive; the description of the spouses’ union in the tomb is contradicted by the gaps left for Elizabeth’s date of death in the prose inscription below the feet of the effigies.109

105 See, for instance, the near-identical effigies on the brass to Sir Hugh Halsam and his wife Joyce in West Grinstead, Sussex (dating from c. 1441), and the brass to Sir William Etchyngham, his wife Joan and son Sir Thomas in Etchingham, Sussex (dating from c. 1444). Norris, Portfolio Plates, figs 166 and 167. 106 Quam sponsarat heram claram, doctam quoque veram / Kyngeston Elizabeth; hic locum imum habet. / Quos thorax admisit unus, lapis iste relisit / Grandis marmoreus…His miserere deus! / Ossa tegit plana petra – quod sit quotidiana / Hic in perpetuum mentio spirituum! Lamp, “Childrey, St Mary’s”, 164. 107 Lamp, “Childrey, St Mary’s”, 169. 108 Ramie Targoff identifies this “third category” of companionship (neither prospective, nor retrospective, but focused on the grave) in a series of epitaphs from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but argues that its emergence was connected to the Reformation, a claim that this epitaph certainly places into question. Ramie Targoff, “Burying Romeo and Juliet: Love After Death in the English Renaissance”, in Love After Death: Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Berhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 147–66. 109 Lamp, “Childrey, St Mary’s”, 162.

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The abject condition of the two corpses evoked in these verses is also contradicted by the appearance of the effigies; the two figures are cut from gilded copper-alloy, shimmering in the light of the chancel windows, their heraldic garb celebrating their status and lineage. It is notable that, while other memorials made after the death of the husband depict the female effigy in the veil and barbe of a widow (including the brass to John Browne and Agnes Stokes we encountered earlier), the brass at Childrey presents Elizabeth in the attire of a wife. Gazing at her own memorial, Elizabeth would have been presented with two versions of spousal unity: the effigies pictured her past as a wife, while the inscription described her future as a corpse lying in the same grave as her husband. Neither depicted nor described was Elizabeth’s widowhood, her identity for nearly twenty years following the erection of the tomb. Collapsing past and future, the double tomb at Childrey effectively erased the singleness of Elizabeth’s present. An alternative response to the problem of interring two bodies was to erect the memorial after the deaths of both spouses, meaning that one – or both – of the deceased may have been interred many years before their burial was marked by a monument. Whereas John of Gaunt commissioned his tomb twenty-five years before his death, his daughter waited nineteen years for the burial of her body to be marked by a monument. The tomb of Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415) and her husband, King João I of Portugal (d. 1433), situated within the Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória in Batalha (Portugal), was complete by 14 August 1434 (Fig. 42).110 It is first mentioned in a will made by João on 4 October 1426, in which the king asks to be buried at Batalha with his late wife Philippa, their bodies “lying together in that monument, made as I have ordered”.111 In this testament João is more concerned to specify the disposition of the two corpses than the arrangement of their effigies, going so far as to describe how the bones of himself and his wife should be placed in separate coffins but within the same tomb.112 The memorial comprises two richly carved effigies of the king and queen lying atop a massive limestone tomb chest supported by eight lions.113 At eye 110 The tomb must have been complete by the time of the reburial of the king and queen, recorded in the inscription on the monument as taking place on 14 August 1434. For Batalha, see Jessica Barker, “Frustrated Seeing: Scale, Visibility and a Fifteenth-Century Portuguese Royal Monument”, Art History 41, no. 2 (2018): 220–45; José da Silva and Pedro Redol, The Monastery of Batalha (London: Scala, 2007). 111 Item mandamos que noso corpo se lamçe no Moesteiro de Samta Maria da Vitoria, que nos mandamos fazer com a rrainha dona Felipa, mynha molher, a que Deus acreçente em sua glorya, em que ella jaaz….jaçamos ambos em huum moymento, asy como o nos mandamos fazer. Saul A. Gomes, Fontes Históricas e Artísticas do Mosteiro e da Vila da Batalha: séculos XIV a XVII, vol. 1, 1388–1450 (Lisbon: Instituto português do património arquitectónico, 2002), doc. 52, 134–35. 112 nom com os seus ossos della, mas em huum ataude. Gomes, Fontes Históricas, doc. 52, 135. 113 The original height of the tomb chest would have been around 20 centimetres less. The level of the floor was lowered by the removal in the nineteenth century of a platform that

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level the view of the monument is dominated by lengthy Latin inscriptions, carved and painted in ornate Gothic textualis script on each long side of the tomb chest, João’s epitaph below his effigy and Philippa’s below hers.114 The epitaphs are remarkable for their meticulous description of the fate of João and Philippa’s bodies after death, detailing Philippa’s initial burial in the nuns’ choir of the female Cistercian monastery at Odivelas near Lisbon on 19 July 1415, the subsequent exhumation of her body on 9 October 1416, its procession and reburial in the southernmost apse of the conventual church at Batalha on 15 October 1416, the interment of João beside his queen on 30 November 1433, and the final exhumation of the royal couple and their reburial in João’s funerary chapel on 14 August 1434.115 This extended account of burials, exhumations and reburials encourages the reader-viewer to imagine the bodies of the king and queen as they gaze upon their tomb, a prompt for the same imaginative juxtaposition of corpse and effigy implied by Creton in his account of Henry IV’s reaction to the tomb of his parents. Philippa’s epitaph on the south side of the tomb chest ends by noting that her corpse is now “concealed in this tomb with the body of the most glorious King Dom João, her most virtuous spouse”.116 By employing the word “in” (em/in) rather than “below”, the epitaph implies that the corpses of the royal couple were interred within the tomb chest, a form of burial made possible by the fact that the monument was erected after both spouses’ demise.117 The implied counterpoint to the marital unity “concealed” (reconditum) in the tomb is the one displayed atop the tomb chest, where the effigies of the royal couple are represented holding hands. A sculpted reflection of corporeal reunion, the monument at Batalha is presented as the apogee of the long iterations of the corpses of the royal couple. It is notable that only this final interment – the reburial of the couple’s bodies side by side – is recorded as taking place on the vigil of the Assumption of the Virgin (14 August), the day associated with João’s divinely aided victories at Aljubarrota and Ceuta. Rather than the dates of João or Philippa’s individual deaths, it is the elevated the central octagon of the Founder’s Chapel above the surrounding ambulatory. Begoña F. Torras, “Brotherly Love and Filial Obedience: The Commemorative Programme of the Avis Princes at Santa Maria de Vitória, Batalha” (master’s thesis, University of Lisbon, 2014), 18, 28. 114 For a translation and transcription of the epitaphs, accompanied by a commentary, see Jessica Barker, “The Sculpted Epitaph”, The Sculpture Journal 26, no. 2 (2017): 235–48; Jessica Barker, “Transcription and Translation of the Epitaph of João I and Philippa of Lancaster, King and Queen of Portugal”, The Sculpture Journal 26, no. 2 (2017): 249–59. 115 The queen’s first burial at Batalha is marked by a (very damaged) Latin verse epitaph set into the west wall of the south transept. Saul A. Gomes and António M. Rebelo, “O primeiro epitáfio latino de d. filipa de lencastre no mosteiro de batalha”, Leira-Fátima, órgão oficial da diocese 46 (2008): 177–92. 116 In this and all subsequent references relating to the epitaph the line numbers for the Latin transcription are given first, with those for the English translation following in brackets. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, lines 77–79 [91–92]. 117 Although no excavations of the Chapel have been recorded, it is notable that João’s will of 1426 also employs “em” (in) to refer to the position of the king’s body in relation to the tomb. Gomes, Fontes Históricas, doc. 52, 135.

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reunion of the couple’s corpses that is presented as the principal commemorative moment. The messages of the monument were amplified by performance. According to the epitaph, the entire royal family, as well as “the most eminent and powerful part of the prelates, lords and nobles of this land”, were present in the Chapel for the final translation of João and Philippa’s bodies to the Founder’s Chapel.118 Large gatherings such as this would have been repeated at least once a year: it was common practice in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the anniversaries of royal and aristocratic funerals to be marked by the public distribution of alms, large-scale processions and elaborate liturgical rites, attended by friends and relatives of the deceased.119 The epitaph includes no fewer than four references to the vigil of the Assumption of the Virgin on 14 August (the date of João’s death and the burial of the royal couple in the Founder’s Chapel), suggesting that the text was intended for public oration as well as private contemplation, perhaps read aloud as part of the anniversary ceremonies prescribed in the king’s will.120 Represented, inscribed and repeatedly performed, the commemorative programme of the Founder’s Chapel narrated the iterations of the bodies of the royal couple and their ultimate reunion in the grave. If the basic function of a tomb was to mark the moment of death and the place of interment, the monument at Batalha elaborates this idea by evoking a multiplicity of dates and locations. The practical requirements of double tombs made it more difficult to synchronise the burial of the corpse and the making of the monument. At St Paul’s and Childrey, the erection of the tomb in anticipation of their demise meant that the bereaved could gaze upon their own effigy lying alongside that of their deceased spouse, a representation of the unity that had been and was to come. At Batalha, the memorial representing the couple lying side by side was erected to coincide with the reburial of their bodies in adjacent coffins. In different ways, therefore, double tombs encouraged the distancing of corpse and effigy. This loosening of ties related to both their material relationship, with the corpse now displaced from within the tomb chest to a vault beneath the monument, and their temporal relationship, since effigies might now be erected many years before or after the interment of the corpse. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, lines 170–76 [183–89]. Among the best-documented examples of this practice are the elaborate ceremonies accompanying the anniversaries of Philippa’s mother, Blanche of Lancaster, at the cathedral of St Paul’s in London, recorded in the account books of her father, John of Gaunt. See Lewis, “Anniversary Service”, 176–92. 120 14 August would have been the height of the commemorative rituals in the Founder’s Chapel as it was the only date when the friars would have been required to perform all the prayers and masses prescribed for the anniversaries of the king and queen’s funerals, as well as the additional trimtayro (“month’s mind”) – involving monks from Alcobaça and other visitors to the monastery – prescribed for the anniversaries of the king and queen’s deaths. Gomes, Fontes históricas, doc. 52, p. 137. See also Soares and Redol, Places of Prayer, 77–78. 118

119

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This is not to say that double tombs were the only form of memorial that encouraged or made use of a more complex relationship between sculpted and natural bodies. One of the most famous examples is the transi tomb, which represents the deceased both as a rotting cadaver and as an idealised body replete with markers of wealth and status.121 The construction of the transi tomb necessitated the dislocation of the corpse to a vault below the tomb chest, while its design played upon anxieties regarding the ability of the sculpted effigy to represent the “true” state of the deceased. Transi tombs first appeared among the courtly elites of France and England at the end of the fourteenth century, the same time as double tombs were reaching new heights of popularity in these regions. One of the earliest was the tomb of Archbishop Henry Chichele, who died in 1446 but whose monument was complete by 1426.122 With his monument situated opposite his archiepiscopal throne in Canterbury Cathedral, Chichele would have been able to contemplate his own multiple representations during his lifetime, evoking a sensation analogous to a modern-day hall of mirrors.123 My purpose in comparing the double tomb to the transi tomb is to throw the radical character of the former into relief. The transi has long been recognised as a fundamental rethinking of the funerary monument: in the words of Binski, it was a “sophisticated anti-tomb”, inserting temporality into the representational sphere of the effigy and exposing the corpse for which it had traditionally acted as a substitute.124 Like the transi, double tombs encouraged the distancing of burial and monument, as well as complicating the temporality of the tomb. Both forms of monument worked against the idea of death as a defined point in time, but whereas the transi exposed death as a process, the double tomb fractured the singular moment of death into multiple events, collapsing the distinctions between past, present and future. In this sense the double tomb could be understood as an essentially “macabre” object; the placement of two effigies side by side troubled the boundary between life and death so that the dead were shown to be alive, while the alive were in some important sense already dead.125 This 121 For transi tombs see Jessica Barker, “Stone and Bone: The Corpse, the Effigy and the Viewer in Late-Medieval Tomb Sculpture”, in Barker and Adams, Revisiting the Monument, 113–36; Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 227–33; Binski, Medieval Death, 139–52; Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973); Ashby Kinch, Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Medieval Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 171–73; Pamela King, “Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb in Fifteenth Century England” (PhD diss., University of York, 1987). 122 Christopher Wilson, “The Medieval Monuments”, in Patrick Collinson, Nigel Ramsay and Margaret Sparks, eds, A History of Canterbury Cathedral (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 476–81. 123 Binski, Medieval Death, 144. 124 Binski, Medieval Death, 149. 125 In the medieval period the term macabré applied only to the specific iconography of the dance macabre. In line with other medieval scholarship, I use the term here to refer to the loose constellation of late-medieval artworks and literature that play upon the boundary between the living and the dead. On the “macabre aesthetic”, see Binski, Gothic Sculpture,

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facet of the double tomb has been overlooked because, unlike the transi, its reconfiguration of the relationship between time and the body was not explicitly thematised on the memorial itself, but rather existed within the unseen dynamics between corpse, monument and viewer. The double tomb involved far more than the addition of a second body to grave and sculpture; it prompted a new way of thinking about the tomb as a category of object, one in which the relationship between the deceased person, the monument and the moment of death was more detached and more flexible.

MEMORIALISING MARRIAGE AND THE IMAGE OF THE BRIDE The history of double tombs is intimately bound with the history of marriage. In France almost two-thirds of double tombs made before 1500 represented spouses; in England the proportion of married couples was close to 95 per cent.126 One of the challenges in writing about medieval marriage lies in the fact that much of the surviving evidence was written by the unmarried clergy: theological treatises, sermons and court records. In his pioneering study of marriage in eleventh- and twelfth-century France, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, Georges Duby laments how he has been forced “to resign myself to relying on an outsider’s view of marital behaviour, a view that usually takes the negative form of condemnation or exhortation”: his perspective on married life is refracted through the lens of writers who are overwhelmingly male and celibate.127 For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this partial view is broadened by the popularity of marriage as a theme in vernacular literature, written for (and in many cases authored by) the laity.128 Double tombs offer another opportunity to understand marriage from the perspective of its practitioners. They were typically commissioned by one of the spouses or their offspring. Moreover, rather than models, exemplifications or types, these monuments commemorate a particular relationship between two individuals. This is not to claim that double tombs open a transparent window onto the inner emotional lives of married men and women. They represent a means of structuring and communicating emotion. Expressions of married love were tailored to the particular context and purpose of the tomb; they 219–27; for the dance macabre, see Elina Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 126 Double tombs depicting relationships apart from marriage appear frequently among the memorials recorded by Gaignières: there are sixty-nine non-spousal double tombs, constituting roughly a third of all joint memorials. This is in contrast to the situation in England, where the overwhelming majority of double tombs commemorated married couples. Clayton’s catalogue of V&A brass rubbings includes 446 double tombs, of which only twenty-three (or 5 per cent) depict non-spousal relationships. 127 Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, 20. 128 See Lipton, Affections of the Mind.

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were designed to be situated within the space of the church and to elicit prayers for the souls of the deceased couple. If funerary monuments represent the aspects of an individual that were to be remembered and were believed to endure after death, then the growing emphasis on spousal love suggests that marriage had come to acquire both a new social value and a heightened religious significance. In the Middle Ages, and for many centuries after, marriage was believed to be both a sacrament and a social contract, a private agreement between individuals with profound implications for their position within the public institutions of Church and State.129 As outlined by Duby, the tensions between these two different models of marriage led to conflict between ecclesiastics and secular lords for control of sexual norms and behaviour.130 A decisive period in consolidating the definition of marriage by the Church occurred in the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and the publication of the Liber Extra (the Decretals of Gregory IX) in 1234.131 Across Europe this period was marked by a flurry of legal activity relating to the provision of rules for marriage: between 1213 and 1289 the issue was addressed by no fewer than thirty-four English synods.132 What emerged was a newly refined model of matrimony that emphasised the exchange of consent, expressed either in words or actions, as the means by which a marriage came into being.133 In his Summa Theologiae, composed between 1265 and 1274, Thomas Aquinas states simply, “consent makes marriage” (consensus facit matrimonium).134 Marriage did not require the presence of a priest; it did not need to be celebrated in a consecrated building, or to follow the standard liturgical performance. Neither did its validity depend upon the assent of the couple’s respective families. Unique among the sacraments, the constitutive act in contracting a marriage was performed by the laity.135 However, while upholding this principle within their courts, ecclesiastical authorities also sought to promote the celebration of marriage within the church as standard practice. The Canterbury synod of 1213–14 and its derivatives forbade For the two-fold status of marriage, see Duby, Love and Marriage, 4; Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, 282–84. For the long legacy of this two-fold status, see Christopher Lasch, “The Suppression of Clandestine Marriage in England: The Marriage Act of 1753”, Salmagundi (1974): 90–109. 130 Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, xix and passim. 131 Pedersen, Marriage Disputes, 2. See also Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, passim; Christine Peters, “Gender, Sacrament and Ritual: The Making and Meaning of Marriage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England”, Past and Present 169 (2000): 63–96; Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, passim; Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from Its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 132 Pedersen, Marriage Disputes, 7. 133 Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 6 –7;Pederson, Marriage Disputes, 4. 134 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplementum, qu. 45 art. 1, in Claude-Joseph Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 7 (Paris, 1882), 456. 135 The only other exceptions are baptism and penance in extremis. Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 7. 129

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20  TABLE OF BIGAMY FROM JAMES LE PALMER’S OMNE BONUM, LONDON, C. 1360— C. 1375. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY MS ROYAL 6 E VI, FOL. 196.

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unions carried out in private, prescribing proper public forms for marriage ceremony; if a marriage took place without these public celebrations, then the synod demanded that the union would only be allowed at the special dispensation of the bishop.136 There thus arose the idea of a “licit” marriage versus an “illicit” marriage. This distinction is pictured in a manuscript illumination accompanying an entry on “bigamy” in James le Palmer’s Omne Bonum, dating from around 1360 to around 1375 (Fig. 20).137 Below a diagram of consanguinity, two weddings are juxtaposed: the first involves a bearded groom and haloed bride, almost certainly Joseph and Mary, whose hands are joined by a priest over an altar, witnessed by a man, woman and two torch bearers; the second occurs within a crenellated structure, signifying a noble residence, where a man and woman join hands with one another, accompanied by two witnesses but without a priest. While both marriages are valid as sacraments (as indicated by the joined hands of the two couples, a sign of the exchange of vows), this illumination expresses the idea that “licit” marriage occurs within the church, whereas “illicit” marriage takes the form of a private social contract. While technically the sacrament of marriage was still effected through the actions of the bride and groom alone, by the fourteenth century the Church had established itself as the only means by which a marital union could be recognised and respectable. Efforts to bring the wedding ceremony within the remit of the Church were accompanied by a new emphasis on the religious value of marriage. Gratian’s Decretum, written in around 1140, posited a two-stage process for marriage, the “initiated marriage” (conjugium initum) and the “ratified marriage” (conjugium ratum), the latter taken by most commentators to mean consummation.138 Sex was thus equated with marriage, and marriage with sex, reflecting St Paul’s advice in his first letter to the Corinthians that marriage should be avoided unless one is unable to control his or her sexual appetites.139 However, by making the exchange of consent the crucial factor in contracting marriage, thirteenth-century canonists and theologians moved the definition of marriage away from sex and towards love.140 These writings tend to draw on the writings of St Augustine, which argue that marriage was not merely a means of limiting sin by regulating fornication, but that it had three specific “goods”: proles (children), fides

Pedersen, Marriage Disputes, 7. British Library MS Royal 6 E VI, fol. 196. See Lucy Freeman Sandler, Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopaedia of Universal Knowledge, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 1996). 138 Decretum Gratiani: emendatum et notationibus illustratum, Gregorii XIII pont. max. Jussu editum. Patrologia Latina 187, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1855), C. 27, q. 2, c. 36 (also c. 11, 12, 14). See Pederson, Marriage Disputes, 3; Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 235–40. 139 1 Corinthians 7: 7–8. Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 4–5. 140 Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 5. 136 137

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(fidelity) and sacramentum (sacrament).141 This sacramental model allowed marriage to become part of the laity’s religious practice, elevating the love between husband and wife to a sign of God’s grace. As Hugh of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century scholastic theologian, wrote in On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith: And this very love … by which male and female are united in the sanctity of marriage by their souls is a sacrament and the sign of that love by which God is joined to the rational soul internally through the infusion of His grace and the participation of His spirit.142

The love that joins the spouses together is characterised here as a “sign” (signum) of the same love that joins God to the soul. Such ideas would have been familiar to the married laity who commissioned double tombs. Emma Lipton has drawn attention to the unprecedented popularity of this “sacramental” model of marriage as a literary topic in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, tracing its influence in vernacular texts such as Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, the N-town plays and The Book of Margery Kempe.143 This interest in marriage as a mode of religious life can also be traced in the increasing popularity of married saints, such as St Anne and St Bridget, as well as the related phenomenon of chaste marriage, in which husband and wife remained together but refrained from sexual intercourse.144 During the later Middle Ages marriage became more closely associated with God, literally and conceptually; wedding ceremonies 141 Hoc autum tripartitum est; fides, proles, sacramentum. In fide attenditur ne praeter vinculum conjugale, cum altera vel altero concumbatur: in prole, ut amanter suscipiatur, benigne nutriatur, religiose educetur: in sacramento autem, ut conjugium non separetur, et dismissus aut dimissa nec causa prolis alteri conjungatur. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 34 (1841), book 9, chapter 7, col. 397. See also Augustine, De bono coniugali, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 40 (1841), col. 373–96. 142 Et haec ipsa rursus dilectio, qua masculus et femina in sanctitate conjugii animis uniuntur, sacramentum est; et signum illius dilectionis una Deus rationali animae intus per infusionem gratiae suae et spiritus sui participationem conjungitur. Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis Christianae fidei, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 176 (1854), book 2, part 11, chapter 3. For the English translation see Hugh of Saint Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis), trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1951), 326. 143 Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 2 and passim. 144 For married saints, see Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 216–21; Ton Brandenburg, “St Anne and Her Family: The Veneration of St Anne in Connection with Concepts of Marriage and the Family in the Early Modern Period”, in Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Lène Dresen-Coenders (London: Rubicon Press, 1987), 101–29; Anja Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia”, in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 259–95. For chaste marriage, see Claudia Bornholt, Saintly Spouses: Chaste Marriage in Sacred and Secular Narratives from Medieval Germany (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012); Dyan Elliot, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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were brought into the space of the church and officiated by a priest, while sermons, vernacular literature and hagiography celebrated spousal love as a reflection of the divine. By situating the image of husband and wife within the church, double tombs participated in this sacralisation of the marital bond. Often positioned in front of an altar and acting as the focal point of liturgical performance, these memorials encouraged parallels between the effigies of husband and wife and other devotional images in the church. The treatment of marriage on these tombs also implies that spousal love was one of the deceased’s virtues, a demonstration of their piety and therefore an encouragement to pray for their soul. A brass memorial to John Cottusmore, chief justice (d. 1439) and his wife Amice Bruley (d. 1445), set into the north wall of the chancel in the church of St Bartholomew, Brightwell Baldwin (Oxon.), includes a verse epitaph drawing attention to the couple’s marriage: But still more does his sorrowing bereaved wife Amice Left with eight children, deplore his passing, she whom death Has taken at last and joins him in the tomb Whose marriage, that it was blessed by Divine fortune Who can doubt? Most beautiful offspring flowed from them and they begot eighteen handsome children.145

Eighteen children (ten deceased and eight living) are presented as a sign of God’s blessing upon John and Amice’s union, a reflection of St Augustine’s idea that children constitute one of the three “goods” of marriage. If one needed further evidence of this claim, another brass memorial to the couple in the same church, made slightly earlier than the mural brass and set into the pavement of the chancel, depicts eighteen kneeling figures crowded below the effigies of John and Amice (Fig. 21). Unlike other memorials, this brass does not distinguish between the living and deceased offspring; these figures function less as a genealogical diagram and more as a sign of their parents’ fecundity, and thus of God’s blessing on the couple.146 Similar ideas are articulated on a brass memorial to John Lyndewode (d. 1419), a wealthy wool merchant, and his wife Alice in Linwood (Lincs.) (Fig. 22).147 John and Alice’s children are shown within a crenellated gallery below the effigies of their parents, each of the seven miniature figures occu145 Sed magis hunc plagam plenam merore relicta/Octo cum liberis deplorat Amicia conjux/ Quam mors absumpsit tandem comitatur et illa/ In tumba carum praesente sepulta maritum/ Quorum coniugium divina sorte beatum/ Quis dubitat soboles: de quo pulcherrima fluxit/ Octodecim liberos quos progenuere decoros. Anthony Wood and Richard Rawlinson, Parochial Collections. Part One, ed. F. N. Davis (Oxford: Oxfordshire Record Society, 1929), 53–54. The full translation can be found in Norris, Monumental Brasses: The Memorials, 1: 98–9. 146 For other examples, see John C. Page-Philips, Children on Brasses (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970). 147 Reinhard Lamp, “The Two Lyndewode Brasses, Linwood, Lincolnshire”, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift 10, no.1 (2010): 155–72; Lamp, “Foot Inscriptions on Three Lincolnshire Brasses”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 17, no. 1 (2003): 24–30.

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21  VIEW OF THE CHANCEL FACING EAST WITH THE FLOOR BRASS (C. 1439) AND MURAL BRASS (C. 1445) TO JOHN COTTUSMORE AND AMICE BRULEY. CHURCH OF ST BARTHOLOMEW, BRIGHTWELL BALDWIN (OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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22  RUBBING OF THE BRASS MEMORIAL TO JOHN LYNDEWODE AND HIS WIFE ALICE, C. 1419. CHURCH OF ST CORNELIUS, LINWOOD (LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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pying their own cinquefoil arch. Clerical garb distinguishes the male figure in the central arch from the others; he must represent William Lyndewode (d. 1446), a prominent ecclesiastical politician, canon lawyer and author of the Provinciale, who was probably responsible for the unusually sophisticated verse inscriptions that accompany the brass.148 A prayer, inscribed across the pediment on which the children stand, implores, “gentle God, make these seven children acceptable to your grace”.149 Immediately below, a longer epitaph describes Alice as John’s “wife of many years” (consortis pluribus annis), before continuing: For forty-three years did these two, in the kindness of their hearts Live together, and unto them had been born offspring Seven.…150

Like the memorials to John and Amice at Brightwell Baldwin, the brass at Linwood presents the couple’s marriage as evidence of their pious character. Here, however, the “good” of their marriage extends beyond the birth of offspring to encompass the longevity and affection of their union; in the terms of St Augustine, their marriage produced both proles and fides. Aside from the date of John’s death, these verses on marriage are the only biographical information offered about the couple. Whereas the epitaph at Brightwell Baldwin extols John Cottusmore’s career as chief justice, the inscription on the Linwood brass fails even to mention John Lyndewode’s profession as a wool merchant, instead focusing entirely on his relationship with his wife. These brasses speak to a reorientation in the aspects of one’s identity that were believed to be especially worthy of commemoration and particularly efficacious in prompting intercessory prayer. It is no coincidence that the memorials at Linwood and Brightwell Baldwin commemorate members of the mercantile and administrative classes respectively. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, in England merchants were some of the earliest patrons of double tombs, importing incised slabs from the Low Countries that showed a male and female effigy side by side. Although the tombs of these new elites tended to be smaller and less expensive than their aristocratic counterparts, they were no less concerned with status. Administrators, lawyers, agriculturalists and merchants adapted the memorial designs of the aristocracy in order to articulate their own distinctive identities and aspirations.151 Occupations are celebrated instead of titles. Likewise, rather than presenting the 148 William Lyndewode was bishop of St David’s from 1442 until his death in 1446. He was buried in St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, an indication of his prominent position at the royal court. Lamp, “Two Lyndewode Brasses”, 165–66. 149 Hos … septem … natos … fac alme … Deus … tibi … gratos. Lamp, “Two Lyndewode Brasses”, 158. 150 X quater at(que) tribus annis, hi corde jocundi / Convixere; quibus fuerant oriundi / Septem. Lamp, “Two Lyndewode Brasses”, 160–61. 151 For the memorial strategies of these new elites, see Anne Leader (ed.), Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018); Saul, English Church Monuments, 238–89.

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marriage of the deceased as a sign of a prestigious alliance between two noble families, tombs of the middling classes tend to pay more attention to the affective texture of a relationship, emphasising the sacramental character of spousal union. Without lands or lineage, new elites were forced to commemorate other forms of achievement on their memorials; the sacralisation of spousal love meant that the affection, longevity and fecundity of their marriage became evidence of their worthy character. This is not to say that the gentry and aristocracy were uninterested in employing marital symbolism on their memorials; spousal themes were articulated across the social spectrum. As we saw at the start of this chapter, the inscription on the brass to John Browne, a Lincolnshire merchant, and Agnes Stokes, written in the voice of the deceased husband, declares Agnes to have been his beloved while he lived, but after his death he prays she will become a bride of Christ (sponsa Christi).152 Agnes is here characterised as a perpetual bride, first to her earthly husband and latterly to Christ. This idea is made even more explicit on a brass to Joan Clopton (d. c. 1430) in Quinton (Warws.).153 After imploring Christ to have mercy on her soul, the marginal inscription continues: After having vowed herself to Thee when she became a widow she is now entombed here The knight, her spouse, having died, she became that even that to Thee, your bride, Jesus.154

The construction of the Latin verse heightens the sense of Joan’s transformation from earthly to heavenly bride; a single word, sponso (spouse), does double duty: it is used first to refer to Joan’s husband, and second in the abstract sense of her union with Christ.155 Her deceased husband, Sir William Clopton (d. 1419), is not even named, referred to only as the “knight” (milite), whereas the logogram for Christ (jhu) is included even though it does not fit the hexameter of the line.156 Joan Clopton’s epitaph, like the one to Agnes Stokes in Stamford, draws on the idea of marriage as an earthly image of the heavenly union between Christ and the Church, a metaphor repeated in the wedding rite, sermons and vernacular literature. This symbolism was also commonly used by churchmen to argue against the remarriage of widows, who were instead exhorted to conform themselves to the model of the Church as bride, awaiting the return of Christ as bridegroom.157 Indeed, three years into her widowhood Joan made an Lamp, “Browne Brothers”, 199–205. Reinhard Lamp, “Floregium – A Selection of Latin Inscriptions on Late-Medieval Brasses in English Churches”, Pegasus-Onlinezeitschrift 9, no. 2 (2009): 109–16. 154 Quae tibi sacrata clauditur hic vidua / Milite defuncto sponso pro te, Jesu, fuit ista. Lamp, “Floregium”, 112. 155 Lamp, “Floregium”, 115. 156 Lamp, “Floregium”, 113. 157 For a detailed discussion of this metaphor, its enumeration in medieval literature and its implications for remarriage, see chapter three. 152 153

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23  DETAIL OF THE BRASS MEMORIAL TO NICHOLAS KNIVETON AND JOAN MAULEVERER, C. 1500. CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS, MUGGINTON (DERBYSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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enfeoffment of her estates, indicating that she had decided to become a vowess: a widow who vows not to remarry.158 Since union with another man would disfigure the ability of marriage to act as an image of sacred coupling, widows such as Joan Clopton and Agnes Stokes assimilated themselves with the symbol, becoming perpetual brides of Christ. Both Joan Clopton and Agnes Stokes are described as a bride, but depicted as a widow in a long mantle with veil and barbe. There are other memorials, however, where the image of the woman does appear to signal her status as a bride. The effigy to Joan Mauleverer, represented alongside her husband Nicholas Kniveton (d. 1500) on a brass memorial in Mugginton (Derbs.), is depicted with long, loose hair flowing to her waist and a circlet adorned with flowers on her head (Fig. 23).159 The combination of uncovered hair and circlet is found on a small number of female effigies from the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.160 Uncovered hair Lamp, “Floregium”, 110. Matthew Ward, “Loyalty and Locality in Tudor Derbyshire: The Brass of Nicholas Kniveton, 1500”, Bulletin of the Monumental Brass Society 125 (February 2013): 492–94; Matthew Ward, The Livery Collar in Late Medieval England and Wales: Politics, Identity, and Affinity (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 121–22, 141–42. 160 See, for instance, an unidentified female brass in Braborne (Kent); the effigy of Elizabeth St John, shown alongside her husband William, Lord Zouche and his first wife Alice Seymour, in Okeover (Staffs.); and the effigy of Joan, Lady Cromwell in Tattershall (Lincs). For more examples of uncovered hair (albeit not necessarily combined with a circlet), see Sophie Oosterwijk, “Deceptive Appearances: The Presentation of Children on Medieval Tombs”, Ecclesiology Today Special Issue “One Thousand Years of English Church Monuments”, ed. Sally Badham, 43 (2010): 57. 158

159

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was a sign of virginity, typically associated with unmarried girls.161 Brides also wore their hair loose, adorned with a garland or crown, as described by Chaucer in the wedding of Griselda from the Clerk’s Tale,162 and depicted in the wedding scene on the seven-sacrament font at Salle (Norfolk).163 There is even a rare surviving example of a mid-fifteenth-century bridal crown from southern Germany: made from silver gilt, the openwork band bears the word trewelich (truly), repeated four times, in each instance separated by a pink-enamel rosette.164 Yet, as Sophie Oosterwijk has pointed out, many of the women depicted with flowing tresses and coronet were wives and mothers, not unmarried girls or brides-to-be.165 Lying next to the effigy of her husband and with six children at her feet, there is no mistaking Joan Mauleverer for a virgin. Equally implausible as an image of an unmarried maiden is the effigy of Douce Venables (d. 1458) on a brass memorial in Wilmslow (Cheshire).166 Depicted with uncovered hair flowing to her waist and a jewelled coronet, Douce joins right hands with her husband, Sir Robert del Bothe (d. 1460), a gesture used to signify the exchange of vows during the wedding rite (Fig. 24).167 In this case, as well as other memorials to wives or widows, the portrayal of the female effigy with uncovered hair and coronet cannot be a sign of youth or virginity. Instead, it must point to the woman’s identity as a bride, looking back to her marriage to her husband as well as pointing forwards to its heavenly exemplar. This connection between marriage and death, wedding and funeral, also extended to the treatment of the bridal gown. Isabella of France (d. 1358), queen of England, was buried in the gown that she had worn for her marriage to Edward II (d. 1327) on 25 January 1308, a ceremony that had taken place when she was only twelve years old. Listed among her precious objects (iocalia) in an inventory compiled shortly after her death, the 161 Kim M. Phillips, “Maidenhood as the Perfect Stage of a Woman’s Life”, in Young Medieval Women, ed. Katherine J. Lewis, Noël J. Menuge and Kim M. Phillips (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 8; Roberta Gilchrist, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), 69. 162 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Clerk’s Tale, ed. Larry D. Benson, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 142, lines 379–92. 163 See Ann Eljenholm Nichols, Seeable Signs: The Iconography of the Seven Sacraments, 1350–1544 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), plate 79. 164 Nürnberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, inv. no. T 3567. There is a catalogue entry for the crown in Berthold Hinz, “Liebe und Tod”, Jahreszeiten der Gefühle: Das Gothaer Liebespaar und die Minne im Spätmittelalter, ed. Schuttwolf et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998), 150, cat. no. 74. For bridal crowns more generally, see Phillips, “Maidenhood as the Perfect Stage”, 9; Malcolm Jones, The Secret Middle Ages (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), 224; Lyndal Roper, “‘Going to Church and Street’: Weddings in Reformation Augsburg”, Past and Present 106 (1985): 88. 165 Oosterwijk, “Deceptive Appearances”, 56–57. 166 L. M. Angus-Butterworth, “The Monumental Brasses of Cheshire”, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 55 (1940): 83–87; William Lack, H. Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Cheshire (London: Monumental Brass Society, 1996), 186–87. 167 The Wilmslow brass and its gesture of hand-holding are discussed in detail in chapter four.

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24  RUBBING OF THE BRASS MEMORIAL TO SIR ROBERT DEL BOTHE AND DOUCE VENABLES, C. 1460. CHURCH OF ST BARTHOLOMEW, WILMSLOW (CHESHIRE, ENGLAND).

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wedding dress must have been preserved under Isabella’s own orders, suggesting its enduring significance to the queen, even after she had conspired in the deposition and murder of her royal husband.168 Isabella of France was not the only woman to have retained the gown from her wedding in order that it might be put to another use after her death. Following her death in 1389, the countess Jeanne d’Étampes was interred with great ceremony in the chapel of Notre-Dame-la-Blanche at the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis.169 The Historia Karoli Sexti Francorum regis, a royal chronicle written by a monk at Saint Denis, describes how Jeanne donated “three sumptuous dresses that she wore for her first marriage” to the church so that they might be made into copes to be worn by the priests as they performed intercessions for her soul.170 Like Isabella, Jeanne must have carefully preserved her wedding dresses for many decades, retaining the gowns even after the death of her first husband, Gauthier VI de Brienne, at the battle of Poitiers in 1356, and her subsequent remarriage to Louis I d’Évreaux, comte d’Étampes (d. 1400).171 But rather than adorning her own body, Jeanne’s gowns were remade into vestments for the canons at Saint Denis: a fitting metaphor for their role as ventriloquists for the deceased countess, voicing the prayers Jeanne was no longer able to say on her own behalf. Wedding gowns were also bequeathed to images. In her will, made on 1 December 1439, Isabella Despenser (d. 1439), countess of Warwick, donated her “weddynggown” to the image of Our Lady at Worcester (Worcs.), along with “the grete Image of wex that is at London”.172 Isabella had been married twice, first to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Worcester (d. 1422), and second to Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439), so it is not clear which 168 F. D. Blackley, “Isabella of France, Queen of England 1308–1358, and the Late Medieval Cult of the Dead”, Canadian Journal of History 15 (1980): 28 –29. The commemorative scheme of Isabella of France is discussed in detail in chapter two. 169 The account of the burial of Jeanne’s d’Étampes refers to the chapel where she is interred as “the chapel named after Queen Jeanne”, in reference to its founder, Jeanne d’Évreux (d. 1371), wife of King Charles IV of France. Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, contenant le règne de Charles VI, de 1380 à 1422, ed. and trans. M. L. Bellaguet, vol. 1 (Paris, 1839), 606. 170 Ut autem religiosi pro eius anima attencius Dominum exorarent, sumptuosa eius vestimenta triplicia, quibus ornata fuerat in sua prima desponsacione, ut inde cape fierent, donavit ecclesia. For the full passage, see Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, 606. See also Mikhail A. Boytsov, “Ghostly Knights: Kings’ Funerals in Fourteenth-Century Europe and the Emergence of an International Style”, in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, ed. Jöelle Rollo-Koster (Routledge: London and New York, 2017), 158. 171 Jeanne d’Étampes was the daughter of Raoul I of Brienne. She married Gauthier VI de Brienne in 1342/43, followed by Louis I d’Evreux in 1357. Her first marriage produced two daughters, both of whom died young, while her second union was childless. 172 This section is a little vague in its syntax, meaning that the wedding gown could be read in association with the previous clause referring to the donation to Our Lady at Worcester, or the subsequent clause referring to donations to Tewkesbury Abbey. However, following the syntax of the rest of the donations in Isabella’s will, it is likely that the gown belongs to the previous clause and is therefore linked to Worcester. “Will of Isabella, Countess of Warwick, 1439”, ed. Fredrick J. Furnivall, in The Fifty Earliest English Wills in the Court of Probate, London (London, 1882), 117–18.

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marriage this “weddynggown” was worn for. The “grete Image of wex” was likely an ex voto, a wax figure set up in front of a sacred image to act as Isabella’s proxy in prayer. These votive figures represented the petitioner, either by consisting of a quantity of wax equal to their weight,173 or else by replicating their appearance.174 Isabella may have envisioned that her wedding dress be used to clothe the wax image, in the same way as other fifteenth-century petitioners, such as Lorenzo de’ Medici (d. 1492), ordered their effigies to be vested in their own clothing.175 Otherwise she may have intended that the gown be used to dress the Virgin herself, just as she ordered in the same testament that the image of Our Lady at Caversham (Oxon.) was to be given a new crown of gold made from her chain and the jewels from two tablets.176 Either way, by donating her wedding dress to Our Lady at Worcester, Isabella drew a parallel between her spousal union and the Virgin’s mystical marriage to Christ, elevating the status of her own wedding through its heavenly exemplar. The appearance of bridal imagery in funerary schemes, whether described in the epitaph, portrayed in the effigy or enacted in testamentary bequests, created an elision between wedding and funeral. Both rituals were believed to initiate a sacred conjoining: the first a union of flesh between man and woman, the second a union of spirit between Christ and the soul, precisely as described by Hugh of Saint Victor.177 Marriage had long defined a woman’s earthly identity; by the end of the Middle Ages it had also become central to her status in the afterlife. Funerary monuments represent the aspects of an individual that were worthy of being remembered or believed to hold an enduring value in the afterlife. The popularity of double tombs in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suggests that marriage – its longevity, fecundity and affection – had come to acquire both an unprecedented social value and a heightened religious significance. This new form of memorial prompted a narrowing 173 In around 1443 Margaret Paston wrote to her sick husband, informing him that her mother had sent a wax image of his weight to Our Lady at Walsingham. Laura D. Gelfand and Walter S. Gibson, “Surrogate Selves: The ‘Rolin Madonna’ and the Late-Medieval Devotional Portrait”, Simiolus 29, no. 3/4 (2002): 133. 174 For ex voto or votive images, see Hugo van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Robert Maniura, “Ex Votos, Art and Pious Performance”, Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 411–25. 175 As described by Giorgio Vasari, Lorenzo de’ Medici ordered three life-sized wax effigies in the aftermath of his assassination attempt during the Pazzi conspiracy of 26 April 1478. One is described as being dressed in the clothes Lorenzo was wearing when he had been wounded. See Giorgio Vasari, “Life of Andrea Verrochio”, in his Lives of the Artists, ed. and trans. George Bull, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 239–40. Gelfand and Gibson, “Surrogate Selves”, 133. 176 “Will of Isabella, Countess of Warwick, 1439”, in Furnivall, ed., Fifty Earliest English Wills, 117–18. 177 Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis Christianae fidei, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 176 (1854), book 2, part 11, chapter 3; Hugh of Saint Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis), trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1951), 325–26.

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of the types of relationship commemorated, or at least the construction of a hierarchy within them. Although heraldic programmes, displayed on the tomb chest and in its immediate surroundings, situated the deceased within a wider network of political and familial allegiances, the juxtaposition of two effigies side by side proclaimed the particular importance of one connection.178 This display of corporeal unity was prospective as well as retrospective: it designated marriage as the defining allegiance of the deceased in their lifetime, while also implying the enduring nature of spousal union in the grave and the afterlife.

QUEER TOMBS This prompts the question of how the growing popularity of the double tomb affected the commemoration of relationships that could not be assimilated into the sacramental model of marriage. . In The Friend, Alan Bray drew attention to memorials dating from the twelfth to the nineteenth century that commemorate two men, or (less often) two women, some of which employ designs identical to those used for monuments to married couples.179 One of the most striking examples is a double tomb to Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, two prominent chamber knights of Richard II, Lollard sympathisers and close friends of Geoffrey Chaucer.180 Both men died in October 1391 while staying in Galata, a Latin suburb of Constantinople, possibly en route to Jerusalem as pilgrims or as part of a more general tour of the Levant.181 Their memorial, originally located in the Dominican church of SS Paolo and Domenico in Galata, features two helms facing one another with shields below, one tilted to the right and the other to the left (against heraldic convention) so as to touch one another at the inner corner (Fig. 25).182 Although the decision to commission a double 178 For heraldic and genealogical schemes, see in particular Anne M. Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries and England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 179 Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 180 Bray, The Friend, 13–16. For Clanvowe, see “Clanvow, Sir John (c. 1341–91)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37286; for Neville, see John A. F. Thompson, “Neville, Sir William (c. 1341–1391)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/19966. 181 Neville and Clanvowe had travelled to Rhodes in 1390, possibly participating in a crusade in Mahdia in Tunis. Neville was back in England in December 1390. In May 1391 both Neville and Clanvowe received protection for a journey abroad on some unexplained royal service, and on 6 June Neville was licensed to appoint attorneys for one year before going overseas. Siegrid Düll, Anthony Luttrell and Maurice Keen, “Faithful Unto Death: The Tomb Slab of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, Constantinople, 1391”, The Antiquaries Journal 71 (1991): 180. 182 The memorial is now housed in the Byzantine collection of the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul. It was transferred to the museum from Arup Camii, the former Dominican conventual church, when the mosque was restored in 1917. Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful unto Death”, 174.

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25  TOMB SLAB TO SIR JOHN CLANVOWE AND SIR WILLIAM NEVILLE, C. 1391. ORIGINALLY LOCATED IN ARUP CAMII, THE FORMER DOMINICAN CHURCH OF SS PAOLO AND DOMENICO IN GALATA, NOW IN THE ISTANBUL ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM, 2894 T.

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tomb for two men who died a mere four days apart and at a great distance from their native land could be explained away as a matter of pragmatism, this does not account for the unconventional treatment of their heraldic emblems.183 Each escutcheon is split into two longitudinal halves; the heraldic arms of Neville are on the right-hand side and those of Clanvowe are on the left. Dividing the shield in this way, a heraldic convention known as impalement, had been used since the start of the thirteenth century to denote marital relationships, typically with the husband’s arms on the dexter half and those of his wife’s family on the sinister.184 During the latter part of Richard II’s reign, impalement was used by some in court circles to signal relationships other than marriage, a fashion that may have been triggered by the king’s adoption of the royal arms impaled by those of St Edward the Confessor as his personal shield.185 In these instances, however, it did not denote the bond between two individuals, but was rather a means of signalling a special devotion to the Confessor (and thus the Crown), or else a sign of commitment to an office, as when a bishop displayed the heraldic arms of his natal family impaled by those of his episcopal see.186 What makes the Neville and Clanvowe monument so exceptional is that impalement was used to symbolise the love between two men.187 The emotional intimacy implied by this heraldic display is made explicit in the Westminster Chronicle (written by two monks at Westminster Abbey between around 1380 and 1397), which refers admiringly to Neville’s inconsolable grief at the death of Clanvowe because “his love was no less [for him] than for himself ”, a devastation that left Neville unable to eat and after two days

183 In the Middle Ages corpses often travelled great distances for burial. Nobles who died far from their native land might be embalmed and taken home directly, or they might receive a burial and funerary monument where they died, and later be exhumed and their corpse transported whole or in part. Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful Unto Death”, 181. 184 The thirteenth-century examples follow an earlier form of impalement known as dimidiation, whereby half of one shield is juxtaposed with half of another (as opposed to having an entire shield on one half, juxtaposed with an entire shield on the other). Paul A. Fox, “Brotherhood in Arms”, The Coat of Arms 1, no. 235 (2018): 69–70. 185 Richard II’s adoption of the arms of St Edward the Confessor, which appear on his monument with Anne of Bohemia, is discussed in more detail in chapter three. 186 Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful Unto Death”, 183; Fox, “Brotherhood in Arms”, 71–83. 187 Scholars have identified two other instances of two men impaling shields, both of which date to the late fourteenth century. The first is the lost glass commissioned by Sir Robert Swillington (d. 1399) for the parish church in Swillington (Yorks.). Incomplete records describe nine shields that featured Swillington’s arms impaled by those of other knights, several of whom were other members of his family. The other example is found in the writings of Jacques de Hemricourt (d. 1403), in which he describes how Sir Makaire de Flémalle, lord of Heys, born in the twelfth century, impaled his personal arms with those of his military leader, the Count of Loos. Although it is unlikely that this account describes actual twelfth-century practice, it shows that by the end of the fourteenth century impaling was thought of as a means of indicating intimate friendship. Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful Unto Death”, 184; Fox, “Brotherhood in Arms”, 70, 75–82.

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led to his own demise.188 It is notable that the word used for love in this passage is diligebat, a derivative of dilectio; as discussed earlier, this was the category of affection particularly associated with spousal relationships. By the end of the fourteenth century heraldry was widely understood to be a symbolic language appropriate for expressing emotional bonds. The Prior of Marton, called as a witness in the case of Scrope v. Grovesnor (1385– 90) at the Court of Chivalry, told this story about the love between two men that prompted the commissioning of two heraldic windows: … there was a knight called Sir Robert Hakell, lord of Quenby … and he so loved [amast tant] one of the Scropes; and he of the Scropes so loved the lord of Quenby that on account of that love [amor] he caused to be made a window in their church of the arms of Quenby; and the lord of Quenby caused to be made a window of the arms of Scrope.189

According to the prior’s testimony, two men chose to commemorate their mutual affection by each erecting a window with the other’s heraldic arms. Even though this story may well be apocryphal, it is worth considering the nature of the heraldic display that the prior describes. These windows would have been a public, but invisible, sign of the emotional bond between Quenby and Scrope; recognising the relationship expressed by the heraldic shields would have relied on the viewer knowing the story behind their commissioning. In contrast, the impaled and tilted shields on the Neville and Clanvowe memorial were an overt and unambiguous declaration of the particular love between two knights. This raises the issue of its patron and intended audience. As the tomb slab is carved from Proconnesian marble quarried from the Sea of Marmara, it cannot have been imported from Western Europe.190 Siegrid Düll argues that the lettering style, the use of shallow counter-relief and the awkward rendering of the crests indicate the work of an Italian (possibly Genoese) sculptor following a northern European model.191 It is unlikely that in the four days between Clanvowe’s death and his own Neville found the time to set down instructions for the design of their joint tombstone. More plausibly, another member of the entourage may have 188 Item xvii . die Octobris dominus Johannes Clanvowe miles egregius in quodam vico juxta Constantinopolim in Grecia diem clausit extremum: quam ob causam dominus Willelmus Nevyle eius comes in itinere, quem non minus [quam] se ipsum diligebat, inconsolabiliter dolens numquam postea sumpsit cibum, unde transactis duobus diebus sequentibus in eodem vico lamentabiliter expiravit. Westminster Chronicle, 480–81. See also Bray, The Friend, 18–19. 189 fuist un chlr mons Robt Haket sr de Quenby … amast tant un de lez Escrops & celuy dez Escrops amast tant le sr de Quenby q pr amor le un fist fair un fenester en lor esglise de lez armez de sr de Quenby & le sr de Quenby fist fair un fenestr de lez armez du Scrop. N. Nicolas (ed.), De controversia in curia militari inter Ricardum Le Scrope et Robertum Grosvenor milites, vol. 1 (London, 1832), 140. 190 Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful Unto Death”, 176. 191 Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful Unto Death”, 177.

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26 BRASS MEMORIAL TO ELIZABETH ETCHINGHAM AND AGNES OXENBRIDGE, C. 1480. CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION AND ST NICHOLAS, ETCHINGHAM (EAST SUSSEX, ENGLAND).

been responsible, perhaps the same person who reported the circumstances of their deaths to the Westminster chronicler with such emotive detail.192 There is a suggestive symmetry between the chronicle and tomb in terms of the intimacy and dynamics of the knights’ relationship; the chronicle account casts Neville as the lover and Clanvowe as the beloved, while the memorial shows Neville’s arms on the dexter, placing him in the position 192 This may also have been the person who brought the religious tract authored by Clanvowe, The Two Ways, back to England. It has an incipit that states the book was written overseas, on Clanvowe’s last journey. Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful Unto Death”, 178, 182, 186n26.

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of the husband, with Clanvowe occupying the position usually given to the wife.193 Either way, the memorial’s singular, bespoke design and its location within the Dominican church, where space was restricted and costly, indicates that someone was acutely concerned that the relationship between the two knights would be remembered and celebrated. Judith Bennett identified another unusual memorial in Etchingham (East Sussex), commemorating two never-married women, Elizabeth Etchingham (d. 1452) and Agnes Oxenbridge (d. 1480) (Fig. 26).194 The effigies are placed side by side, turned towards each other in semi-profile. Elizabeth (on the heraldic dexter), diminutive in size, is depicted with long, loose hair flowing to her hips; Agnes (on the sinister) is shown with hair plaited but uncovered. They are identically dressed in low-necked gowns over a transparent chemise, trimmed at the neckline and cuffs with fur, and with a narrow band adorned with a triangular ornament in their hair.195 As Bennett notes, the design of this brass is typical of spousal memorials made by the London “F” workshop, active in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, whose products are distinctive in that they often represent the effigies facing one another.196 Yet there have also been adjustments made to the standard design for married couples in order to accommodate two effigies of the same gender. Some of these adaptations involve creating a greater sense of distinction between the figures, as seen in the unusually large gap between the effigies, their different scales, and the separation of the inscription at their feet into two columns. Others, however, emphasise the intimacy between Agnes and Elizabeth: for instance, the fact that the inscription at their feet solicits prayer for both women, as well as the striking way in which the effigies are made to look upwards and downwards so their eyes meet one another.197 Unlike Neville and Clanvowe, nothing certain is known about the lives of Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham; as unmarried and childless women they are invisible in the historical record.198 The Etchingham and Oxenbridge families were neighbours (the family seat of the Oxenbridges was only twelve miles from Etchingham) and of broadly equivalent social status. Although the generational placement of the two women within their 193 Keen suggests instead that the placement of Neville’s arms on the dexter was to recognise the higher status of his family. Düll, Luttrell and Keen, “Faithful Unto Death”, 183. 194 Judith M. Bennett, “Two Women and Their Monumental Brass, c. 1480”, Journal of the British Archaeological Society 161 (2008): 163–84. See also Judith M. Bennett, “Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge”, in The Lesbian Premodern, ed. Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 131–45. 195 Bennett, “Two Women”, 164. 196 Bennett, “Two Women”, 164. 197 Hic iacet Elizabeth Echyngham filia / primogenita Thome et Margarete / Echyngham que obijt tercio die / decembris anno domini MCCCClii. Hic iacet Agnes Oxenbrigg filia Roberti / Oxenbrigg que obijt iiii die augusti / Anno domini MoCCCClxxx quorum /animabus propicietur deus amen. Bennett, “Two Women”, 164, 175, 177, 181n10. 198 Bennett, “Two Women”, 168.

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respective families is uncertain, Bennett argues that Elizabeth Etchingham was most likely the daughter of Thomas I Etchingham (d. 1444) and Margaret Knyvett, meaning she would have been in her twenties when she died, and roughly contemporaneous to Agnes, who was probably the daughter of Robert Oxenbridge II (d. 1433 or earlier) and therefore in her fifties when she died.199 The mystery of the brass deepens when one considers the fact that it must have been commissioned shortly after Agnes’ death, so more than thirty years after the demise of Elizabeth, and yet it is located in the Etchingham family mausoleum. Whomever commissioned the memorial was clearly unwilling or unable to spend a great deal of money on it: the brass to Agnes and Elizabeth is far smaller than the other Etchingham brasses in the same church; the copper-alloy sheet from which the effigies are cut was recycled from an early fifteenth-century memorial; and it is currently located in the south chancel, whereas the other Etchingham brasses occupy a more prestigious (and therefore expensive) location in the chancel.200 There is thus an apparent contradiction between the memorial’s singular design and its meagre execution, suggesting a patron deeply concerned to commemorate a relationship that had ended some three decades previously, but with limited resources to do so. This raises the possibility that Agnes herself ordered the brass, or at least set out its design before her death, perhaps enlisting the assistance of her own elder brother and the permission of Elizabeth’s to locate it in the church at Etchingham.201 The low-relief slab to William Neville and John Clanvowe and the brass to Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham are two examples of a small, and almost entirely overlooked, group of medieval tombs commemorating two people of the same sex, some of which represent individuals between whom no familial ties can be identified.202 Bennett and Bray dismiss the 199 The uncovered hair and smaller size of Elizabeth’s effigy have been cited as evidence that she must have been a child when she died. However, as Bennett argues, diminutive effigies do not always indicate children, and the fact that Elizabeth was included on Agnes’ tomb some thirty years after her death suggests that she must have made an exceptionally strong impression, an influence that is easier to explain if Elizabeth had a longer life and the two women were of similar age. Bennett, “Two Women”, 168–69. 200 As Bennett points out, it is impossible to determine whether the current location is original, but the difference in location between this brass and the rest of the Etchingham memorials is suggestive. Bennett, “Two Women”, 164–66. 201 This is also the scenario that Bennett proposes. “Two Women”, 173–74. 202 Muriel Clayton’s catalogue of brasses and incised slabs held by the Victoria & Albert Museum lists 1,240 brasses dated between c. 1277 and 1500, of which twenty-three are double tombs commemorating relationships other than marriage. The engravings commissioned by Roger de Gaignières, made between 1695 and 1715, include 1,415 memorials dated from c. 1100 to 1500, of which there are sixty-nine double tombs commemorating relationships other than marriage. See Jean Adhémar and Gertrude Dordor, “Les tombeaux de la collection Gaignières: Dessins d’archéologie du XVIIe siècle”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6e periode, 84 (1974): 1–192; Adhémar and Dordor, “Les tombeaux de la collection Gaignières: Seconde partie: Personnages morte entre 1430 et 1616”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6e periode, 88 (1976): 1–128; Adhémar and Dordor, “Les tombeaux de la collection Gaignières: Troisiéme partie: Personnages mortes entre 1616 et 1714 et supplement”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 6e

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question of whether the bonds celebrated by these memorials also involved sex; such a narrow focus on sexual acts rather than sexual identities is to impose modern categories on medieval relationships.203 Indeed, it is precisely the desire to read through these monuments to the biographies of the deceased, whether with the intention of discovering a forgotten dynastic alliance, or else to definitively classify these relationships as homosexual, that has led many scholars to overlook the most interesting and radical aspects of the objects themselves. These tombs mark a significant moment in queer history because they present same-sex relationships as analogous to marriage, appropriating and adapting the designs of monuments to married couples. In late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England the marital bond had become the principal form of social connection to be celebrated on funerary monuments, a development that involved a concurrent narrowing of the range of relationships commemorated on the tomb. Yet, conversely, the dominance of spousal tombs also created an opportunity for other types of couples to borrow the conventions developed for representing marriage bonds in order to signal the intimacy of their own relationship. The rhetoric of marriage – its exclusivity, enduring character and sacred significance – could be repurposed to express the connection between two men or two women.

SYMBOLS AND SOCIETY Although double tombs are “about” a relationship, they also express changing notions of personhood in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Earlier memorials represented the deceased first and foremost as a member of a social group defined by class, occupation and gender: knight, noblewoman, priest, bishop, king or queen. In the later Middle Ages, tomb sculpture participated in a growing interest in the particularity of the individual, including their bodily appearance, their voice and gait, and the character of their affective relationships. Spousal ties thereby entered into the commemorative sphere with new importance. Insofar as marriage had previously been represented on tomb sculpture, it was as a means of recording familial alliances and the line of inheritance. These remained critical concerns, but added to them was a sense of spousal love as essential to an individual’s achievements, character and value. As the brass memorials at Linwood and

periode, 90 (1977): 1–76; Muriel Clayton (ed.), Catalogue of Rubbings of Brasses and Incised Slabs, rev. edn (London: Board of Education, 1929). 203 Bennett uses the term “lesbian-like” to refer to the relationship between Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham, as well as to other female friendships in the Middle Ages whose lives and intimacies were broadly analogous to modern-day lesbianism. Bennett, “Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge”, 135–41. See also Bray, The Friend, 6.

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Brightwell Baldwin declare, we should have pity upon – and pray for – the souls of the dead couple because of the success of their marriage. These affective ties did not end at the grave. By representing the sculpted effigies of the couple side by side, double tombs proclaimed the corporeal unity of husband and wife. As seen on the brass memorial at Childrey and the royal tomb at Batalha, the effigies were sometimes accompanied by inscriptions emphasising the companionship of the couple in the tomb. Yet neither text nor image functioned as a straightforward description of the state of the couple. It was common for double tombs to be erected during the lifetime of the bereaved spouse, and in some cases many decades before their death. These monuments blurred the boundary between life and death: the dead spouse was depicted as if they were alive, and the living one as if they were dead. In this sense, double tombs became the focal point for a continuing relationship between the bereaved and deceased spouse, particularly during the celebrations associated with the anniversary of their death. It also involved a fundamental rethinking of the tomb itself. At a basic level, the function of a tomb was to mark the place of burial and the moment of death, yet double tombs often commemorated a burial that was yet to take place, and a moment of death that had yet to occur. This complicated the temporality of the monument, which was both retrospective (looking back to a past relationship) and prospective (looking forward to a reunion in the tomb), but overlooked the present singleness of the living spouse. Temporal slippage also characterises the elision between wedding and funeral. Described as brides in their epitaphs, represented as brides on their memorials, and even buried in their wedding dress, women in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries perpetually re-enacted their wedding ceremony. Bridal iconography in commemorative contexts also looked forward to the wedding-feast between Christ and the Church, when all the faithful would become brides anew. Double tombs often play upon this dual status of marriage, which was understood as both an earthly alliance and a symbol for the heavenly union between God and man. In this way, marital iconography on tomb sculpture was as much about sacred symbolism as the couple themselves. The union between husband and wife was an echo of the hoped-for union between their soul and God, a post-mortem conjoining that was itself believed to depend in part on whether their earthly relationship had reflected its heavenly exemplar as faithfully as possible. As David d’Avray points out in his analysis of the use of sacred analogies in medieval marriage sermons, “the symbolism was not just epiphenomenal, not merely surface coating: it affected the social meaning of marriage”.204 Double tombs sit at a juncture between the symbolic ideal of marriage and the lived experience of these relationships. These memorials reveal the rhetoric – visual and textual – that structured the ways in which men and 204

d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 154.

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women expressed marital affection. Yet they also reoriented the frameworks that men and women used to understand their marriage in life, and after death became a means through which the surviving spouse might perpetuate that relationship. Double tombs were more than reflections of social reality; they were also symbols that worked to reshape it.

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I

n the first book of his Chronicles, written between 1369 and 1373, Jean Froissart describes a tender encounter between two royal spouses: Philippa of Hainault (d. 1369) and Edward III, king of England (d. 1377). Gravely ill and confined to her chamber at Windsor Castle, Philippa calls for her husband to be brought to her bedside. As he stands before her, she takes his right hand with her right hand, echoing the solemn oath of the couple’s wedding day, and begs him to grant her three final requests. The last of these enjoins the king to be buried beside her at Westminster Abbey: Thirdly, my lord, I pray that you would not choose another tomb/ burial (sepulture) other than lying next to me in the Abbey of Westminster, when God is happy to do His will with you.1

Although this passage has been cited as evidence that Edward and Philippa originally planned to commission a joint memorial, the word ­sepulture can denote either a monument or a burial place, so it is also possible that Froissart is referring merely to joint interment.2 Indeed, an entry in the queen’s household expenses reveals that she had begun to plan her own, individual monument as early as 1364.3 By the time of Philippa’s death, it is 1 Tiercement, monseigneur, je vous prie que vous ne vueilliéz eslire aultre sepulture que de gesir deléz moy ou cloistre de Wesmoustier, quant Dieu plaira faire sa voulenté de vous. Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 864, fol. 313v, reproduction in The Online Froissart, ed. Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, version 1.5 (Sheffield: HRIOnline, 2013), http:// www.hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart. 2 Mark Ormrod, “Queenship, Death and Agency: The Commemoration of Isabella of France and Philippa of Hainault”, in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline Barron and Clive Burgess (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 91, 96–97; Veronica Sekules, “Dynasty and Patrimony in the Self-Representation of an English Queen: Philippa of Hainault and Her Images”, in England and the Continent in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Andrew Martindale, ed. John Mitchell (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000), 169–73. 3 There are four references in the royal accounts to the making of Philippa’s tomb: the first is found in a list of the expenses of the queen’s household and comprises a payment of

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probable that her sculpted effigy (commissioned from her countryman Jean de Liège in January 1366) would already have been completed, awaiting the final installation of the memorial in the southeast bay of the Confessor’s Chapel in June 1376.4 Philippa’s monument is strikingly different from the gilt-bronze memorials in the surrounding bays, its contrasting black Dinant marble tomb chest and white alabaster figures emulating the funerary fashions of the French royal tombs at Saint Denis.5 It has only one effigy, an apparent portrait likeness depicting the queen as a matronly figure with lined cheeks, square chin and rounded stomach. Edward III was afforded no particular prominence on the monument, his presence confined to a miniature statuette on the tomb chest, merely one of the thirty-two figures representing Philippa’s kin.6 As Philippa’s household clerk and chronicler, Froissart must have been aware of the queen’s plans – already underway at the time he was writing – for her own, individual memorial.7 Rather than a misunderstanding or a record of thwarted romantic intentions, his account of the death-bed pact between Philippa and Edward might instead be understood as a means of drawing attention to the tension between the public, institutional character of royal marriage and its private bodily intimacies. A bifurcation established in life continues after death: Philippa expresses her desire for Edward’s corpse to lie in close proximity to her own, their bodies united in the grave even as their effigies lay apart on separate monuments. The distinction between royal effigy and royal corpse implicit in Froissart’s anecdote is a recurring theme in the commemoration of monarchs and their wives. Just as matrimony was believed to be a two-fold institution, both a private social contract and an image of a sacred coupling, so the £66 13s. 4d. to Marie de St Pol, which Mark Ormrod has dated to late 1364/early 1365. The second is found in the exchequer rolls and comprises a payment of £133 6s. 8d., made to Jean de Liège on 20 January 1366. The third (found in the exchequer rolls) is two payments made on 31 May 1376 and 28 June 1376 to John Orchard, described as a “stonemason of London” for making six copper angels and a set of iron railings for the tomb. The final payment in the exchequer rolls was made on 24 January 1377 to William de Wylughes, keeper of the fabric of St Paul’s Cathedral, to purchase an iron “tomb” currently placed over the monument to Michael Northburgh, bishop of London (d. 1361), so that it might be re-­purposed for Philippa’s tomb. Ormrod, “Queenship, Death and Agency”, 96–97, 99; Frederick Devon, ed., Issues of the Exchequer … from King Henry III to King Henry VI (London, 1837), 189, 199–201. 4 Jean de Liège was chief tomb-maker at the court of the French king, Charles V, and was responsible for a number of royal monuments, including the effigies laid over the entrails of Charles IV (d. 1328) and his wife Jeanne d’Evreux (d. 1371). Michèle Beaulieu and Victor Beyer, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs français du Moyen Age (Paris: Picard, 1992), 70–73. 5 Susie Nash has identified the material of the tomb chest in her forthcoming work on Dinant marble. For the tradition of contrasting black and white stone on memorials, see Kim Woods, Cut in Alabaster: A Material of Sculpture and its European Traditions, 1330–1530 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 165. 6 Only two of the statuettes have survived. For the original scheme, see Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship, 99–100, fig. 59. 7 Jean Froissart, Chronicles, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 10, 12, 38.

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person of the king was similarly doubled, both an individual ruler and an embodiment of the Crown. To put it another way, both monarchy and marriage existed as (or between) individuals, but also as symbols, meaning that royal marriage contained within itself the seeds of extraordinary symbolic complexity. This chapter considers the rhetoric of love in the context of the royal tomb, exploring what these memorials might reveal about the role of emotion in the concept and practice of monarchical power in the later Middle Ages. The opening section takes a broad view of the commemoration of royal marriage, looking first at the various ways in which spousal ties were expressed in the treatment of the corpse, and then how these practices were progressively replaced by the display of royal couples side by side on the same funerary monument. This sets the scene for a detailed investigation of two remarkable royal monuments: the tomb of Richard II (d. 1400), king of England, and Anne of Bohemia (d. 1394) at Westminster Abbey, and the memorial of João I (d. 1433), king of Portugal, and Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415) at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha. Royal tombs were among the most expensive artworks commissioned during the Middle Ages. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that it is on these memorials that we find the most monumental and grandiose expressions of the marital bond. Yet the tombs of monarchs and their wives did more than amplify the same spousal themes found on the memorials of merchants, knights and aristocrats. In their blending of matrimony and monarchy, royal double tombs made manifest the intersection between two bifold institutions.

CORPSE AND EFFIGY Whereas the cast or sculpted body tended to represent royal power, the treatment of the corpse more often expressed affective ties. A striking example of this bifurcation of corporeal identity is the funerary programme of Isabella of France (d. 1358), infamous for her role in the deposition and murder of her royal husband, Edward II (d. 1327), king of England. As one might expect given the circumstances, Isabella and Edward were interred more than a hundred miles apart: the alabaster monument to Edward II is situated immediately to the north of the high altar at Gloucester Abbey, while Isabella’s memorial – also made of alabaster – was located in the centre of the choir of the London Greyfriars.8 However, despite the distance between their monuments, Isabella devised alternative means of perpetuating her connection to her royal husband. As mentioned in chapter one, the corpse of the dowager 8 Blackley, “Isabella of France, Queen of England”, 28–9; Christian Steer, “Royal and Noble Commemoration in the Mendicant Houses in London, c. 1240–1540”, in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline Barron and Clive Burgess (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 128.

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queen was wrapped (involuendo) in the same dress she had worn on her wedding day more than fifty years previously. An inventory of Isabella’s possessions at Hertford Castle, made shortly after her death, includes: One tunic with a mantle of red samite lined with yellow sindon in which the queen was married. Taken for wrapping the body of the queen when the same body of the queen was placed in the grave.9

The preservation of the wedding mantle required considerable advance planning, suggesting the enduring significance of these garments to royal brides. Indeed, the inventory lists the wedding dress in a separate section from the clothing that was in actual use at the time of Isabella’s death, instead placing it in the category of iocalia (precious objects).10 In all likelihood the last time Isabella had worn this mantle was for her marriage to Edward, a ceremony that had taken place when she was only twelve years old. Comparable to the tradition of burying clerics in vestments for celebrating Mass and kings in the robes for their anointment, arraying the corpse of a queen in the dress worn on her wedding day expresses the notion of a body defined by its participation in the sacrament of matrimony. This was not the only aspect of Isabella’s interment that asserted her spousal ties. A register of burials in the Greyfriars church, compiled by one of the friars in around 1526, notes that “the heart of King Edward, her husband, lies beneath the breast (sub pectore) of her effigy”.11 There are no surviving documentary records relating to the bodily division of Edward II. However, if this description is accurate, then the king’s heart must have been excised and embalmed shortly after his death, raising the intriguing possibility that Isabella ordered Edward’s heart to be preserved at the same time she was preparing to rule in his stead. The position of the heart beneath the breast of her effigy, presumably known to the friar because it was recorded on the monument’s epitaph, symbolised the couple’s corporeal and emotional bond: Edward’s heart was placed where the heart of Isabella’s effigy would be imagined to be, his heart substituting for her own. Free from some of the dynastic considerations dictating the placement and form of the monument for the burial of the corpse, the burial of the heart was often used as a means of expressing affective ties.12 A chronicle of 9 Una tunica cum. i. mantello de samito rubeo liniato cum sindone glauco in quibus domina regina fuit marita. Liberatur- Pro corpore regine involuendo cum sepultura corporis eiusdem regine imponenda … Blackley, “Isabella of France, Queen of England”, 26n18. 10 Blackley, “Isabella of France, Queen of England”, 26n18. 11 In medio chori in tumba elevata de alabastro jacet Nobilis domina Isabella…et sub pectore imaginis eius jacet Cor Regis Edwardi, mariti sui. Charles L. Kingsford, ed., The Grey Friars of London: Their History with the Register of Their Convent (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1915), 74. The register was compiled in c. 1526 by a friar of the Greyfriars church in London. 12 For heart burials see, for example, Immo Warntjes, “Programmatic Double Burial (Body and Heart) of the European High Nobility, c. 1200–1400. Its Origin, Geography and Functions”, in Death at Court, ed. Karl-Heinz Spieß and Immo Warntjes (Wiesbaden:

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Tewkesbury Abbey (1066–1263, compiled in the thirteenth century) records that Gilbert I, earl of Hertford and Gloucester (d. 1230), was interred in front of the high altar with the heart of his wife Isabel Marshal (d. 1240) beside him in a gilt-silver vessel.13 Another notable example was found at Sweetheart Abbey in Kirkcudbrightshire (Scotland), a Cistercian community endowed by Dervorguilla de Balliol, lady of Galloway (d. 1290), in 1273.14 According to Andrew of Wyntoun, a Scottish chronicler writing in around 1420, Dervorguilla ordered the heart of her husband, John Balliol (d. 1268), to be embalmed and placed in an ivory casket decorated with enamel and silver, keeping this precious object by her side continuously and paying it the same respect as she was accustomed to give to her spouse while he was living.15 Wyntoun also claims that Dervorguilla asked for her own body to be interred with the heart of her husband between her hands, thereby placing it on her chest – heart to heart – in a position analogous to the heart of Edward II within the monument to Isabella of France.16 The significance of these heart burials is also revealed in the way the organ was treated prior to its interment. At both Tewkesbury and Sweetheart Abbey the embalmed heart was placed within a precious container, one of gilt silver and the other of ivory, an enshrinement echoing the relics of saints.17 Material evidence for such practices survives in the form of an embalmed heart in a heart-shaped lead container, discovered in the crypt of Christ Church, Cork (Ireland) in 1863 (Fig. 27).18 If the bodily fragments of the holy dead offered a point of connection between humanity and God, these relic-like hearts also enabled enduring ties, albeit of a romantic rather than divine nature. Husband and wife could thereby continue as “one flesh” in spite of the isolation of bereavement: as Wyntoun describes, Harrassowitz, 2012), 239–54; Danielle Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), 141–49. 13 Isabel’s heart is described as being enshrined in a cuppa argentea deaurata. The chronicler also records a Latin verse inscription referring to Gilbert. “Annales de Theokesberia ad 1066–1263”, in H. R. Luard, ed., Annales Monastici vol. 1, rolls series 36 (London, 1864), 113. See also Philip Lindley, “The Later Medieval Monuments and Chantry Chapels”, in Tewkesbury Abbey: History, Art and Architecture, ed. Richard K. Morris and Ron Shoesmith (Logaston, Herts.: Logaston Press, 2003), 163, 303n13; Warntjes, “Programmatic Double Burial”, 246–47. 14 Fawcett, Architecture of the Scottish Medieval Church, 175; G. P. Stell, “Balliol, Dervorguilla de, Lady of Galloway (d. 1290)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/49378. 15 Scho bawmyd, and gert it be layd / In till a cophyn off evore / That scho gert be made tharefore / Annamalyd and perfytly dycht / Lokyt, and bwndyn wyth sylver brycht. Andrew Wyntoun, The Orygynale Chronykil of Scotland, ed. David Laing (Edinburgh, 1872–79), 2: 322. 16 Scho ordanyt in hyre testament / And gave byddyng wyth hale intent / That that hart thai suld than ta / And lay it betwene hyr pappys twa / As detyt thai war than wyth honowre / To lay hyr wyth that in sepultoure. Wyntoun, Orygynale Chronykil, 2: 322. 17 For a remarkable example of the treatment of the hearts of saints, see Katherine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy”, Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1994): 1–33. 18 Oxford, Pitt Rivers Museum 1884.57.18.

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27 EMBALMED HEART IN A LEAD HEART-SHAPED CONTAINER, TWELFTH OR THIRTEENTH CENTURY. ORIGINALLY IN CHRIST CHURCH, CORK (MUNSTER, IRELAND), NOW OXFORD, PITT RIVERS MUSEUM 1884.57.18.

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the heart allowed Dervorguilla to interact with her husband “as if he were present”.19 The treatment of Isabella’s corpse, wrapped in her wedding dress and interred with the king’s heart, expressed the enduring nature of her relationship with, and even ownership of, the body of the king. In choosing to be buried with the heart of her spouse while retaining individual monuments, Isabella of France followed in a broader royal tradition, one with a number of precedents among her natal family.20 Isabella’s grandfather, Philippe III le Hardi (d. 1285), king of France, and his second wife Marie of Brabant (d. 1321) had separate memorials for their bodies – his principal tomb was located at the royal mausoleum of Saint Denis and hers at the Franciscan convent in Paris – but their hearts were interred together in the choir of the Dominican convent in Paris.21 In close proximity lay the hearts of Jeanne de Navarre (d. 1349), Isabella’s niece, and her husband Philippe d’Évreux (d. 1343), king of Navarre; Philippe’s body was buried at Pamplona Cathedral (Navarre), while Jeanne was interred in Saint 19 That [cophyne scho gert by hir] sett / And till hyr lord, as in presens / Ay to that scho dyd reverens / And thare scho gert set ilka day / [As] wont before hyr lord wes ay. Wyntoun, Orygynale Chronykil, 2: 322. 20 For a discussion of the broader trend, see Warntjes, “Programmatic Double Burial”, 247–48 and passim. 21 Aubin-Louis Millin, Antiquités nationales, ou Recueil des monumens pour servir à l’histoire générale et particulière de l’Empire françois, vol. 4 (Paris, 1791), 79; Marguerite Keene, Material Culture and Queenship in 14th-century France: The Testament of Blanche of Navarre (1331–98) (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 47.

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Denis.22 A drawing of the heart monument to Jeanne and Philippe, made in around 1700 by Louis Boudan, shows two effigies lying side by side with their hands clasped in prayer and heads crowned by canopies with heraldic emblems on the underside; an epitaph in gold lettering on the chamfer of the tomb chest recorded that the monument was erected by their daughter, Blanche of Navarre (d. 1398).23 A more complete French royal monument of this type has survived, in this case marking the burial of the entrails of Charles IV (d. 1328), king of France, and his wife Jeanne d’Évreux (d. 1371) at the Cistercian Abbey of Maubuisson.24 Commissioned by Jeanne d’Évreux in 1371, the monument was made by the sculptor Jean de Liège, who was also responsible for the effigy of Philippa of Hainault in Westminster Abbey.25 Following the design of royal memorials at Saint Denis, the effigies are carved from white marble, crowned and clad in regalia, the fingers of the king parted to grasp a sceptre (Fig. 28). The only clues to their function as markers for the burial of body parts rather than bodies are the diminutive scale of the effigies and the lumpy sack of viscera they each clutch to their chest. Simultaneously intact and fragmented, the effigies of the king and queen are resplendent in coronation robes, representing their shared position as embodiments of royal authority, while at the same time grasping their disembowelled entrails, a reminder of the union of their viscera in the grave. In France and England during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, royal marriages tended to be commemorated first and foremost through the treatment of the corpse. This might include the division of the corpse to allow the joint interment of hearts or viscera, or, more rarely, burying the corpse of the queen with her wedding mantle. Marriage did not, however, assume a prominent role in the design of the principal dynastic monument marking the burial of the king’s body; monarchs continued to be depicted alone. This royal reticence in adopting double tombs was particular to the Millin, Antiquités nationales, 79–80; Keene, Material Culture and Queenship, 28, 47–50. Cy gist le coeur du Roy Phelippe par la grace de Dieu Roy de Navarre et Comte d’Evreux lequel trespassa au siege devant au Royaume de Grenade lequel il avoit mis contre les mescreans de la foy lan 1343 le 16e jour de Septembre. Cy gist le coeur de Jehanne par la grace de Dieu Royne de Navarre Comtesse d’Evreux fille de Loys Roy de France aisne’ fils du Roy Phelippe le Bel laquelle trespassa a Constans les Paris l’an 1349 le 6e jour d’octobre et a fait faire cette sepulture leur fille la Reyne Blanche. Bodleian Library MS Gough Drawings Gaignières 1, fol. 19. The heads of the two effigies have survived and are now held at the Louvre (accession no. RF 515). 24 The memorial was originally located to the south of the high altar at Maubisson. It is now held at the Louvre (accession nos RF 1436, RF 1437). See Jean-Yves Langlois, Armelle Bonis and Monique Wabont, “Un princesse maudite jusque dans sa sépulture? La tombe attributée à Blanche de Bourgogne (d. 1326) dans le chapitre de l’abbaye Notre-Dame-laRoyale dite de Maubisson (Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône, Val-d’Oise)”, in Inhumations de prestige ou prestige de l’inhumation? Expressions du pouvoir dans l’au-delà, IVe-XVe siècle, ed. Armelle Alduc-Le Bagousse (Caen: Publications du CRAHM, 2009), 232–33. 25 Carla Lord, “Jeanne d’Évreux as a Founder of Chapels: Patronage and Public Piety”, in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 34; Sekules, “Philippa of Hainault and Her Images”, 171. 22 23

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28  JEAN DE LIÈGE, EFFIGIES FROM THE ENTRAIL TOMB OF CHARLES IV AND JEANNE D’ÉVREUX,

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Capetian and Valois dynasties in France and the Plantagenet dynasty in England. On the Iberian peninsula, in contrast, a double casket decorated with escutcheons and heraldic motifs houses the remains of Alfonso VIII (d. 1214), king of Castile, and Leonor of England (d. 1214) at the Cistercian abbey of Las Huelgas, Burgos,26 while the lost memorials in the Capilla

1371. ORIGINALLY IN MAUBISSON

26 The double tomb at Las Huelgas was made some time after the royal couple’s deaths, most likely in the early fourteenth century. Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras has proposed that two richly carved tombs housed in the porch of the same church were the original thirFRANCE), NOW teenth-century monuments of both Alfonso VIII and Leanor of England. See Rocío Sánchez PARIS, LOUVRE R. F. Ameijeiras, “La memoria de un rey victorioso: Alfonso VIII y la Fiesta del Triunfo de la Santa Cruz”, in Grabkunst und Sepulkralskulptur in Spanien und Portugal. Arte funerario 1436, 1437.

ABBEY (VAL-D’OISE,

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29 BERTRAN RIQUER AND PETRUS DE BONHUYL, MONUMENT TO JAUME II OF ARAGON AND BLANCA OF ANJOU, 1310—15. MONASTERY OF SANTES CREUS (CATALONIA, SPAIN).

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30 MONUMENT TO CHRISTOPHER II OF DENMARK AND EUPHEMIA OF POMERANIA, C. 1332. SØRO ABBEY (ZEALAND, DENMARK).

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Real in Seville included life-sized seated effigies of Fernando III, king of Castile (d. 1252), his wife Beatriz of Swabia (d. 1235) and his son, Alfonso X (d. 1284).27 At the Cistercian monastery of Santes Creus, the monument to Jaume II, king of Aragon (d. 1327) and Blanca of Anjou (d. 1310) features effigies of the king and queen positioned either side of the pyramidal lid of their tomb chest (Fig. 29).28 Moving northwards, Eric VI (d. 1319), king of Denmark, appears alongside his wife Ingeborg (d. 1319) on their brass memorial in Ringsted Cathedral,29 while Christopher II (d. 1332), his successor, and Euphemia of Pomerania (d. 1330) are commemorated with

en España y Portugal, ed. Barbara Borgässer, Henrik Karge and Bruno Klein (Frankfurt: Vervuert Iberoamericana, 2006), 289–315; Rose Walker, “Leonor of England and Eleanor of Castile: Anglo-Iberian Marriage and Cultural Exchange in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries”, in England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th to 15th Century: Cultural, Literary and Political Exchanges, ed. María Bullón Fernández (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 67–88. 27 Javier Martínez de Aguirre, “La primera escultura funeraria gótica en Sevilla: la Capilla Real y el Sepulcro de Guzmán el Bueno (1248–1320)”, Archivo español de arte 68, no. 270 (1995): 111–30; Teresa Laguna Paúl, “Mobiliario medieval de la capilla de los reyes de la catedral de Sevilla: Aportaciones a los ‘ornamenta ecclesiae’ de su etapa fundacional”, Laboratorio de Arte: Revista del Departamento de Historia del Arte, no. 25 (2013): 53–77. 28 Tom Nickson, “The Royal Tombs of Santes Creus: Negotiating the Royal Image in Medieval Iberia”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 72, no. 1 (2009): 1–14. 29 Knud Holm, “The Brass of King Erik Menved and Queen Ingeborg: Restoration and Examination”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 15, no. 1 (1992): 2–18.

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cast-copper alloy effigies at Søro Abbey, lying atop a tomb chest decorated with warnings against “women’s wiles” (Fig. 30).30 Even taking the political, military and dynastic crises of the French and English monarchies into account, the absence of royal double tombs throughout the thirteenth and most of the fourteenth centuries is notable, particularly given the evident desire of many kings and queens to commemorate their marriage in other ways. Although an argument from absence can only ever be speculative, one way of understanding this lacuna is in terms of the unique character of royal monuments. The tomb of the king did far more than commemorate a powerful individual; it symbolised the eternal and sacred character of the monarchy as an institution. By the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the tombs of French and English monarchs were clustered in Saint Denis and Westminster Abbey respectively, their design and materials governed by a series of long-standing conventions weighted with symbolic significance. Whereas other patrons sought novel designs in order to make their memorial stand out in the crowded space of the church, the purpose of royal tombs was to stress the continuity between the deceased king and his predecessors. The disposition of the royal corpse was far less constrained by institutional and dynastic traditions, and thus offered the freedom to commemorate spousal relationships in ways that could be more personal, intimate and particular. Representing the effigies of the king and queen on the same monument thus constituted a radical shift in royal commemoration, with implications for the image of the monarchy as an institution. The first French monarch to be  commemorated  with a joint memorial was likely Charles IV and  his wife Jeanne d’Évreux, the same royal spouses whose entrails were interred together at Maubisson. Both Charles and Jeanne had their bodies buried in the choir at Saint Denis. The effigies of the royal couple were damaged, relocated and reconstructed prior to the eighteenth century: drawings from the collection of Roger de Gaignières, made in around 1700, show only the sculpted figures and their gablettes, placed on separate tomb chests, while a plan of the choir of Saint Denis published by Michel Félibien in 1706 depicts the couple in an arrangement of six royal effigies on one large tomb chest directly to the south of the high altar.31 However, there is evidence to suggest that the effigies of Charles and Jeanne were originally placed atop the same tomb chest. A list of monuments in Saint Denis, compiled at the end of the fourteenth century, names the memorial of Charles and Jeanne as a single

30 Sally Badham and Sophie Oosterwijk, “‘Monumentum aere perennius’? Precious-metal Effigial Tomb Monuments in Europe 1080–1430”, Church Monuments 30 (2015): 68–71. 31 Michel Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Denys en France (Paris, 1706), 553. For drawings of the effigies from the collection of Roger de Gaignières, see Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Drawings Gaignières 2, fols 36 and 38.

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item.32 Moreover, in his transcription of the epitaphs in the Abbey, Félibien records a single entry for the couple: Here lies Charles, king of France and Navarre, son of King Philip le Bel, who died in the year 1327 on the vigil of Candlemass. And Queen Jean, his wife, daughter of the noble prince Louis de France, sometime count of Évreux.33

A date of death is recorded for Charles but not Jeanne, indicating that the tomb was made during the queen’s forty-three-year widowhood. Indeed, when commissioning the entrail tomb in her testament of 1371, Jeanne notes that the monuments to mark the burial of her body and her heart had already been made and erected.34 A double tomb at Saint Denis would have been particularly appropriate given the intercessory services Jeanne had established at the Abbey. She ordered these to be celebrated at the high altar as well as in the chapel she had founded to the Virgin and St John the Evangelist, with instructions that after her death masses were to be said for herself and her husband jointly.35 Jeanne’s prestigious foundations at Saint Denis attest to the dowager queen’s continuing power, an agency all the more remarkable when one considers that in 1328 the same chapter had refused to accept the fifty pounds in rents Charles IV bequeathed to the Abbey in order to establish his own chantry dedicated to St Denis.36 Given her wealth and influence at the Abbey, a compelling case emerges that Jeanne d’Évreux was the patron of a double tomb for herself and her royal husband at Saint Denis, a monumental version of the joint entrail tomb she had ordered at Maubisson.

32 Ad partem septentrionalem, prope magnum altare, sepulti sunt simul secundum ordinem, sub sepulcris marmoreis, cum ymaginibus de albastro, primo loco: Philippus Longus, Philippi Pulchri secundogenitus; deinde Johanna Ebroisensis et Karolus, filius Philippi Pulchri tertiogenitus, predicte regine maritus … A. Vidier, “Inventaire des reliques et liste des sépultures de rois de France qui se trouvaient dans l’Abbaye de Saint-Denis au XIVe siècle”, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France (1901): 147. 33 Cy gist le Roy Charles, Roy de France & de Navarre, fils de Roy Philippe le Bel, qui trespassa l’an M. CCC. XXVII. veille de la Chandeleur: & Madame la Royne Jehanne sa compaigne fille de noble Prince Monsieur Louys de France jadis Comte d’Evreux. Michel Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Denys en France (Paris, 1706), 553. 34 Item nous voulons et ordonnons vne tombe estre faicte, laquelle sera mise & assize sur nos entrailles au lieu ou elles seront enterrees, telle comme bon semblera a nos executeurs sans faire aucun oustrage, et voulons que largent en soit paye comptant par nos executeurs se nous ne la faisions [sic] faire en nostre viuant, car les autres tombes pour nostre cors et nostre cuer sont faictes et ia mises ez lieux ou il doiuent estre mis et ce qui sera a parfaier [sic] nous voulons que il soit parfait par nos executeurs. Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, Menant, t. 6, fols 127v–128r. See E. A. R. Brown, “Jeanne d’Évreux: ses testaments et leur exécution”, Le Moyen Age 119, no. 1 (2013): 74n60. 35 Brown, “Jeanne d’Évreux”, 71–72. For the Chapel of the Virgin and St John the Evangelist, which once featured four statue-columns of Jeanne, Charles and two of their daughters, see Lord, “Jeanne d’Évreux as Founder of Chapels”, 24–33. 36 In January 1329 Philip IV transferred the chantries of Charles IV to the Sainte-Chapelle. Brown, “Jeanne d’Évreux”, 65, 68.

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31  LOUIS BOUDAN, DRAWING OF THE MONUMENT TO CHARLES V AND JEANNE DE BOURBON IN THE ABBEY OF SAINT DENIS, C. 1700. OXFORD, BODLEIAN LIBRARY, MS GOUGH DRAWINGS GAIGNIÈRES 2, FOL. 43.

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The double tomb of the third Valois king, Charles V (d. 1380) – whose support and intervention had been crucial in ensuring that Jeanne d’Évreux was able to enact the terms of her will – was made within a few years of the memorial to Jeanne and Charles IV and may well have involved at least one of the same sculptors.37 Although the only pieces of the tomb to have survived are the effigy of the king, the lions at his feet, and three microarchitectural fragments,38 a drawing from the Gaignières collection allows us to reconstruct something of the monument’s original appearance (Fig. 31).39 The royal spouses lie side by side on the same tomb chest. Their heads are crowned by gablettes with painted heraldry on the underside and epitaphs on the reverse, while their bodies are framed within an arcature inhabited by three miniature figures on each side: one pair censing, one pair in ecclesiastical vestments holding books, and one pair of bishops with mitre and crosier. In 1364 Charles V commissioned André Beauneveu, a sculptor from Valenciennes described by Froissart as “without equal in any land”, to make monuments for his grandfather, his father, himself and his wife, Jeanne de Bourbon.40 However, as Susie Nash has noted, it seems that Charles did not necessarily envision a double tomb at this point: as late as 1374, ten years after the initial contract with Beauneveu, the king states in his testament that his wife should be buried in Saint Denis “if she wishes with us” (se il le plait avecque nous).41 Perhaps it was Jeanne’s death in 1377 that prompted the decisive change from a single to a double tomb. A reference to workmen engaged in making the tomb reveals that work was still taking place in 1376; the memorial must have been completed before 1378, when Charles IV of Bohemia asked to see it during a visit to the Abbey.42 Even though its final design appears to have been an afterthought, this double tomb set the pattern for Charles V’s immediate successors: Charles VI (d. 1422) and his wife Isabelle of Bavaria (d. 1435), and Charles VII (d. 1461) and his wife Marie of Anjou (d. 1463). Both couples have memorials that follow the same pattern as the double tomb of Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon: the effigies are framed within an ornate microarchitectural structure incorporating niches for miniature figures, while gablettes crown the head of each effigy with epitaphs carved on the reverse and heraldry painted on

Brown, “Jeanne d’Évreux”, 58, 73–79. The effigy of Charles V is at Saint Denis, the three microarchitectural fragments are in the Louvre, while the two lions were sold by Christie’s in July 2017 and are now owned by a private collector. 39 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Drawings Gaignières 2, fol. 43. 40 Françoise Baron, ed., Les fastes du Gothique: le siècle de Charles V (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1981), 130, no. 75; Nash, André Beauneveu, 31–36; Stephen Perkinson, The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 133, 142–47. 41 Baron, Les fastes du Gothique, 130, no. 75; Nash, André Beauneveu, 32–33. 42 Nash, André Beauneveu, 33. 37

38

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32 JEAN-BAPTISTE ALEXANDRE LEBLOND, PLAN OF THE CHAPEL OF ST JOHN THE BAPTIST IN SAINT DENIS, 1706.

the underside.43 A floor plan published by Félibien shows these monuments positioned side by side in the chapel of St John the Baptist – also known as the chapel of Charles V – in the south choir aisle at Saint Denis, the tombs of Charles V and Charles VI each situated in front of an altar (Fig. 32).44 This cluster of Valois couples would have offered an immediate contrast to the thirteenth-century memorials to their Carolingian and Capetian predecessors in the choir, a dramatic sign of the shift in emphasis from the celebration of dynastic lineage to the commemoration of marital ties.45 From the end of the fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth centuries, double tombs were an increasingly popular means of commemorating monarchs and their wives. Charles III of Navarre (d. 1425) and his wife Eleanor of Castile (d. 1416) are commemorated with a joint memorial at Pamplona Cathedral, made by the sculptor Jehan Lome from Tournai. Modelled on the monuments at Saint Denis, the tomb is made from contrasting black marble and white alabaster, its epitaph drawing attention to the king’s Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Drawings Gaignières 2, fol. 44. See also Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, ed., Paris 1400: les arts sous Charles VI, exh. cat. (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 360–61. 44 A= tomb of Charles V and Jeanne de Bourbon; B= tomb of Charles VI and Isabella of Bavaria; C= tomb of Charles VII and Marie of Anjou. Michel Félibien, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Sant-Denys en France (Paris, 1706), 555. 45 The programme of Carolingian and Capetian memorials in the choir dates from 1264 and was almost certainly commissioned by the abbey of Saint Denis. See Georgia Sommers Wright, “A Royal Tomb Program in the Reign of St Louis”, Art Bulletin 56, no. 2 (1974): 224–43. 43

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descent from Charlemagne and Louis IX.46 An extraordinary monument at the Cartuja de Miraflores in Burgos, its tomb chest in the shape of an eightpoint star, features alabaster effigies of King Juan II of Castile and León (d. 1454) and Isabella of Portugal (d. 1496). The royal couple lie side by side but turn away from one another, separated by a low openwork screen.47 Double tombs were also embraced by the new Avis dynasty in Portugal. João I and his wife Philippa of Lancaster, and Duarte I (d. 1438) and his wife Leonor of Aragón (d. 1445), were both commemorated with double tombs at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha. In England, despite the disruptions of succession crises and civil war, three joint memorials were erected during this period: the first portrays Richard II and Anne of Bohemia; the second Henry IV (d. 1413) and Joan of Navarre (d. 1437); and the third depicts the first Tudor king, Henry VII (d. 1509), and his wife, Elizabeth of York (d. 1503).48 The task of accounting for such a fundamental change in royal representation requires balancing the particular and the general, the contingent and the strategic. As we have seen, the first double tomb to a French monarch may well have been commissioned by Jeanne d’Évreux, the widow of Charles IV, a reflection of her commemorative priorities and continuing influence in the Valois court. The second, by contrast, appears to have emerged only as the result of a late alteration by Charles V to his original memorial design. Alerting us to the multiplicity of agents and the lengthy procedures involved in the commissioning of a royal memorial, these examples warn against interpreting double tombs as manifesting the wishes of one person or belonging to a single moment. At the same time, the multitude of double tombs commissioned by royal patrons across Europe in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suggests that we need to attend to cultural and political shifts far broader than the circumstances of individual kings or queens. The increasing importance of marriage to royal commemoration speaks to changes in both the idea and the institution of monarchy.

46 E. Bertaux, “Le Mausolée de Charles le Noble à Pampelune et l’art franco-flamand en Navarre”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3rd ser., 50, no. 2 (1908): 89–112; R. Steven Janke, Jehan Lome y la escultura gótica posterior en Navarra (Pamplona: Diputación Foral de Navarra, 1977), 55–92; Theodor Müller, Sculpture in the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain: 1400–1500 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 51–52. 47 Beatrice Proske, Castilian Sculpture: Gothic to Renaissance (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1951), 66–74; Jesús Barcena, Escultura gótica funeraria en Burgos (Burgos: Excma. Diputacíon Provincial de Burgos, 1988), 203–16. For a more recent discussion of the monument, see Felipe Pereda, “El cuerpo muerto del rey Juan II, Gil de Siloé y la imaginación escatalógica. (Observaciones sobre el lenguaje de la escultura en la alta Edad Moderna)”, Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte 13 (2001): 53–86. 48 For an overview of English royal monuments, see Mark Duffy, Royal Tombs of Medieval England (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2003).

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THE KING’S TWO BODIES The medieval concept of the Crown – and its elaboration through law, image and ritual – forms the central theme of The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology, published in 1957 by the intellectual and political historian Ernst Kantorowicz.49 It has proved to be one of the most influential accounts of the relationship between bodies and institutions, both for historians of the Middle Ages and for philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault.50 Kantorowicz traced the medieval origins of the concept of the Crown (or Dignity) as a “corporation”, defined as a group of individuals that form a single independent legal entity.51 But whereas such entities were usually incorporated from a multitude of living people (and continue to be so today in the case of private and publicly limited companies), the Crown was a “corporation by succession”, composed of all those successively vested with the royal office.52 As a corporation extending through time, therefore, the Crown was immortal; the person of the king, the Crown’s current individuation, remained mortal. As the Italian jurist Baldus de Ubaldus (d. 1400) explained: Two things concur in the king: the person and the signification. And that signification, which is something appealing to the intellect, miraculously preserves forever, though not corporeally: for let the king be deficient with regards to his flesh, he nevertheless functions holding the place of two persons.53

Death was the moment of separation between these two bodies, the point at which the body of the individual king became visibly divorced from the immortal Crown. Although Kantorowicz was primarily interested in the concept of the “two bodies” as a legal principle, he also saw echoes and elaborations of these ideas in royal funerary practices of the fourteenth, fifteenth and

49 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, 7th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 50 Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction: Fifty Years of The King’s Two Bodies”, Representations 106, no. 1 (2009): 63–66; Bernhard Jussen, “The King’s Two Bodies Today”, Representations 106, no. 1 (2009): 102–17. 51 Following the technicalities of medieval legal usage, Kantorowicz employs the word “Dignity” to distinguish the sovereignty vested in the individual king by the people from the “Crown”, which refers more broadly to the collective sovereignty of the realm. In the interests of simplicity I use the word “Crown” to encompass both meanings, as they are not easily distinguishable in visual terms. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 383–409; see especially 384. 52 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 387. 53 Duo concurrunt in rege: persona et significatio. Et ipsa significatio, quae est quoddam intellectuale, semper est perseverans enigmatice: licet non corporaliter: nam licet Rex deficiat, quid ad rumbum, nempe loco duarum personarum. Baldus de Ubaldus, Consilia (Venice, 1575), vol. 3, 159. Quoted in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 400–01.

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sixteenth centuries.54 He drew particular attention to the use of the funeral effigy: a wooden figure vested in coronation robes and carrying the royal insignia that lay atop the coffin during the funeral procession, Office of Dead and Requiem Mass.55 In England such a figure is first recorded in the Great Wardrobe accounts for the funeral of Edward II in 1327; the earliest royal funeral effigy in France was employed at the death of Charles VI in 1422.56 According to Kantorowicz, funeral effigies inverted the usual relationship between the king’s two bodies: his natural mortal body, usually visible, was now concealed in the wooden coffin, while his fictive corporate body, usually invisible, was now displayed in the figure of the effigy.57 In this sense, the funeral effigy operated a double fiction, or, in Kantorowicz’s words, “a persona ficta – the effigy – impersonated a persona ficta – the Dignitas”.58 This same duality could be identified in permanent memorials, with the effigy of the king, depicted in the robes and insignia of his office, representing the “awe-inspiring body politic” and set in opposition to “the decrepit and decaying body natural in the tomb”.59 According to Kantorowicz, royal tombs and funerary effigies celebrated the immortality of the Crown as an institution, a corporate persistence in spite of the bodily disintegration of its individual incumbent. Absent from this account, however, is any discussion of the queen’s body. This is despite the fact that one of the earliest funeral effigies represents a queen, Anne of Bohemia, commissioned by her husband, Richard II, for her lavish funeral procession from the royal palace at Sheen to Westminster Abbey.60 Only the head and neck survive. Far from an image of the immortal Crown, the taut skin and emaciated face of a woman on the brink of death are depicted with unflinching immediacy (Fig. 33).61 Anne of Bohemia was also the first queen of England to share a memorial with her spouse, their cast copper-alloy effigies lying hand in hand on a magnificent Purbeck 54 It is likely that Kantorowicz’s funerary interests were sparked by his close friend and colleague at Princeton, Erwin Panofsky, whose advice he credits in many of the footnotes. Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 419–37. 55 Ralph E. Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Librairie E. Droz: Geneva, 1960), 85–104; Susan Jenkins and Krista Blessley, “Royal Wooden Funeral Effigies at Westminster Abbey”, The Burlington Magazine 1390, vol. 161, Special Issue Westminster Abbey and Its Collections (2019): 26–35; Julian Litten, “The Funeral Effigy: Its Function and Purpose”, in Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, eds, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994). 56 The very earliest evidence of the use of a funeral effigy comes from the records of ceremonies conducted in Daroca (Aragon) in 1291, where the Jewish community prepared a “representation” of the dead king Alfonso III. Eleanor Lourie, “Jewish Participation in Funerary Rites: An Early Use of Representatio in Aragon”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982): 192–94. 57 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 421. 58 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 421. 59 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 435. 60 Duffy, Royal Tombs, 164. 61 Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, eds, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), 37–39.

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33  FUNERAL EFFIGY OF ANNE OF BOHEMIA, 1394. WESTMINSTER ABBEY, LONDON.

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marble tomb in the southwest bay of the Confessor’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey. If, as Kantorowicz argues, royal monuments represent the body politic, then the introduction of tombs depicting the effigies of kings and queen side by side implies a concurrent shift in the monarchy as an institution. This idea is taken up by John Carmi Parsons in an article on the burial and commemoration of English queens, in which he contends that the inclusion of the queen’s effigy on the tomb of her husband represented a new structural position for the spouse of the monarch, emphasising her political role as mother and intercessor, an idea which he also saw reflected in changes to the coronation and funeral rites. According to Parsons, appending the effigy of the queen to the tomb of the king – as opposed to granting her an individual memorial – implicitly subordinates wife to husband, depicting a model of the Crown in which the queen’s power is channelled exclusively through her relationship with her spouse.62 In this account, the effigy of the queen is characterised as a sign of the Crown’s authority, comparable to the orb, crown or sceptre; the placement of the queen’s body alongside that of the king is held to express her status as an instrument and sign of his power. Mark Ormrod, on the other hand, is more equivocal in his interpretation of royal double tombs, arguing that they enhance the position of the queen by representing her as an integral element in the performance of state, while at the same time depriving her of individual identity by depicting her as a mere adjunct in a memorial scheme that inevitably centred around the king.63 While Ormrod and Parsons offer persuasive accounts of the connection between royal double tombs and the institutional role of the queen, the dichotomy they construct between single memorials as expressions of the queen’s identity versus joint memorials supressing their individuality is less convincing. Just as there are examples of single memorials in which the queen is little more than a dynastic marker for her husband (the tomb of Eleanor of Castile at Westminster Abbey could be placed in this category), so there are joint memorials commissioned by a queen that grant surprising prominence to the identity of her natal family, political connections and even her former spouse (for instance the tomb of Joan of Navarre and Henry IV at Canterbury Cathedral).64 Rather than signs of queenly subjugation, joint memorials are better understood as images that present the queen as an integral part of the Crown, incorporating her into the royal body in ways that could equally be used to either suppress or express her individual identity. 62 John C. Parsons, “The Burials and Posthumous Commemorations of English Queens to 1500”, in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe, ed. Anne J. Duggan (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), 332–33, 337. 63 Ormrod, “Queenship, Death and Agency”, 88. 64 For Eleanor of Castile, see Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski, eds, Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), 361–66; Duffy, Royal Tombs, 84–88. For Joan of Navarre, see chapter three.

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The commemoration of marriage also has implications for the changing character of the royal tomb, and more broadly for the rhetoric of the Crown. If, as Kantorowicz claimed, and many later writers have tacitly accepted, the royal effigy is an image of the body politic, then placing the effigies of king and queen side by side must represent the institutional functions of royal marriage. Such a distinction between the personal and the corporate, however, was not so sharply defined on royal memorials, at least not by the end of the fourteenth century. In his discussion of the joint memorial to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, Paul Binski argues that this display of conjugal union represented a more personal conception of the royal tomb, a new form of monarchical monument that stressed the particular attributes of the individual king.65 Indeed, it is noteworthy that two of the earliest memorials commemorating a royal couple in England and France, the tombs of Richard II and his wife Anne of Bohemia, and Charles V and his wife Jeanne de Bourbon, are also among the first uses of portrait likeness for a royal effigy. Richard and Anne’s memorial even includes an epitaph referring to the king as “tall in body” (corpore procerus) and the queen as “beautiful in body” (corpore formosus) alongside descriptions of their speech, expression and character.66 As signalled in the previous chapter, the depiction of marriage on royal monuments occurred concurrently with an increasing emphasis on individual particularities in images of the king, in terms of both his external appearance and his inner character.67 Considered from this perspective, the presence of the queen on the tomb of her husband suggests a change more radical than the mere grafting of a new member onto the body of the Crown. Double tombs attest to a new concept of the royal body, one in which the body politic was blended with the body natural, as well as a new rhetoric of royal power, whereby the emotional texture of the relationship between the king and queen becomes a means to persuade their subjects of their superhuman authority. The following sections substantiate these claims through detailed examinations of two double tombs that place particular emphasis on the representation of marriage: the monument to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, and the tomb of João I and Philippa of Lancaster. Both are monuments of extraordinary ambition and singular design. Both represent monarchs who made marriage central to the rhetoric of their royal power, in ways that were sometimes criticised or even mocked by their contemporaries. 65 Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 201–02. 66 For the full epitaph, see Philip Lindley, “Absolutism and Regal Image in Ricardian Sculpture”, in The Regal Image of Richard II and the Wilton Diptych, ed. Dillian Gordon, Lisa Monnas and Caroline Elam (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), 292n49. 67 Stephen Perkinson has drawn attention to the growing interest in representing the individual physiognomy of the king in images produced at the court of France during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. He explains this fashion partly in terms of the popularity of physiognomy, which stressed the connection between external appearance and inner character. Perkinson, Likeness of the King, 135–88.

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EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, WESTMINSTER ABBEY (LONDON, ENGLAND).

PURBECK MARBLE. LENGTH OF TOMB CHEST: 367CM; WIDTH OF TOMB CHEST: 189CM; HEIGHT OF TOMB CHEST: 145CM (NORTH SIDE); 252CM (SOUTH SIDE). CHAPEL OF ST

34  HENRY YEVELE, STEPHEN LOTE, NICHOLAS BROKER AND GODFREY PREST, MONUMENT TO RICHARD II AND ANNE OF BOHEMIA, 1395—99. GILDED COPPER ALLOY AND

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35  VIEW OF THE MONUMENT TO RICHARD II AND ANNE OF BOHEMIA FROM THE CONFESSOR’S CHAPEL.

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The pairing of these two couples also reflects the close personal ties between them: Philippa of Lancaster and Richard II were first cousins, who maintained an active correspondence in their lifetimes, and there is evidence to suggest that (despite never seeing it at first hand) Philippa and João commissioned their funerary monument in part as a response to Richard and Anne’s memorial.

RICHARD II AND ANNE OF BOHEMIA Cast in copper alloy, gilded and adorned with delicate pointillé patterns, the effigies of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia lie hand in hand atop their Purbeck marble tomb chest, the now-empty niches of which once housed an array of angelic supporters (Figs 34 and 35). Their tomb stands in the westernmost bay of the Confessor’s Chapel, part of an ensemble of Plantagenet and Lancastrian memorials encircling the shrine of the royal saint Edward the Confessor (Fig. 36). Richard and Anne are not the only couple to be commemorated in the Chapel. Memorials to Edward I (d. 1307) and Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290) stand to the north of the shrine, either side of the monument to Henry III (d. 1272); her elegant memorial is topped with a glittering gilt copper-alloy effigy, while his eschews figural representation altogether in favour of a plain Purbeck marble tomb chest. As we saw earlier, the tombs of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault stand in two adjoining

36  PLAN OF THE CONFESSOR’S CHAPEL.

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bays to the south of the shrine; his follows Plantagenet tradition by combining a golden cast-metal effigy and Purbeck marble tomb chest, while hers emulates the royal tombs in France with contrasting white alabaster and black Dinant marble. In both cases, husband and wife are represented in close proximity but on separate memorials, each made from different materials and drawing on different conventions for royal commemoration. Richard and Anne’s memorial, on the other hand, breaks with this pattern by depicting the effigies of the royal spouses side by side: one monument commemorating both the monarch and his wife. Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, the eldest daughter of Emperor Charles IV and his fourth wife Elizabeth of Pomerania, on 20 January 1382. The union, initiated by Pope Urban VI in order to unite his allies in England and the Holy Roman Empire against his rival, Clement V, excited little enthusiasm in England.68 Criticism centred on the enormous sums of money that Richard II paid to Anne’s half-brother, Wenceslaus IV, in exchange for the match: as the Westminster chronicler rather impolitely declared, “the English king paid out no small sum to secure this tiny scrap of humanity”.69 Aside from the heavy burden the marriage inflicted on the Crown’s finances, English writers also describe the unusual intimacy between Richard and Anne. Thomas Walsingham (d. c. 1422), a monk at St Albans who compiled his chronicle between 1377 and 1422, noted that the king “rarely if ever allowed [Anne] to be away from his side”.70 Many chroniclers comment on the king’s overwhelming grief following Anne’s death on 7 June 1394. This led to apparently spontaneous expressions of post-mortem devotion, far exceeding the conventional modes of comportment for the grieving spouse in this period. Walsingham describes Anne’s funeral as “famous because of its expense, and equally infamous because of the king polluting the place with the blood of the earl of Arundel at the beginning of the funeral service”, referring to an incident in which the king, incensed after Richard Fitzalan arrived late to the queen’s exequies, struck the earl in the head with such force that he fell, bleeding, onto the pavement of the abbey-church.71 A chronicle written by Adam Usk (d. 1430), an expert in canon law and a member of the committee that determined Richard II’s deposition, relates how the king had ordered the palace of Sheen, “a royal and most splendid manor”, to be razed to the ground (extirpari) because

Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 85–91. non modicam pecuniam refundebat rex Anglie pro tantilla carnis porcione. The Westminster Chronicle, ed. and trans. L. F. Hector and Barbara Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 24–25. See also The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. Christopher Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 4–7. 70 The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, trans. David Preest, with introduction and notes by James G. Clark.(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 220. 71 The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 292. See also The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, ed. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1: 960–63. 68 69

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Anne had died there.72 Richard’s apparent abhorrence of places associated with Anne is even more extreme in the Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi, written by a chronicler from Evesham Abbey, which notes that for an entire year after her death the king refused to enter any chamber in which Anne had been.73 These comments cannot be read as straightforward descriptions of the nature of Richard and Anne’s relationship. Usk, Walsingham and the second Evesham chronicler are openly critical of Richard, a perspective that colours their accounts of the king’s excessive, even violent attachment to his wife. Yet the actions they describe are attested by other, less politically-charged sources. Entries in the Calendar of Patent Rolls reveal that Richard and Anne – unlike most other royal couples in this period – travelled together on all major itineraries.74 Moreover, the king’s orders for the palace at Sheen to be destroyed in its entirety are recorded in writ of privy seal dated 9 April 1395.75 Contracts and payments for the making of the tomb reveal that the king had an unusually close and sustained interest in the commemoration of his deceased queen. Incorporating expressions of emotion into the rhetoric of monarchical power, the memorial at Westminster placed royal marriage at the very centre of the royal image. Indeed, it is likely that hostile chroniclers framed their critique of the king in relation to his excessive spousal affection precisely because they recognised the prominent role that Anne occupied in the rhetoric of the Ricardian court. By making the public performance of marital love so central to his royal persona, Richard charged his marriage with a new kind of political significance, and in doing so made it a focus of hostility for opponents. Nowhere was this emphasis on royal marriage more evident than the monument that Richard commissioned for himself and his deceased queen. On 1 April 1395, ten months after Anne’s death, Richard made a contract with the masons Henry Yevele and Stephen Lote to construct “a tomb of fine marble”.76 This was followed on 24 April by a second indenture, instructing the coppersmiths Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest to fashion “two effigies of copper and latten”, as well as cast-copper saints, escutcheons, heraldic animals, inscriptions and a microarchitectural frame, to be attached to the Purbeck tomb chest.77 Further details were recorded in other, lost documents: the craftsmen are ordered to await 72 Quod manerium, licet regale et pulcherimum, occasione ipsius domine Anne mortis in eodem contingentis rex Richardis funditus mandavit et fecit extirpari. Chronicle of Adam Usk, 18–19. See also The St Albans Chronicle, 1: 736–37. 73 Sed nec in locum aliquem, uni sciebat illam perantea fuisse, per totum annum sequentum introire dedignabatur. Historia vitae et regni Ricardi Secundi, ed. George B. Stow (University Park, PA: University of Pensylvannia Press, 1977), 134, lines 2989–90. 74 Saul, Richard II, 456. 75 H. M. Colvin, R. Allen Brown and A. J. Taylor, A History of the King’s Works, vol. 2, The Middle Ages (London: HMSO, 1968), 998. 76 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 203. 77 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 200–01.

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additional instructions regarding the wording of the inscription, as well as the choice of saints and heraldic shields, to be provided by the king or his treasurer.78 Both contracts refer to un patron that had been shown to the craftsmen: these sketches or models, sometimes executed by a painter, are mentioned in a number of tomb contracts and wills from the late-medieval period, particularly those for cast-metal effigies.79 Richard was closely involved in the design of the monument, retaining his interest even as he was negotiating his second marriage to Isabella of France. An entry in the Exchequer accounts for 1 March 1396, just eleven days before Richard’s betrothal to Isabella was solemnised via a proxy at the Sainte-Chappelle, notes that the king bought drinks for certain craftsmen “for forming two images of copper, in likeness of the king and queen”.80 He also permitted the production of the tomb to exceed its original time span and budget. Although the contracts allowed two years and four months for the completion of the monument (far longer than is stipulated in other tomb contracts from this period), payments for gilding were still being made as late as 14 April 1399.81 This gilding cost Richard an additional £300, due in part to the elaborate patterns of punched dots (pointillé) added to the effigies and lid of the tomb chest, decoration not mentioned in the 1395 contracts.82 The final cost of Richard and Anne’s tomb was thus a staggering £970, making it the most expensive memorial documented from medieval England.83 This monument was not only remarkable for its expense and the close involvement of the king; it also placed an unusual emphasis on the relationship between Richard and Anne. It was the first royal tomb to portray the effigies holding hands: the contract stipulates that the effigies were to be portrayed “joining and enclosing together their right hands” (aionauntz &

78 For example: xii imagez du dit metal endorrez des diuerses seintz counterfaitz tiels seintz come as ditz Nicholas & Godfrey serront nommez & assignez par nostre dit seignur le Roy ou son Tresorer…. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 201. 79 In 1447–48 a painter named Clare was paid £8 for a “picture” of the effigy of Richard Beauchamp, while a pattern for Margaret Beaufort’s effigy was made by the painter Maynard Vewick (probably of Netherlandish origin) sometime before 1511. See Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 211–12; Philip Lindley, Gothic to Renaissance: Essays on Sculpture in England (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), 50–51, 63; Saul, “Patronage and Design”, 323–4; Saul, English Church Monuments, 106–07. 80 Devon, Issues of the Exchequer, 263. 81 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 211; Lindley, “Absolutism and Regal Image”, 69, 291n32. 82 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 211; Lindley, “Absolutism and Regal Image”, 69; Jenny Stratford, Richard II and the English Royal Treasure (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), 38–39. 83 Cf. the alabaster monument of Ralph Green and Katherine Clifton at Lowick (Northants.), which cost £40 including transportation. It is possible that the tomb of Richard Beauchamp (d. 1439) at Warwick was more expensive than that of Richard II and Anne, but its accounts are incomplete. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 211, 219; Saul, English Church Monuments, 109.

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cloisauntz ensemble lour meyns dextres).84 Although the arms of the figures were stolen in the eighteenth century, traces of the gesture are still visible in the shape and direction of the folds on the effigies’ mantles (Fig. 34).85 The Westminster Chronicle, composed by two monks at the abbey in the latter part of Richard’s reign, records that the couple’s wedding was conducted in the abbey church, followed two days later by the queen’s coronation.86 For these royal spouses, Westminster Abbey was a place of successive sacraments, each of which entailed a bodily transformation: it was the place where their two bodies became “one flesh”, the place where they were crowned and anointed with sacred oil, and the place where their corpses would lie side by side awaiting resurrection. The crowned gilt-bronze effigies, grasping sceptres in their left hands while holding one another by the right hand, were thus a material echo of the wedding and coronation rites that the living bodies of the couple had performed in the same church. The merging of these two rites, marriage and coronation, is encapsulated in a detail of the monument’s design. In his contract with Godfrey and Prest, Richard requested that an orb surmounted by a cross be placed “between” (parentre) the effigies of the king and queen.87 Although the orb was stolen in the intervening centuries, its original position is discernible from a fixing-hole in the effigy plate, indicating that it was placed immediately above the joined hands of the two figures. The orb is a recurring motif in images of Richard II. In the Westminster Portrait (c. 1395) the king is shown holding the orb in his right hand and sceptre in his left, reversing the usual positions of the two attributes in order to grant the orb pre-eminence.88 The artist of the Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–99), a portable altarpiece intended for the private devotions of the king, represented the orb, containing within itself a minute island on a silver sea, atop the banner of St George; orb and banner are blessed by the Virgin and Child, who are about to present it to (or receive it from) the kneeling figure of Richard in the adjoining panel.89 A lost altarpiece, recorded at the English College at Rome in the seventeenth century, featured kneeling figures of Anne and Richard, the latter Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 200. Richard Gaywood’s engraving of 1665 (published in Sandford) depicts the effigies joining hands. The first time the effigies are shown without arms is in an engraving published by Gough in 1796. Francis Sandford, A Genealogical History of the Kings and Queens of England, rev. edn (London, 1707), 203; Richard Gough, Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain, vol. 1 (London, 1796), part 2, 163, plate 61. 86 Que terciodecimo Kalendas Februarii in ecclesia Westmon’ regi desponsata est et in die sancti Vincencii proximo subsequente per manus domini Willelmi Courteneye archiepiscopi in reginam coronabatur. The chronicle was begun sometime in the 1380s and complete before 1397. Westminster Chronicle, xii, 23–25. 87 un ball ouesque vne crosse parentre les dites ymages. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 200, 202. 88 Pamela Tudor-Craig, “The Wilton Diptych and Contemporary Panel Painting”, in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 217; Gordon, Wilton Diptych, 57–58. 89 Gordon, “The Wilton Diptych: An Introduction”, in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 23; Gordon, Wilton Diptych, 57–58. 84 85

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37  DETAIL OF INITIAL WITH RICHARD II AND ANNE OF BOHEMIA FROM A ROYAL CHARTER ISSUED BY RICHARD II TO SHREWSBURY, 22 NOVEMBER 1389. SHREWSBURY AND ATCHAM BOROUGH COUNCIL, GUIDHALL, SHREWSBURY, MUNIMENTS 3365/24.

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presenting an orb to the Virgin with the Latin inscription: “This is your dowry, Holy Virgin, wherefore rule over it Mary”.90 On these altarpieces the orb functions as a symbol for the kingdom of England, often referred to at this time as the dowry of the Virgin.91 This connection between the orb and dominion meant that the attribute was the exclusive preserve of the king: the double portraits from the Liber Regalis (c. 1390) and Shrewsbury Charter (1389) depict Richard holding the orb while Anne is empty-handed (Fig. 37).92 On the tomb, however, this pattern is broken. With the sceptre in his left hand, it would be impossible for Richard’s effigy to both hold the orb and clasp his wife’s hand, meaning that the king effectively relinquishes possession of the orb in order to take hold of Anne. Positioning the orb above the effigies’ joined hands – held by neither but associated with both – symbolises a new concept of royal power, one in which the kingdom is presented as the couple’s shared possession. The indissoluble bond between the royal couple is also expressed in the robes worn by Richard and Anne’s effigies. Their clothes are engraved with intricate pointillé patterns mimicking luxurious fur-lined garments embroidered with heraldic badges, similar to those worn by Richard and Edward the Martyr in the Wilton Diptych (Fig. 38).93 The letters “R” (for Richard) and “A” (for Anne) are scattered among the heraldic devices on the lower portion of the king’s gown. On the queen’s effigy these initials feature even more prominently: the letters are powdered over her bodice, mantle and skirt, in the latter case interspersed with collared and chained ostriches, one of the queen’s heraldic badges.94 Initials were often used alongside mottos and badges as a quasi-heraldic device to indicate allegiance, patronage or ownership. For instance, a royal inventory of 1399 lists a gold belt and several dozen silver vessels marked with the letter “A”, presumably belonging to the late queen, while Richard’s jewel book of 1395 to 1397 records numerous

90 Dos tua Virgo pia haec est, quare rege Maria. Gordon, “Wilton Diptych: An Introduction”, 23–24. 91 Gordon, “Wilton Diptych: An Introduction”, 23. See also Gordon, “Small Worlds: The Orbs in the Westminster Retable and the Wilton Diptych”, in A Wider Trecento: Studies in 13th- and 14th-Century European Art Presented to Julian Gardner, ed. Louise Bourdua and Robert Gibbs (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 31–38. 92 For the Liber Regalis (London, Westminster Abbey MS 38, fol. 20), see Paul Binski, “The Liber Regalis: Its Date and European Context”, in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 233–46; for the Shrewsbury Charter (Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council, Guidhall, Shrewsbury, Muniments I. 24), see Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry, 520, no. 716. 93 Embroidered fabrics and figured silks with heraldic badges are also mentioned in the royal inventories. See Lisa Monnas, “Fit for a King: Figured Silks in the Wilton Diptych,” in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 166-70, 172; Kay Staniland, “Extravagance or Regal Necessity? The Clothing of Richard II,” in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 88, 90-91; Jonathan Alexander, “The Portrait of Richard II in Westminster Abbey,” in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 205. 94 Michael Siddons, Heraldic Badges in England and Wales (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 2: part 1, pp. 176–77.

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38  GEORGE HOLLIS AND THOMAS HOLLIS, ETCHING OF THE EFFIGIES OF RICHARD II AND ANNE OF BOHEMIA INDICATING THE POINTILLÉ DECORATION, C. 1840.

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39  POINTILLÉ DECORATION ON THE LOWER SECTION OF THE DRESS WORN BY ANNE’S EFFIGY, INCLUDING KNOTS AND CHAINED INITIALS.

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items with the initial “R”, including fifteen spoons.95 Crowned “R”s in gold are interspersed with foliate diamonds on the blue robe worn by Richard II in his Westminster Portrait. Distinctive to the monument, however, is the way in which both initials appear on both effigies. In much the same way as a shield with impaled arms, this combination of initials inextricably links Richard and Anne’s identities to that of their spouse. This idea is taken further in the decoration on Anne’s skirt, where a small chain links each pair of initials, a motif that came to be popular in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but was extremely unusual at the time the memorial was erected (Fig. 39).96 These linked initials were placed alongside trefoil knots, similar in appearance to the torque, one of the badges used by Anne’s half-brother Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia.97 Such a collection of connective devices – knots and chains – amplifies the theme of linkage symbolised in the joined hands of the effigies. It may also have been intended to express Anne’s position as the link between the Bohemian and English monarchies, an alliance for which, as the chroniclers complained, Richard had expended vast sums of money.98 The diplomatic importance of Richard and Anne’s marriage was emphasised in the eulogies that accompanied their memorial. Sometime between 1402 and 1413, an anonymous Bohemian traveller transcribed three lengthy Latin poems to Anne of Bohemia; references to Anne’s funeral and a close textual relationship to the latten inscription on the chamfer of the tomb 95 Caroline Barron, “Introduction”, in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 13–14; Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 153–55; Stratford, English Royal Treasure, 52. 96 The only near-contemporary parallel I have found is a fragment of a wall painting in the provost church at Vyšehrad (Prague), on which the letters ‘a’ and ‘p’ (for abbatissae pragensis) are intertwined with knots. See Barbara D. Boehm and Jiri Fajt, eds, Prague: The Crown of Bohemia 1347–1437, exh. cat. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 95, 98, 200–01, 221. 97 For Wenceslaus IV and the torque badge, see Milada Studničková, “Gens Fera: The Wild Men in the System of Border Decoration of the Bible of Wenceslas IV”, Umění 62, no. 3 (2014): 214–39. 98 Saul, Richard II, 89–93.

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chest indicate that they were written during the five-year period between the queen’s death and the completion of the monument in 1399.99 Indeed, the leonine hexameters in which they are composed suggest that the texts were intended to be read aloud, perhaps on the occasion of the funeral itself: one epitaph speaks of the sadness that England, Wales, Germany and Bohemia will experience, placing their grief emphatically in the future tense.100 In the traveller’s description, the poems are located alongside the royal memorials in the Confessor’s Chapel, most likely displayed on parchment pasted to wooden boards (known as tabulae), a practice recorded for other tombs in the late Middle Ages, including the monument to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York at Westminster.101 One of the poems devotes a lengthy section to Richard and Anne’s relationship: And because Richard, the heir of Prince Edward, Was an illustrious king and lacked a wife, A suitable maiden is chosen for the king’s embraces, By a council of nobles, lest he go to waste. Nobles traverse kingdoms, the sharp spur under the knight Compels the horses to run so that the king may be a husband. Various spouses are seen which would befit various kings, But Anne, pleasing, is bequeathed to ours. At last our king made Anne his queen, Whom he betrothed in the eyes of the Church. So very happy, the king and Anne for many years Were married; fulfilling her days she was worthy After this, death snatched Anne away from our prince, About which the king grieved.102

Despite being written on the occasion of Anne’s death, these verses focus on Richard’s feelings as the bereaved spouse, narrating his betrothal, union and 99 Michael Van Dussen, From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 21, 23–26, 130, 138; Michael Van Dussen, “Three Verse Eulogies to Anne of Bohemia”, Medium Aevum 15 (2005): 231–60. 100 Van Dussen, “Three Verse Eulogies to Anne of Bohemia”, 235–36. 101 Other examples of epitaphs displayed next to a tomb on parchment tablets include Geoffrey Chaucer’s Latin epitaph by the mid-fifteenth-century Italian humanist Stephen Surigo, displayed next to his tomb in Westminster Abbey, and the early sixteenth-century eulogies to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, displayed on tablets close to their tombs in the Lady Chapel at the Abbey. See Vincent Gillespie, “Medieval Hypertext: Image and Text from York Minster”, in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes, ed. P. R. Robinson and R. Zim (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 207–29; Sonsoles García González, “The Tabulae: Ephemeral Epigraphy in the Surroundings of Medieval Tombs”, Church Monuments 31 (2016): 68–84; J. Krochalis, “Magna Tabula: The Glastonbury Tablets”, in Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, ed. J. P. Carley (Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2001), 435–567; Conrad Rudolph, “The Tour Guide in the Middle Ages: Guide Culture and the Mediation of Public Art”, The Art Bulletin 100, no. 1 (2018): 45–46. 102 Michael Van Dussen, From England to Bohemia, 132–33, 139–40 (“Nobis Natura Florem”, lines 33–46).

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40  TESTER OVER THE MONUMENT TO RICHARD II AND ANNE OF BOHEMIA.

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eventual separation from his queen.103 Drawing from the tropes of chivalric literature, much attention is devoted to Richard’s pursuit of his bride; the queen is presented as a maiden of rare quality, the one who is chosen over many others. Anne’s death is framed in terms of Richard’s loss and defined in terms of his grief, lionising the very same outpouring of emotion that was so roundly criticised by fourteenth-century chroniclers. Although the elegies were composed prior to the making of the monument, by the time the Bohemian traveller visited the Abbey, tomb and text could be read in conjunction. Each amplifies and elaborates the significance of the other: the intimacy pictured in the monument takes on narrative form in the verses, while the affection described in the verses is made manifest in the gestures of the effigies and the emblems on their garments. Just as the body of the king incorporated two persons, dualism was also essential to the idea of marriage. Matrimony, like monarchy, was understood to constitute the mortal and the immortal, the human and the superhuman: both a transitory legal relationship between two individuals, and an image of the eternal, sacred conjoining of Christ and the Church. This two-fold concept of marriage – social contract as symbol of sacred truth, sacred truth reflected through social contract – is expressed in the design of Richard and Anne’s memorial. A wooden tester is suspended between the piers over the monument, its soffit decorated with four painted subjects: Christ in Majesty and the Coronation of the Virgin are depicted in the two central panels, while pairs of angels each holding a shield occupy the two outermost compartments (Fig. 40).104 The figure of Christ in Majesty holds an orb in his left hand, a mirror image of the orb adjacent to the joined hands of the effigies, the cast copper-alloy orb positioned underneath its painted counterpart. Effigies and tester thus engage in the same exchange between divine and human royalty as represented on the Wilton Diptych and the lost altarpiece in Rome, albeit in this case the effigies of king and queen offer the orb in unison. Immediately below the image of Christ in Majesty is the Coronation of the Virgin, an event long associated in medieval exegesis with the marriage between Christ and the Church and the union of the Bride and Bridegroom in the Song of Songs.105 This compartment is also positioned over Richard 103 In this sense the verses might be better categorised as an elegy, which can be defined as a funeral address that focuses more on the feelings of the bereaved than the deceased. Swift, Representing the Dead, 12. 104 Abigail Granville, “The Tester Over the Tomb of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia”, in Paint and Piety: Collected Essays on Medieval Painting and Polychrome Sculpture, ed. Noëlle Streeton and Kaja Kollandsrud (London: Archetype, 2014), 113–30; Granville, “A Study of the Materials and Techniques of the Tester Over the Tomb of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, Westminster Abbey” (Postgraduate Diploma in Conservation of Easel Paintings diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 2010). 105 In the Golden Legend, the heavenly reception of the Virgin is made analogous to that of the Bride by the Bridegroom, with Christ speaking the words from the Song of Songs 4: 8: “Come from Libanus, my spouse, come from Libanus: thou shalt be crowned.” Jacobus de

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and Anne’s effigies, drawing attention to the visual parallels between the two couples: both are dressed in flowing robes, both wear floor-length mantles and both originally had crowns upon their heads.106 Although much of the paint has flaked away, the outline of the Virgin’s head and shoulders reveals that she was depicted with loose, flowing hair similar to Anne’s effigy. These visual echoes are amplified by a reference to Anne as the “flower of the field” (flos campi) in one of her Latin verse epitaphs, a name that the Bride of Lebanon uses for herself in the Song of Songs.107 Floral imagery is woven throughout these verses. Anne is called “a happy bud” (felix germen), and the poet describes how “her scent wafts to us” (ad nos funditur suus odor).108 Such verdant metaphors were closely associated with the Bride and were also common to descriptions of the Virgin from this period, whom the Bride was held to prefigure. The elision between Queen, Virgin and Bride of Lebanon was characteristic of the rhetoric of the royal court in the fourteenth century; in the F Prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Alceste (widely thought to represent Anne) is dressed like a daisy in a green robe and white crown adorned with “oriental” pearls, and also compared to the sun, “the emperice and floure of floures alle”.109 Drawing on these poetic conventions, monument and epitaphs establish a series of typological associations between royal couples – Richard and Anne, Bride and Bridegroom, Christ and the Virgin – elevating the marriage of the king and queen through association with their divine exemplars. These sacred echoes were enhanced through the suggestion that the royal couple had a chaste marriage, emulating the practice of many married saints. The tomb chest of Richard and Anne was modelled on the monument to Edward III in the adjoining bay, with identical canopied niches and cusped quatrefoil decoration.110 There is one important difference, however. Whereas the tomb chest for Edward III’s monument features images of his Voragine, The Golden Legend: Or Lives of the Saints, ed. F. S. Ellis, trans. William Caxton (London: Dent, 1900), 4: 110–27. See also Philippe Verdier, Le couronnement de la vierge: les origines et les premiers développements d’un thème iconographique (Montréal: Institut d’etudes Médiévales, 1980), 81–112. 106 The contract stipulates the effigies be coronez (crowned), but the crowns appear to have been taken at an early date. In the 1665 engraving by Gaywood Richard’s effigy wears a crown, but Anne’s was already missing. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 200; Sandford, Genealogical History, 203. 107 Song of Songs 2: 1. Van Dussen, Heresy and Communication, 27, 131 (“Nobis Natura Florem”, line 4). 108 Van Dussen, Heresy and Communication, 131–32 (“Nobis Natura Florem”, lines 5, 32). Compare to Song of Songs 1: 11; 2: 13; 4: 10; 7: 8, 11. 109 Geoffrey Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, 593, lines 185–225. See also Van Dussen, “Three Verse Eulogies to Anne of Bohemia”, 241. 110 The contract instructs Yevele and Lote to raise the tomb to the same height as the tomb of Edward III. It is possible that the two tomb chests were made by the same workshop. Marble was supplied for Edward III’s tomb chest in 1386; as master mason of the Abbey at the time, Yevele probably oversaw the construction of Edward’s monument. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 203. See also Binski, Westminster Abbey, 196–97; Duffy, Royal Tombs, 146–51; Harvey, English Mediaeval Architects, 361–63.

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twelve children, the now-empty niches on Richard and Anne’s tomb chest originally housed gilt copper-alloy saints, surrounding the couple with a heavenly, as opposed to earthly, court.111 As Phillip Lindley points out, such juxtaposition would have drawn immediate attention to the couple’s childlessness.112 Indeed, far from avoiding the question of offspring, the monument presents Anne as a quasi-saintly supporter of those in childbirth. The inscription on the tomb chest praises Anne for “helping pregnant women” (pregnantes relevavit), a role that is expanded in one of the epitaphs recorded by the Bohemian traveller: Cheerful, she visited pregnant women in their suffering And any pregnant woman in need is comforted by her.113

Another epitaph praises the queen for visiting the sick, particularly those in childbirth.114 This association with pregnancy places Anne in the role of her namesake St Anne, mother of the Virgin, seen in this period as the model of sexual restraint in marriage and patron saint of pregnant women.115 Fourteenth-century chroniclers also play upon the affinity between the queen and her eponymous saint.116 In his Concordia, a poem describing the festivities arranged to mark the king’s reconciliation with the city of London in August 1392, the Carmelite friar Richard Maidstone refers to Anne as “one who bears the name of Mary’s Mother, Mary who bore Christ” and implores the queen to honour her namesake by showing grace to her subjects.117 111 In the two contracts Richard orders twelve saints, each to be placed in their own niche on the tomb chest, but the extant monument is larger than planned and includes two extra niches on each side. These saints must have been lost at an early date as Gaywood’s 1665 engraving shows the niches empty. See Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 201, 203; Lindley, “Absolutism and Regal Image”, 64; Sandford, Genealogical History, 203. 112 Lindley, “Absolutism and Regal Image”, 64. See also Katherine J. Lewis, “Becoming a Virgin King: Richard II and Edward the Confessor”, in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late-Medieval Europe, ed. Samantha J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (London: Routledge, 2002), 90. 113 Pregnantes pena mulieres vissit amena / Et per eam plena quevis relevatur egena. Van Dussen, Heresy and Communication, 130, 138 (“Anglica Regina”, lines 13–14). 114 Visere languentes voluit, partum pacientes. Van Dussen, Heresy and Communication, 131, 138 (“Femina Famosa”, line 11). 115 For the cult of St Anne in the late-medieval period, see Ton Brandenburg, “Saint Anne: A Holy Grandmother and Her Children”, in Sanctity and Motherhood, ed. Anneke B. MulderBakker, Garland Medieval Casebooks 14 (New York and London: Garland, 1995), 31–68; Brandenburg, “St Anne and Her Family: The Veneration of St Anne in Connection with Concepts of Marriage and the Family in the Early Modern Period”, in Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Lène Dresen-Coenders (London: Rubicon Press, 1987), 101–29; Gail McMurray Gibson, “Saint Anne and the Religion of Childbed: Some East Anglian Texts and Talismans”, in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 95–110; Virginia Nixon, Mary’s Mother: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Europe (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 116 Wendy Scase, “St Anne and the Education of the Virgin”, in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1993), 83n12; Van Dussen, “Three Verse Eulogies to Anne of Bohemia”, 241–42. 117 Matris christifere nomen sortita Marie/ Quod titulis, Anna, ‘gracia’ sonat idem. / Non decet hunc titulum vacuum fore, nam gerit illum/ Gracia que populis nunc valet esse suis.

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Another account of these celebrations, composed in the last quarter of the fourteenth century by the Augustinian canon Henry Knighton, records that the citizens of London presented Anne with a gold tablet depicting St Anne, “whom she held in special devotion, because she herself was called Anne”.118 This association is elaborated by the Evesham chronicler, who describes how the queen successfully petitioned Pope Urban VI to have the cult of St Anne more solemnly celebrated in the English Church, as well as (erroneously) reporting that Anne was buried at Westminster Abbey on the feast day of her name saint.119 Seen within a broader context, the references to pregnancy and childbirth on the tomb of Richard and Anne are revealed as the culmination of a courtly programme in which the person of the queen was elided with her saintly namesake, redeeming her childlessness by presenting her as a mother for all Christendom. 120 Saintly associations were also used to align Richard with the ideal of chaste marriage. John the Baptist, a saint martyred for denouncing Herod’s licentiousness who thereby came to be closely associated with marital continence, is invoked in the bronze inscription on the tomb chest: “O Baptist whom he venerated, may you by your prayers save him!”121 The king established an annual obit for himself and Anne at the altar of St John the Baptist in Westminster Abbey in 1391; a priest in this chapel would have been able to see the Confessor’s shrine and glimpse the effigies of the royal couple beyond.122 Richard was also known for his devotion to Edward the Confessor, a royal saint reputed to have refrained from sexual intercourse during marriage: the Confessor appears alongside the king (and John the Richard Maidstone, Concordia: The Reconciliation of Richard II with London, ed. David R. Carlston, trans. A. G. Rigg (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003), 72, lines 433–38. Van Dussen argues that Richard Maidstone was also responsible for “Nobis Natura Florem”, one of the epitaphs recorded by the Bohemian traveller (see Van Dussen, “Three Verse Eulogies to Anne of Bohemia”, 240). 118 similiter et regine aliam tabulam auream, de Sancta Anna, quam ipsa in speciali deuocione habebat, eo quod ipsamet Anna vocabatur. Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. G. H. Morton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 548–49, lines 1395–97. 119 Sepulta est itaque cum maxima solennitate in ecclesia de Westmonasterio, in die Sancte Anne sequentur; cuius festum, ut in ecclesia Anglicana solennius celebraretur, ista regina a domino papa imperauit. Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi, 134, lines 2991–93. Anne was actually buried on 3 August, the octave of the feast of St Anne. See also Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 2; Saul, Richard II, 324. 120 The influence of this depiction can be seen in a post-medieval epitaph recorded by antiquarians, describing Anne as a regia virgo (virgin queen) and noting that nunquam laeta parens, nam sine prole iacet (never a joyful mother, she lies without offspring). The epitaph is recorded in John Dart, Westmonasterium. Or the History and Antiquities of the AbbeyChurch of St Peter, Westminster (London, 1723), 45; Sandford, Genealogical History, 194; John Neale and Edward Brayley, The History and Antiquities of the Abbey Church of St Peter, Westminster (London, 1818–23), 109. 121 Votis Baptiste – salves quem pretulit iste. Lewis, “Virgin King”, 87. 122 There is evidence, however, that Richard was using the Confessor’s arms alongside his own for as much as a decade before their official adoption. Fox, “Brotherhood in Arms”, 71; Shelagh Mitchell, “Richard II: Kingship and the Cult of Saints”, in Gordon, Monnas and Elam, Regal Image, 120.

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Baptist) on the Wilton Diptych; contemporary chroniclers record Richard’s devotions at his shrine; and the statues of the king and queen which the citizens of London were ordered to erect after the 1392 reconciliation were accompanied by the heraldic arms of the Confessor.123 Although Richard followed his royal predecessors in choosing burial next to the Confessor’s shrine, he was the first to order the removal of another tomb to accommodate his memorial; the king’s close association with the saint would have made the possibility of an alternative location particularly unappealing.124 In 1397 Richard officially adopted the arms of England impaled by those of the Confessor as his personal shield, appropriating a heraldic arrangement usually associated with spousal union to express his devotion to the saint.125 Two shields displaying the English royal arms impaled by the arms of Edward the Confessor are engraved on the underside of the canopy over the head of Richard’s effigy, juxtaposed with the impaled arms of Richard and Anne in the same position over the head of the queen.126 This arrangement aligns Richard’s relationship with the Confessor with his marriage to Anne. Heraldically speaking, the two relationships are presented as equivalent: the Confessor is shown as the “husband” of Richard, while Richard is the husband of Anne. The king had already experimented with this idea in 1393 when he paid for a tripartite shield to be inserted into a window at Westwell church (Kent), featuring the heraldic arms of the Confessor impaling the royal arms, which themselves impaled the arms of Anne.127 These two marriages, one spiritual and one earthly, encapsulate the idea of matrimony expressed in the memorial. Here the union between king and queen is presented as far more than an emotional bond between two individuals; the royal marriage is an image of a divine mystery, its significance accrued through association with a multitude of heavenly exemplars. Richard’s and Anne’s devotion to saints known for marital continence is often cited as evidence that the royal couple may themselves have deliberately refrained from sexual intercourse.128 Indeed, a line from one of Anne’s epitaphs (almost) explicitly states that she had a chaste marriage: “pure, she was married to the pure Richard II” (munda fuit mundo Ricardo 123 Lewis, “Virgin King”, 93; Mitchell, “Kingship and the Cult of Saints”, 115–17; Nigel Saul, Richard II, 311–16. 124 For the payment made on 14 December 1395 for the removal of another tomb from the Confessor’s Chapel, see Devon, Issues of the Exchequer, 262. See also Sally Badham, “Whose Body? Monuments Displaced from St Edward the Confessor’s Chapel”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 160 (2007): 135–52. 125 Mitchell, “Kingship and the Cult of Saints”, 117. 126 Lewis, “Virgin King”, 87–88; Binski, Westminster Abbey, 54–55, 60. 127 Fox, “Brotherhood in Arms”, 71. 128 Among those who have suggested the marriage was deliberately chaste are Caroline Barron, “Richard II: Image and Reality”, in Gordon, Wilton Diptych, 15; John M. Bowers, “Chaste Marriage: Fashion and Texts at the Court of Richard II”, Pacific Coast Philology 30, no. 1 (1995): 20; Alfred Thomas, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 43, 45–48; Tudor-Craig, “English Panel and Wall Painting”, 218.

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nupta Secundo), a phrase echoed in the gilded copper-alloy inscription on the chamfer of the tomb chest.129 However, in a letter to her half-brother, Wenceslaus IV, probably written sometime between 1385 and 1386, Anne expresses her grief over her inability to conceive a child: We thus describe our position to your highness as lacking nothing that could be desired, except that we write grieving that still we are not rejoicing in our puerperio, but, concerning this, hope of health works in the near future, if the Lord permits.130

Kristen Geaman has argued that the use of the word puerperio, which usually meant childbirth, rather than proles (offspring) or conceptio (conception), may indicate that the queen had recently experienced a miscarriage, although she concedes that the more likely term for such an event would be abortus.131 Regardless of such ambiguity (perhaps a deliberate obfuscation on behalf of the queen), this letter confirms that Richard and Anne had a sexual relationship in the early years of their marriage and actively sought to conceive a child. Such a rare and intimate insight into the gynaecological misfortunes of a fourteenth-century queen draws attention to the disjunction between image and reality, between the lived experience of a relationship between two individuals and the idea of marriage presented in the monument. Rather than reflecting the actual continence of Richard and Anne’s marriage, the monument was part of a strategy to reformulate the couple’s infertility – a political and personal failure – into evidence for their saintly virtue. If we understand Richard and Anne’s memorial as a rhetorical image, a meticulous fabrication designed to convince the onlooker of particular ideas about the royal couple, then the question is raised as to whom the monument was addressed. Its position in the shrine, elevated above the ambulatory and enclosed by monuments, meant that the tomb was concealed from most visitors to the Abbey (Fig. 41). Access to the Confessor’s Chapel, affording close views of the memorial and its parchment tabulae, became increasingly restricted in the fourteenth century: the addition of the tomb of Edward I left only a narrow gap at the staircase from the northern ambulatory to the shrine, while the monument to Richard and Anne blocked entry via the southern staircase (Fig. 36).132 With access from the Van Dussen, Heresy and Communication, 131, 138 (“Femina Famosa”, line 5). The inscription on the tomb chest reads Dum vixit mundo – Ricardo nupta secundo. Translations of the epitaph usually give mundo as “the world”, but when read in conjunction with the epitaph it is better to translate it as the adjective meaning “clean” or “pure” agreeing with Ricardo, thus giving the translation: “While she lived she was married to the pure Richard II.” 130 Kristen Geaman, “A Personal Letter Written by Anne of Bohemia”, English Historical Review 128, no. 534 (2013): 1091–94. 131 Geaman, “A Personal Letter”, 1092. 132 In 1441 Henry V commissioned a stone screen behind the high altar, further enclosing the Chapel. Warwick Rodwell, The Coronation Chair and the Stone of Scone: History, Archaeology and Conservation (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013), 39, 41. 129

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41  VIEW OF THE MONUMENTS TO RICHARD II AND ANNE OF BOHEMIA (FOREGROUND) AND EDWARD III (BACKGROUND) FROM THE SOUTH AMBULATORY.

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ambulatory obstructed, the primary means of approaching the Confessor’s Chapel was through the sanctuary, one of the most sacred spaces in the abbey-church and hardly practicable as a route for hordes of pilgrims.133 This architectural arrangement staged different viewing experiences for the effigies of the king and queen respectively. Monks, pilgrims and other visitors to the abbey (such as the Bohemian traveller) would have first encountered the tomb from the south ambulatory, a position from which the two effigies are scarcely visible, raised approximately 252 centimetres above the pavement. Standing within the Confessor’s Chapel allows Richard’s effigy to be examined at close range. Anne, however, remains distanced from the viewer by the figure of her husband, meaning that the pointillé chained initials on her effigy are almost impossible to see, as are the sections of the bronze inscription located on the south and east sides of the tomb chest referring to her role in aiding pregnant mothers. It was the epitaphs, rather than her effigy, that offered visitors the most richly detailed image of the queen: one could read of Anne’s “rosy flesh” (caro rosa) and shining virtues (claruit in se plus propria per merita) in the parchment tabulae, even if her gilt copper-alloy figure could only be glimpsed from afar.134 Rather than limiting its capacity to communicate, the difficulty in seeing certain aspects of the tomb may have augmented the monument’s rhetorical power, leaving plenty of room for imaginative projection. The presence of half-seen things suggests to the viewer that they are not the intended audience for this imagery; the effigies of the royal couple – and their quasi-saintly marriage – are a heavenly vision presented to Christ and the Virgin on the tester above their heads.135 Through gesture, emblems and text, the memorial to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia insisted that the royal couple was a single, indissoluble entity. Commissioned by the king and constructed with his close and sustained oversight, its design is often cited as an expression of the unusual character of Richard and Anne’s marriage, a union seemingly marked by extraordinary emotional intimacy and heroic feats of sexual continence. Without denying the likelihood that Richard and Anne enjoyed a marriage of particular affection, to draw a straightforward connection between image and reality is to overlook the sophistication of royal rhetoric at the Ricardian court. Richard and Anne’s memorial is a meticulously crafted representation, remarkable for the extent to which it assimilated spousal affection into the language of monarchical power. Situated at the site of their wedding and coronation, joined hands juxtaposed with the orb of the Binski, Westminster Abbey, 53, 91; John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), 234; Rodwell, Coronation Chair, 41. 134 Van Dussen, Heresy and Communication, 130 (“Anglica Regina”, line 24), 132 (“Nobis Natura Florem”, line 30). 135 For more on the effects of partial visibility and its particular significance for tomb sculpture, see Jessica Barker, “Frustrated Seeing: Scale, Visibility and a Fifteenth-Century Portuguese Royal Monument”, Art History 41, no. 2 (2018): 220–45. 133

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kingdom, the monument blurred the boundaries between royal power and royal love, suggesting that the emotional bond between Richard and Anne was evidence of their “royal” character. This relationship is described in the mode of chivalric romance, compared to the exemplary marriages of saints such as Edward the Confessor and St Anne, and even presented as an earthly echo of the ideal, eternal marriage of the Bride and Bridegroom. It is impossible to identify the same distinction between body politic and body natural that Kantorowicz discusses in relation to other royal tombs: the emotional relationship between Richard and Anne and their involvement in the processes of childbirth (albeit on behalf of others) merge seamlessly with their role as the manifestation of the Crown. Spousal love had become a defining feature of royal identity.

JOÃO I AND PHILIPPA OF LANCASTER If the monument to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia marked the moment when marriage began to acquire a new importance in royal commemoration, this trend was to reach its apogee some forty years later in the kingdom of Portugal. The polychromed limestone monument to João I, king of Portugal, and his wife, Philippa of Lancaster, stands in the centre of the Founder’s Chapel in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha (Fig. 42). Finely carved effigies of the king and queen, their heads crowned by canopies and feet resting on corbels, lie atop a tomb chest of extraordinary size, which itself is supported upon the backs of eight lions. On the south wall, forming a backdrop to João and Philippa’s tomb as one enters the Chapel, stands an arcade of four ogee-arched niches, each recess housing a monument to one of their sons.136 Although two of their offspring are buried alongside their wives, neither of these couples is commemorated with effigies. Like the memorial to Richard and Anne in the Chapel of the Confessor, the tomb of João and Philippa is the only monument in the Founder’s Chapel to represent the figures of husband and wife side by side. On 2 February 1387 Philippa of Lancaster, the eldest daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399), wed João I in a hurried ceremony in the city of Porto (Fig. 43).137 Their union was contracted as part of a military alliance between João and Gaunt, who was engaged in an ultimately futile 136 The ensemble of tomb monuments on the south wall commemorates (from east to west): Fernando (d. 1443); João (d. 1442) with his wife Isabella of Barcellos (d. 1465); Henry the Navigator (d. 1460); and Pedro (d. 1449) with his wife Isabella of Urgell (d. 1459). See Begoña F. Torras, “Four Princes, One Monument, One Perfect King: The Fifteenth-Century Pantheon of an Idealised Royal Family in the Monastery of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha”, Portuguese Studies Review 23, no. 1 (2014): 77–96. 137 For accounts of their marriage, see Fernão Lopes, The English in Portugal, 1367–1387: Extracts from the Chronicles of Dom Fernando and Dom João, trans. and ed. Derek W. Lomax and R. J. Oakley (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1988), 228–29.

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42  MONUMENT TO JOÃO I AND PHILIPPA OF LANCASTER, 1434 (BEGUN AFTER 1426). POLYCHROMED LIMESTONE. LENGTH OF TOMB CHEST: 334 CM, CURRENT HEIGHT OF TOMB CHEST (INCLUDING STONE BASE): C. 198 CM, WIDTH OF TOMB CHEST: 170 CM, LENGTH OF JOÃO’S EFFIGY: 178 CM, LENGTH OF PHILIPPA’S EFFIGY: 169 CM. FOUNDER’S CHAPEL, DOMINICAN CONVENT OF SANTA MARIA DA VITÓRIA, BATALHA (LEIRIA, PORTUGAL).

campaign to claim the throne of Castile on behalf of his second wife, Constanza of Castile (d. 1394). João, the illegitimate son of Pedro I (d. 1367), had recently established himself as king of Portugal after a stunning and unexpected victory over the Castilians at the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385. In return for bringing 2,000 lancemen, 1,000 archers and 2,000 foot soldiers to aid Gaunt’s campaign, João demanded that Gaunt cede to him some Castilian territories as well as the hand of Philippa in marriage.138 For João, the 138 For the contract between João and Gaunt, see Fernão Lopes, Cronica del Rei Dom Joham I de boa memoria e dos Reis de Portugal o decimo, vol. 2, ed. W. J. Entwistle (Lisbon:

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value of the match lay in Philippa’s impeccable royal bloodline. As granddaughter of Edward III and cousin to Richard II, his new queen’s pedigree buttressed the position of a bastard whose claim to the throne of Portugal rested primarily on military success. The importance of this marriage to the legitimacy and sanctity of the new Avis dynasty is revealed in the major artistic project of João’s reign: the Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória, also known as Batalha. Construction of the convent begun around the time of João and Philippa’s marriage and continued throughout the king’s lifetime.139 João’s will, written on 4 October 1426, describes how he had ordered the convent to be built on the site of Aljubarrota in gratitude to the Virgin for his victory granted by God (Fig. 44).140 In the same testament the king commissions the Founder’s Chapel, which he explicitly designates as a royal mausoleum, forbidding burial in the centre to anyone except the king of Portugal, while reserving the walls for the sons and grandsons of kings.141 He also orders a double

43 GENEALOGICAL DIAGRAM SHOWING THE DESCENDANTS OF EDWARD III.

Imprensa Nacional, 1968), part 2, 203–05 (chapter XCIII). For the wider political context, see also P. E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), chapters 16–20. 139 João’s will states that the construction of the monastery had already begun at the time of the siege of Melgaço in 1387. Saul A. Gomes, ed., Fontes históricas e artísticas do mosteiro e da vila da Batalha: séculos XIV a XVII, vol. 1, 1388–1450 (Lisbon: Instituto português do património arquitectónico, 2002), doc. 52, 135. See also José da Silva and Pedro Redol, The Monastery of Batalha (London: Scala, 2007), 11–13. 140 Gomes, Fontes históricas, doc. 52, 135. See also da Silva and Redol, Monastery of Batalha, 11–13. 141 Gomes, Fontes históricas, doc. 52, 135, 138–39. In reserving the Chapel as a royal mausoleum, João followed his predecessor, Alfonso IV (d. 1357), who established a mausoleum for himself, his wife and children in the presbytery of Lisbon Cathedral. Eduardo Carrero Santamaría, “La catedral, el santo y el rey: Alfonso IV de Portugal, san Vicente mártir y la capilla mayor de la sé de Lisboa”, in Hagiografia peninsular en els segles medieval, ed. Francesca Espanõl and Francesc Fité (Lleida: Edicions de la Universitat de Lleida, 2008), 73–92; da Silva and Redol, Monastery of Batalha, 75–77.

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44  WEST FAÇADE AND FOUNDER’S CHAPEL, SANTA MARIA DA VITÓRIA, BATALHA, C. 1402— 1438.

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tomb with his late wife Philippa, who had died on 18 July 1415 and whose body was interred in the southernmost apse of the conventual church.142 These plans were brought to completion a year after the king’s death: on 14 August 1434 the bodies of João and Philippa were transferred from their temporary graves at the east end of the church to their tomb in the Founder’s Chapel, carried by João’s six sons and accompanied by a solemn procession of his grandchildren, royal women, lords, nobles and prelates.143 Although by the second quarter of the fifteenth century double tombs were common throughout much of northern Europe, they were entirely unknown in Portugal. The novelty of João and Philippa’s joint memorial is revealed in the king’s detailed – and perhaps somewhat anxious – instructions regarding the disposition of the two bodies. He asks for his corpse to be buried in the Founder’s Chapel next to his wife: in the same monument in which she lies, not with her bones, but in my own coffin, in such a way so that she lies in her coffin and I lie in mine, but lying together in our monument, as I have ordered to be done.144

It is possible that a joint memorial was suggested by artists from northern Europe engaged in the construction of the conventual church. Fifteenth-century documents record the presence of French, Flemish, English and German artists alongside their Portuguese counterparts, while the Dominican friar Luís de Sousa, writing in 1623, relates how João brought the most celebrated architects and skilled stonemasons from foreign lands to build the monastic complex at Batalha.145 Gomes, Fontes históricas, doc. 52, 134–35. The epitaph on the tomb describes the queen’s first interment as taking place in Capella majori et principaliori (the major and principal Chapel). The precise location is indicated by the presence of another inscribed epitaph to Philippa on the west wall of the south transept, as well as the recent discovery of a cavity under the pavement of the southernmost apse. See Saul A. Gomes and A. M. Rebelo, “O primeiro epitáfio latino de d. filipa de lencastre no mosteiro de batalha”, Leira-Fátima, órgão oficial da diocese, 44 (2008): 177–92. 143 The reburial of João and Philippa is recorded in the epitaph inscribed on the tomb chest. See Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 235 (lines 167–75), 257–58 (lines 180–88). 144 … em aquell moymento em que ella jaaz, nom com os seus ossos della, mas em huum ataude, asy e em tall guisa que ella jaça em seu ataude e nos em o noso, pero jaçamos ambos em huum moymento, asy como o nos mandamos fazer. Gomes, Fontes históricas, doc. 52, p. 135. 145 Huguet, the name of the master mason responsible for the Founder’s Chapel, recorded at Batalha from 1402 to 1438, suggests that he was a foreigner, possibly French. A ‘Master Conrad’ and ‘Master Whitaker’ are among the craftsmen commemorated in an inscription near the west entrance to the monastic church. Flemish and German artists are documented in the stained glass workshop during the second and third quarters of the fifteenth century, including a certain Luís Alemão, who may also have worked in Franconia and Nuremberg. See Carlos Barros, O vitral em Portugal, séculos XV–XVI (Lisbon: Banco Espirito Santo e Comercial de Lisboa, 1983), 83–84; Friar Luís de Sousa, Primeira parte da história de S. Domingos, 3rd edn, vol. 2 (Lisbon, 1866), 262; Jean-Marie Guillouët, Le portail de Santa Maria da Vitória Batalha et l’art européen de son temps, Portugalia Sacra 1 (Lleira: Textiverso, 2011), 198–216; Daniel Hess, “In Search of Luís Alemão: Stained Glass in Germany from 1400-1460 and the Fragments in Batalha”, in Mario Abreu, ed., O vitral: História, 142

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The main impetus for commissioning a double tomb, however, must have come from Philippa, whose parents (John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster), brother (Henry IV) and cousin (Richard II) were all commemorated with their spouses. Although she never returned to England after her marriage, Philippa maintained close ties to her native land: the queen had a number of correspondents in England, including Richard II,146 while important posts in her household were held by Englishmen, such as her chancellor, Adam Davenport, and treasurer, Thomas Elie Payn.147 Philippa introduced the use of Sarum to Lisbon Cathedral, and was also involved in arranging a Portuguese translation of John Gower’s Middle English poem, Confessio Amantis, undertaken by Robert Payn, a member of her household.148 It is notable that the queen’s grave in the southernmost apse at Batalha was left without a monument for almost eighteen years, her only memorial an inscription on the west wall of the south transept that notes, “here in the crypt lies the noble Philippa”.149 The choice of such a humble monument could not have been due to a lack of funds: João made lavish offerings to the community at Batalha and ordered elaborate ceremonies to accompany Philippa’s interment in the conventual church on 15 October 1416.150 A more plausible explanation is that the burial in the apse was always conceived an interim arrangement, suggesting that a joint memorial for the king and queen had already been decided by the time of Philippa’s death in 1415. One feature of the monument in particular reveals Philippa’s influence: the effigies of the king and queen are portrayed with their right hands joined (Fig. 19). This gesture is found on forty-five funerary monuments conservação e restauro: Encontro internacional, Mosteiro da Batalha, 27–29 de abril 1995 (Lisbon: Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico, 2002), 44–53; da Silva and Redol, Monastery of Batalha, 19, 28–29. 146 Four of these letters (three written by Philippa and one written to her) are published in M. Dominica Legge, ed., Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions from All Souls MS. 182, Anglo-Norman Texts 3 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1941), 73–74 (no. 28 – Philippa to Richard II), 347–48 (no. 287 – Philippa to Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury), 360–62 (no. 297 – Henry, bishop of Norwich to Philippa), 372–73 (no. 307 – Philippa to Henry, bishop of Norwich); another is published in Mary Ann Everett Wood, ed., Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain, vol. 1 (London, 1846), 78–81 (no. 31 – Philippa to Henry IV). See also Manuela Santos Silva, A rainha inglesa de Portugal: Filipa de Lencastre (Lisbon: Circulo de Leitores, 2012), 221–29. 147 Russell, English Intervention, 542. 148 Tiago Viúla de Faria, “From Norwich to Lisbon: Factionalism, Personal Association, and Conveying the Confessio Amantis”, in John Gower in Late-Medieval Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. A. Sáez-Hildago and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 131–52. See also Joyce Coleman, “Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal – and Patron of the Gower Translations?”, in England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th to 15th Century: Cultural, Literary and Political Exchanges, ed. María Bullón-Fernández (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 135–65. 149 Hic iacet in cripta quondam [praec]lara [Philipp]a. Gomes and Rebelo, “O primeiro epitáfio”, 182. 150 For documents relating to the translation of Philippa’s body for burial at Batalha in October 1416, see Gomes, Fontes históricas, docs 35 and 36, 93–97.

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(thirty-six surviving and a further nine recorded), mostly dating from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.151 Prior to João and Philippa’s tomb, all but two of these hand-joining monuments were commissioned in England.152 Philippa would have seen the effigies of her parents joining hands on their alabaster memorial at the cathedral of St Paul’s in London, completed six years before her departure for Portugal.153 As the only other royal monument to depict the effigies joining hands, the tomb of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia is another possible model for Philippa and João’s monument. Despite the fact that they could not have seen it in person, there are reasons to believe that the royal couple knew of and admired the Westminster tomb. A memorial in Braga Cathedral to the couple’s first-born son, Afonso (d. 1400), features a gilt copper-alloy effigy with silvered details,

45  EFFIGY OF PRINCE AFONSO SHOWING POINTILLÉ DECORATION ON HIS ROBE, C. 1400. GILDED AND SILVERED COPPERALLOY. BRAGA CATHEDRAL (MINHO, PORTUGAL).

The hand-holding gesture will be discussed in chapter four. The exceptions are an incised slab to Ulrich von Lass (d. c. 1295) and his wife Berchta (d. before 1293/94), in Rein Abbey, Styria (modern-day Austria), and a slab in high relief commemorating an unknown knight and lady in Lwówek Śląski (modern-day Poland). For the Rein Abbey slab, see Reiner Puschnig, “Das Erbbegräbnis des Ulrich von Laas”, Mitteilungen des Steiermärkischen Landesarchivs 15 (1965): 23–38. For the sculpted slab in Lwówek Śląski, see Andrzej Grzybkowski, “Die Dextrarum Iunctio auf dem Grabmal in Löwenberg”, Zeitschrift für Kuntsgeschichte 47 (1981): 59–69. 153 For Gaunt’s tomb, see Barker, “Stone and Bone”, 121–24; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 7–35. 151

152

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46  WEST FACE OF THE MONUMENT TO JOÃO AND PHILIPPA.

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47  SOUTH PORTAL, SANTA MARIA DA VITÓRIA, BATALHA, C. 1387—1402.

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the draped cloth and the child’s long robe decorated with pointillé flowers, trees and plants (Fig. 45).154 Copper-alloy effigies had a long tradition in English royal tombs, but were unprecedented in Portugal.155 Furthermore, the memorial to Afonso is the only other surviving medieval monument to feature pointillé ornamentation, a decorative technique usually associated with small-scale goldsmiths work but employed to magnificent effect on the tomb of Richard and Anne. The most plausible explanation, particularly given Philippa’s regular correspondence with her native land, is that the king and queen were instructing Portuguese artists to use materials and techniques that had been described to them by English associates. With the tomb at Braga in mind, it seems probable that João and Philippa were consciously modelling their commemorative choices on those of the queen’s family, in particular the double tomb of her parents at St Paul’s Cathedral and that of her royal cousin at Westminster Abbey. As well as advertising their connection to the English royal court, the gesture of joined hands was part of a broader programme at Batalha emphasising João and Philippa’s marriage. Heraldry played a prominent role in this spousal scheme. The reverses of the canopies over the heads of the effigies feature crowned escutcheons carved and painted with the arms of João (Portugal) and the impaled arms of João and Philippa (Portugal, impaling the arms of England with a label of three points) (Fig. 46). The same pair of shields is repeated in the stained glass in the Founder’s Chapel.156 They also feature prominently on the façade of the conventual church. On the south portal the same pair of escutcheons, crowned and topped with canopies, is carved on the apex of the canopy (Fig. 47). On the west portal the shields flank the pinnacle of the ogee-arch directly above a relief sculpture of the Coronation of the Virgin, thereby creating the same parallel between earthly and heavenly spouses found on the tester above the memorial to Richard and Anne (Fig. 48). A final pair of carved shields is located on the jambs of the west portal on the consoles upon which stand the two innermost saints flanking the door: João’s shield is on the sinister below St Paul and Philippa’s is on the dexter below St Peter. As well as proclaiming João and Philippa’s presence to a wider audience, the clustering of the emblems of the king and queen around the two public entrances of the conventual church anticipates the more elaborate marital imagery within the church interior. The heraldry on the south and west portals alerts us to the comprehensiveness of the funerary programme at Batalha. The commemoration 154 Badham and Oosterwijk, “Monumentum aere perennius”, 79–88; Rui Borges et al., “Gilding and Silvering Surface Decoration Techniques and Copper Provenance Studies in the Tomb of D. Afonso of Portugal”, X-Ray Spectrometry 37, no. 4 (2008): 338–45. 155 Binski, Westminster Abbey, 110–11. See also Badham and Oosterwijk, “Monumentum aere perennius”, 59–68. 156 For João and Philippa’s arms in the stained glass of the Founder’s Chapel, see Barros, O vitral em Portugal, figs 4, 18–20, 29; James Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views of the Church of Batalha … (London, 1795), 33.

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of João and Philippa extended far beyond their tomb chest and effigies, or even the Founder’s Chapel, but rather encompassed the entire conventual church. Yet, despite the fact that the marital symbolism on the south and west façade and within the interior of the Founder’s Chapel was conceived as a unified programme, viewers could not see all these aspects simultaneously. In an article on Chartres Cathedral, Paul Crossley employed the rhetorical category of ductus (meaning flow, movement or journeying) as a way of conceptualising how medieval architecture would have been experienced sequentially, proposing that the spatial arrangement and disposition of imagery created a series of pathways through the church in which the sculptures on the exterior of the building prepared the viewer for the places, objects and rituals they would encounter inside.157 Such rhetorical pathways offer another way of thinking about the disposition of spousal imagery at Batalha. When approaching the church via the west portal, the viewer would first be confronted with João and Philippa’s escutcheons juxtaposed with the Coronation of the Virgin, before passing alongside the same two shields on either side of the door as he or she entered the nave and turned to the right, where they would finally catch sight of the effigies of the king and queen, hands joined, on their memorial in the centre of the Founder’s Chapel. Moving from the west façade to the Founder’s Chapel, there is a marked progression from heraldry to bodies: from symbols for the institutional and genealogical aspects of marriage, to representations of João and Philippa’s emotional and corporeal intimacy. Whereas this kind of progressive revelation was typically associated with shrines or reliquaries, as at Chartres where it culminated with the sacred tunic of the Virgin, at Batalha

48 CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN AND ROYAL HERALDRY FROM THE APEX OF THE WEST PORTAL, SANTA MARIA DA VITÓRIA, BATALHA.

Paul Crossley, “Ductus and Memoria: Chartres Cathedral and the Workings of Rhetoric”, in Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 215–49. See also Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 9–50.

157

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these rhetorical pathways pointed towards the memorial to the king and queen.158 The most extensive account of João and Philippa’s marriage could only be deciphered by standing in close proximity to their monument. The north and south sides of the tomb chest are entirely covered in Latin inscriptions; at just fewer than 1,700 words, this is the longest inscribed epitaph on a surviving medieval tomb.159 The epitaph is split into two parts, one relating to Philippa and the other to João, each section detailing their lineage, moral attributes, noteworthy deeds and the circumstances of their death and burial.160 While the king’s epitaph focuses on his military triumphs at Aljubarrotta and Ceuta, the queen’s is a remarkable portrait of the fifteenth-century feminine ideal. Philippa is presented as a devout Christian, spending almost all her time in contemplation, reading or prayer, an image reinforced by the Book of Hours that her effigy holds in her left hand.161 Yet, according to the epitaph, even Philippa’s devotion to God was surpassed by her perfect love for her husband and children: But most of all, she loved her own husband most faithfully: and morally reproving her own children, she, most virtuous, instructed them.162

Philippa’s devotion to her husband is echoed in her motto, y me plet (I love him), which is carved in ornate Gothic lettering on the chamfer of the tomb chest, positioned directly between the queen’s epitaph and her effigy. Repeated six times so as to be legible from almost every angle (four on the south side of the tomb chest and once on the east and west sides), this motto encapsulates the idea of the queen defined in terms of her emotional relationship with her husband. Philippa is commemorated first and foremost as a wife. Yet there was more to this spousal rhetoric than merely praising an excellent marital performance. Just as Anne of Bohemia was portrayed as the supporter for all pregnant women, so Philippa’s epitaph presents her Crossley, “Ductus and Memoria”, 216–18. For a translation and transcription of the epitaphs, accompanied by a commentary, see Jessica Barker, “The Sculpted Epitaph”, 235–48; Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 249–59. 160 The section relating to Philippa is positioned below her effigy on the south side while the section relating to João is below his effigy on the north side; the chronology of the events recounted makes it clear that these are intended to be read together, starting with Philippa’s and ending with João’s. Barker, “Sculpted Epitaph”, 236. 161 Haec felicissima Regina a puellari aetate, usque in suae terminum vitae, fuit Deo devotissima: et divinis officiis ecclesiasticae consuetis tam diligenter intenta, quod clerici literati et devoti religiosi erant per eandem saepius eruditi: in oratione autem erat tam continua, quod demptis temporibus gubernatione vitae necessariis, contemplationi et lectioni, seu devotae orationi totum residuum applicabat. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 250 (lines 38–43), 254 (lines 47–52). 162 Plurimum vero fidelissime dilexit proprium virum: et moralissime proprios filios castigando virtuosissima doctrinavi. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 250 (lines 43–44), 254 (lines 53–54). 158

159

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as the model for all wives. The queen is described as “an exemplar of good living for married women, a guiding direction for her ladies in waiting, and the occasion of absolute honour”.163 The idea of the queen as the paragon of female virtue derives from the hagiography of saintly queens, such as St Margaret of Scotland (d. 1093) and St Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231), who were praised for their charitable works and devotion to prayer, as well as for running a well-ordered household.164 Although some were said to be virgins or to have insisted on a chaste marriage, other saint-queens were celebrated for their role as wife and mother, their hagiographers presenting their love for their husband as a reflection (albeit meagre in comparison) of their love for Christ. In particular, the language and themes of Philippa’s epitaph invite comparison with her royal forebear, St Isabel (or Elizabeth) of Portugal (d. 1336), wife of King Dinis (d. 1325).165 Like Philippa, St Isabel was praised for peace-making, almsgiving, dedication to the daily offices and ensuring the moral righteousness of the young women in her household; unlike Philippa, her marriage was framed as part of her earthly suffering, an opportunity to demonstrate Christian forbearance in the face of flagrant infidelity, rather than a defining aspect of her sanctity.166 Indeed, Philippa’s epitaph seems to deliberately invert Isabel’s hagiography when it claims that the queen was even more devoted to João than she was to prayer.167 Yet these marital priorities do not appear to have impinged on her saintly status. Describing the exhumation of the queen on 9 October 1416 in preparation for her translation to Batalha, the epitaph notes that her body was “discovered to be intact and pleasantly sweet-smelling” (integrum inventum et suaviter odoriferum), a standard formula for claiming sainthood, followed by a list of named witnesses to the miraculous state of the corpse. 168 The epitaph thus 163 Virtuosissima ista Domina extitit faeminis maritatis bene vivendi regulare exemplar, Domicellis directio et totius honestatis occasio. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 250 (lines 51–52), 255 (lines 62–64). 164 Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 216–21; Marc Glasser, “Marriage in Medieval Hagiography”, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981): 3–34; Anja Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia”, in Mulder-Bakker, Sanctity and Motherhood, 259–95. 165 For the life of Isabel of Portugal and her reputation for sanctity (leading to her official canonisation in 1625), see Giulia Rossi Vairo, “Isabella d’Aragona, rainha santa de Portugal, e il monastero di Santa Clara e Santa Isabel di Coimbra (1286–1336)”, Collectanea Franciscana 71 (2001): 139–70; Giulia Rossi Vairo, “La storiografia d’Isabella d’Aragona: da santa a regina (secoli XIV–XXI)”, in La participación de las mujeres en lo político, ed. Cristina Segura Graíño and Isabel del Val Valdivieso (Madrid: Almudayna, 2011), 47–62. 166 Vitae Elisabethae reginae Portugalliae, in C. Ianningo, J. Sollerio and J. Pinio, eds, Acta Sanctorum, Julii, part 2 (Paris and Rome, 1867), 175–83. See also Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 220. 167 Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 250 (line 43), 254 (line 52). 168 Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 250 (lines 66–72), 255 (lines 79–84). For the long-standing Christian tradition of the “odour of sanctity” and its role in the construction of holiness, see Susan A. Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 227–29; Martin Roch,

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suggests that Philippa’s exemplary life had granted her an extraordinary status in death, an achievement based in no small part on her love for her royal husband. This was not a relationship that ended in the grave. One of the epitaph’s most striking features is its emphasis on the union between João and Philippa’s bodies after death.169 The queen’s epitaph details Philippa’s initial burial in the nuns’ choir of the female Cistercian monastery of Odivelas in Coimbra on 19 July 1415, the subsequent exhumation of her body on 9 October 1416, its procession and reburial in the southernmost apse of the conventual church at Batalha on 15 October 1416, and the final exhumation of the queen and her reburial in the Founder’s Chapel on 14 August 1434.170 João’s epitaph describes the translation of his body from Lisbon to be interred alongside Philippa at Batalha on 30 November 1433, and repeats the account in Philippa’s epitaph (with added details) of the translation and reburial of the royal couple on 14 August 1434.171 This extended description of burials, exhumations and reburials takes up almost a third of the inscription. Even the names and titles of the members of the royal family who were present at the various funeral processions are recorded, painstakingly listed in order of precedence. The apogee of the long iterations of the two royal corpses is their reunion in the Founder’s Chapel, as recounted at the end of Philippa’s epitaph: Afterwards she was translated to this Chapel, and concealed in this tomb with the body of the most glorious King Dom João, her most virtuous spouse, beneath that form [sub illa forma] which is contained in his epitaph.172

The “form” that the corpses lie beneath may refer to the effigy of the king, or else to the description of him contained within his epitaph. Either way, these closing lines prompt the viewer/reader to consider the corporeal intimacy that is “concealed” (reconditum) within the tomb, a mirror and inversion of the intimacy between the two sculpted figures displayed atop the tomb chest. This invitation to imagine the hidden bodies of the royal couple is compounded by the difficulty in seeing their sculpted effigies. Measuring 170 centimetres from the base of the supporting lions to the chamfer of the tomb chest, the monumental proportions of the memorial mean that the effigies are raised too far above the head of the viewer to be easily seen in situ.173 Monument and epitaph thereby incline attention from the seen L’intelligence d’un sens: Odeurs miraculeuses et odorat dans l’Occident du haut Moyen Âge (Ve–VIIIe siècles) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 249–328. 169 Barker, “Stone and Bone”, 124–25. 170 Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 250–51 (lines 64–79), 255 (lines 77–91). 171 Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 252–53 (lines 144–76), 257–58 (lines 157–89). 172 postea fuit translatum ad hanc Capellam, in hoc tumulo reconditum cum corpore gloriosissimi Regis Domini Johannis, sui conjugis virtuosissimi, sub illa forma quae in suo epitaphio continetur. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 251 (lines 77–79), 255 (lines 89–92). 173 Barker, “Frustrated Seeing”, 228–36.

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to the unseen; away from the effigies and towards the burial of João and Philippa’s corpses side by side, an arrangement explicitly directed by the king in his 1426 testament. More than a mere image of spousal intimacy, the monument at Batalha proclaimes its status as a marker for the actual proximity of the king and queen’s bodies in the grave, lying next to one another until the Last Judgement. While Philippa may have suggested a joint memorial, and João initiated its construction, the epitaphs were commissioned by the couple’s eldest son and heir, Duarte I (d. 1438).174 The characterisation of Philippa as an ideal wife and mother was part of a wider programme overseen by Duarte that sought to portray himself, his parents and his brothers as an exemplary family.175 In an outline of a sermon written for João’s funeral on 30 November 1433, Duarte directs the officiant, friar Fernando de Arroteia, to address different groups at the ceremony with particular moral messages.176 For the royal women in attendance, both married and unmarried, Duarte suggests they should take note of five aspects of the life of Philippa, whom he refers to as the “holy queen” (santa raynha), one of the epithets associated with St Isabel of Portugal. Firstly, they should keep in mind her devotion to prayer and the daily Offices; secondly, her perfect love and fidelity to her husband; thirdly, that she was the foundation of good marriage for ladies in the kingdom, who thus excel all other noblewomen in the honour they show their husbands; fourthly, that because of this the women of the kingdom can call themselves daughters of such honourable kings; and finally they should leave their sons in her care.177 The Crónica de D. João I by Fernão Lopes, an account of João’s reign commissioned by Duarte in 1434, repeats these themes, describing how Philippa “loved the noblest of husbands most faithfully and made great efforts never to annoy him”, and concluding that “if the perfect manner in which she lived could be recorded in detail, any woman could study it with profit, no matter how high her rank”.178 Chronicle,

174 Duarte’s patronage is indicated in the epitaph itself, which refers to Duarte’s reign in the present tense and describes the new king as “manfully imitating his father’s deeds”. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 252 (line 142), 257 (line 155). 175 Begoña F. Torras, “Four Princes, One Monument, One Perfect King: The Fifteenth-Century Pantheon of an Idealised Royal Family in the Monastery of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha”, Portuguese Studies Review 23, no. 1 (2014): 77–96. 176 Antonio J. Dias Dinis, Esquema de sermão de el-rei D. Duarte para as exéquias de D. João I, seu pai (Braga, 1954). For a discussion of the sermon, see Torras, “Four Princes”, 80. 177 The final point is difficult to translate as the subject is not clear. Following the sense of the other points, I have read it (lhe) as a reference to Philippa. Many thanks to Maeve O’Donnell-Morales and Jack Levy for advising on this translation. Dinis, Esquema de sermão de el-rei D. Duarte, 27–28. 178 Amou bem fielmente o sseu muy nobre marido, teemdo gram semtido de o nunca anojar… semdo seus perfeitos costumes em que muyto floreçeo per meudo postos em scpito, assaz seriam dabastosa emsinança pera quaaesquer molheres, posto que de moor estado fossem. Lomax and Oakley, The English in Portugal, chapter XCVIII, 236–37. For the connection between the chronicle and epitaph, see Barker, “The Sculpted Epitaph”, 240–41.

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epitaph and sermon present Philippa as a matrimonial model to be studied and emulated by other women. Such ideas derive from a genre of literature known as mirrors for princes, one of the most popular examples being De Regimine Principum by Giles de Rome, which typically include instructions for the prince on how to manage his household.179 These manuals present relationships between members of the ruling family as the origin and model for good political relations; Giles begins his second book, “On the Rule of the Family”, by declaring that “all human communities have arisen out of the family, from which the rules for social order begin”.180 Duarte gives this connection between family and kingdom a slightly different inflection. Harmonious relations within the royal family are presented as the origin of the moral rectitude of families throughout the kingdom, with Philippa’s love and fidelity to João the guarantor for the marital success of all her subjects. Rather than a symbol for a broader political order, the royal family becomes the model for a broader familial order. This quasi-sacred blending of the institutions of marriage and kingship explains apparently strange passages in a book of advice authored by Duarte, the Leal Conselheiro (written in 1437–38), which describes how João and Philippa (along with himself and his queen) had arranged marriages for more than one hundred ladies in their palaces, the success of which was demonstrated in the fact that none strayed from their husbands.181 Fernão Lopes also comments upon this royal predilection for matchmaking, relating how João was accustomed to arranging marriages in his household without notifying the bride or groom until the evening before the wedding, only revealing the name of their future spouse at the ceremony itself.182 Regardless of the couple’s own preferences, Lopes remarks, there could be no contradiction of the king’s orders! Matrimony, an institution that was subject first and foremost to the jurisdiction of the Church, is presented in these anecdotes as an aspect of royal governance. 179 Torras, “Four Princes”, 78. For the mirror for princes tradition, see Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c. 1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 180 E familia igitur omnis homines communitas orta est; et ab ea de societatum regimine praecepta incipienda sunt. Giles de Rome, De regimine principum, ed. V. Courdaveaux (Paris, 1857), 35. 181 E passarom de cem molheres que ElRey e a Raynha, meus Senhores Padre e Madre, cujas almas Deos aja, e nos casamos de nossas casas, e prouve a Nosso psenhor Deos que algũa, que eu saiba, nunca falleceo em tal erro des que foy casada. Duarte, Leal Conselheiro, ed. Joseph M. Piel (Lisbon: Livraria Bertrand, 1942), 181, lines 2–6 (chapter XLV). See also Oliviera Marques, Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages, trans. S. S. Wyatt (Madison, Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 172. 182 E temdo-as asy cassadas na vontade a todas huum dia per estas pallauras: “Mamda-vos dyzer el-Rey que vos façaees prestes pera espossar da manhaã” – sem mais dizemdo com quem; ca nam era dello sabedor o tal recado lauaua ... Em outro dya leuou el-Rey consygo os noyous a camera da Raynha, e ally dise a cada huum aquella que reçebesse; a cujo mamdado nam ouue contradiçam, posto que nam acertasse mays de huma cassar com quem tinha (em) sua vontade. Lopes, Cronica, vol. 2, ch. CXXXVIII, 283. See also Marques, Daily Life, 173.

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As well as participating in a broader change in which spousal relationships were drawn into the concern of the Crown, there was a more pragmatic reason why such prominence was given to João and Philippa’s marriage. Just as the memorial to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia reformulated the couple’s infertility into evidence for their holiness by presenting Anne as the ideal mother, so João and Philippa’s monument portrayed the couple as ideal spouses as a means of refuting claims that their marriage was legally invalid. In his chronicle of João’s reign, Fernão Lopes refers to an unnamed “historian” (estoriador) who had accused the king of taking Philippa as his wife – and consummating the union – without the necessary papal bull of dispensation.183 While admitting there was a delay of almost two years in receiving the papal bull, Lopes portrays this as a mere administrative formality: according to the chronicler, Pope Urban VI had signed the roll approving the dispensation before João and Philippa’s marriage, but failed to formalise this in a written bull.184 Lopes goes on to describe how João sought to refute “the suspicion that some ignorant people were voicing” by ordering the papal letters, when they had finally arrived, to be published in Lisbon Cathedral and the news announced in a public sermon delivered by a Franciscan friar, Rodrigo de Sintra.185 Given that the royal chronicler wrote his account almost fifty years after João and Philippa’s wedding, the fact that he devotes three chapters to recounting the circumstances and chronology of the papal dispensation, even transcribing the two letters from the pope, indicates that this issue was a continuing source of anxiety for the royal family, especially at the moment the Crown passed to the couple’s son.186 The decision to erect a double tomb at Batalha can thus be understood in part as a means of refuting the alleged illegitimacy of João and Philippa’s union. As we will see in chapter four, the joining of right hands was the central legal and sacramental gesture of the wedding rite; in cases of disputed marriage brought before the ecclesiastical courts, the testimony of witnesses that they had observed the couple joining right hands and exchanging words of consent was treated as sufficient evidence for the validity of the union. It is no surprise, then, that a number of hand-joining monuments were commissioned in the context of legal disputes, particularly regarding the transfer of lands and titles through the marriage.187 Echoing the central gesture of the wedding rite, the joined hands of the effigies at Batalha acted Lopes, Cronica, chapter CXVIII, 241–44. Lopes, Cronica, chapters CXXIII–CXXIV, 251–55. 185 mandou el-Rey que as pubricassem na ingreja cathedrall de Lixboa, por tirar de sospeita o que alguuns inorantes fallauom, dizemdo que pois seus embaxadores tantos vezes hiam e vinham, que o Papa Urbano nom quisera despemssar com elle. Lopes, Cronica, chapter CXXIV, 255. 186 Lopes, Cronica, chapters CXXIII–CXXVI, 251–63. 187 The connection between hand-joining monuments and legal disputes will be discussed in detail in chapter four. 183

184

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as a public and enduring symbol of a ceremony whose validity had been disputed throughout João and Philippa’s marriage. This political agenda raises the issue of the intended audience for João and Philippa’s memorial. As the royal mausoleum for the Avis dynasty, the Founder’s Chapel was a stage for grand ceremonies involving diverse – albeit elite – participants. The epitaph records that the entire royal family, as well as “the most eminent and powerful part of the prelates, lords and nobles of this land”, were present in the chapel for the translation of João and Philippa’s bodies.188 This large gathering would have been repeated at least once a year: it was common practice in the later Middle Ages for the anniversaries of royal and aristocratic funerals to be marked by the public distribution of alms, large-scale processions and elaborate liturgical rites, attended by friends and relatives of the deceased. Indeed, the king’s will instructs that the celebrations at Batalha for the anniversaries of his death and that of his queen were to be performed by Cistercian monks from Alcobaça, “and other visiting monks and clerics”, in addition to the resident friars.189 Such extraordinary events need to be considered alongside more habitual, quotidian encounters with the tomb. The most frequent visitors to the Founder’s Chapel would have been the Dominican friars resident at Batalha. They were required to spend many hours performing intercessory rites for the royal couple: João’s will stipulates that the masses of the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary were to be said or sung daily for the souls of him and Philippa; every Monday the friars were to perform the Office of the Dead and a Requiem Mass; and an additional versicle was to be sung for the queen after the friars had completed the daily offices and before they went to eat.190 Although João does not specify the location of these services, they would have almost certainly taken place at the altar that once

188 et praecipua et potior pars prelatorum, dominorum et generosorum istius terrae. Barker, “Transcription and Translation”, 253 (lines 173–74), 258 (lines 186–87). 189 E nos dias dos finamentos da dita rrainha e meu, os frades d Alcobaça e os do dicto Moesteiro e outros quaaesquer frades e cleriguos que hy venham digam hum trimtayro rrezado em cada huum sahimento aalem das missas e Oras que ham de dizer. Although the monks at Alcobaça are not explicitly instructed to go to Batalha for the celebrations, the fact that they are listed alongside visiting friars and clerics suggests that the king was envisioning one grand service at Batalha attended by the monks at Alcobaça, rather than two celebrations taking place simultaneously at separate monasteries. Gomes, Fontes históricas, doc. 52, 137. See also Patrícia Soares and Pedro Redol, eds, Places of Prayer at the Monastery of Batalha, exh. cat. (Lisbon: Direção-Geral de Patrimõnio Cultural, 2015), 77. 190 The masses of the Holy Spirit and Virgin were spoken on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Sundays, while on Thursdays the mass of the Holy Spirit was sung and the mass of the Virgin was spoken, and on Sundays the mass of the Virgin was sung and the mass of the Holy Spirit was spoken. On the anniversaries of João and Philippa’s funerals, on All Soul’s Day, and on the octave of the anniversary of their deaths these commemorative responsibilities were even more burdensome: the Dominicans were to say Vespers, Matins, all the other Offices of the Dead, two Requiem Masses, two responses and the masses of the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary. Gomes, Fontes históricas, doc. 52, 137. See also Soares and Redol, Places of Prayer, 77–78.

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49  ELEVATED VIEW OF THE EAST FACE OF THE MONUMENT TO JOÃO AND PHILIPPA.

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stood between the piers at the easternmost end of the monument.191 A priest celebrating mass for João and Philippa would have been granted a privileged and particular view of the royal monument. From the elevated position of the altar platform the sculpted bodies of the couple are largely concealed behind the vegetal corbels at their feet, meaning that only their joined hands can be seen (Fig. 49). The view of the memorial from the altar thereby focused attention on a sign of João and Philippa’s marital fidelity, perhaps prompting the priest to remember that the saintly character of the royal couple – in particular the queen – had been demonstrated through their perfect affection for their spouse. One of the most distinctive features of the monument at Batalha is its relationship to the chapel in which it is housed. Whereas the memorial to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia is part of an ensemble of royal tombs framing the shrine of Edward the Confessor, the monument to João and Philippa is itself the centrepiece of the chapel (Fig. 50). The south wall of the Founder’s Chapel has an arcade of four ogee-arched niches, each containing a monument to one of João and Philippa’s sons (and in two cases their wife),192 the east wall is punctuated by further niches that once housed altars associated with the princes’ tombs, while the west wall originally featured cupboards for liturgical vessels and royal armour.193 João and Philippa’s monument stands within a separate octagonal space in the centre of the chapel, marked by eight narrow piers opening out into broken, stilted arches with cusped ornamentation.194 Surmounting the monument is a lantern comprising a magnificent stellar vault raised on a clerestory of eight windows, which creates a shaft of light that envelops the effigies of João and Philippa while leaving the memorials to their sons in comparative darkness.195 There 191 Although it was removed after the dissolution of the monasteries in Portugal in 1834, the altar was described by travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, complete with a wooden altarpiece featuring a gilded low-relief carving of the Crucifixion and a painted panel of the Virgin and Child attributed to Rogier van der Weyden. Lorne Campbell, ed., Rogier van der Weyden and the Kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2015), no. 20, 173–75. For travellers’ accounts, see Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views, 33, 35; Thomas Pitt, Observations in a Tour to Portugal and Spain (1760) [Observações de uma viagem a Portugal e Espanha, 1760], ed. Maria João Neto (Lisbon: Instituto Português do Património Arquitectónico, 2006), 135. The altar is depicted in an engraving of the Founder’s Chapel (after a painting by James Holland), published in William H. Harrison, The Tourist in Portugal (London: Robert Jennings, 1839), opposite 232. 192 For the collective monument to João and Philippa’s sons, see Torras, “Four Princes”, 82–95. The exception to this programme is Duarte, who commissioned his own magnificent funerary chapel at the east end of the conventual church. 193 The altars and cupboards are recorded in Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views, 39. The armour of João I, later joined by that of João II, was recorded by Domingos António de Sequieras in around 1808. For illustrations see Soares and Redol, Places of Prayer, 80–81. 194 da Silva and Redol, Monastery of Batalha, 77. 195 There are Iberian parallels for the placement of a free-standing tomb under an octagonal vault, including the Saint Ildefonso chapel in Toledo Cathedral, Barbazana Chapel in Pamplona Cathedral cloister, the chapel of Saint Barbara in the old cathedral cloister at Salamanca and the Saint Catherine Chapel in Burgos Cathedral cloister. See Tom Nickson,

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were practical reasons for the different spatial arrangements at Westminster and Batalha: unlike Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, João and Philippa were the first royals to be interred in the Founder’s Chapel and were thus able to select the most prominent location for their own monument. It may also, however, reflect conceptual differences in the way in which the royal couples are presented. At Westminster, the marriage of Richard and Anne is aggrandised through a series of typologies: Edward the Confessor, St Anne, the Bride and Bridegroom, Christ and the Virgin. These sacred echoes are

50  RECONSTRUCTION OF THE FOUNDER’S CHAPEL IN THE REIGN OF DUARTE I (TO SCALE), WITH MONUMENTS (DOTS) AND ALTARS (STRIPES).

Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 147–48.

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also present at Batalha, but here far more emphasis is placed on João and Philippa as the definition of the spousal ideal. Rather than demonstrating how closely their marriage conformed to a divine exemplar, it is the royal couple themselves who are presented as the paragon of spousal love, a model to be followed by the children who surround them, as well as all the couples in their kingdom. Considering the memorial of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia alongside that of João I and Philippa of Lancaster draws attention to the correspondences, as well as some important distinctions, in the tone and texture of their spousal rhetoric. These were the first double tombs commissioned by their respective royal dynasties, setting a pattern that was to be followed by their successors. They were also the only royal monuments to adopt the hand-holding device, with the exception of the memorial to Duarte I and Leonor of Aragon, also at Batalha, which is a copy of João and Philippa’s tomb. Both monuments were accompanied by extensive epitaphs that emphasised the love between the couple as evidence of their extraordinary virtue, an aspect of their character that set them apart from their subjects. These tombs are symptomatic of a broader (and often overlooked) shift in royal discourse at their respective courts, one in which spousal love was incorporated into the language of monarchical identity and power. At Batalha this rhetoric of royal marriage was marked by the unusual degree to which it focused on the person of the queen. Whereas the memorial at Westminster presents Richard as the loving subject and Anne as the object of his affections, at Batalha it is Philippa’s love for João that dominates. The king is presented primarily as a military figure, whereas Philippa’s all-surpassing devotion to her husband is portrayed as the essence of her royal office, the guarantee of her salvation and the spring from which fidelity flows for all the couples in her kingdom.

LOVE, BEYOND TWO BODIES One of the distinctive characteristics of royal images during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was their increasing personalisation.196 This interest in the particularities of the monarch exhibited itself in the fashion for facial likeness, in the popularity of personal devices such as the heraldic badge, as well as in the new attention paid to bodily comportment (such as voice and gait) in descriptions of the king. Double tombs represent another aspect of this tendency. Their popularity among kings and queens at the end of the Middle Ages lies in contrast to the earlier royal reluctance to commission joint memorials, a reticence that persisted even as this form of monument became widespread among the nobility, See, for instance, Binski, Westminster Abbey, 111, 199, 201–02; Perkinson, Likeness of the King, passim.

196

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gentry and mercantile elites. Although late in arriving, when double tombs to royal couples did finally appear they were marked by an extraordinary emphasis on the spousal bond, expressed through the comportment of the effigies, the language of their epitaphs and the treatment of the heraldic emblems of the king and queen. The dynamics of individual relationships must have contributed to the decision to commission a double tomb, but this does not provide a sufficient explanation for such a fundamental shift in royal image-making. Rather than believing that royal marriages in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suddenly became more loving, this change is better explained in terms of a shift in the aspects of royal identity that were deemed appropriate and desirable for commemoration. Or, to put it another way, the bond of affection between the king and queen was now held to be an effective means of expressing royal power and identity. Such rhetoric suggests that the boundary between the concept of the Crown and the person of the individual monarch had become more porous, complicating Kantorowicz’s account of the king’s two bodies. Affective ties took on a new universality as an aspect of the immortal royal office, just as the immortal royal office became more particular as it was inflected by the emotional relationship between the king and queen. Of course, as a dynastic alliance and a means of producing heirs, marriage had long been an affair pertaining to the Crown. The distinctiveness of this new rhetoric lay in its emphasis on the emotional bond between the royal couple as an aspect of their regal character; the strength, persistence and quality of royal love became a demonstration of the king and queen’s more-than-human status. One consequence of this was the suggestion of a quasi-sacred connection between the queen and the familial performance of her subjects. So Anne of Bohemia became the guarantor of safe childbirth for the women of England, while Philippa of Lancaster secured the marital fidelity of Portuguese wives. The unity of the body politic was thereby conjoined with the “one flesh” of husband and wife.

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L

ike many memorials from the fifteenth century, the Ingleton brass in the parish church of St Michael, Thornton (Buckinghamshire) pictures a man with more than one spouse (Fig. 51). The armoured effigy of Robert Ingleton (d. 1473), Justice of the Peace for Buckinghamshire and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Edward IV, is flanked by his three wives: Margaret Dymoke to his left, Clemens Lister and Isabel Cantilupe to his right.1 Successive wives stand alongside one another, collapsing the boundaries between life and death. This is an impossible image of spousal unity. In death the women are united, but in life each of the wives could only be Robert’s spouse in the absence of the others. Clustered beneath their feet are the children which they each bore him: three sons and five daughters in the case of Margaret, two sons and three daughters in the case of Clemens, and one son and two daughters in the case of Isabel. Cut from the same template, these three female effigies are distinguishable only by the escutcheon bearing the arms of their natal family above their head.2 While Robert’s effigy is also adapted from a workshop model, it is the only figure of its type on the memorial, set apart by the ornate detailing of its armour as opposed to the simple vertical folds of the women’s skirts. The three-line 1 The brass rests on a stone tomb chest. It is now in the nave, but was originally located in the centre of the chancel. E. A. Greening Lamborn, “The Ingylton Tomb at Thornton, Bucks”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 8, no. 5 (1947): 186–91; William H. Lack, Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Buckinghamshire (London: Monumental Brass Society, 1994), 210–12; William Page, ed., “Parishes: Thornton”, in The Victoria History of the County of Buckinghamshire, vol. 4 (London: St Catherine Press, 1927), 243–49; E. Clive Rouse, “Restoration of the Ingylton Tomb at Thornton, Bucks.”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 8, no. 7 (1949): 316–19; Saul, English Church Monuments, 235, 285. 2 In 1755 Browne Willis recorded further heraldry painted on the shields held by figures carved on the tomb chest, including the Cantilupe and Dymoke arms. Browne Willis, The History and Antiquities of the Town, Hundred, and Deanry of Buckingham (London, 1755), 305.

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51  BRASS MEMORIAL TO ROBERT INGLETON, MARGARET DYMOKE, CLEMENS LISTER AND ISABEL CANTILUPE, C. 1472. CHURCH OF ST MICHAEL, THORNTON (BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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Latin inscription at the base of the frame records Robert’s titles, date of death and pleas to Christ and the Virgin for mercy on his soul, but neglects to even mention Margaret, Clemens or Isabel.3 Like the children clustered at their feet, these wives are appendages to a memorial that first and foremost commemorates Robert. Gathering his spouses together was a means to create a comprehensive record of his offspring and marital connections, a genealogical summary of the successors to his estates. Women in the Middle Ages also remarried frequently.4 But, while there are numerous examples of a male effigy flanked by two or more wives, a mere handful of memorials show a female effigy surrounded by multiple husbands.5 Such a disparity highlights the stark contrast in the positions of men and women within marriage, as well as in the social and legal spheres more broadly, an inequality that circumscribed their choices in death as well as in life. Running alongside these material disadvantages was the sacred symbolism of marriage, the internal logic of which was far more censorious of remarriage for widows than widowers. This chapter examines the commemorative programmes of much-married women, considering the ways in which the symbolic value of marriage was used to justify the social marginalisation of widows. At the same time, it explores the means by which some widows actively appropriated this symbolism to express their own identity. The centrepiece is a detailed study of the tomb of Margaret 3 Armiger Ecce pius Iacet Hic tellure Robertus / Ingylton dominus de Thorneton jure patronus / In quinto decimo moriens Octobris ab orbe / Ad celos transit Mil. C quattor hec 72 simul adde / Sit sibi propicia celi Regina Maria. Salvet eum Christi matris amore Deus. There was once another inscription on the chamfer of the tomb chest, which gave the first names of the three wives, but only listed the full name, date of death and biographical information for Robert. See Willis, Town, Hundred, and Deanry of Buckingham, 303–04; Greening Lamborn, “Ingylton Tomb”, 186. 4 Around half of all aristocratic widows in fifteenth-century England would go on to remarry. See Joel T. Rosenthal, “Aristocratic Widows in Fifteenth-Century England”, in Barbara J. Harris and Joann K. McNamara (eds), Women and the Structure of Society: Selected Research from the Fifth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), 36–47; Joel T. Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 205. 5 I have only been able to identify ten monuments of this type that survive from pre-Reformation England, almost all of which are modest brasses made in the early sixteenth century. These are (in chronological order): the brass to Maud Harcount, Sir John Phelip and Walter Cooksey in Kidderminster (Worcs.), 1415; the monument to Margaret Holland, John Beaufort and Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence at Canterbury Cathedral (Kent), c. 1439; the brass of Alice Palmer, John Andrew and Thomas Palmer in Wye (Kent), c. 1440s; the brass to Agnes Fortey, William Scors and Thomas Fortey in Northleach (Glos.), 1447; the brass to Margaret Andew, John Monkeden and William Andrew in Cookham (Berks.); the brass to Alice Assheton, John Lawrence, Richard Radclyffe and Thomas Bothe in Middleton (Lancs.), c. 1510; the brass to Alice Baldry, Robert Wymbyll and Thomas Baldry in St Mary Tower, Ipswich (Suffolk), 1506; the brass to Margaret Goldwell, Laurence Hensell and John Goldwell in Biddenden (Kent), c. 1520; the brass to Joan Smith, Thomas Mede and John Smith in Clavering (Essex), c. 1520; the brass to Alice Langham, Thomas St John, John Cotton and (another) John Cotton in Panfield (Essex), c. 1525. In a few other cases it is unclear whether the second male effigy is the woman’s son or another husband, so these have been omitted.

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Holland, duchess of Clarence (d. 1439) and her two royal husbands, housed in her own funerary chapel at Canterbury Cathedral. Subverting the conventions for the commemoration of widows in fifteenth-century England, this memorial co-opted the bodies of her spouses (both effigy and corpse) into a scheme that proclaimed Margaret’s own pre-eminence. Despite social constraint and religious censure, the development of new legal devices around inheritance allowed widows like Margaret to amass unprecedented wealth with its attendant powers and freedoms. For these women there were new opportunities to express their marital ties in ways that transgressed, and even inverted, the norms and expectations of their gender.

THE CONCEPT OF BIGAMY In the Middle Ages the term “bigamy” was not used primarily to denote the practice of having two wives (or husbands) at the same time, but rather referred to remarriage after the death of one’s first spouse.6 At no point did the Church ban this practice; remarriage was legal, legitimate and extremely common during the medieval period.7 However, the theological status of second marriage was a matter of controversy from the mid-fourth century Council of Neocaesarea onwards, a debate that was to have practical implications for the married laity in late-medieval England.8 While the Church Fathers explicitly stated that remarriage should not be considered a sin, and furthermore that it retained the status of a sacrament, they also argued that second marriages were defective in their symbolic signification. Thomas Aquinas summarises this position in his Summa Theologiae: … although a second marriage taken in itself is a perfect sacrament, yet taken in relation to a first marriage it has something of a defect in the sacrament, since it does not have the full signification, since it is not of one woman to one man, as with the marriage of Christ and the Church; and by reason of this defect the blessing is withdrawn from second marriages. But this should be understood of the case where the second marriage is the second for both the man and the woman, or for the woman only. For if a virgin contracts marriage with a man who has had another wife, the marriage is blessed none the less: for the signification is in some way preserved even in relation to the first marriage, since Christ, even if he had a single Church as a bride, nevertheless has many persons within one Church as brides; but the soul cannot be the bride of any other but Christ, since with the demon it commits fornication, and there 6 The following discussion is indebted to David d’Avray’s important book, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 7 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 131–32. 8 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 141–56. See also Peters, “Gender, Sacrament and Ritual”, 68.

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is no spiritual marriage there; and because of this, when a woman marries for the second time, the marriage is not blessed because of a defect of the sacrament.9

The crux of Aquinas’ argument lies in the two-fold status of marriage as established by St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians: marriage is both a sacrament, conveying God’s blessing on the couple, and a symbol, signifying the union between Christ and the Church.10 Remarriage disfigures this sacred symbolism because the union is no longer exclusive to one man and one woman; one or both of the spouses have already become “one flesh” with another person. According to this argument, the sacramental facet of marriage ends at the death of one of the spouses but its symbolic facet endures, rendering remarriage a blemish on the earthly image of sacred coupling. This symbolic understanding of marriage was not restricted to the theological elite. It had concrete implications for the laity in late-medieval England, most notably in the form of the wedding rite.11 The following rubrics are taken from editions of the Sarum Manual printed in the early sixteenth century, but were introduced to the wedding rite, with minor variations, by the third quarter of the fourteenth century.12 They state that there were to be three alterations to the wedding in the case of remarriage. First, the pall would not be held over the couple when they knelt at the altar steps for their marriage to be consecrated.13 Second, one of the three priestly blessings was to be omitted, notably the prayer that explicitly refers to the status of marriage as a symbol of the union between Christ and the Church: O God, who has consecrated the state of matrimony to such an excellent mystery, that in it is signified the sacramental and nuptial union between Christ and His Church …14

This prescription neatly underlines the connection between ritual practice and theological debates on the symbolic nature of marriage. Indeed, after directing the priest to omit the blessing, the Sarum Manual embarks on a lengthy digression explaining the rationale behind this instruction, citing SS Paul, Ambrose and Jerome.15 It also quotes from a spurious For the Latin text, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplementum, qu. 63, art. 2, in Claude-Joseph Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 7 (Paris, 1882), 569. The English translation is by d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 147. 10 Ephesians 5: 22–32. 11 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 152–56. 12 The rubrics and commentary on the blessing of second marriages are found in manuscripts of the Sarum Manual dated to the end of the fourteenth century. They must predate the Pupilla oculi by John Burgh, written in 1385, in which they are paraphrased. From this point onwards, they appear in all printed editions of the Manual and almost every manuscript version in a public collection bears some trace of them. Collins, Manuale, 54–56n65. 13 Collins, Manuale, 53. 14 Deus qui tam excellenti misterio coniugalem copulam consecrasti: ut Christi et ecclesie sacramentum presignares in federe nuptiarum. Collins, Manuale, 53. 15 Collins, Manuale, 54–58. 9

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“new constitution”, which it claims was issued by Pope John XXII in 1321 in response to the large numbers of English priests travelling to Rome to receive absolution for blessing second marriages.16 By way of conclusion, the Manual paraphrases the position set out in Aquinas’ Sentences, picking up on his idea that the symbolic defect in second marriages only holds when it was the woman who had already been married, not the man: as a symbol for Christ, the husband can marry a “Church” composed of many brides, whereas the wife, as a symbol for the Church, can only marry one husband, with female remarriage even being compared to the fornication of the soul with a demon.17 According to the Manual, the alterations to the wedding rite were therefore only necessary if the bride had been married before, not for previously married men. The disparity between the genders is particularly notable in the third alteration to the ceremony for second marriages. When joining right hands to exchange their vows – the central sacramental act of the wedding – brides who had already been married are instructed to keep their right hand “covered” (tectus), presumably with a glove.18 No explanation for this prescription is provided in the Manual. Just as married women were required to veil their hair, the covering of the hand by which the bride offers her body to the groom must refer to her previous sexual relationship: her right hand had already been the conduit through which she became “one flesh” with another, so could only be offered again when renewed by a covering. These differences in the wedding rite for remarriage would have been apparent to the bride and groom, as well as the witnesses; one did not need to understand Latin to notice the absence of the pall, or the bride’s covered right hand. Laymen and women were certainly aware of the debates surrounding remarriage. A pastoral handbook from the late fourteenth century entitled Pupilla oculi (The Pupil of the Eye), numerous copies of which circulated in England, gives the same symbolic rationale for omitting the priestly blessing in the case of remarriage.19 Another popular literary work, of similar date but very different genre, provides further evidence that the laity were familiar with the controversies surrounding theological status of remarriage for women. In Chaucer’s prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the eponymous wife begins by relating a recent criticism of her decision to marry five times, a censure that was framed with reference to biblical models: But to me it was told, certainly, it is not long ago That since Christ went never but once 16 The constitution is found neither in the registers of Pope John XXII, nor in any published collection of his decretal letters. Archbishop Whittlesey attributed the constitution to Pope Benedict XII when promulgating it on 23 October 1370, but Benedict’s papal registers also seem to lack it. Collins, Manuale, 54n65, 57. 17 Collins, Manuale, 58. 18 Collins, Manuale, 47. 19 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 156.

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To a wedding, in the Cana of Galilee, That by that same example he taught me That I should be wedded but once.20

Throughout the tongue-in-cheek defence of her many marriages, the wife of Bath demonstrates a remarkably broad knowledge of biblical teaching on marriage; she dismisses St Paul’s criticisms of remarriage on the grounds that “counsel is no commandment”, and challenges her listeners to show her where God expressly prohibited marriage.21 She concludes by conceding that, while “maidenhead has precedence over bigamy” and her much-married state gives her little to boast of, God requires followers of more prosaic piety as well as saints: “he has not every utensil all of gold; some are of wood, and do their lord service”.22 Although Chaucer does not make use of the symbol of Christ and the Church so beloved of clerical authors, these few verses effectively encapsulate the status of remarriage in the eyes of the Church: not a sin, but a defective sacrament nonetheless. Chaucer must have believed such views would have been recognisable to his readers, since the humour of the wife of Bath’s rebuttal relies on the audience’s familiarity with the ideas that she satirises. By playing upon the contradictions between theological ideals and the priorities of everyday life (economic, social and sexual), Chaucer exposes the quotidian compromises inhabited by much-married women in the Middle Ages. Ideas regarding the symbolic status of marriage, and its implications for remarriage, penetrated well below the theological elite.23 The notion of marriage as a symbol of the union between Christ and the Church was far more than a theological gloss on a pre-existing social institution; it altered the wedding rite for remarriage, and thereby would have changed the ways in which men and women understood their own relationships. As d’Avray summarises in Medieval Marriage: “the symbolism is not epiphenomenal, not merely surface coating: it has affected the social meaning of marriage”.24 As seen in the preceding chapters, monuments made this metaphor manifest, enhancing its potency and expanding its audience. They enabled the Church to reinforce and communicate its teachings on the sacred symbolism 20 But me was toold, certeyn, nat longe agoon is / That sith that Crist ne wente nevere but onis / To weddyng, in the Cane of Galilee / That by the same ensample taughte he me / That I ne sholde wedded be but ones. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, lines 9–13, in Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, 105. 21 Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, lines 49–76, in Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, 105–06. The reference to “conseillyng is no comandement” (line 67) relates to St Paul’s precepts in 1 Corinthians 7: 7–9. 22 I graunte it wel; I have noon envie / Thogh maydenhede preferre bigamye. / It liketh hem to be clene, body and goost / Of myn estaat I nyl nat make no boost / For wel ye knowe, a lord in his household / He nath nat every vessel al of gold / Somme been of tree, and doon hir lord servyse. Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, lines 95–101, in Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, 106. 23 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 156. 24 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 154.

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of marriage, while also offering a means for married men and women to assimilate their individual relationships within a wider symbolic structure. This raises the question, therefore, of how women in the Middle Ages chose to commemorate their second (and third, and fourth) marriages, a social contract that marred the status of matrimony as the image of the union between Christ and the Church.

FUNERARY SCHEMES OF MUCH-MARRIED WOMEN Remarriage was more problematic for women than for men. While this distinction touched upon theological principles, it also pertained to the status of women in the eyes of society and its institutions. As Joel Rosenthal has pointed out, one of the most significant differences between men and women in the Middle Ages was the extent to which their identity was fixed over the course of their lifetime.25 Irrespective of marriage and remarriage, a man’s personal and familial identity would remain largely the same over the course of his life: his children would always be his children, his surname would always be his surname, his family would always be his family. Female identity was far more changeable. On her wedding day a woman acquired a new surname, leaving behind her father’s family to be assimilated into that of her husband. From a legal and social perspective, she was not the same person throughout the course of her life. Each subsequent marriage prompted yet another transmutation in her identity, a reincorporation into a new family.26 Yet if she had children from her previous marriages, she was also tied to her old affiliations. This created problems for much-married women when it came to deciding how – and with whom – to be commemorated. In a statistical overview of women’s commemorative choices in England between 1450 and 1550, Barbara Harris identified sixty-five wills made by women who had been married more than once and in which the testator specified where she wanted to be buried.27 Out of this group, twenty-five chose to be buried with their first husbands and the remaining forty with their second, third or fourth husbands. While noting that women tended to favour their first husband, Harris suggests that they were also influenced by factors such as the social rank of their respective spouses, the length of each marriage, the husband to whom they bore their first child or first son, and (more difficult to ascertain) their emotional attachments. In one case the testator explains the reasoning behind her choice: the will of Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege, 177. Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege, 178. 27 Barbara J. Harris, “Defining Themselves: English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550”, Journal of British Studies 49, no. 4 (2010): 742. For another discussion of the burial preferences of women who had remarried, see Rosenthal, “Aristocratic Widows”, 44–45. 25

26

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Agnes Say (dated 1478) states that she wishes to be buried with the second of her four husbands, Sir John Fray, because he was the father of her two favourite daughters.28 After negotiating different allegiances throughout her lifetime, in arranging the burial of her corpse a woman was required to make a definitive choice. Funerary monuments, on the other hand, offered an opportunity for a much-married woman to commemorate her many identities. One notable example is the alabaster memorial to Joan of Navarre (d. 1437), whose effigy lies alongside that of her second husband, Henry IV, king of England (d. 1413), in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral (Fig. 52).29 While Henry IV dictated the location of the tomb, the prominence of Joan’s first husband and her natal family in the design of the memorial suggests that the queen was responsible for its commissioning.30 Throughout the decoration of the monument Joan’s emblems are granted parity with those of Henry IV. The background of the painted soffit of the wooden tester, coloured azurite blue and scattered with forget-me-nots and broom flowers, features diagonal lines composed alternately of Henry’s motto, soverayne, and Joan’s, a temperance.31 These mottoes are also found on the backgrounds of the two painted panels at the head and foot of the tomb, representing the Martyrdom of Becket and Coronation of the Virgin, as well as the cornice of the tester, which is painted with soverayne on the south side (over Joan’s effigy) and a temperance on the north (over Henry).32 Heraldic parity continues with the three escutcheons painted on the soffit of the tester, which bear the impaled arms of Henry and Joan in the central roundel, balanced by the English royal arms in the western roundel and the arms of Navarre in the eastern roundel.33 Whereas royal monuments tend to prioritise the king’s heraldry, as seen on the tomb of Richard 28 Will of Agnes Say, London, National Archives: E 326/8550. See also Harris, “Defining Themselves”, 743. 29 The fullest account of the tomb to date is by Christopher Wilson, “The Medieval Monuments”, in A History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. Patrick Collinson, Nigel Ramsay and Margaret Sparks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 498–504. See also Tanja Müller-Jonak, Englische Grabdenkmäler des Mittelalters 1250–1500 (Petersburg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2010), 238–39. 30 In Henry IV’s final testament, dated 21 January 1409, the king asks for his body to be buried in Canterbury Cathedral, leaving the precise location to be determined by his cousin, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1414). No mention is made of a memorial. John Nichols (ed.), A Collection of All the Wills Now Known to be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England (London, 1780), 203–07. 31 For the painted scheme on the tester, see Marie Louise Sauerberg, “Report on the Examination and Treatment of the Paintings on the Tomb of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre” (conservation report, Hamilton-Kerr Institute, Cambridge, 2008). 32 Sauerberg, “Paintings on the Tomb of Henry IV”, 1:44, 61; Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 501. 33 The impaled arms of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre are also carved and painted on the shields held by the alabaster angels in the central niches on the east and west ends of the tomb chest.

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II and Anne of Bohemia, the escutcheons on the tester over Henry and Joan’s memorial place equal importance on three identities: Henry’s status as king of England, the marriage between Henry IV and Joan, and Joan’s standing as a princess of the royal house of Navarre. The monument also commemorates the queen’s first marriage. Silver-leaf ermine punctuate Joan’s motto a temperance on the soffit of the tester, another ermine is carved on the boss below a shield-bearing angel on the southeast corner of the tester,34 while three further carved ermine were once attached to the cornice on its eastern side.35 It is likely that the two small, muzzled creatures at the feet of Joan’s effigy also represent ermine.36

52 THOMAS PRENTYS AND ROBERT SUTTON, MONUMENT TO HENRY IV AND JOAN OF NAVARRE, 1413—19. TRINITY CHAPEL, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL (KENT, ENGLAND).

Technical examination confirmed that the beasts on the soffit and boss are ermine, not weasels or genets, as they were executed in silver leaf, now heavily tarnished. See Sauerberg, “Paintings on the Tomb of Henry IV”, 1:6, 26, 2: sample 2329/4. 35 Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol. 11 (Canterbury, 1800), 408. These attached badges appear in the engravings in Dart’s Westmonasterium (84) and Sandford’s Genealogical History (274) but are misinterpreted as cherubs and quatrefoils respectively. 36 Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 97. 34

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These beasts proclaim the dowager queen’s former identity as duchess of Brittany through her marriage to her first husband, Jean IV, duke of Brittany (d. 1399). Ermine were the most important badge of the Breton dukes: the principal residence of the duke and duchess was named Chasteau de l’Hermine (Castle of the Ermine),37 while the couple’s eldest son, Jean V (d. 1442), had chained and collared ermines as supporters on his seal of majesty.38 On 24 February 1408 Joan arranged for an alabaster monument to be transported from England to Brittany so that it could be erected over the grave of Jean IV in Nantes Cathedral.39 This memorial featured an effigy of the duke wearing a collar of ermine with a crowned ermine pendant, commemorating his role as founder of the Order of the Ermine, a chivalric association in which Joan herself appears to have played a prominent role.40 Rather than being defined solely by her status as dowager queen, the memorial represents Joan’s identity as cumulative, commemorating each of her successive ties to the ruling houses of Navarre, Brittany and England. While Joan was buried beside her second spouse, other women married in the knowledge that a memorial had already been erected picturing them lying next to a former husband. In a testament made three days before his death from dysentery contracted at the siege of Harfleur, Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1415) asks for his body to be buried in the choir of the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity, Arundel (Sussex).41 He orders a monument to be newly made (de novo faciendo) according to the discretion of his executors and names his widow, Beatrice of Portugal (d. 1439), the illegitimate daughter of João I, as the chief beneficiary of his will.42 The earl 37 The castle was situated at the edge of the old royal capital of Vannes. D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, The Knights of the Crown: The Monarchical Orders of Knighthood in Later Medieval Europe, 1325–1521 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987), 275–76. 38 R. Blanchard, ed., Lettres et mandements de Jean V, duc de Bretagne, vol. 4, 1402–06 (Nantes: Société des bibliophiles bretons, 1895), plate II; Boulton, Knights of the Crown, 277–78. 39 Thomas Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, literae, vol. 8 (London, 1727), 510. Although the memorial has not survived, early eighteenth-century drawings by Louis Boudan and Jean Chaperon record its appearance. For the engraving by Louis Boudan, see Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Drawings Gaignières 1, fol. 102. For Jean Chaperon, see Gui-Alexis Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne (Paris, 1707), 1: 498. For a discussion of the tomb as a diplomatic gesture, see Woods, Cut in Alabaster, 175. 40 Joan’s standing in the Order of the Ermine is revealed by the fact that Jean V ordered the return of collars of deceased members in November 1437, an act most likely prompted by his mother’s death in July of that year. Boulton, Knights of the Crown, 274–78. 41 et corpus meum sepeliendum in choro Collegii sancte Trinitatis Arundell quando ab hac luce migrare contigo in quodam monumento de novo faciendo iuxtam ordinacionem et discrecionem executores meos prout eis melius et honestius videbitur pro statu meo expedire. “Will and Testament of Thomas Fitzalan, 10 August and 10 October 1415”, Arundel, Arundel Castle Archives, FA 19. See also Rowena E. Archer, “War Widows”, in The Battle of Agincourt, ed. Anne Curry and Malcolm Mercer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 221. 42 Beatrice’s marriage to Thomas Fitzalan in November 1405 was arranged by Philippa of Lancaster and Henry IV. Ann Everett Wood, ed., Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain, vol. 1 (London, 1846), 78–81 (no. 31 – Philippa to Henry IV). The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, trans. David Preest, with introduction and notes by James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 340.

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53  THOMAS PRENTYS AND ROBERT SUTTON, MONUMENT TO THOMAS FITZALAN, EARL OF ARUNDEL, AND BEATRICE OF PORTUGAL, 1415— C. 1420. FITZALAN CHAPEL, ARUNDEL (WEST SUSSEX, ENGLAND).

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leaves no instructions in the will regarding the appearance of his monument; his sudden and unexpected death in France makes it unlikely that other contracts or documents were drawn up. The memorial, which depicts the magnificently vested effigies of the earl and countess side by side atop a tomb chest adorned with miniature clerics, is therefore likely to reflect choices made by Beatrice (Fig. 53).43 Although Beatrice contracted a second marriage to John Holland, duke of Exeter (d. 1447) in January 1433, this did not shift her post-mortem commitments. Following her death in Bordeaux on 23 October 1439, Beatrice’s body returned to Arundel to be buried beside Thomas. An inventory of the collegiate church at Arundel from 1506 lists a number of items donated by Beatrice, including an antiphonal, two sets of vestments, one of white cloth of gold and the other of embroidered black velvet, as well as: two red altar cloths of gold. the over altar with a Crucifix of Mary and John with a frontal of cloth of gold called damask velvet without towel. which was brought into this place with the bones of lady dame Beatrice late countess of Arundel.44

The corpse of the countess, accompanied by luxurious gifts for the collegiate community, traversed more than five hundred miles and crossed the English Channel in order to be interred beside her first husband. Such efforts indicate that she made these arrangements for her burial during her lifetime. Throughout her second marriage, Beatrice would have been aware that her effigy lay next to that of Thomas Fitzalan, a monumental reminder of her relationship with her first husband and the promise of their reunion in the grave.45 The presence of a double tomb did not guarantee, however, that a widow would choose to be buried alongside her former husband. When Katherine Clifton (d. 1460) married Sir Simon Felbrigg (d. 1442), both bride and groom already had a double tomb with their first spouse.46 Simon had been depicted alongside his first wife Margaret of Silesia (d. 1416), daughter of the duke of Teschen and the foremost of Anne of Bohemia’s ladies in waiting, 43 For a discussion of this memorial, see Jessica Barker, “The Speaking Tomb: Sight, Sound and the Voices of the Dead,” in Picturing Death, 1200–1600, ed. Perkinson and Turel (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 44 Although the archive catalogue at Arundel lists the date of the inventory as 1505, the document itself records the date as 1506. “Inventory of the Books, Plate and Other Goods in the Collegiate Church, 14 June 1505”, Arundel, Arundel Castle Archives, CA60. A 1517 copy of the same inventory is published in William St John Hope, “On an Inventory of the Goods of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, Arundel”, Archaeologia 61 (1909): 61–96. 45 John Holland would himself go on to be commemorated alongside two female effigies (probably representing his first and third wives, but perhaps his first wife and sister) at St Katherine’s Hospital in London, now in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London. 46 Sir Simon Felbrigg and Katherine Clifton must have married before 1428, at which date Simon is documented as holding the half-fees of Islip, Drayton, Great Addington and Twywell in Northamptonshire, which he acquired through Katherine’s jointure. William Page, ed., “Parishes: Lowick”, in The Victoria History of the County of Northampton, vol. 3 (London: St Catherine Press, 1930), 238.

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on a magnificent brass memorial in the parish church of St Margaret, Felbrigg (Norfolk).47 Katherine’s short-lived first marriage to Ralph Green (d. 1417) had been marked by an alabaster memorial in the parish church of Lowick depicting the effigies joining right hands, a gesture that was specifically requested by Katherine in the contract commissioning the memorial, dated 14 February 1419 (Fig. 70).48 Both Simon and Katherine expended considerable sums of money on memorials to commemorate their first marriages, suggesting that, at the time of their commissioning, the newly bereaved spouses expected these monuments to eventually mark their own burial.49 Such an intention is made explicit in the inscription accompanying the brass in Felbrigg, which begins “here lies Simon Felbrigg, knight” with three spaces for the day, month and year of his death to be filled in later. Yet, sometime over the course of their second marriage, there was a shift in Simon and Katherine’s post-mortem commitments. In her testament, written forty years to the day after the contract for her tomb with Ralph, Katherine asks to be buried beside Simon’s body in the choir of the Norwich Blackfriars.50 This request reveals that Simon had decided to be interred with Katherine – or at least apart from his first spouse – at some point prior to his death in 1442. Although there are no records of its appearance, their double burial would certainly have been marked with a double tomb. Katherine was one of the wealthiest residents in Norwich in the mid-fifteenth century; in 1451 she paid £100 in taxation, three times more than any other resident of the city, while in her will of 1459 she donated £20 towards the building of a new steeple for the Blackfriars church.51 Given such munificence, and 47 For the career of Sir Simon Felbrigg and the brass memorial with his first wife, see John D. Milner, “Sir Simon Felbrigg, KG: The Lancastrian Revolution and Personal Fortune”, Norfolk Archaeology 37 (1978): 84–89; Stratford, Richard II and the English Royal Treasure, 96n49; Saul, English Church Monuments, 293–94. 48 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 217–24; T. A. Heslop, “The Alabaster Tomb at Ashwellthorpe, Norfolk: Its Workmanship, Cost and Location”, in Patrons and Professionals in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2011 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Paul Binski and Elizabeth A. New (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2012), 340–41; Marks and Williamson, Gothic, 442, no. 330. 49 Katherine’s tomb with Ralph Green cost £40, a considerable sum and double the amount paid for the tomb of Sir Edmund and Joan Thorpe in Ashwellthorpe, Norfolk, attributed to the same sculptors. Although in the case of Simon’s memorial with Margaret the expense is not documented, as a product of the prestigious London Series B workshop the brass represented the most ostentatious choice for this type of memorial. Sally Badham, “Cast Copper-Alloy Tombs and London Series B Brass Production in the Late Fourteenth Century”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 17, no. 2 (2004): 105–27; Heslop, “Alabaster Tomb at Ashwellthorpe”, 334. 50 Norwich Record Office, NCC Reg. Brosyard, fol. 185r. The burial of Katherine and Simon’s bodies in the Norwich Blackfriars is also recorded in “Copy of a Visitation of Burials by Thomas Benolt (d. 1534), Windsor Herald”, London, College of Arms, MS CGY 647, fol. 56; John Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Islands Adjacent, 2nd edn (London, 1767), 531. 51 Norwich Record Office, NCC Reg. Brosyard, fol. 185r. See also Francis Blomefield, “North Erpingham Hundred: Felbrigg”, in Topographical History, vol. 8 (1808), 110; Roger Virgeo, “A Norwich Taxation List of 1451”, Norfolk Archaeology 40, no. 2 (1988): 149.

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the fact that the couple were interred in the most prominent position in the conventual church, a monument of some grandeur must have marked their grave. Yet Katherine did not entirely shed her former identity after her second marriage: sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century (probably after Simon’s death) she commissioned two escutcheons emblazoned with her arms impaled by those of her first and second husbands for the spandrels of the porch of St Etheldreda in Norwich.52 As Katherine Clifton’s two memorials demonstrate, a remarried woman might accrue monuments just as she accumulated successive identities. Multiple monuments made manifest the notion of a woman becoming different social and legal “persons” over the course of her lifetime; each marriage subsumed her within a new identity in the eyes of the law. Here we return to the notion of “two bodies” familiar from royal commemoration, but whereas the king’s two-fold identity was a legal fiction constructed to sustain a surfeit of power, the multiple persons embodied by medieval women reveal a lack of legal or social autonomy. Katherine’s two memorials commemorate two Katherines: one a member of the Green family and the other a Felbrigg. An alternative way to resolve the problem of commemorating multiple marriages was to commission a memorial that depicted oneself alone. For a few aristocratic women, widowhood offered both the financial resources and independence to enable them to arrange their own funerary schemes. In addition to their dower, the third of their husband’s property to which they were automatically entitled during their lifetime, an increasing number of women in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England also benefited from a jointure, a legal device whereby specific lands from the husband’s family became the joint property of the couple and their heirs.53 This opened up new potential for women to accumulate wealth, opportunities that grew exponentially for women who had been widowed multiple times. Alice Chaucer (d. 1475), granddaughter of Geoffrey Chaucer, enjoyed a meteoric social ascent from commoner to duchess, a rise occasioned by three advantageous marriages, first to Sir John Phelip (d. 1415), second to Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury (d. 1428), and lastly to William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk (d. 1450).54 Both Alice’s second and third husbands made provisions 52 Escutcheons bearing the arms of Clifton and Felbrigg impaling Clifton (but not Green impaling Clifton) were recorded over the west door of the church of St Peter Parmentergate, also in Norwich, dating to the 1420s. Many thanks to Sandy Heslop and Helen Lunnon for sharing this information with me. See Brian Ayers, Clare Haynes, T. A. Heslop and Helen Lunnon, The Parish Churches of Medieval Norwich, part 1 (forthcoming). 53 Simon Payling, “The Politics of Family: Late Medieval Marriage Contracts”, in The MacFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), 21–47; Mavis E. Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79–82; Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege, 196–205. 54 Rowena E. Archer, “Alice Chaucer and her East Anglian Estates”, in Bloore and Martin, eds, Wingfield College, 187–89.

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for her to be buried beside them.55 In a codicil to his will dated 20 May 1427, Thomas Montagu orders a monument within a newly built chapel at Bisham Priory (Berks.), instructing that the tomb should contain three separate compartments: the middle compartment, raised six inches above the other two, was to house his body, while his first wife, Eleanor Holland (d. 1418), was to be interred at one side, and his “beloved” wife Alice on the other “if she so chooses”.56 William de la Pole also made a bid for Alice’s post-mortem affections. In a will dated 17 January 1448/49 the duke orders that “an image of myself and another of my wife be made in stone” at the site of his burial in the Charterhouse in Hull, and orders that the masses which he had founded for them both be sung daily over his grave.57 Yet Alice eschewed both Thomas and William, choosing instead to be buried alone, in close proximity to the tomb she had ordered for her parents in the church of St Mary, Ewelme (Oxon.). During her final, twentyfive-year widowhood Alice was one of the wealthiest women in England, enjoying an annual income of around £2,000, riches she used to order a lavish and bespoke memorial.58 Lying atop a tomb chest emblazoned with escutcheons celebrating her dynastic connections, Alice’s alabaster effigy is depicted in the garb of a widow, a coronet atop her head and the order of the Garter on her left arm (Fig. 54).59 A series of pierced windows in the lower part of the tomb chest reveals a second effigy portraying Alice as a withered cadaver, visible only if the viewer prostrates him- or herself upon the pavement of the chancel. The entire memorial is surmounted by a rectangular canopy built through the wall to the chancel, adorned by a celestial throng engaged in prayerful gestures. Whereas most alabaster tombs of the fifteenth century, including the examples discussed at Arundel and Lowick, were carved to standard designs by workshops based near the alabaster quarries in the Midlands, the sophistication of Alice’s monument suggests 55 In contrast, Alice does not feature prominently in the will of her first husband, Sir John Phelip, who is commemorated on a brass depicting himself, his second wife, and her first husband at Kidderminster (Worcs.). Archer, “War Widows”, 225. 56 In cuius medio tumbam fieri volumus de quatuor pedum altitudine continentem tria loca distincta, quorum medius locus altior erit aliis duobus per medietatem unius pedis in quo corpus nostrum volumus inhumari. Et ex uno latere nostro reponi volumus corpus domine Alianore quondam predilecte consortis nostre defuncte. Ex altero vero latere nostro sepelliri volumus, si voluerit, corpus domine Alicie dilectissime uxoris nostre. London, Lambeth Palace Library, Register Chichele, 1, fols 406–408v. Printed in E. F. Jacob, ed., The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1414–1443, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 397. See also Mark Duffy, “Two Fifteenth-Century Effigies in Burghfield Church and the Montagu Mausoleum at Bisham (Berkshire)”, Church Monuments 25 (2010): 72. 57 London, Lambeth Palace Library, Register Stafford, fol. 189. Printed in Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Testamenta Vestuta, vol. 1 (London: Nichols and Son, 1826), 256–57. See also Sally Badham, “Medieval Monuments to the de la Pole and Wingfield Families”, in Bloore and Martin, eds, Wingfield College, 150. 58 Archer, “Alice Chaucer”, 192. 59 John A. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth-Century Almshouse (London: Ashgate, 2000), 175–93; King, “Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women”, 306–07; Saul, English Church Monuments, 297–99.

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54  MONUMENT TO ALICE CHAUCER, DUCHESS OF SUFFOLK, C. 1470-75. CHURCH OF ST MARY, EWELME (OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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it was a special commission from London carvers.60 With few parallels among other memorials of the period, the distinctiveness of the monument suggests Alice’s involvement as patron, its design being a reflection of her taste and preferences. The tomb of Alice Chaucer has been celebrated as a rare example of female agency in medieval England, a monument that expresses the extent of the countess’s independence.61 Pamela King, for example, claimed that the design of Alice’s tomb reflects her position of autonomy, “an autonomy which ignores her role as wife, but connects her instead to her father’s

60 Badham, “Medieval Monuments”, 153–54. For the alabaster industry in late-medieval England, see Nigel Ramsay, “Alabaster”, in English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products, ed. John Blair and Nigel Ramsay (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 29–40. 61 Among the numerous references to Alice Chaucer’s tomb and female autonomy, see Carol M. Richardson, “Art and Death”, in Viewing Renaissance Art, ed. Kim Woods, Carol M. Richardson and Angeliki Lymberopoulou (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 212; Joel T. Rosenthal, Margaret Paston’s Piety (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 111; Saul, English Church Monuments, 297–99.

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family”.62 Yet positing this dichotomy between natal and marital ties – the former linked to independence and the latter to subservience – runs the risk of obscuring the more complex negotiation at play between Alice’s identities as daughter, wife and widow. Her tomb was the centrepiece of a much broader scheme of post-mortem provision. On 3 July 1437 Alice and her third husband, William de la Pole, obtained a licence to found an almshouse at Ewelme, called God’s House, for two chaplains and thirteen poor men.63 The statutes for God’s House (compiled between 1448 and 1450) instruct the community regarding the intercessions they were to perform for Alice and William, which include the following prayer, to be recited twice daily in English with a clear and distinct voice: God save in body and soul our sovereign lord the king, my lord William, duke of Suffolk, my lady Alice, duchess of Suffolk his wife, our founders, my lord John their son, and all Christian people.64

This prayer (like almost all the intercessions prescribed in the statutes) was recited in the Chapel of St John the Baptist, the eventual site of Alice’s own tomb.65 Once the memorial had been erected, priests and paupers would have gazed upon Alice’s effigy, while at the same time reciting prayers for both her and William. This spoken reminder of Alice’s marital bond was echoed in the heraldic display in the glazing and on Alice’s tomb chest, which featured escutcheons commemorating Alice’s second and third marriages.66 Choosing to be buried alone did not mean eschewing all commemoration of spousal ties; the lone effigy of Alice Chaucer was enveloped in markers of her status as a much-married woman, an identity voiced in intercessory prayer and symbolised in heraldic escutcheons. Negotiation between various identities, competing and complementary, underlies the commemorative choices of remarried women. The twice-married Isabella Despenser (d. 1439), countess of Warwick, paid for a chantry chapel to be erected over the sepulchre of her first husband, Richard Beauchamp, earl of Worcester (d. 1422) at Tewkesbury Abbey, the mausoleum of her natal family.67 An inscription painted on the exterior cornice of the King, “Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women”, 307. The almshouse was not fully functional until 1444–45, over twenty years after the licence was granted, by which time the original scheme had expanded to include a school. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 23–35. 64 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 213, 146–48, 235 lines 615–21. 65 The Chapel of St John the Baptist was built sometime before 1438 under the patronage of Alice and William as part of the construction of God’s House. Alice’s tomb is situated within the wall that divides the chancel and the Chapel of St John the Baptist. Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 48, 159. 66 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 193–99. 67 The chapel was dedicated in 1423, one year after Richard was killed (due to a scribal error, the Founder’s Book of Tewskesbury Abbey gives the date as 1433). Phillip Lindley, “The Later Medieval Monuments and Chantry Chapels”, in Tewkesbury Abbey: History, Art and Architecture, ed. Richard K. Morris and Ron Shoesmith (Logaston: Logaston Press, 2003), 173; Julian M. Luxford, “The Founder’s Book”, in Morris and Shoesmith, Tewkesbury 62 63

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chapel commemorates Isabella as founder of the chapel, while canopied niches set between the pilasters at each corner once housed twelve statuettes representing the tutelary patrons of Tewkesbury Abbey, the direct ancestry of Isabella.68 Isabella and Richard may themselves have been represented in the form of kneeling statues in two of the three niches on the west wall of the upper storey of the chapel.69 Despite the resources she expended on her husband’s chantry chapel, Isabella was not interred within its walls. She chose instead to be buried to the right of her father in the centre of the choir.70 In her will, dated 1 December 1439, Isabella instructs that: my Image [is] to be made all naked, and no thyng on my hede but myn here cast bakwardys … and at my hede Mary Mawdelen leyng my handes a-crosse and seynt Iohn the Evangelyst on the right syde of my hede; and on the left syde, Seynt Anton, and at my fete a Skochen of myn Armes departyd with my lordys, and ii Greffons to bere hit uppe.71

Like Alice Chaucer, Isabella Despenser chose to be commemorated with a cadaver effigy; unlike Alice, there was no idealised figure to counterbalance her penitential image. There was also a saintly connection between the two memorial programmes. Alice’s carved cadaver gazes at a depiction of Mary Magdalene painted on the wooden boards above, while the Magdalene was placed at the head of Isabella’s effigy, reaching over to lay the figure’s hands across its chest.72 The long, loose hair of the Magdalene (a defining attribute) may also have encouraged associations with the uncovered hair of the two female cadaver effigies. In the case of Isabella’s memorial, the figure of the Magdalene at the head of the effigy acted as a counterweight to the escutcheon at her feet commemorating her first marriage. Notwithstanding the fact that the Magdalene was one of the most popular saints of this period, the Abbey, 60; Julian M. Luxford, The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries: A Patronage History, 1300–1540 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 180. 68 The inscription reads: Mementote Dominae Isabellae LeDespenser cometissae de Warrewyk quae hanc cappellam fundavit in honorem Beatae Mariae Magdalenae et obiit Londinis apud minores anno domini mccccxxxix die Sancti Johannis Evangelistae et sepulta est in choro in dextra patris sui: cuius animae propitietur deus amen. Lindley, “Later Medieval Monuments”, 173–57; Luxford, English Benedictine Monasteries, 180. 69 Lindley, “Later Medieval Monuments”, 174; Luxford, English Benedictine Monasteries, 180–81. 70 A chronicle of the founders and foundation of Tewkesbury Abbey, copied out in c. 1550 from an earlier manuscript, describes the location of Isabella’s burial as in dextris patris sui. “Chronica de Fundatoribus et de Fundatione Ecclesiae Theokusburiae”, in William Dugdale, ed., Monasticon Anglicanum, rev. edn, vol. 2 (London, 1819), 63. See also Lindley, “Later Medieval Monuments”, 176. 71 “Will of Isabella, Countess of Warwick, 1439”, in Furnivall, Fifty Earliest English Wills, 116–17. See also Lindley, “Later Medieval Monuments”, 176. 72 For both women, devotion to the Magdalene extended beyond the design of their tomb: the chantry chapel at Tewkesbury was dedicated to the Magdalene, the Virgin and St Leonard; on the seal of God’s House the Magdalene appears alongside St John the Baptist. See Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, frontispiece ii, 165; Lindley, “Medieval Monuments”, 173.

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combination of a famously reformed prostitute and a penitential cadaver may have held particular appeal for women who had been married multiple times, offering hope in the afterlife for the sexually active.73 As these examples demonstrate, women in the Middle Ages responded to the problem of commemorating multiple marriages in a variety of ways: Beatrice of Portugal arranged to be buried with a former husband while married to another; Katherine Clifton commissioned two memorials, one with each spouse; whereas Alice Chaucer and Isabella Despenser arranged for monuments depicting them alone but emphasised their marital ties in their wider commemorative programme. Individual monuments did not automatically signal a rejection of marital ties, nor did joint memorials necessarily mean that a women’s identity became subsumed within that of her spouse. Although medieval law classed a much-married woman as successive legal “persons”, each of whom replaced the other, women themselves seem to have conceived of their identity as cumulative, each new union superimposing another layer of affiliations onto those inherited from their family and deceased spouse(s). While the burial of the corpse forced them to choose which took precedence, the many registers of representation within a memorial ensemble – visual and textual, figural and heraldic, sculpted and spoken – offered the opportunity to express multiple identities and affiliations. There was one option, however, that was chosen by only a handful of women in medieval England. As discussed earlier, men were frequently represented flanked by two or more wives, but it was extremely rare for women to commission a memorial that gathered together their successive spouses on the same tomb. Such a discrepancy stemmed in part from the laws of inheritance. Women (unless they were heiresses) did not inherit property and could not pass on a patrimony to their children. Siblings who shared a mother but not a father belonged to separate lines of inheritance; from a legal standpoint their mother’s other spouses were irrelevant. Whereas a man might commission a memorial depicting multiple spouses along with their children to record all the potential heirs to his estates, there was no economic motivation to commemorate a woman in this way, unless she happened to be an heiress. This close intertwining of memorial design with the imperatives of inheritance is revealed in the fact that only two of the surviving monuments depicting a woman with multiple husbands commemorate members of the landowning elite; the rest show the male effigies in civilian dress, indicating that they had not attained the status of an esquire. One exception proves the rule: a brass at Kidderminster 73 King, “Cadaver Tombs and the Commemoration of Women”, 307. For the cult of Mary Magdalene in the later Middle Ages see Michelle A. Erhardt and Amy M. Morris, eds, Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Riverhead, 1993); Katherine L. Jansen, The Making of the Magdalene: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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(Worcs.) depicting Maud Harcourt (d. c. 1414), flanked by her two spouses, Sir John Phelip (d. 1415), who would go on to be Alice Chaucer’s first husband, and Walter Cooksey.74 Maud had brought Sir John substantial estates in Buckinghamshire, Cheshire and Worcestershire, which she had acquired as a dower from her first husband; the memorial thus pictures Maud in the middle of the two male effigies to reflect her economic role as the conduit through which her second husband acquired lands from her first.75 More difficult to ascertain is the role that attitudes to gender may have played in making a memorial to a wife and her multiple husbands less acceptable in the eyes of medieval patrons. Sermons and ecclesiastical regulations do not explicitly address the issue of monuments to female remarriage. Yet this was a society in which the comparative status of men and women was expressed through the relative positioning of their bodies in space, rules that governed the segregation of the laity within some churches, with women either situated on the left (or north) side of their male companions, or else restricted to the westernmost section of the nave.76 The Sarum Missal stipulates that the bride was to be positioned to the left of the groom in the wedding rite, to reflect the belief that Eve was taken from a rib of Adam’s left side.77 These same conventions governed the respective positions of men and women when represented in images: altarpieces, stained glass and manuscript illuminations depict male patrons kneeling to the right of their female counterparts.78 Likewise, double tombs almost always place the man on the woman’s dexter, one of the only exceptions being monuments that show the effigies holding hands.79 It is thus difficult to believe that patrons and viewers would not have been sensitive to the hierarchy implied by an image of a woman flanked by two men. Also potentially problematic for a medieval audience is the fact that such a memorial would be a public and overt representation of female remarriage, situating within the church building an apparent disfigurement of the symbolic value of matrimony as an image of the union between Christ and the Church. If a much-married woman marred 74 E. B. Barnard and J. F. Parker, “The Monumental Brasses of Worcestershire. Part III”, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society 11 (1934): 142–43; Malcolm Norris, Monumental Brasses: The Memorials (London: Philips & Page, 1977), 1: 98. 75 L. S. Woodger, “Phelip, Sir John (d. 1415), of Kidderminster, Worcs.”, in History of Parliament Online, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1386-1421/member/ phelip-sir-john-1415. 76 Corinne Schleif, “Men on the Right – Women on the Left: (A)symmetrical Spaces and Gendered Places”, in Women’s Space: Patronage, Place and Gender in the Medieval Church, ed. Virginia C. Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), 224–26. 77 vir a dextris mulier et mulier a sinistris viri. Collins, Manuale, 44. The rubric relating these positions to Adam and Eve is found in the 1526 printed edition of the Sarum use, edited in The Sarum Missal in English, trans. Frederick E. Warren, vol. 2 (London: De la More Press, 1913), 144. 78 Schleif, “Men on the Right – Women on the Left”, 207–12. 79 The implications of the reversal of positions of the male and female effigies on hand-joining monuments are discussed in chapter four.

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the image of marriage, then an image of a much-married woman might also have been seen as a challenge to social and religious ideals.

THE HOLLAND CHAPEL AT CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL One memorial from fifteenth-century England broke spectacularly with such conventions. In the Holland Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral, three finely carved alabaster effigies, resting on a Purbeck marble tomb chest, commemorate Margaret Holland, duchess of Clarence (d. 1439) and her two husbands, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset (d. 1410) and Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence (d. 1421) (Figs 55 and 56). The figure of Margaret is placed at the centre of the monument with her spouses to either side, their crowned and armoured effigies co-opted into a scheme that emphasises her importance. Margaret Holland’s tomb is a unique and sumptuous image of a twice-married woman. Yet it is more than a representation. In a remarkable demonstration of her agency and influence at the royal court, the duchess arranged for the bodies of her two husbands to be exhumed and reburied alongside her in the grave. The rich documentary and material evidence of the Holland Chapel offers the opportunity to explore in unusual depth attitudes to remarriage in late-medieval England, its representation, commemoration and theological implications, from the perspective of a wealthy and powerful dowager duchess. Margaret Holland was born in or before 1388, the daughter of Thomas Holland, earl of Kent (d. 1397) and Alice Fitzalan (d. 1416) (Fig. 57). Her father was the matrilineal half-brother of Richard II and enjoyed increasing prestige and wealth under the Ricardian regime.80 Such close connections to the Crown proved less advantageous after the usurpation by Henry Bolingbroke in 1399, precipitating a dramatic reversal in the fortunes of the Holland family. In January 1400 Margaret’s brother and uncle were both executed for their involvement in a plot to seize Henry and his sons in Windsor.81 Margaret, on the other hand, prospered following the Lancastrian coup. Her position in the new regime was assured due to her marriage in 1397 to John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, the eldest son of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, and thus half-brother to Henry IV.82 Beaufort became the leading figure at the court of Henry IV, intimately involved in 80 For the Holland family, see Michael M. N. Stansfield, “The Holland Family, Dukes of Exeter, Earls of Kent and Huntingdon, 1352–1475”, (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1987). 81 Stansfield, “Holland Family”, 121–50. 82 Margaret and John were married at some point before he became marquess of Somerset on 28 September 1397, likely around the time of his legitimation, which was confirmed by royal patent on 9 February 1397. R. L. J. Shaw, “Holland, Margaret, Duchess of Clarence (b. in or before 1388, d. 1439)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, doi:10.1093/ ref:odnb/98133.

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55  MONUMENT TO MARGARET HOLLAND, DUCHESS OF CLARENCE, JOHN BEAUFORT, EARL OF SOMERSET AND THOMAS OF LANCASTER, DUKE OF CLARENCE, 1439. PAINTED AND GILDED ALABASTER, PURBECK MARBLE. LENGTH OF TOMB CHEST: 227CM; WIDTH OF TOMB CHEST: 203CM; HEIGHT OF TOMB CHEST: 119CM. HOLLAND CHAPEL, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.

56 (FACING)  HOLLAND CHAPEL, VIEW TOWARDS THE EAST WINDOW.

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57 GENEALOGICAL DIAGRAM OF MARGARET HOLLAND, JOHN BEAUFORT AND THOMAS, DUKE OF CLARENCE.

 

 

 

   





  









     



   



    

 







 



  

 

royal policy and entrusted with a series of important military expeditions. He was appointed chamberlain of England on 7 November 1399, positioning him as the primary channel for royal favour and for contact between the king and his council.83 His most important military activities centred around Calais, of which he was captain from 1401 until his death, responsible for defending the fortress against numerous attacks by the French and Burgundian armies.84 Margaret’s marriage to Beaufort, with whom she was to have four surviving sons and two daughters, placed her at the very centre of royal power and prestige. Beaufort was taken ill during the parliament of 1410 and died, probably following a heart attack, at St Katherine’s Hospital in London on 16 March, naming his brother Henry Beaufort, then bishop of Winchester, as the sole executor of his will with his wife as supervisor.85 Widowhood only increased Margaret’s wealth, leaving her in control of almost all Beaufort’s estates in addition to the fifth of the revenues of the earldom of Kent that she had received following the death of her brothers.86 These riches were the deciding factor in the speed of her second marriage and the choice of her new spouse. Only five months after Beaufort’s death Margaret contracted to marry Thomas of Lancaster, the younger son of Henry IV, who at the 83 Gerald L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 61–63. 84 Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 62. 85 For the will of John Beaufort, see Nichols, Collection of Wills, 208–12. See also Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 62, 64. 86 Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 63.

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time had no title and few lands. Margaret’s brother-in-law, Henry Beaufort, feared that Thomas might siphon off his nephews’ inheritance and so vigorously contested the union.87 After a delay of almost two years, Margaret and Thomas were married in May 1412. Although Thomas was made earl of Aumale and duke of Clarence shortly after the wedding, there remained a huge discrepancy in his income compared to that of his wife: between 1418 and 1420 Margaret received around £1,500 per annum from her estates, compared to the £300 or so that Thomas earned from his.88 Margaret’s second marriage was to end even more suddenly than her first. On 1 August 1417 Clarence landed at Touques with Henry V, embarking on a period of sustained campaigning in France that was brought to a close only with his death. He led the scaling party at the siege of Caen in 1417, initiating an occupation that was to last almost thirty years, and in the summer of 1419 conducted a daring chevauchée to the walls of Paris that precipitated the flight of Charles VI to Troyes.89 Perhaps envious of missing his brother’s glorious victory at Agincourt, Clarence launched a surprise attack on the Franco-Scottish forces at Baugé on 22 March 1421. His small army was soon overwhelmed; in the ensuing confusion Clarence was slain.90 For Margaret this political disaster was also a personal catastrophe. In addition to her husband’s death, her two eldest surviving sons were taken hostage by the French forces. Margaret’s second marriage had been childless. In her final, seventeen-year widowhood she largely withdrew from public life, devoting herself to artistic patronage and cultivating a close relationship with the monastery of Syon, Henry V’s Bridgettine foundation.91 The duchess died in the vicinity of Syon, probably on 31 December 1439. At this time she was one of the wealthiest women in England, with the inquisition post mortem recording an annual value of her lands totalling some £952 18s. 8d.92 Margaret’s final wish, expressed in a letter from her nephew Henry VI, was for her two husbands’ bodies to be reburied beside her in the chapel she had recently prepared for them at Canterbury Cathedral. The Holland Chapel lies directly against the east wall of the southwest transept of Canterbury Cathedral (Fig. 58). Retaining the arrangement of the Romanesque chapel it replaced, it is a two-storey structure consisting of Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 63–65. Gerald L. Harriss, “Thomas [Thomas of Lancaster], Duke of Clarence (1387–1421)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/27198; Shaw, “Holland, Margaret, Duchess of Clarence”. 89 Richard A. Newhall, The English Conquest of Normandy, 1416–1424: A Study in Fifteenth-Century Warfare (New York: Russell & Russell, 1924), 57–58, 98–100, 124–28, 140–41, 216, 275–76. 90 For the battle, see John D. Milner, “The Battle of Baugé March 1421: Impact and Memory”, History 91 (2006): 484–507. 91 George R. Keiser, “Patronage and Piety in Fifteenth-Century England: Margaret, Duchess of Clarence, Symon Wynter and Beinecke MS 317”, Yale University Library Gazette 60, nos 1–2 (1985): 37. 92 London, National Archives: C 139/101/73. 87

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two bays.93 The new chapel was built at a slight angle to the main axis of the cathedral and the old semi-circular apse replaced with a flat east end, thereby allowing for the inclusion of a broad, five-light window (Fig. 59).94 In addition, the vault of the lower chapel was placed higher than it had been in the Romanesque scheme to accommodate an elaborate lierne vault.95 Richard Beke, architect of the Priory from 1432 to 1458, would have been responsible for overseeing its construction and design.96 The Holland Chapel was part of a wider programme of rebuilding the west end of Canterbury Cathedral in the late fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century, including the nave (which took place between 1377 and c. 1403) and southwest transept (from c. 1414 to c. 1435).97 Breaks in the masonry indicate that the Holland Chapel belongs to a separate phase of construction, probably undertaken during a hiatus in the major projects caused by insufficient funds.98 Work may already have been underway by around 1435, when a letter to the Prior records Margaret contributing 100 marks to the cathedral.99 Construction of the lower chapel proceeded quickly.100 The south windows were glazed before 1438,101 while the altar was dedicated on 18 December 1439, little more than two weeks before Margaret’s death.102 A separate funerary chapel within England’s foremost cathedral was a highly prestigious commission. The Holland Chapel was comparable in cost and ambition to the chapel of St Edward the Confessor ordered by Henry 93 Francis Woodman, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 176; Rupert Austin, “Canterbury Cathedral: The Medieval South-West Transept”, in Canterbury’s Archaeology 2010–2011, 35th Annual Report of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust (Canterbury: Canterbury Archaeological Trust, 2012), 53. 94 Austin, “Medieval South-West Transept”, 53; Mark Duffy, “St Michael’s Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral: A Lancastrian Mausoleum”, Archaeologia Cantiana 123 (2003): 314–15; Woodman, Architectural History, 176. 95 Austin, “Medieval South-West Transept”, 53. 96 I have followed the dates given by Wilson for Beke’s tenure as architect of the Priory; Harvey cites a slightly different range, placing him between 1435 and 1457. Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 34; Harvey, English Medieval Architects, 17; Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 503; Woodman, Architectural History, 178. 97 These dates are from Austin, “Medieval South-West Transept”, 47–49. 98 A letter from Prior Molash to the chamberlain John Elham, dated c. 1435, records how the prior was forced to send his masons home because of defaults in farm rents. Austin, “Medieval South-West Transept”, 53; J. B. Sheppard (ed.), Christ Church Letters: A Volume of Medieval Letters Relating to the Affairs of the Priory of Christ Church, Canterbury (London, 1877), 7–9. 99 Sheppard, Christ Church Letters, 7. 100 In contrast, work on the upper chapel continued for at least a decade following Margaret’s death. Woodman, Architectural History, 178. 101 In the windows Edmund Beaufort is titled “count of Mortain”, whereas from 1438 he was styled earl of Somerset. The inscription is recorded by the sixteenth-century herald Richard Scarlett, “Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, London, British Library, MS Harley 1366, fol. 3r. See also Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 503n230. 102 The dedication of the Holland Chapel is recorded in John Stone’s Chronicle. William G. Searle, ed., Christ Church, Canterbury: 1. John Stone’s Chronicle. 2. List of Deans, Priors and Monks….(Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1902), 26. See also the translation in Meriel Connor, trans. and ed., John Stone’s Chronicle: Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, 1417–1472 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010), 69.

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58  FLOOR PLAN OF CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, IDENTIFYING BURIALS BELONGING TO MARGARET HOLLAND, JOHN BEAUFORT, AND THOMAS, DUKE OF CLARENCE.

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59  FLOOR PLAN OF THE HOLLAND CHAPEL, WITH RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HERALDIC SCHEME IN THE WINDOWS.

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IV, also at Canterbury Cathedral, whose construction began as Margaret’s commission was nearing completion.103 Margaret’s ability to commission such a lavish funerary scheme is partly attributable to her wealth and partly to good timing: a break in the building works at Canterbury coincided with the period in which she wanted to build a sepulchral chapel. It was also the culmination of a long-standing relationship with the cathedral. Margaret and her husbands participated in a broader tradition of Lancastrian patronage at Canterbury during the first half of the fifteenth century, their benefactions commemorated in heraldic shields scattered across the cathedral.104 The heraldic arms of Margaret, Beaufort and Clarence are found among the heraldic vault bosses in the cloisters (built between c. 1395 and 1414) and southwest porch (1425–26/27), while an anonymous sixteenth-century

103 For the Chapel of Edward the Confessor in the north aisle of the Trinity Chapel, built in c. 1437–41, see Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 502–03. 104 Francis Woodman, “The Holland Family and Canterbury Cathedral”, Canterbury Cathedral Chronicle 70 (1976): 26; Francis Woodman, “Kinship and Architectural Patronage in Late Medieval Canterbury: The Hollands, the Lady Chapel and the Empty Tomb”, in Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Canterbury, BAA Conference Transactions 35, ed. Alixe Bovey (Leeds: Maney, 2013), 247–56.

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herald also recorded the shields of Beaufort and Clarence “on the north syde of the Churche wyndowes”.105 In choosing to locate her funerary chapel at Canterbury, the duchess aligned her own patronage with a pattern established during her two marriages. The alternative would have been to be buried in a religious institution associated with the Holland family, such as Bourne Abbey in Lincolnshire, where Margaret’s father and brother were interred, or the Greyfriars church in Stamford, also in Lincolnshire, the burial place of her grandfather and royal grandmother.106 As the funerary schemes of Isabella Despenser and Alice Chaucer reveal, commemoration alongside one’s natal family was a popular choice among wealthy widows – particularly heiresses – in fifteenth-century England.107 Margaret’s decision to be commemorated at Canterbury defined her identity first and foremost in relation to her two royal husbands; the location of her tomb proclaimed her close association with the Lancastrian throne. The centrepiece of the chapel, dominating its interior space, is the monument to Margaret and her two husbands (Fig. 55). Conceived in unison with the chapel, it was begun during Margaret’s lifetime and completed soon after her death: an entry in the Parliament Rolls for November 1439 records that the executors had already spent the 1000 marks which the duchess set aside in her will “to be dispendid abowte here terement and sepulture”.108 The memorial comprises a Purbeck marble tomb chest and plinth, measuring 227 centimetres long, 203 centimetres wide and 119 centimetres high, standing on a low Purbeck platform.109 Three effigies lie upon the tomb chest, their heads resting upon pillows held by pairs of angels and their feet supported by heraldic beasts (in the case of the male effigies) and lapdogs (in the case of Margaret) (Figs 55 and 60). The raised alabaster rail enclosing the effigies once held an epitaph engraved on a latten fillet; holes for its fastening are still visible on the west side. Cusped quatrefoils adorn the tomb chest, while the plinth is decorated with encircled quatrefoils and tracery lancets. Although no fixing-holes can now be discerned, these

105 “Late Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Canterbury Cathedral”, London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 162, fols. 33v–34r. For the dating of the cloisters and southwest porch, see Woodman, Architectural History, 164, 173. 106 Margaret’s grandmother, Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent (d. 1385) was buried with her grandfather, Thomas Holland, 1st earl of Kent (d. 1360) at the church of the Franciscans in Stamford (Lincs.). Margaret’s father, Thomas Holland (d. 1397) and her brother, Edmund Holland (d. 1408), second and fourth earls of Kent, were interred in Bourne Abbey in Lincolnshire. 107 Another notable example is Joan, Lady Cobham (d. 1434). Saul, English Church Monuments, 296. Nigel Saul, Death, Art and Memory in Medieval England: The Cobham Family and Their Monuments, 1300–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 26–31, 116–17, 239. 108 PRO SC8/27/1320 in Anne Curry, ed., The Parliamentary Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, vol. 11, Henry VI 1432–1445 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 286–87. 109 Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 320.

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quatrefoils would probably have framed enamelled latten shields similar to those on the tomb of the Black Prince in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury.110 In contrast to the deep grey of the Purbeck marble tomb chest, the three effigies are carved from pale, pink-veined alabaster.111 Alabaster had been associated with royal commemoration in England since the reign of Edward III, being chosen for the effigies of Edward II at Gloucester Abbey, William of Hatfield (d. c. 1340) at York Minster, Isabella of France at the Franciscan church in London, John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster at St Paul’s in London and Philippa of Hainault at Westminster Abbey.112 Various explanations have been posited for the sudden popularity of alabaster as a funerary material, ranging from its aesthetic qualities (lustre and flesh-like appearance), to its whiteness (symbolic of chastity and innocence), its biblical associations (alabaster as the container that the Magdalene breaks to anoint the feet of Christ), and its purported ability to preserve corpses.113 Yet, like all materials, the significance of alabaster was fluid, its range of associations shifting at different times and places. Its appeal to patrons stemmed as much from its social cachet as its symbolic qualities.114 Kim Woods has argued that after the deposition of Richard II alabaster memorials became increasingly associated with the House of Lancaster, commissioned by those who wished to assert, continue or (occasionally) revise their allegiance to the new royal regime. These connotations were encouraged, according to Woods, by the fact that the main alabaster quarries at Chellaston in Derbyshire and Tutbury in Staffordshire were controlled by the duchy of Lancaster: alabaster was, quite literally, a Lancastrian stone.115 In the case of Margaret’s tomb, the choice of alabaster invites comparisons with the alabaster monument to Joan of Navarre and Henry IV at the east 110 The current surface of the stone is not a reliable indicator for its original appearance as large parts of the tomb chest were restored in the 1940s. Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 320–21; Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 506n242. 111 The style of the effigies indicates that they were made by the same sculptors responsible for the monuments to Sir Reginald Cobham (d. 1446) and his wife at Lingfield, Surrey; John Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1435) at Arundel Castle, Sussex; and John Holland, duke of Exeter (d. 1447) and his two wives, originally in St Katherine’s Hospital in London, now in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London. As well as the exceptional quality of their carving, this group of monuments is distinctive for combining alabaster effigies with other types of stone. Based on the distribution of the effigies, Nigel Saul suggested this workshop might have been based in London. Jon Bayliss, “An Indenture for Two Alabaster Effigies”, Church Monuments 16 (2001): 29; Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 320; Saul, English Church Monuments, 68; Saul, Death, Art and Memory, 178. 112 Ramsay, “Alabaster”, 36; Kim Woods, “The Fortunes of Art in Alabaster: A Historiographical Analysis”, in From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History, ed. Colum Hourihane (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 91–94. 113 See especially Woods, Cut in Alabaster, 143–78. Other recent discussions include: Sally Badham, “The Rise to Popularity of Alabaster for Memorialisation in England”, Church Monuments 31 (2016): 11–67; Rachel Dressler, “Identity, Status, and Material: Medieval Alabaster Effigies in England”, Peregrinations 5, no. 2 (2015): 65–96. 114 Woods, Cut in Alabaster, 165–68. 115 Woods, Cut in Alabaster, 234–44. See also Woods, “Plantagenets in Alabaster”, 102–04.

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end of the same cathedral, a connection strengthened by the fact that Henry and Joan’s memorial featured the heraldic arms of Beaufort and Clarence on the cornice of its tester.116 Like the decision to locate her funerary chapel at Canterbury, the materials which Margaret chose for her monument continued patterns of patronage established by her husbands’ family, asserting her identity as a member of the Lancastrian dynasty. If the location and materials of her tomb aligned the duchess with her two husbands, the design of the Chapel suggests these were connections primarily intended to enhance her own importance. Margaret’s alabaster effigy lies in the centre of the monument, dressed in a flowing, full-length mantle and gown with stitched sleeves. The soft folds of her drapery contrast with the stiff armoured bodies of the two knights who lie beside her: Clarence to her right, in recognition of his higher rank, and Beaufort to her left. This tripartite pattern – Margaret in the centre flanked by her two husbands – is echoed in the decoration of the Chapel. A complex lierne vault surmounts the lower Chapel, its three principal intersections marked by a large shield set within a rose (Fig. 61).117 The two outer compartments contain the arms of Beaufort and Clarence, with Margaret’s second husband given the more honorific position over the altar; the central boss, located directly above Margaret’s effigy, contains Clarence impaling Holland, the heraldic arms that the duchess bore during her second marriage. Two lodged hinds and two lodged greyhounds, heraldic beasts associated with the Holland and Lancastrian families respectively, frame this central boss, further signalling its pre-eminence.118 Mirroring the arrangement of the tomb, the vault ­projects the tripartite arrangement along a longitudinal axis. The same pattern, albeit with some elaborations, also structured the heraldic glazing in the east window.119 Sketches and notes made by the herald Richard Scarlett in 1599 suggest that the shields were arranged horizontally, one in each of the five lights: the impaled arms of Clarence and Holland in the northernmost light, followed by the arms of Clarence in the adjacent light, the arms of Holland in the central light and then the arms

116 For the use of alabaster for the monument of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre, see Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 500. For the heraldry on the tester, see C. Humphery-Smith, “The Tomb of King Henry IV”, Canterbury Cathedral Chronicle 70 (1976): 38–39; “Late Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Canterbury Cathedral”, London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 162, fols 31v–32v. 117 Although these bosses were repainted in the early twentieth century, their heraldry reproduces the original scheme: the antiquarian Thomas Willement, writing in 1827, recorded the same arms visible today. Thomas Willement, Heraldic Notices of Canterbury Cathedral (London, 1827), 41–42. 118 Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 125–29, 151–52. 119 All the glass in the east window now dates from shortly after 1945, itself a replacement for a Victorian reglazing scheme commemorating Kent regiment losses in the Crimean war. “Letter from Sgd. H. Anderson to R. Tophill, 26 Oct 1945”, Canterbury Cathedral Archives, U197A. See also Madeline H. Caviness, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), 285–86.

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61  HOLLAND CHAPEL, LIERNE VAULT.

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of Beaufort (Fig. 59).120 By the time Scarlett visited the chapel the shield in the southernmost light was already broken; following the symmetry of the scheme, it would have originally displayed the arms of Beaufort impaling Holland.121 All the shields in the east window, including the lost escutcheon, were supported by a white hind and a white greyhound.122 Using the greyhound as the supporter for the shields of both men unified the heraldic scheme, as well as underlining Beaufort and Clarence’s shared identity as members of the Lancastrian dynasty.123 The heraldic programme in the east window of the Holland Chapel was pre-empted in the heraldic initials adorning Margaret’s book of hours (known as the Clarence Hours), commissioned in c. 1428, the same time the duchess formalised her relationship with Syon Abbey.124 Just like the east window, there are five heraldic initials of the Clarence Hours, comprising the individual arms of Margaret, Beaufort and Clarence along with two escutcheons each showing the duchess’s arms impaled by one of her spouses.125 The identical heraldic pattern in the Chapel and Margaret’s book of hours – as well as the unusual cohesiveness of the vault bosses, tomb and glass – strongly suggests that the duchess herself directed these schemes. This heraldic scheme is also remarkable for the prominence it gives to the emblems of Margaret’s natal family. The Holland arms are positioned centrally on the monument, glass and vault bosses, each recurrence emphasising their importance. The duchess may have felt a particular responsibility for preserving her Holland identity: as one of the co-heirs of her childless brother, Edmund Holland, earl of Kent (d. 1408), Margaret had inherited 120 The arrangement is implied by Scarlett’s numbering of the shields from one to five. The alternative would be for the shields to be arranged vertically, but this would sit uneasily with other fifteenth-century glazing schemes and also the arrangement in the south windows of the Holland Chapel, in which Scarlett explicitly states the shields were arranged horizontally from east to west. “Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, fols. 1v–2v. The same shields are recorded in “Late Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Canterbury Cathedral”, (fol. 35v), but without any indication of their placement. 121 Scarlett draws the outline of a blank shield, numbered 5, with the note: “the arms broken away”. “Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, fol. 2v. 122 “Late Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Canterbury Cathedral”, fol. 35v; “Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, fols 1r–2v. See also Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 325; Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 505. 123 Both John of Gaunt (Beaufort’s father) and Henry IV (Clarence’s father) commissioned, owned and donated objects decorated with greyhounds. Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 127–28; Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 325. 124 The Clarence Hours was sold by Sotheby’s in 1989 and is now held at the Kolumba museum in Cologne, Germany (Sammlung Renate König, MS III). Scott and the Sotheby’s sales catalogue date the manuscript to the 1420s, while Joachim M. Plotzek argues that the miniature showing Margaret’s commitment to the religious life means the date of the manuscript can be narrowed further to c. 1428. See Joachim M. Plotzek, Das Stundenbuch der Margaret Duchess of Clarence (Cologne: Kolumba, 2004), 33–34; Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 178; Sotheby’s Sales Catalogue: Catalogue of the Celebrated Library of the Late Major J. R. Abbey (London, Monday 19 June 1989), lot. 3018, 65. 125 The only difference between the two schemes is that Margaret’s arms appear twice in the book of hours.

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a fifth of the Holland lands.126 Monuments to heiresses often demonstrate an interest in commemorating their natal family: the brass to Joan, Lady Cobham (d. 1434), last in a long family line, shows her effigy flanked by six heraldic shields celebrating the Cobham lineage. Although she had been married five times, Joan is styled simply as “Lady of Cobham”.127 Likewise, a lost brass to Margaret Paston (d. 1484), heiress of the Mautbys, had an escutcheon of arms at each corner: three commemorated the illustrious connections of the Mautbys, whereas only one showed her arms impaling those of her Paston husband.128 The Holland Chapel differs from these monuments in balancing the emphasis on Margaret’s natal identity against her marital connections. Whereas Joan Cobham and Margaret Paston accord hardly any attention to their spouses, in the Holland Chapel the Holland arms are always flanked by those of Margaret’s husbands: a three-fold pattern repeated in the effigies, vault bosses and glass. The heraldic decoration was also unusual in its restricted scope. Rather than following the Cobham and Mautby monuments (or that of Alice Chaucer at Ewelme) in celebrating a more extensive dynastic network, the escutcheons in the east window of the Holland Chapel focused exclusively on Margaret’s two marriages.129 The positioning of a wife in the centre with her husbands to either side was almost unheard of in funerary schemes of this period. Yet it is this arrangement that governs the design of the monument, glass and vault bosses in the Holland Chapel. Two successive marriages have merged into a single spousal union; the three-fold repetition of a three-fold pattern emphasises the shared bond between Margaret and her two husbands. If the tripartite scheme of the Holland Chapel underlined the unity between Margaret and her two spouses, it also positioned the duchess as the focal point of these relationships. Inverting the usual pattern for memorials to multiple spouses, the female effigy on the Holland tomb is far more lavish than those of her male counterparts. All three figures rest their heads on a pillow, but only the one supporting Margaret is adorned with large, decorative tassels. The duchess wears a coronet that is twice as wide as those worn by her two husbands, her hair below covered by an intricate jewelled crespine (Fig. 62).130 Margaret’s effigy was made even more lavish by the addition of metal attachments. A series of small, round holes encircles the collarbone of Margaret’s effigy: a double hole on the right of her neck, a

Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 63. Saul, English Church Monuments, 296. 128 Saul, English Church Monuments, 295. 129 Given his interests as a herald, it is very unlikely that Scarlett would have neglected to include any other escutcheons had they existed at the time he visited the Chapel, although he certainly omitted the devotional images that would have taken up most of the east window. 130 The crespine, a headdress formed of wire or knitted mesh, was popular in the first half of the fifteenth century. Margaret’s effigy is a fairly late example. See Duffy, “Fifteenth-Century Effigies”, 77–78. 126 127

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double hole on her breastbone and two single holes on the left side of her neck. The earliest engraving of the monument, made by Wenceslaus Hollar sometime between 1637 and 1640, shows Margaret wearing two necklaces, a series of round beads close to her neck and a collar of SS – a mark of affiliation with the Lancastrian dynasty – slung low across her breast.131 Hollar embellished or misread other details of the monument and it is difficult to tally the twin necklaces, especially the low-slung position of the collar, with the holes on Margaret’s neck.132 The most likely explanation is that the holes on Margaret’s collarbone were intended to attach a single collar of SS, worn close to the base of her neck, as seen on the effigy of Joan of Navarre in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury.133 Another near-contemporary example can be found on the alabaster monument to Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (d. 1425) and his two wives, Margaret Stafford (d. 1396) and Joan Beaufort (d. 1440), which shows the earl with a collar of SS over his aventail, while the two female effigies have more delicate versions worn at their collarbone (Fig. 63).134 Like the Neville tomb, all three effigies on the Holland 131 These jewels had disappeared by the time of the engraving in the second volume of Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments (first published in 1796), which depicts the effigy with the same holes that are visible today. For the collar of SS, see Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 65–73; Ward, Livery Collar. 132 For instance, Hollar represents the two dogs at the feet of Margaret’s effigy as lions. 133 Other examples include the effigy of Joan Peryent on her brass at Digswell, Hertfordshire (1415); the wife of Sir T. Brook on a brass at Thorncombe, Devon (1437); and Elizabeth Mortimer, wife of Thomas, Lord Camoys, on a brass at Trotton, Sussex (c. 1419/21). 134 It is possible that Margaret knew of this monument: Joan Beaufort, Ralph’s second wife, was Margaret’s sister-in-law.

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63  MONUMENT TO RALPH NEVILLE, EARL OF WESTMORLAND, MARGARET STAFFORD AND JOAN BEAUFORT, C. 1425. CHURCH OF ST MARY, STAINDROP (COUNTY DURHAM, ENGLAND).

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memorial wore symbols of their Lancastrian affiliation; unlike the Neville tomb, it was Margaret’s husbands that wore identical collars of SS carved in alabaster, while the duchess proclaimed her loyalty through a collar made in more precious materials. In the fifteenth century the materials, weight and expense of the livery collar were an important means of signalling the status of its wearer, and indeed their estimation in the sight of the donor: for instance, at their marriage in 1403 Henry IV gave Joan of Navarre a gold SS collar worked with jewels and his motto, which cost the substantial sum of £385 6s. 8d.135 An attached collar in glittering metal, a rare and bespoke adornment, was another means of distinguishing Margaret’s effigy from those of her husbands, marking her pre-eminent position.136 Margaret’s distinctiveness is accentuated by the knightly effigies at either side, which at first glance appear to be identical. Indeed, without the polychromy on their tabards, the differences between the male figures are so slight as to have confounded both sixteenth-century heralds and modern scholars.137 In terms of their bodily appearance, only two small details distinguish the effigies: Beaufort’s effigy has lines around his nose and mouth, while Clarence is portrayed with slightly longer legs.138 More noticeable – and more significant for fifteenth-century viewers – are differences in symbolic markers of identity and status. Beaufort wears a jewelled circlet over his bascinet, appropriate to his status as an earl, while Clarence is shown in a ducal coronet. Both wear collars of SS, but Beaufort’s collar has an additional ring pendant, an embellishment that was to be repeated for the effigy of his son at Wimborne Minster, Dorset.139 The most conspicuous distinction between the two figures is the beasts at their feet: Clarence has a seated greyhound with a collar, tiret and leash, while Beaufort rests his feet against an eagle with raised wings, wearing a crown as its collar and a chain dangling to the ground. Margaret’s husbands used these beasts as markers of identity during their lifetimes: a seal of John Beaufort from 1408 shows his arms hanging from the neck of an eagle contourné,140 while Clarence’s Ward, Livery Collar, 26–28. There are only two other examples of attached necklace on a funerary monument in England: the effigy of Joan Neville at Arundel Castle (c. 1485) has a series of holes below her carved Yorkist collar, possibly intended for affixing jewels, while the effigy of Reginald Cobham at Lingfield, a product of the same workshop as the Holland tomb, has a series of holes on the sides of his neck and chest. For Arundel, see A. Broderick and J. Darrah, “The Fifteenth-Century Polychrome Limestone Effigies of William Fitzalan, 9th Earl of Arundel, and His Wife, Joan Neville, in the Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel”, Church Monuments 1 (1986): 71. For Lingfield, see Saul, Death, Art and Memory, 177–78. 137 The effigies are confused in “Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, fol. 1v; H. S. London, “The Greyhound as Royal Beast”, Archaeologia 97 (1959): 146; Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 128–29. See also Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 506n243. 138 Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 316; Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 506. 139 Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 316; Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 506. 140 W. de Grey Birch, Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol. 2 (1892), 482, no. 7282. In addition, Beaufort’s seal of 1401 shows his arms supported by two eagles (Douët d’Arcq, Collection de sceaux des archives de l’empire (Paris, 1863), 2: 294, no. 10197). 135

136

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wardrobe accounts from around 1418 to 1421 record the duke purchasing cloth embroidered with greyhounds.141 Clarence is also known to have employed a pursuivant (junior officer of arms) in his retinue named Blanc Levrier, or “the White Greyhound”.142 These beasts were also associated with Henry IV, thereby advertising Beaufort and Clarence’s royal connections: a painted figure of an eagle stood outside Westminster Hall on the day of Henry’s coronation, while a copy of the Statutes of England from the 1420s depicts the king’s beast as a white greyhound in a blue collar of SS.143 In its use of heraldic and para-heraldic devices, the Holland monument marks its incumbents as members of the elite. The subtlety of these signs enhances rather than diminishes their function: small differences invite explanation, and yet discerning their full meaning relies upon familiarity with heraldic conventions and personal knowledge of Beaufort and Clarence. The effigies thereby defined the status of their viewers as well as the deceased; the ability to identify the two men would have distinguished those who were within their social sphere from those who were without. Whereas the heraldic beasts echo objects owned and used by Margaret’s husbands during their lifetime, the armour worn by the effigies would have been entirely unfamiliar to the two men. Rather than representing Beaufort and Clarence in attire resembling that which they would have worn during their military careers, the effigies wear armour characteristic of the 1440s: a rounded great bascinet, outer neck plate following the outline of the chin and throat, and poleyn wings shaped into the joint of the knee.144 On one level this choice can be understood as a means of signalling membership of the military class as well as the high status of the two men. At the time of the monument’s construction, the attire of the two men would have been recognised as cutting-edge, fashionable and expensive.145 Representing their effigies in the most technologically advanced armour may have been seen as particularly appropriate for Beaufort and Clarence given the fame of their military exploits. In his Ancient Funeral Monuments, published in 1631, the antiquary John Weever records a fragment of a verse epitaph to Clarence in the Holland Chapel, which included a series of Latin puns on the name of the duke as one “who once shone (clarus) in war and was not outshone (clarior) by anyone”.146

141 C. M. Woolgar, ed., “Wardrobe Account for Thomas of Lancaster, Duke of Clarence, c. 1418–1421”, in Household Accounts from Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2: 656, 658, 662. 142 Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 128. 143 Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 91–92, 127–28. 144 For changing fashions in the style and construction of armour during this period, see Tobias Capwell, Armour of the English Knight, 1400–1450 (London: Thomas del Mar, 2015), 192–93. See also Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 316. 145 Capwell, Armour of the English Knight, 26–28. 146 Weever cites a “Lib. Sawler MS” in the Cotton library as his source for this epitaph. Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments, 14.

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On another level, the choice of armour – as well as the near-identical appearance of the two effigies – could be understood as a form of chronological manipulation. Two men who were born to different generations and died more than a decade apart are represented as contemporaries. As modern viewers, for whom all medieval fashions belong to a distant past, it is easy to overlook the strangeness of this chronological artifice; to onlookers in the fifteenth century (a time when male costume had an unprecedentedly rapid rate of variation) such archaism would have been broadly analogous to dressing someone from the twenty-first century in the fashions of the 1980s.147 The choice of attire exposes a commemorative hierarchy in which the “time” of the effigies is defined by the death of one of the spouses. Take, for instance, the tomb of Ralph Neville, Joan Beaufort and Margaret Stafford, two wives who died forty-four years apart but are presented in identical hairstyles and garments of a style that belongs to the 1420s,148 the time of Ralph’s death (Fig. 63).149 In this case it is the death of the husband that established the date of his wives’ effigies, whereas in the Holland Chapel it was the death of the wife that dictated the time to which her two spouses belonged. The Holland tomb transforms Margaret’s long-dead husbands into fashionable knights of the 1440s, creating an image of temporal and corporeal proximity that could be achieved only within the grave. The unity between the spouses was also expressed through the use of polychromy. Prized for its flesh-like translucency, alabaster sculpture was usually left largely unpainted, with colour limited to details such as jewellery and the ornamental hem of robes.150 The polychromy on the effigies of the duchess and her two husbands, however, was far more extensive.151 In 1599 the herald Richard Scarlett described the colours on Margaret’s effigy: The countess had these arms [an arrow indicates a shield containing the arms of Holland: Gules, three lions passant guardant Or, within a bordure Argent] upon her inner garment and her husbands’ on 147 See Margaret Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion (London: British Library, 2009), 121. For a critical overview of the widely accepted hypothesis that fashion itself emerged with the appearance of a new men’s clothing style in mid-fourteenth-century Burgundy, see SarahGrace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 48–49. 148 Aside from the matching SS collars, the most distinctive aspects of the female effigies are their hairstyles: two small, tight buns at the side of their heads, each adorned with a crespine (a headdress formed of wire or knitted mesh). This form of small, tight bun with crespine was popular in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, appearing on, among other examples, the effigy of Joan of Navarre at Canterbury Cathedral (1413–19), Katherine Clifton at Lowick (1419–20) and a lost brass from St Helen Bishopsgate, probably commemorating Joan Poynings (c. 1420). 149 Interestingly, the earl wears armour that would have been outmoded at the time of his death (a surcoat, great bascinet and aventail), perhaps betraying his traditional preferences. Capwell, Armour of the English Knight, 108–10. 150 Ramsay, “Alabaster”, 29–30; Woods, “Art in Alabaster”, 86. 151 No traces of the original scheme remain today: the thick polychromy on the effigies’ crowns and collars is a later addition, probably dating from the same time as the restoration of the monument to Archbishop Chichele in 1897–99. Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 478.

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her outer garment: the arms of England quartered.152

Scarlett indicates the two knights were also painted, stating that “both [of] them [had] the arms of England quartered … but being worn away so much, I could not discern the difference”.153 This must refer to the arms of Beaufort and Clarence, both of whom bore the English royal arms in the style adopted by Henry IV after 1406, distinguished by a mark of difference: a bordure compony argent and azure for Beaufort and a label of three points ermine for Clarence.154 This vibrant heraldic display emphasised the spouses’ shared royal status, with all three effigies coloured predominantly in the red, blue and gold of the English royal arms (Fig. 64). It is noteworthy that Scarlett describes Margaret’s mantle as bearing the royal arms without a mark of difference. Assuming it had not worn away by the time he was writing, the absence of the bordure compony argent and azure (Beaufort) or label of three points ermine (Clarence) would have allowed Margaret to simultaneously signal her marriages to both royal spouses. The Holland arms painted on the duchess’s dress were the old royal arms of England with a white border as a mark of difference, reflecting the status of Margaret’s father as half-brother of Richard II. This means that Margaret’s effigy was clothed in royalty twice over: her inner garment expressed her natal ties to the earlier Plantagenet kings, while her outer garment displayed her marital links to the Lancastrian throne. Whereas the painted arms on the two knightly effigies were restricted to their tabards, the figure of the duchess was emblazoned in vivid colours from head to toe. Even for viewers who were not versed in heraldic subtleties, the extent of the polychromy on Margaret’s effigy would have indicated her particular importance on the memorial.

64  RECON­STRUCTION OF THE POLYCHROMY ON THE EFFIGIES.

“Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, fol. 2r. Ibid., fol. 1v. 154 Scarlett’s observations are corroborated by the Kentish herald John Philipot (writing in 1624), who noted that the effigy of Clarence was depicted with “his arms depicted on his breast”, while Margaret had “upon her robes the arms of England within a border argent”. “John Philipot’s Kentish Church Notes”, London, British Library, MS Egerton 3310A, fol. 25r. 152 153

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A further means of expressing Margaret’s double royalty – Lancastrian and Plantagenet, marital and natal – was through the combination of the hind and greyhound. These two beasts are found together in the east and south windows, as well as flanking the central vault boss in the Holland Chapel (Fig. 65). Greyhounds were associated with the Lancastrian royal dynasty, while a white hind gorged with ducal coronet had long been used as the heraldic badge of the Holland family, its adoption originating with Margaret’s royal grandmother, Joan the Fair Maid of Kent.155 Margaret herself owned objects decorated with hinds, signalling her continued identification with her natal family. Clarence’s wardrobe accounts record a payment made in 1419 to a certain “John Bullock, weaver of London” for restoring a set of room hangings decorated with “palms and hinds”.156 These accounts also record the purchase of fourteen horse trappers embroidered with greyhounds and hinds for Clarence’s horses, as well as another five trappers with the same beasts made specifically for the horses of Margaret (pro equis domine).157 Free from the strict codification that had come to govern the use of heraldic shields, badges were a more personal and adaptable device, encompassing a range of associations that extended far beyond the signalling of title and lineage.158 A nobleman or woman was 155 For the greyhound, see Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 325; Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 127–28. For the hind, see Birch, Catalogue of Seals, vol. 3 (1894), 110, no. 10, 774; Siddons, Heraldic Badges, 2: part 1, 151–52. 156 Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 665. 157 Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 656, 658, 662. 158 For badges, see D’Arcy Jonathan Dacre Boulton, “Insignia of Power: The Use of Heraldic and Paraheraldic Devices by Italian Princes, c. 1350-1500”, in Art and Politics in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, 1250–1500, ed. Charles M. Rosenberg (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 103–27; Laurent Hablot, “La devise, mise en signe du prince, mise en scène du pouvoir” (PhD diss., University of Poitiers, 2001); Laurent Hablot,

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able to choose these markers for him- or herself, meaning that the form of the badge – typically an object, beast or plant – was a means of defining his or her own identity and ideals. When used in combination, the semantic possibilities of badges extended still further, communicating ideas about character, politics and affiliations.159 A notable example, discussed in chapter two, are the pointillé badges adorning the effigies of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, juxtaposing the couple’s initials with devices such as the white hart and chained ostrich, associated with Richard and Anne respectively (Figs 38 and 39). Such emblems are often a prominent feature of late-medieval funerary memorials, but are rarely commented upon beyond their function as a marker of identity. Taking a more expansive view, we could instead think about these devices as a means of drawing the tomb into dialogue with objects used, worn and bestowed by the deceased during their lifetime, items that might be present in proximity to the monument or else conjured in the memories of its viewers. During Margaret and Clarence’s marriage, the juxtaposition of hind and greyhound was an important means through which the couple symbolised their union; the combination of these devices would have accumulated new layers of meaning during Margaret’s long widowhood. The horse trappers with greyhounds and hinds were made for Margaret’s journey across the English Channel in November 1419, the start of a two-year sojourn in France that was to end with Clarence’s death at the battle of Baugé in 1421.160 Such a sudden disaster precipitated an equally abrupt shift in the duchess’s material surroundings: the types of objects, images and clothing that she encountered in her daily life. This decisive change is encapsulated in the entries from Clarence’s household accounts: expenditure on colourful textiles and lavish ornaments is swiftly replaced by payments for obsequies, burial arrangements and the hearse.161 Journeying to meet her husband, Margaret brought silk trappers decorated with hounds and hinds; on her return she followed a corpse conveyed by horses dressed in sombre black cloth.162 Even though it is impossible to recover the range of meanings that a heraldic badge might hold for a particular viewer in a specific context, to restrict their significance to a fixed marker of identity is to overlook the intimate and evolving relationship between these devices and those who bore them. For Margaret and those in her circle, the prominence of hinds and greyhounds in the Holland Chapel may have been more than a sign “Heraldic Imagery, Definition and Principles”, in The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography, ed. Colum Hourihane (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 386–98. 159 For the badge as political device, see Emily J. Dickinson, “Partisan Identity in the French Civil War, 1405–1418: Reconsidering the Evidence on Livery Badges”, Journal of Medieval History 33, no. 3 (2007): 250–74. 160 Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 103. The extravagant purchases for this family expedition to France in 1419 are recorded in Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 604–81. 161 Payments for Clarence’s funeral expenses are found in Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 627–28, 658, 660–61, 665, 668. 162 Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 658.

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of her marriage; it is possible that these badges also acted as an emblem of Clarence’s military expedition and his bloody death at Baugé. The legacy of this disastrous battle continued to define the duchess during her widowhood. Following their capture at Baugé, two of her sons, Thomas and John Beaufort, were held as hostages in Scotland for many years.163 Margaret was actively involved in the negotiations for their release, using a captive she had inherited from Clarence, Jean of Orléans, count of Angoulême (d. 1467), as a bargaining factor.164 Thomas Beaufort was freed in 1430 at great cost; his ransom totalled 28,000 eo (or £7,000), some of which was still outstanding upon his death at the siege of Louviers in 1431.165 Margaret’s eldest surviving son and heir, John Beaufort the Younger, was not released until the autumn of 1438, following his exchange for the count of Eu and the payment of a ransom of 24,000 lt (£4,000).166 A few weeks after his return to England, John attended the mass of the Virgin at Canterbury Cathedral, welcomed by his uncle, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, as well as the prior and convent.167 During this visit he would have been able to observe his mother’s funerary chapel, which by this date was nearing completion. If he were to have turned his attention to the south windows, John would have seen his own heraldic arms and titles accompanied by those of his three brothers (Fig. 59).168 Mirroring the scheme on the vault bosses and

163 Thomas Beaufort was initially in the hands of John Stuart, earl of Buchan and later transferred to Tanguy de Châtel. John Beaufort was held by the Scottish knight Laurent Vernon. Rémy Ambühl, “Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: The Golden Age of Private Ransoms”, (PhD diss., University of St Andrews), 2009, 78–79. 164 In a contract sealed in February 1431, it was agreed that Thomas Beaufort’s ransom was to be exchanged for the release of the count of Angoulême, although this ultimately fell through. Rémy Ambühl, Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 151. See also Jim Bolton, “How Sir Thomas Rempston Paid his Ransom: Or, the Mistakes of an Italian Bank”, in Conflicts, Consequences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages, The Fifteenth Century 7, ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 107. 165 Thomas took £3,000 towards his ransom with him when he returned to war in France in 1431. Ambühl, Prisoners of War, 130n13, 151; Bolton, “Mistakes of an Italian Bank”, 107. 166 Ambühl, Prisoners of War, 130n13; Ambühl, “Golden Age of Private Ransoms”, 79n118; Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 160, 204–05, 311. 167 John Beaufort the Younger’s visit to Canterbury took place on 1 December 1438. John Stone’s Chronicle, ed. Searle, 22. 168 The arms were arranged in order of seniority: Henry Beaufort, “earl of Somerset” (d. 1418); John Beaufort, “count of Somerset” (d. 1444) in the southeast window, and Thomas Beaufort, “count of Perche” (d. 1431) and Edmund Beaufort, “count of Mortaine” (d. 1455) in the southwest window. Although all of the escutcheons are now lost, Scarlett recorded the glazing scheme at the end of the sixteenth century. See “Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, fol. 3r (position of shields, arms and titles); “Late Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Canterbury Cathedral”, fol. 35v (same shields, no indication of position, only one title “Thome comitis perticensis”); The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. Lucy Toulmin-Smith (London: G. Bell, 1909), 2: 40 (“south wyndowes” contained “these 3. Name, John Counte of Somerset, The Lorde Percy, The Lorde Mortaine; and every one with the Kinge armes”).

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east window, these shields alternated with medallions of lodged hinds and greyhounds, some of which have survived to this day.169 The escutcheons of her four sons are the only other heraldry recorded in the Holland Chapel; unlike other funerary schemes that celebrated the deceased’s wider dynastic connections, Margaret’s programme (insofar as it has been recorded) focused exclusively on her husbands and male offspring. When considered against the backdrop of the Hundred Years War, the design of Margaret’s funerary chapel appears to have been motivated in part by a desire to enhance the prestige of her two surviving sons, particularly John Beaufort the Younger. As John sought to resume his place at a tumultuous court after a seventeen-year absence, it was Margaret’s marriages that gave her son a unique, two-fold connection to the Lancastrian Crown. By choosing to include Clarence in her funerary scheme, rather than just the father of her children, Margaret stressed her sons’ relationship with both men, and thus their particular proximity to the king. The Holland Chapel is a monument to the agency of a remarkable widow. Housed within her own funerary chapel in England’s foremost cathedral, surrounded by her heraldry and emblems, painted in vivid colours and encrusted with jewels, Margaret’s effigy proclaimed her wealth, power and royalty. Far from being constrained by her identity as a wife, Margaret co-opted her two royal husbands into a scheme that aggrandised her own position. While the unusual choices made by the duchess in her funerary programme were enabled by her money and independence, they were also shaped by the political realities – and tragedies – of the Lancastrian ascendancy and Hundred Years War. The reintroduction of her eldest surviving son to the English court following his long captivity in Scotland was eased by Margaret’s own close association with the Crown, a relationship forged through her two Lancastrian husbands. In this way, the position of Margaret’s effigy, flanked by the figures of her spouses and bordered by the arms of her sons, makes manifest a particular form of power available to much-married women in fifteenth-century England. Margaret is portrayed as the lynchpin between these powerful men‚ husbands and sons, a position that supported her own status as well as theirs.

REMARRIAGE, REBURIAL AND RESURRECTION As well as her material status and the political aspirations she held for her sons, Margaret’s funerary scheme expressed something else, more nebulous but no less vital to understanding the duchess’s intentions: her sense of a continuing relationship with her two deceased husbands. The possibility of a heavenly future for affective relationships – a reunion of resurrected 169 Scarlett numbers the shields and medallions in the south windows, indicating their position. “Richard Scarlett’s Heraldic Collections of 1599”, fol. 3r.

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flesh – was a question that medieval writers, especially in England, rarely addressed.170 In Love After Death, Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff argue that this silence must have been due in part to Christ’s response to the Sadducees in the Gospel of Matthew: when asked to whom a women married seven times would belong at the Resurrection, Jesus replied that “in the resurrection, they shall neither marry or be married, but be like the angels in heaven”.171 Quoted or paraphrased over and over again by medieval theologians, this verse explicitly denies the possibility that the bonds of marriage or sexualised bodies would endure into eternity. Yet popular expectations seem to have diverged from biblical teaching. The Latin inscription accompanying a brass memorial to Richard Bertlot (d. 1462) and his wife Petronilla Walton ends with a plea for the widow to be reunited with her deceased spouse: “pray for the man and may his wife be joined to him!”172 Another remarkable example is the epitaph that Sir Thomas More (d. 1535) composed for the tomb of his first wife, Jane Colt (d. 1511) at the church of All Saints in Chelsea, London, a monument in which he hoped himself and his new wife, Alice Middleton (d. 1546/51), would also eventually be interred.173 After declaring that he cannot decide which of his wives, deceased or living, was most dear to him, More laments: O we could have lived together, the three of us, So well, if fate and our religion had Allowed us. But now I pray that we will be joined Here in this tomb and there in heaven. So Will death bestow on us what life could not.174

More was famed for his theological erudition, and yet these verses express a vision of conjugal union in the hereafter that directly contradicts Christ’s teaching, conjuring an image of polygamous post-mortem bliss. Death is presented as an opportunity for a ménage à trois impossible in life. Whereas the potential for spousal love in the Resurrection was rarely discussed, the continuing responsibility that the bereaved owed to their deceased spouse(s) during their lifetime was a recurring theme for medieval 170 Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff, “Introduction: Love After Death. A Sketch”, in Love After Death: Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 12; Bernhard Jussen, “Posthumous Love as Culture”, in Jussen and Targoff, Love After Death, 41–43. 171 Matthew 22: 30. See Jussen and Targoff, “Introduction”, 12. 172 pro que viro rogita coniugatur sua sponsa. Jerome Bertram, “Embellishment and Restoration: the Barttelots and their Brasses at Stopham, Sussex”, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society 28, no. 4 (2012): 334–62. 173 As well as being inscribed on the tomb, the epitaph also circulated as an independent text, first appearing in More’s 1518 collection Epigrammata clarissimi disertissimique viri Thomae Mori Britanni (Basel: Johannes Froben, 1518), 270–71. See also Jussen and Targoff, “Introduction”, 3–6. 174 O simulo iuncti poteramus vivere nos tres / Quam bene, si fatum relligioque sinant. / At societ tumulus, societ nos obsecro coelum. / Sic mors, non potuit quod dare vita, dabit. See Leicester Bradner, “More’s Epigrams on Death”, Moreana, 50, no. 2 (1976): 33–36.

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theologians and preachers. The expectation for post-mortem fidelity fell disproportionately upon women, a disparity justified through reference to the same marital symbolism – the groom as the figure of Christ and the bride as an image of the Church – that we encountered earlier as the explanation given in the Sarum Manual for the alterations to the wedding rite in the case of women (but not men) who had previously been married.175 A description of the turtledove from the Physiologus Latinus, a late-antique moralising treatise on the nature and figurative meaning of animals that was popular in the medieval period, praises this bird for her loyalty to her deceased spouse: If it happens that her husband is caught by the hawk or birdcatcher, she unites with no other man but is always desiring him and is every moment longing for him. And in this representation of the husband and this desire for him she remains till death.176

Exhorting the reader to imitate the turtledove’s lifelong chastity, the author then explains its figurative meaning, drawing upon the symbolism of the bride as the Church and groom as Christ: Such is the holy church, who, after she saw her spouse hanging on the cross, resurrecting the third day, and ascending to heaven, does not unite with another man but desires him, longs for him, and remains in love with him until death.177

The Physiologus thereby sets up a triple-layered typology: the fidelity of the turtledove towards her deceased mate is a figure for the steadfast chastity expected of a widow, which is itself a symbol of the faithfulness of the Church to Christ. These echoes also involve a temporal parallel. The moral of the pining turtledove implies that the period between the husband’s death and the widow’s own is analogous to the period of waiting between Christ’s Ascension and the Last Judgement. Medieval widows were thus caught between the social pressure to remarry, driven by the realities of mortality, inheritance and kinship, and the moral pressure exerted upon married women to conform to their Jussen, “Posthumous Love as Culture”, 39–47. Ita ut si quando evenerit ut masculus eius aut ab accipitre aut ab aucupe capiatur, haec alteri masculo se non iungit, sed ipsum semper desiderat et ipsum per singula momenta sperat et ipsius recordatione et desiderio usque ad mortem perseuerat. This text is from version B, the version of the Physiologus with widest circulation. Physiologus Latinus, Éditions preliminaires, versio B, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1939), 50. The English translation is taken from Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore, trans. Michael J. Curley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 57. See also Jussen, “Posthumous Love as Culture”, 39. 177 Talis est enim sancta ecclesia, quae postquam vidit virum suum crucifixum, et die tertia resurrexisse et in caelos ascendisse, alio viro non coniungitur sed ipsum desiderat et ipsum sperat, et in illius amore et caritate usque ad mortem perseverat. Physiologus Latinus, 50. For the English translation see Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore, 57. See also Jussen, “Posthumous Love as Culture”, 39–40. 175

176

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sacred figuration. This quandary is vividly expressed in the Ephesian Matron by Petronius, a tale in which a widow copulates with a guard in her first husband’s tomb. This first-century text was incorporated into the Seven Sages of Rome cycle in the Middle Ages, the earliest versions of which were written in Old French during the thirteenth century.178 One of these Old French cycles was the basis for a Latin version in the early fourteenth century, which was itself translated into almost all European vernaculars and became one of the most widely available prose texts in the late-medieval period.179 The Old French versions reframe Petronius’s tale around the conflict between the widow’s duty to her deceased spouse and the pressure extorted by her natal family to marry a richer and nobler second husband. The widow eventually relents and negotiates a marriage deal with a knight who is guarding a hanged man near her husband’s tomb. After the body that the knight was supposed to be watching is stolen, the widow saves his life by substituting her deceased husband’s corpse for that of the hanged man. Yet, when the widow demands the knight marry her as her reward, he refuses and accuses the widow of forgetting her duty to her dead spouse. By way of conclusion, the narrator remarks, “thus she sits between two chairs, her arse on the ground!”180 The “Ephesian Matron” encapsulates the predicament that widows were trapped in: caught between religious duty to her deceased husband and the social and economic pressures to remarry. Attempting to do both risked failing to do either, provoking mockery and condemnation. As well as marring the symbolic character of spousal union, female remarriage was believed to compromise the widow’s ability to care for the memory – and thus the soul – of her deceased husband. Such concerns would have shaped Margaret’s own understanding of her widowhood. She was meticulous in her care of her deceased husbands: the duchess stayed overnight at Canterbury on the first anniversary of Clarence’s death, purchasing special prayers to be said on her behalf, and also paid for candles to be kept continually burning over the site of the duke’s grave for at least seven years after his demise.181 Whereas Margaret contracted her marriage to Clarence a matter of months after Beaufort’s death, she adopted a different approach to her second widowhood. Avowed to a celibate life, Margaret developed a close relationship with Syon Abbey, Henry V’s Bridgettine foundation in London. This connection was defined Historia Septem Sapientium, ed. Detlef Roth, 2 vols (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004). The following discussion is indebted to Jussen, “Posthumous Love as Culture”, 47–54. 179 Jussen, “Posthumous Love as Culture”, 49. 180 Or est ele cheoiste entre deus selles son cul a terre. Historia Septem Sapientium, groups 1 and 2, no. 27, 430; cf group 3, no. 27, 538; and group 4, no. 27, 648. 181 These payments are most likely for the first anniversary, although the chronology of the account book is slightly confused. There were always two tapers burning near the grave; on the anniversary of Clarence’s death there were as many as thirty. Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 682. 178

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and formalised in a series of entries in the papal registers for 1428 to 1429: Margaret was given permission to dwell near Syon and to be visited by enclosed brethren who would administer the sacraments to her, hear confession, preach and assist her in the making of her will.182 In return for these spiritual benefits, Margaret was a generous benefactor, purchasing at least seven books for Syon, including a fine Bible (now British Library, Additional MS 4006).183 Her commitment to the religious life is commemorated in the Clarence Hours, a lavishly illustrated book of hours owned and almost certainly commissioned by Margaret around the time she formalised her relationship with Syon.184 A half-page miniature marking the beginning of the fifteen gradual Psalms depicts the Virgin ascending the steps to the Temple to be blessed by the high priest, here depicted as a bishop with crozier and mitre, overseen by her parents Joachim and Anne (Fig. 66). Immediately below this scene a second woman, depicted in a fashionable horned headdress and wearing the same long-sleeved green gown as the Virgin, kneels before an open book on a prie dieu and is blessed by a veiled woman standing before an open doorway. Two scrolls furl around the right side of the foliate border with verses from the Psalms, one of which refers to the blessings of communal life: “behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity”.185 Although there is no heraldry to identify the kneeling woman in this scene, her clothing and posture indicate that she is intended to be understood as Margaret. The miniature marks the duchess’s new dedication to the religious life, setting up a typological parallel between the Virgin entering the Temple and Margaret entering the Abbey. Care for the dead, and preparation for her own demise, seem to have been matters of great importance for the duchess during her time at Syon. The themes of death and resurrection dominate the Life of St Jerome, a hagiography compiled and translated into the vernacular for the duchess by her spiritual advisor Simon Wynter, a monk at Syon, sometime between 1421 and 1429.186 The prologue, which is addressed to “the hyghe Princesse 182 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters (London: HMSO, 1906–09), 7: 1417–31, 8:1427–47. See also Keiser, “Patronage and Piety”, 37. 183 V. Gillespie and A. I. Doyle, eds, Syon Abbey, with the Libraries of the Carthusians (2001); E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham, Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c. 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 184 On the Clarence Hours see Plotzek, Stundenbuch, 33–34; Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 178; Catalogue of the Celebrated Library of the Late Major J. R. Abbey, lot. 3018, 65. 185 Ecce quam bonum et quam iocundum habitare fratres in unum. Psalm 132: 1. The other inscription is adapted from Psalm 50: 3, one of the penitential Psalms: Miserere mei Deus secundum magnam misericordiam tuam et secundum multitudinem mise. 186 The text must have been compiled before 1429, when Simon Wynter (who describes himself in a colophon at the beginning of the Life as “brothire and prest of þe monastery of Syon”) transferred from Syon to a monastery of less rigorous observance, but probably after Margaret’s formal attachment to Syon in c. 1428. Keiser, “Patronage and Piety”, 32, 38;

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66  PRESENTATION OF THE VIRGIN AT THE TEMPLE FROM THE CLARENCE HOURS, LONDON, C. 1428. COLOGNE, KOLUMBA, SAMMLUNG RENATE KÖNIG MS III, FOL. 65V.

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Margaret duchesse of Clarence”, claims that the book will teach her how to “be always redy to dye” so that she might “abyde deeth as the comyng of a loved frende”.187 The same concerns are reflected in the Clarence Hours. As well as the dates of Beaufort and Clarence’s deaths entered into the calendar, the manuscript contains four decorated initials that incorporate their heraldic arms.188 Like the east window of the Holland Chapel, the heraldic programme in Margaret’s book of hours focuses exclusively on herself and her two husbands; as noted before, it even pre-empts the design of the window in its five-fold pattern of the three spouses’ individual heraldic arms plus two escutcheons with the impaled arms of the duchess and each of her husbands. All but one of the shields with her husbands’ heraldic arms are positioned next to images of death and resurrection: the arms of Beaufort impaling Holland are juxtaposed with an image of the Last Judgement at the beginning of the seven penitential Psalms; Clarence’s arms are placed next to a funeral scene at the start of the Office of the Dead; and at the Commendation of Souls the arms of Beaufort are placed next to a miniature showing angels carrying three souls upwards to the Trinity (Figs 67, 68, 70). The only apparent exception to this pattern is the arms of Clarence impaling Holland at the Prime of the Office of the Virgin, juxtaposed with an image of the Arrest of Christ (Fig. 69). Perhaps Margaret saw this image of armed violence, featuring a crowd of guards in armour reminiscent of fifteenth-century fashions, as an oblique reference to Clarence’s bloody death on the battlefield. It is certainly one of the miniatures that attracted the most attention: the face of Christ, grasped simultaneously by Judas and an armoured knight, is smeared from rubbing or kissing. Interestingly, the other area on this folio similarly blurred is the escutcheon of Clarence and Margaret’s arms directly below the scene: the only heraldic shield in the Clarence Hours to bear the traces of such tactile ministrations. Just as the miniature of the Presentation to the Temple sets up a correspondence between the Virgin’s dedication to God and Margaret’s own religious commitment, so the duchess may have seen the violence of Clarence’s demise as an echo of Christ’s suffering. One of the most unusual features of the illuminations is the inclusion of the Trinity receiving the three souls in the miniature of the Commendation George R. Keiser, “St Jerome and the Bridgettines: Visions of Afterlife in Fifteenth-Century England”, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), 143–44n1. 187 E. Gordon Whatley, with Anne B. Thompson and Robert K. Upchurch, eds, “St Jerome”, in Saint’s Lives in Middle English Collections (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004), 119, lines 1–2, 15–23. The prologue is only published in this edition; I have used another, more detailed edition for the core text of the Life (see below). 188 The entries in the calendar place the manuscript in Margaret’s ownership, including obits for the duchess’s two spouses, parents, brothers and eldest son. All are made in a single, uniform hand, and were probably executed at the same time. Plotzek, Stundenbuch, 30; Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 178.

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67  LAST JUDGEMENT WITH ARMS OF BEAUFORT IMPALING HOLLAND FROM THE CLARENCE HOURS, FOL. 57R.

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68  FUNERAL SCENE WITH ARMS OF CLARENCE FROM THE CLARENCE HOURS, FOL. 75R.

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69  ARREST OF CHRIST WITH ARMS OF CLARENCE IMPALING HOLLAND FROM THE CLARENCE HOURS, FOL. 33V.

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70  COMMENDATION OF SOULS WITH ARMS OF BEAUFORT FROM THE CLARENCE HOURS, FOL. 106R.

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(Fig. 70). Typically this scene shows God the Father alone, as seen in the Hours of Elizabeth the Queen, a manuscript produced in the same London workshop as the Clarence Hours.189 This alteration to the standard iconography was almost certainly directed by Margaret herself, who may have requested the Trinity as a reference to the fact that, at the time of the manuscript’s commissioning, both of her husbands were buried in the Trinity Chapel at Canterbury. Clarence’s will, made on 10 July 1417, specifically requested that he be interred “at the feet of our lord and father of noble remembrance”.190 According to the chronicle of John Stone, a monk at Christchurch writing between 1467 and 1472, both Beaufort and Clarence were originally buried “at the shrine of St Thomas, in the northern part”.191 Henry IV was buried in the bay immediately to the north of Becket’s shrine, meaning Clarence would have been interred in the next bay to the east: a position now occupied by the sixteenth-century monument to Dean Wotton (Fig. 58). Beaufort must therefore have been interred in the bay to the west of Henry’s monument.192 It is difficult to imagine a more prestigious site of sepulchre for Margaret’s husbands, their bodies flanking the king and in close proximity to the shrine of Becket, one of the most popular saints in western Christendom. Their corpses, however, were not to remain in the Trinity Chapel for long. A letter from Henry VI to the prior and convent at Canterbury, written less than three weeks after Margaret’s death, orders the exhumation and reburial of the bodies of Beaufort and Clarence: we be enformed that our Aunte the Duchesse of Clarence ordeyned in hire lyve for the lying of the bodies of our Oncle the duk of Clarence & of our Cosyn therl of Somersete hire husbands in a certain Chapelle ordeyned therfor with in Christescherche … see that the said bodies be exhumed and in the place therefore disposed entered.193

189 The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen is held at the British Library, London MS Additional 50001. The Commendation of Souls is on folio 67v. See Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, nos 55 and 56. 190 Item, legamus corpus nostrum ad sepeliendum in ecclesia Christi Cantuarensis ad pedes alte memorie domini et patris nostri, cuius anime propitietur Deus (Nichols, Collection of Wills, 230). Several fifteenth-century chroniclers record the fulfilment of the duke’s wish after his death. See The Chronicle of John Hardyng, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1812), 385; John Stone’s Chronicle, ed. Searle, 26; C. L. Kingsford, ed., “Extracts from London Chronicles”, in English Historical Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 295. 191 Isti supradicti domini [Beaufort and Claurence] sepulti fuerunt ad feretrum sancti Thome ex parte boriali. John Stone’s Chronicle, ed. Searle, 26. 192 Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 311. 193 “Register of Christchurch Priory”, fol. 135r. Printed in J. W. Legg and W. H. St John Hope, eds., Inventories of Christchurch, Canterbury: With Historical and Topographical Introductions and Illustrative Documents (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1912), 152.

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Throughout the letter, the king is keen to stress that he is following “thentent & ordinaunce” of the duchess.194 The relocation of bodies for political or practical reasons was not uncommon in the Middle Ages.195 As we saw in chapter two, Philippa of Lancaster’s corpse was exhumed and reburied twice, first by her husband and second by her eldest son.196 After his death in 1450, William de la Pole was first interred in the collegiate church in Wingfield, Suffolk; ten years later his body was exhumed and reburied in the Charterhouse in Hull by his widow, Alice Chaucer, following the preference that William laid down in his will.197 In both these cases (and in many other documented exhumations from this period) the first interment was conceived as a temporary measure while preparations were made for the deceased’s final resting place. The disinterment of Margaret’s husbands does not follow this pattern. Although Mark Duffy has argued that the burials in the Trinity Chapel were intended as an interim arrangement, citing the apparent absence of a monument over Beaufort or Clarence’s grave, the care and expense associated with their burials is not consistent with a temporary grave.198 Clarence’s account books reveal prolonged negotiations between his servants and the archbishop regarding the location of his burial, while the London mason John Warlowe and five assistants were employed for two days in the delicate task of excavating the grave out of the fill above the vault of the Trinity Chapel crypt.199 Furthermore, the fact that the duchess felt it necessary to request an official letter from the king authenticated with his royal seal, rather than rely upon her executors to enforce her decision, suggests that the relocation of her husbands’ bodies was far from a fait accompli.200 Clarence’s testament left no doubt that it would be contrary to his own wishes. Considered from this perspective, the exhumation and reburial of Beaufort and Clarence emerges as a remarkable, even transgressive example of female agency; Margaret removed her deceased husbands from the presence of a king and a saint, overturning their own funerary preferences, in

“Register of Christchurch Priory”, fol. 135r. For further examples of the exhumation, relocation and reburial of bodies in the Middle Ages, see Daniell, Death and Burial, 93–96; Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body, 67–68. 196 For the burials and reburials of Philippa of Lancaster’s corpse, see also Barker, “Stone and Bone”, 124–25. 197 Badham, “Medieval Monuments”, 150. 198 Duffy, “Lancastrian Mausoleum”, 311. 199 Woolgar, “Wardrobe Account”, 627–28, 679–80. See also Wilson, “Medieval Monuments”, 504n232. 200 The fact that John Stone, writing over twenty-five years later, included the exhumations and reburials in his chronicle suggests at the very least that the monastic community considered this to be a notable event, and perhaps one that also caused some resentment. The chronicler also mentions that the body of Margaret’s fourth son, Thomas Beaufort (d. 1431), was moved to the Holland Chapel from its original burial place near the tomb of Becket in the monk’s cemetery, but does not say when this reburial occurred or who directed it. See John Stone’s Chronicle, ed. Searle, 20–21, 26. 194 195

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order to co-opt them into a commemorative scheme that stressed her own importance. While Margaret’s ability to arrange the exhumations speaks of her power and connections, the reasons why she would go to such lengths to do so are less straightforward. From a political perspective, the exhumations were unnecessary. As the monuments of Katherine Clifton and Simon Felbrigg demonstrate, it was not unheard of for a joint memorial to mark a single burial.201 Margaret could have ordered the triple monument without moving Beaufort and Clarence’s bodies, creating a memorial to her prestigious marriages while avoiding the expense and controversy of arranging her husbands’ exhumations. From a theological perspective, the exhumations were redundant. Proximity to a spouse would not ensure the continuance of marital union into the afterlife. As clerical writers made clear, at the Last Judgement individual marriage ties would be subsumed within the sacred marriage that they had symbolised.202 However, Margaret’s funerary scheme – like the epitaphs of Richard Bertlot and Thomas More – suggests that her own sense of a continuing relationship with her spouses diverged from the strictures of this doctrine. Whether “learning to die” with her confessor Simon Wynter, or reciting the daily office while meditating on the miniatures in the Clarence Hours, at some point during her second widowhood the duchess decided that she wanted her body to lie alongside her deceased spouses, their intimacy in life extending into the grave and, perhaps, the Resurrection. Margaret’s concern to ensure her proximity with the bodies of her spouses speaks to a broader mindset regarding the relationship between corpse, grave and resurrection. Practices such as inscribing prayers on the underside of the coffin, painting images of saints on the interior of the burial cist, or (as we saw in chapter two) dividing the corpse so it could be present in multiple churches, betray a popular assumption that the disposition of the corpse – where it was, and what it was “looking” at – could affect its condition in the afterlife.203 This principle also extended to whom the corpse was buried beside. If the dead were to be raised from their graves, as images of the Doom so vividly depicted, then it would follow that the person whom you lay beside would also be your companion at the Last Judgement. Even subtle distinctions in the relative position of corpses were believed to be significant. As we saw earlier, Thomas Montagu, Alice Chaucer’s second husband, instructed that the central compartment within his monument, which was to contain his own corpse, be elevated six inches 201 For another example, see Elisabeth Taburet-Delahaye, ed., Paris 1400: Les arts sous Charles VI, exh. cat. (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 25. 202 Jussen, “Posthumous Love as Culture”, 43. 203 For images painted within the grave, see Anna Bergmans and Ilona Hans-Collars, “Awaiting Eternal Life: Painted Burial Cists in the Southern Netherlands”, Church Monuments 28 (2013): 13–32. For bodily division, see Warntjes, “Programmatic Double Burial”, passim.

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above those of his two wives.204 This image of spousal hierarchy was not intended for contemporary viewers, but rather for the end of time; Thomas’s corporeal pre-eminence would have been hidden within the memorial, concealed from all except God until the moment of his resurrection.205 Considered from this perspective, Margaret’s decision to rebury her husbands beside her in the Holland Chapel takes on another layer of significance. Although the tomb has never been opened (or at least no such opening has been recorded), it is likely that the position of the bodies of Margaret, Beaufort and Clarence reflects that of their effigies.206 Assuming this is the case, the monument in the Holland Chapel would be more than an image of Margaret’s pre-eminence; it would represent an attempt by the duchess to orchestrate a marital dynamic in the afterlife, one in which she occupies the central position.

WITH OR WITHOUT MEN Some of the most pioneering studies of female experience in the Middle Ages have focused on categories of women defined by the absence of men: virgins, nuns and widows.207 This tendency is partly driven by the historical record: wives are subsumed into their husband’s legal identity, so rarely appear under their own guise in documentary evidence. However, there has also been an assumed correlation between singleness and autonomy, and inversely between marriage and subordination. Scholars searching for signs of female agency in funerary sculpture have thus overwhelmingly focused on tombs that depict women alone. Yet this ignores the prominent role that wives and widows played in commissioning double tombs, monuments through which they were able to direct their own representation as well as those of their husbands. For women who had been married multiple times, the many registers of representation on a memorial – effigy, devotional 204 Jacob, Register of Henry Chichele, 397. Another example, specifying exactly the same difference in height between the bodies of the man and woman, is found in payments for the making of the crypt to house the bodies of Philip the Good (d. 1467) and Isabella of Portugal (d. 1471) at the Chartreuse de Champmol (Dijon), which instruct that the body of the duke should lie on a trestle table that was six inches taller than the one for the duchess. For an image of this arrangement, see Jacques-Philippe Gilquin, watercolour drawing of the crypt of the Chartreuse de Champmol, 1736 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS nouv. Acq. Fr. 5916, fols 28v–29). 205 For the practice of burial within the tomb chest, see Barker, “Stone and Bone”, 117–19. 206 See Barker, “Stone and Bone”, 117–19. 207 The literature in this area is vast, covering history, literature and history of art. See, for instance, Caroline Barron and Anne F. Sutton, eds, Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500 (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Kim M. Philips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, c. 1270–c. 1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

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images, inscriptions and heraldic devices – offered a means of commemorating different identities simultaneously. This does not necessarily mean that the appearance of these monuments was distinctive; as Nigel Saul points out, in most cases female effigies commissioned by women are indistinguishable from female effigies commissioned by men.208 Female patrons used the same artists, the same materials and the same imagery as their male counterparts. Yet women can adopt the modes and language of the patriarchy for themselves while still expressing their agency; monuments do not need to be exclusively or identifiably “feminine” in their design to embody female identity. With this in mind, the Holland Chapel offers a different perspective on the magnificent monument of Alice Chaucer at Ewelme, often cited as an example of female agency and autonomy in late-medieval England (Fig. 54). Margaret Holland and Alice Chaucer shared many similarities: both were wealthy heiresses with royal connections, both were married multiple times and both lived through a long widowhood. It is possible that they knew one another personally: sometime after 1421 Alice married Margaret’s brother-in-law, Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury.209 Despite their social connections, the funerary choices of the two women lie in stark contrast. Rather than commission a single tomb like Alice (the most straightforward choice given the burial of her husbands in the Trinity Chapel), Margaret chose to erect a triple monument within a chapel adorned with emblems of her marital connections. Whereas Alice’s cadaver gazed at devotional paintings on the tester above its head, Margaret’s effigy stared upwards at a vault boss showing the impaled arms of herself and Clarence: a symbol of her most prestigious marriage. Indeed, Margaret’s commemorative programme is more readily compared to those of her male peers. Although monumental tombs with three effigies were not common in general, they were fashionable among the men of Margaret’s circle:210 John Holland, Margaret’s first cousin, is depicted alongside two of his wives at the Tower of London,211 and as we have seen, Saul, English Church Monuments, 292. Rowena E. Archer, “Chaucer [married names Phelip, Montagu, de la Pole], Alice, duchess of Suffolk (c. 1404–1475)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/54434. 210 Aside from the examples mentioned here, I have found only three other monumental tombs with three effigies in England dating before 1500: an anonymous knight with two women at Marnhill, Dorset; Sir Christopher Boynton and his two wives at South Cawton, Yorks.; and the monument attributed to John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester (or his father) and two wives at Ely Cathedral, Cambs. The situation for brasses is very different: Muriel Clayton’s catalogue of brass rubbings at the V&A records fifty-three brasses with three or more effigies (out of a total of 1,240 pre-1500 memorials). 211 Although John’s will requested that he be buried in a tomb with two of his wives and his sister, the heraldry on the monument indicates that the two female effigies represent John’s first wife, Anne Stafford, and his third wife, Anne Montagu. As we saw above, John’s second wife, Beatrice of Portugal, is commemorated alongside her first husband, Thomas Fitzalan in Arundel Castle. Nichols, Collection of Wills, 282. 208

209

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Ralph Neville, whose second wife was Margaret’s sister-in-law, has a triple monument in Staindrop (Fig. 63).212 Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, laid down instructions in his will of 1427 for a chapel with a monument in the centre displaying the effigies of himself and his two wives: Eleanor Holland (Margaret’s sister) and Alice Chaucer.213 While Alice refused to become an adjunct to her spouse’s triple monument, Margaret overturned her husbands’ testamentary desires in order to make them appendages to her funerary scheme. An inversion of the idea of the wife as adjunct and a riposte to the notion of remarriage as compromise, the Holland tomb embodies the particular forms of power available to a much-married woman in the fifteenth century.

212 Ralph’s second wife, Joan Beaufort, was the sister of Margaret’s first husband (Anthony Tuck, “Neville, Ralph, First Earl of Westmorland (c. 1364–1425)”, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/19951). 213 Duffy, “Fifteenth-Century Effigies”, 72.

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K

atherine Clifton’s first marriage was brief, childless and seemingly uneventful.1 Her husband, Ralph Green, was a member of the Northamptonshire gentry, an esquire to the body of Henry IV, and a dutiful servant for the house of Lancaster.2 Ralph’s quiet and uncontroversial life lies in stark contrast to the spectacular rise and fall of his father, Sir Henry Green, Richard II’s unpopular minister who was summarily executed during Henry Bolingbroke’s invasion of 1399.3 It was perhaps the memory of Sir Henry’s disgrace that prevented his son from attaining a knighthood, despite having served as a Member of Parliament, sheriff and justice of the peace.4 Ralph’s marriage to Katherine, the daughter of Sir John Clifton and granddaughter of Ralph, first Lord Cromwell, may have been an attempt to enhance his standing within the local community.5 Their union, however, was cut short after no more than three and a half years: Ralph died

1 In the secondary literature on Lowick ‘Katherine Green’ is sometimes wrongly described as the daughter of Anketill Mallory, Esq. of Winwick in Northamptonshire, a confusion that may have been due to the presence of the Mallory arms in the glazing adjacent to Ralph’s memorial. See George F. Beltz, Memorials of the Order of the Garter (London, 1841), 372– 73n6; Carole Rawcliffe, “Green, Ralph (c. 1379–1417), of Drayton, Northants”, in The History of Parliament Online: The House of Commons 1386–1421, ed. J. S. Roskell, Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe (https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1386-1421/member/ green-ralph-1379-1417); Richard Marks, The Medieval Stained Glass of Northamptonshire, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi of Great Britain 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 127–28. 2 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 219; Carole Rawcliffe, “Green, Ralph”. 3 L. S. Woodger, “Green, Sir Henry (c. 1347–1399) of Drayton, Northants”, in History of Parliament Online (https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1386-1421/member/ green-sir-henry-1347-1399). 4 Ralph served as MP, sheriff and JP for Northamptonshire (his main residence), as well as sheriff and JP for Wiltshire (where he had inherited valuable possessions from his mother). Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 219; Marks and Williamson, Gothic, 442, no. 330; Rawcliffe, “Green, Ralph”. 5 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 219; Rawcliffe, “Green, Ralph”.

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in October 1417, probably a casualty of the second invasion of Normandy.6 As we saw in chapter three, Katherine soon remarried the Norfolk landowner Sir Simon Felbrigg, allowing her to return to the county in which she had been raised.7 Her second marriage lasted for more than twenty years, preceding a widowhood of almost equal duration.8 In the middle of the fifteenth century Katherine was the wealthiest person in Norwich, residing in the Music House and contributing to the rebuilding and aggrandisement of a number of city churches.9 Shortly before her death in 1460, Katherine requested that her body be buried in the choir of the Norwich Blackfriars, next to her second husband.10 Katherine’s short and childless marriage to Ralph Green might have been forgotten altogether were it not for their magnificent memorial, which has survived to this day in the parish church of Lowick (Northants.) (Fig. 71). On St Valentine’s Day 1419, Katherine entered into a contract with Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, two sculptors based at the alabaster quarry of Chellaston (Derbs.), to make a tomb for herself and her first husband.11 Prentys and Sutton led a workshop of national importance, specialising in the production of alabaster tombs; the choice of these distinguished sculptors hints at Katherine’s ambitions for her monument.12 The contract 6 In May 1414 and February 1416 Ralph settled almost all his estates on trustees holding to his own use and that of his wife (indicating that he and Katherine were married by this date). In June 1417 Ralph obtained permission to entrust his affairs to attorneys before leaving for France; he died just over four months later. Rawcliffe, “Green, Ralph”. 7 The seat of Katherine’s father was Buckenham Castle, Norfolk. Francis Blomefield, “Hundred of Shropham: Old Bukenham”, in An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the Country of Norfolk, vol. 1 (London, 1805), 376; Rawcliffe, “Green, Ralph”. 8 Sir Simon Felbrigg died on 3 December 1442. George F. Beltz, Memorials of the Order of the Garter (London, 1841), 372; Blomefield, “North Erpingham Hundred: Felbrigg”, in Topographical History, vol. 8 (1808), 110; Colin Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century: Endings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 102n55. 9 For a more detailed discussion of Katherine’s life in Norwich, see chapter three. For her patronage of Norwich churches, which included the Blackfriars church, St Ethelreda and St Peter Parmentergate, see Brian Ayers, Clare Haynes, T. A. Heslop and Helen Lunnon, The Parish Churches of Medieval Norwich, part 1 (forthcoming). 10 Norwich Record Office, NCC Reg. Brosyard, fol. 185r. The burial of Katherine and Simon’s bodies in the Norwich Blackfriars is also recorded in “Copy of a Visitation of Burials by Thomas Benolt (d. 1534), Windsor Herald”, London, College of Arms, MS CGY 647, fol. 56; John Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments of Great Britain, Ireland, and the Islands Adjacent, 2nd edn (London, 1767), 531. 11 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 217–18. See also T. A. Heslop, “The Alabaster Tomb at Ashwellthorpe, Norfolk: Its Workmanship, Cost and Location”, in Patrons and Professionals in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2011 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Paul Binski and Elizabeth A. New (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2012), 34; Nigel Ramsay, “Alabaster”, in English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products, ed. John Blair and Nigel Ramsay (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 31. 12 There are two further documentary references to the sculptors: Prentys and Sutton are named in a 1419 contract for the (now lost) effigies of an earl and countess at Bisham Priory (Berks.); in 1414 the abbey of Fécamp (Normandy) purchased unworked alabaster at the Chellaston quarry from a maistre Thomas Prentis. Stylistic similarities link them to a much larger number of memorials, including high-status commissions such as the tomb of Henry IV and Joan of Navarre at Canterbury Cathedral and the monument to Thomas Fitzalan and

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stipulates that the tomb was to be made of good-quality alabaster, measuring nine feet long and four feet two inches wide, gilded, painted and “arries oue colours” (arrayed with colours).13 It was to feature two effigies, one the counterfeit of an esquire armed at all points, the other of a lady in her surcot ouverte. An arch of alabaster was to surmount the entire monument.14 The total cost of the memorial and its transport to the church was £40.15 This was a significant sum for a monument to an esquire, double the amount spent on the alabaster tomb to Sir Edmund Thorpe (d. 1418) and his wife Joan (d. 1415) at Ashwellthorpe (Norfolk), another product of the Prentys and Sutton workshop.16

SHIRE, ENGLAND).

Beatrice of Portugal at the Fitzalan Chapel in Arundel. See Badham and Oosterwick, “English Tomb Contracts”, 221–24; Ramsay, “Alabaster”, 32; Christopher Wilson, “The Medieval Monuments”, 501–03. 13 Substantial remnants of polychromy survive on the undersides of the canopies and the coronets worn by the two effigies. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 217–18. 14 This was removed at some point before the late seventeenth century. An engraving from c. 1685 shows the monument without its canopy, the sides of the arch shorn off from the same points as can be seen today. Robert Halstead, Succinct Genealogies of the Noble and Ancient Houses (London, 1685), 189. 15 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 219. 16 In her will of 1414 Joan Thorpe set aside £20 for a tomb. A comparison between the Ashwellthorpe and Lowick monuments reveals strong stylistic similarities indicating manufacture by the same workshop. Heslop, “Alabaster Tomb at Ashwellthorpe”, 334.

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72  LOWICK MONUMENT, DETAILS OF JOINED HANDS.

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One particular instruction in the contract demands further attention. Katherine stipulates that, “lun des ditz ymages tenant lautre par la main” (one of the said effigies [should] hold the other by the hand). The sculptors followed her request closely: Katherine’s effigy reaches across her body in order to place her right hand within the right hand of Ralph, whose fingers curl around to embrace the back of her hand (Fig. 72). These joined hands were designed to command attention, bent at a near-impossible angle so they could be raised above the torsos of the effigies, the naturalism of the pose sacrificed for the sake of its visibility. As touched upon in earlier chapters, the Lowick tomb belongs to a small group of late-medieval monuments that portray the effigies holding hands. There are thirty-six examples from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with at least a further nine that no longer survive.17 All the examples depict a married couple, and all the effigies join right hand to right hand.18 Furthermore, as we saw in chapter two, hand-joining monuments were a peculiarly English phenomenon: aside from one example in Styria (modern-day Austria), one in Silesia (modern-day Poland) and three in Portugal, all the memorials that display this gesture are found in England.19 Hand-joining memorials were concentrated in time as well as place: the majority of hand-joining tombs were made between 1370 and 1440, with another brief period of popularity in the mid-1450s and 1460s.20 Within this geographic and chronological cluster, there is much variety in material and technique. Joined hands were cut into monumental brasses, incised into stone slabs, carved onto alabaster and freestone effigies, and even cast in copper alloy for the monument to Richard II and Anne of Bohemia in Westminster Abbey. The gesture was never the preserve of a single workshop but instead associated with a range of craftsmen, encompassing architect-masons of national prestige, such as Henry Yevele,21 as

17 See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. There were doubtless other, lost examples. 18 The one exception to this may be a monument in the churchyard at Kirby-in-Cleveland (Yorks.). The tomb is extremely weathered and the effigies have lost their arms below the elbow. The position of the remaining stumps suggests that they were holding hands, although it is unclear whether they joined right hand to right hand or the man took the woman’s left hand with his right hand. Gittos and Gittos, Interpreting Medieval Effigies, 29, plate 4. 19 Furthermore, two of the Portuguese monuments have a direct connection to England. For the monument to João I and Philippa of Lancaster, see chapter two. For the monument to Duarte I and Leonor of Aragón, see da Silva and Redol, Monastery of Batalha, 112–13; Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views, 32; Joana Ramôa José da Silva, “O retrato de D. João I no Mosteiro de Santa Maria da Vitória”, Revista de Historia da Arte 5 (2008): 92–95. 20 See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. 21 See the entry on Yevele in John Harvey, English Mediaeval Architects: A Biographical Dictionary Down to 1550, rev. ed. (Gloucester: Sutton, 1984), 358–66. Yevele’s involvement in hand-joining monuments is discussed in detail below.

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well as anonymous local sculptors.22 This reflects the wide range of individuals who were commemorated by hand-joining monuments, from royalty to the mercantile classes. Such diversity in materials, artistic technique, formal ambition and the status of the deceased can be appreciated in a glance by comparing the colossal limestone monument to João I and Philippa of Lancaster, located within their own funerary chapel in the royal foundation of Batalha, with the relatively modest brass depicting Richard Torryngton (d. 1356), a wool-exporter from London, with his wife Margaret Incent (d. 1349) at the parish church of St Peter in Great Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire (Figs 42 and 73).23 Unlike other motifs in funerary sculpture, the gesture of joined hands cut across networks of making and commissioning. Building on our earlier discussions of the hand-joining monuments to John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, and João I and Philippa of Lancaster, this chapter explores the dense meanings sedimented in this touching gesture. There has been a tendency to treat each monument as For example, the monument to a serjeant-at-law and his wife at Flamstead, Hertfordshire has been attributed to a sculptor based at the nearby Totternhoe quarries. Nigel Saul, “The Early Fifteenth-Century Monument of a Serjeant-At-Law in Flamstead Church (Hertfordshire)”, Church Monuments 27 (2012): 12–19. 23 William Lack, Martin H. Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Hertfordshire (Stratford St Mary: privately published, 2009), 96; Saul, English Church Monuments, 252. 22

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73  RUBBING OF THE BRASS MEMORIAL TO RICHARD TORRYNGTON AND MARGARET INCENT, C. 1380— C. 1390. CHURCH OF ST PETER, GREAT BERKHAMSTED (HERTFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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an isolated example linked to the particular biographies of the deceased; the joined hands of the effigies are often characterised as a sign of an exceptional marriage, either in terms of the bonds of affection between the couple or the wife’s high status.24 Hand-joining memorials were, however, linked to wider cultural phenomena. As we saw in chapter one, the popularity of this gesture coincided with a time and a place in which the commissioning of a double tomb – and the celebration of marriage in funerary programmes – was becoming increasingly common. Reading joined hands as a straightforward expression of the inner emotional lives of the couple obscures (perhaps wilfully) the artificiality of the gesture. Hand-joining effigies were meticulously fashioned images, the appearance of which was governed as much by artistic practices and material constraints as it was the inclinations of their patrons, romantic or otherwise. Because hand-joining monuments are usually treated in biographical rather than artistic terms, they have yet to be situated within broader debates surrounding the expressivity of Gothic sculpture. Art historians interested in this issue have usually focused on representations of sacred subjects, where the expressivity of the sculpted figures seems to be linked to their moral condition.25 Often cited as a paradigmatic example of expressivity are the Wise and Foolish Virgins on the north portal of Magdeburg Cathedral; the wise virgins smile serenely (or perhaps smugly), while their foolish counterparts on the opposite jamb screw up their faces in anguish and wipe tears from their eyes. As Jacqueline Jung astutely observes, this scheme is remarkable for narrating the parable through gesture and expression rather than symbolic attributes, amounting to nothing less than “the elevation of emotional response to the central subject of representation”.26 Whereas in earlier schemes the difference between wisdom and foolishness was symbolised through an upturned versus a downturned lamp, at Magdeburg Cathedral the two groups of women are distinguished in terms of their gestural responses to the inevitable emotional outcomes engendered by their sagacity or folly. Jung argues that such gestural storytelling was a means of co-opting the beholder into a kind of theatrical performance, blurring the boundary between subject and object so that both become players in the same drama, albeit one in which the movement of the viewer through the portal determines the finale.27

24 See, for example, Sally Badham, “‘Beautiful Remains of Antiquity’: The Medieval Monuments in the Former Trinitarian Priory Church at Ingham, Norfolk. Part 1: The Lost Brasses”, Church Monuments 21 (2006): 16; Coss, The Lady, 87; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 27–28; Ralph A. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 345; Saul, English Church Monuments, 303. 25 The exceptions to this rule are the enigmatic founder figures at Naumburg. For an extended discussion and bibliography, see Assaf Pinkus, Sculpting Simulacra in Medieval Germany (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 29–65. 26 Jung, “Dynamic Bodies and the Beholder’s Share”, 139. 27 Jung, “Dynamic Bodies and the Beholder’s Share”, 141, 145–46.

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While Jung points to the virgins’ capacity to exert a kind of “psychological pressure” on the viewer, Paul Binski places more emphasis on the acculturated and formalised character of their gestures.28 For Binski, such bodily comportments should be understood as rhetorical ornament (or figurae), a means of lending the artwork direction and persuasive power. In this sense, therefore, gesture is to be understood within the same category as symbolic attributes and clothing, rather than opposed to them.29 Moreover, as a kind of ornament, the significance of gesture lies less in understanding precisely what it means, in the sense of verbal content, but rather in its manner of enunciation: we might recognise that the gestures of the foolish virgins seem to be expressive of something like despair, but their most significant quality is their expressiveness itself, the amplification of bodily gesticulation as a device to grab – and retain – our attention.30 The philosopher Giorgio Agamben framed the same argument in different terms when he asserted that “the gesture … is communication of communicability”.31 Binski and Agamben are both pointing towards the Gordian knot that entwines gesture, spectator and meaning: for a bodily comportment to be an “expression” depends on a spectator recognising its meaningfulness (the idea that is expressive of something), yet at the same time it is impossible for this meaning to ever be firmly or fully identified. While “expression” (from exprimere, to press or force out) is defined as an inner meaning turned exterior, its action inevitably takes precedence over its content. This chapter seeks to articulate the multifaceted significance of the motif of holding hands in funerary sculpture, casting a different (albeit complementary) light on these debates regarding performativity, artifice and the “content” of gestural signs.32 I begin by addressing the treatment of joined hands in medieval theology, art and literature. The gesture at once constituted a sacramental sign and a mark of political or legal accord. Importantly, in medieval thought the joining of hands belonged to a different gestural category than the smiling or tearful virgins at Magdeburg; it pertained first and foremost to the realm of the will, not emotion. Shifting attention to hand-joining memorials themselves, I then consider the 28 Jung, “Dynamic Bodies and the Beholder’s Share”, 125; Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 51–77. Another discussion around expression and the Magdeburg virgins is found in Gertsman, “The Facial Gesture”. 29 Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 57. 30 Binski, Gothic Sculpture, 68. 31 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 59. 32 In the interests of space, I focus on the medieval period and set aside the different traditions associated with the depiction of the gesture in other periods. For the classical tradition, see Glenys Davies, “The Significance of the Handshake Motif in Classical Funerary Art”, American Journal of Archaeology 89, no. 4 (1985): 627–40; Karen K. Hersch, The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 208–12.

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problem of intentionality: which aspects of the gesture were directed by patronal choice, as opposed to workshop practices or material constraints. In doing so, I push against the tendency to overdetermine the gesture, to seek a biographical meaning undergirding the nuances of its appearance. The focus of the discussion then turns from what the gesture means to how it means. I explore the relationship between the representation of joined hands and its performance, in both legal and sacramental contexts. This reveals that the joining of hands took on particular associations when represented on a funerary monument, the potency of the gesture activated within the performance of intercessory rituals for the dead. Mindful not to become entangled in the Gordian knot, this chapter does not attempt to establish a single meaning for hand-holding, nor posit an explanation to account for its appearance on each of the forty-five extant and recorded memorials. On the contrary, one of my central concerns is the capaciousness and polyvalence of the gesture, its ability to encompass a range of meanings dependent on situation, occasion and the viewer. Moreover, some hand-joining monuments seem to have functioned primarily as a quotation of another tomb, a means of signalling affiliation to one’s superiors or membership of a particular political group. In these cases, joined hands could be said to have moved from symbol to allegory: emptied of the content to which it originally referred, the gesture instead becomes an arbitrary sign, deployed without reference to the ideas and values for which it purports to stand.

GESTURE AS “FIGURE” The joining of hands participated in a broader gestural culture, one that defined and categorised bodily motions in terms of their varying relationship to inner feeling and the will. In the Middle Ages one of the bestknown of all discussions of gesture was the twelfth chapter of the treatise De Institutio Novitiorum (On the Formation of Novices).33 This tract, written by Hugh of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century scholastic theologian, served as a behavioural manual for new members of the community, instructing them in the routines, customs and individual comportment appropriate to monastic life.34 The chapter in question, entitled De disciplina servanda in gestu (on the discipline to be kept in gesture), opens by defining gesture as

Hugh of Saint Victor, De Institutione Novitorum, in Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 176 (1854), cols 938–43. 34 J. A. Burrow, Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 110–11; Boyd Taylor Coolman, The Theology of Hugh of St Victor: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199–200; Jean-Claude Schmitt, La raison des gestes dans l’occident médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 173–205. 33

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“the movement of the whole body and a symbolic figure”.35 In other words, gesture is a means of expressing externally the inner movements of the soul, transforming the body into a “figure” (figuratio) in the eyes of God and man. Hugh’s main concern lies in the connection between orderly gesture (gestus) and moral rectitude. He argues that disordered gesture (gesticulatio) is a sign of inner weakness; moderate and controlled use of the body should be a hallmark of monastic life.36 In particular, novices should maintain the discrete functions of each member of the body and not confuse them with one another: One must respect distinctions between what the parts of the body do, so that every part performs the function for which it was created: the hand should not speak, nor the mouth listen, nor the eyes usurp the function of the tongue.37

Although framed as an admonition, this statement is also a tacit recognition of gesture’s communicative power. According to Hugh, it is possible for eyes and hands to “speak” in the same way as the mouth, and for the mouth to communicate the act of listening. Hugh’s characterisation of gesture as a bridge between exterior and interior – a visible sign of invisible moral conditions – underlies much that was written about gesture in later centuries.38 One notable example is the The Donet, written sometime after 1443 by Reginald Pecock, the (latterly disgraced) bishop of Chichester (d. in or after 1459), which proposes the same connection between inner and outer signs, but with an emphasis on the opposite direction: the capacity of exterior comportment to affect the interior state of the soul. Pecock compares the body to the fortifications of a castle. If a captain wants to protect the “inner ward” of his castle, he must attend to its gates and walls; in the same way, Pecock argues, external bodily performances, including “our bodily going, moving, resting, sitting, gesture, laughing, speaking and countenancing”, must be regulated in order to protect one’s inner moral condition.39 35 Gestus est motus et figuratio membrorum corporis. Hugh of Saint Victor, De Institutione Novitorum, col. 938. See also Jean-Claude Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures in the West: Third to Thirteenth Centuries”, in A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 67. 36 Hugh of Saint Victor, De Institutione Novitorum, col. 941. 37 Discretio actionum in membris conservanda est, ut scilicet id agat unumquodque membrum ad quod factum est, ut neque loquatur manus, neque os audiat, nec oculus linguae officium assumat. Hugh of Saint Victor, De Institutione Novitorum, col. 941. The translation above is from Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 111. 38 One hundred and seventy-two manuscript copies of De Institutio Novitiorum survive, spread over a wide geographic area, and dating right up to the end of the Middle Ages, testament to the work’s enduring popularity and circulation. Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 174, 198. 39 Reginald Pecock, The Donet, ed. Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, Early English Text Society Original Series 156 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 50, lines 3–15. This passage is discussed in Paul Murphy, “Body Talk: Gestures of Emotion in Late Medieval England”, Literature Compass 13, no. 6 (2016): 416.

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Although these texts were written more than three hundred years apart, they exemplify an enduring concern in the Middle Ages with gesture as a sign of a person’s inner state, and particularly with the disciplining of bodily motions as a means of regulating thoughts and feelings. In common with other clerical writers, they are exclusively concerned with expressive gesture, that is, the apparently spontaneous movements that erupt from emotional states. Neither discusses those bodily motions that define and communicate the relationship between individuals. This category, loosely defined as demonstrative gesture, includes political and legal signs such as the immixtio manuum, whereby a vassal placed his hands palm to palm between the palms of his lord in order to express allegiance.40 In his Chronicles, Jean Froissart describes how the English lords renewed their allegiance to Richard II upon the young king reaching his majority in 1388: When the service was over, the king’s uncles kissed him, in sign of homage, and swore faith and duty to him forever. Then came the barons, prelates, and all who held anything under him, and with joined hands, as was becoming vassals, swore faith and loyalty, and kissed him on the mouth.41

This passage describes immixtio manuum as the centrepiece of a choreographed sequence of gestures, including kissing on the mouth and the swearing of oaths, which redefined the relationship between the king and his nobles. Placing your hands, the tools of activity and authority, between the hands of another expressed the nesting of your actions within theirs, the subjugation of your will to their intentions. Such was the importance and widespread recognition of these symbolic acts that modifications in their performance could be used to communicate the subtle nuances of political hierarchy. Another passage from Froissart describes how the young Edward III of England did homage as duke of Guienne to King Philip VI of France with a sworn oath and a kiss but without the immixtio manuum, thereby expressing loyalty but not subjection.42 Such subtle gestural inflections – and the power dynamics they embodied – could also be communicated through images. An initial from a historical compendium, made in London during the latter part of the reign of 40 Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 11–13. See also Jacques Le Goff, “Le rituel symbolique de la vassalité”, in his Pour un autre Moyen Âge: Temps, travail et culture en Occident (Paris: Gallimard 1977), 349–420. 41 Aprés la messe, en cause d’ommaige, les oncles du roy baisierent le roy et lui firent et jurerent foy et hommaige a tenir a perpetuelle. Aprés, les contes et barons jurerent, aussi les prelas et ceulx qui tenuz estoyent de relever, et baisierent par foy et par hommaige, leurs mains jointtes, ainsi comme il appartient, le roy en la bouche. Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 865, fol. 363v, reproduction in The Online Froissart, ed. Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, version 1.5 (Sheffield: HRIOnline, 2013; http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/ onlinefroissart). See also Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 12. 42 Jean Froissart, Chronicles, book 1, section 45, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Brereton, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 55. See also Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 13.

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Richard II, illustrates the truce at Berwick-upon-Tweed, which was agreed between Edward III, king of England and David I, king of Scotland in 1357.43 At first glance the illumination appears to express the equality between the two monarchs: the figures stand side by side, their right hands joined, with escutcheons above representing the two kingdoms (Fig. 74). Yet the nuances of their gestural relationship imply the superiority of the English king. While both figures are shown with their feet facing forwards and torso turned towards the other, David twists at ninety degrees so that we see his face in profile, whereas Edward turns to only a three-quarter view. Moreover, David places his left hand on the right shoulder of his companion, his

74 TRUCE BETWEEN EDWARD III AND DAVID I FROM A COMPILATION OF DOCUMENTS ON ROYAL POLITICS, LEGISLATION AND CEREMONY, LONDON, C. 1386—99. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY

London, British Library MS Cotton Nero D VI, fol. 61v. Scot McKendrick, John Lowden and Kathleen Doyle, eds, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, exh. cat. (London: MS COTTON NERO British Library, 2011), 352. D VI, FOL. 61V. 43

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head tilted slightly so as to look up at Edward, who returns his gaze with a downward glance. This hierarchy becomes even more apparent when the miniature is compared to hand-joining monuments, which were reaching the height of their popularity at the same time and among the same court circles within which this manuscript was produced. Edward is the active agent in the joining of hands, his fingers curling around the back of David’s hand in exactly the same way as Ralph Green grasps the hand of Katherine Clifton on their memorial at Lowick (Figs 72 and 74). Just as Ralph is shown to the left of Katherine, David is positioned on the left-hand side of Edward; as we will see, the dexter was usually the side of greater honour, but on hand-joining monuments this order tended to be reversed so that the husband could adopt the more active stance. The position and gestures of the Scottish king thus echo those of the wife, while the English king adopts a stance analogous to that of the husband. Rather than describing a sequence of gestures, as Froissart does in his Chronicles, the designer of this initial has translated the political dynamics between the English and Scottish Crowns into a single pose between two bodies. Just as gesture expressed the relationship between political and legal entities, so it was used to define sexual unions. Ivory caskets, mirror cases and manuscript miniatures often depict couples engaged in a sequence of gestures marking the progressive stages of their romance.44 This choreography of courtship is pictured in a miniature accompanying the poem Ci Commence del Arbre d’Amours, part of a miscellany of philosophical and scientific texts made in Thérouanne or Saint-Omer in 1277, which depicts the same couple three times, on each occasion progressing further up the branches of the tree of love, surmounted by Cupid with bow and arrow (Fig. 75).45 Beginning on the ground below the tree, the man kneels before the women in a gesture reminiscent of the immixtio manuum, but the woman turns away with one hand on her heart and the other palm outstretched towards him; on the lower pair of branches the woman reaches out to touch the forearms of the man, who continues to kneel with hands clasped together; on the upper branches both lovers are seated on the same plinth-like structure with the woman stretching out both arms to embrace the man, while the man places his left hand on her right shoulder. On the perilous route from courtship to marriage, gesture offered a way for men and women to signal and structure the trajectory of their relationship. Echoes of these courtly motions can be discerned on one of the most gestural memorials from the Middle Ages: the tomb of Walter Stewart (d. 1294/96), earl of Menteith, and his wife Mary (d. 1281/90) at the Augustinian Priory of Inchmahome, located on an island in the Lake of Menteith 44 For numerous examples, see Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London: Laurence King, 1998). 45 Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 2200, fol. 198v. See Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 122; Stones, Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, part 1, 507–12.

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75  TREE OF LOVE FROM A MISCELLANY OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC TREATISES, THÉROUANNE OR SAINT-OMER, 1277. PARIS, BIBLIOTHÈQUE SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE, MS 2200, FOL. 198V.

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76  MONUMENT TO WALTER STEWART, EARL

77  RECONSTRUCTION OF THE INCHMAHOME

OF MENTEITH AND HIS WIFE MARY, C. 1281—96.

MONUMENT.

INCHMAHOME PRIORY (STIRLING, SCOTLAND).

(Stirlingshire, Scotland).46 Dating between c. 1281 and 1296, this is the earliest surviving monument in the British Isles to depict the effigies of a married couple lying side by side. Both effigies reach across to embrace one another around the shoulder, their arms overlapping to create an unbroken connection between the spouses, while the knight turns on his side to look at his wife, his left arm reaching across to pull her mantle over her body (Figs 76 and 77). The dynamic pose of the effigies underlines the emotional and psychological bond between the couple, their entangled limbs 46 For a detailed discussion of this monument, see Jessica Barker, “Legal Crisis and Artistic Innovation in Thirteenth-Century Scotland”, British Art Studies 6 (2017), https://doi. org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-06/jbarker.

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encouraging us to treat the two figures as a single entity. At the same time, the vigorous sideways sweep of the knight’s gestures, his firm grasp on the woman’s mantle and neck and the forceful press of his foot on her drapery seem to demonstrate a possessiveness amounting almost to compulsion: Walter literally “takes hold” of his wife. This intimate exchange encapsulates the concept of gesture as defined by Hugh of Saint Victor; the gestures of Walter and Mary animate their entire bodies, transforming their corporeal forms into a symbolic image. At Inchmahome, gesture and bodies are entwined in a knot that cannot be unbound; the significance of the effigies is inextricable from their comportment. The connection is far looser in the case of hand-joining memorials. Unlike the effigies at Inchmahome, the couples represented on these monuments rarely turn to look at one another; the two right hands are usually the only point of corporeal connection between the sculpted figures. Rather than animating the whole body, the gesture tends to be rendered in such a way as to restrict its movement to the hands and forearms. Above the elbow the right arm remains clamped to the torso. In some cases, the left hands are engaged in gestures that augment and amplify the meaning of the joined right hands (the significance of which will be discussed below). On other memorials, however, the comportment of the left hand is entirely divorced from that of the right, occupied either in generic gestures of aristocratic masculinity/femininity, such as the male effigy gripping the sword belt and the female entwining her fingers in her mantle cord, or else in holding attributes related to the occupation and identity of the deceased. This sense of detachment between gesture and effigies is exemplified on the monument at Lowick: the joined hands of Katherine Clifton and Ralph Green are hyper-articulated, the wrists bent at a near-impossible angle so they can be raised to an unnatural height above the torsos of the sculpted figures (Fig. 72). The overall effect is to render the joined hands as an independent motif, connected to but separable from the two sculpted figures. As we saw earlier, this is exactly how the gesture is treated in the contract for the making of the memorial, which instructs the sculptors to carve two images of alabaster, one the “counterfait” of an esquire, armed, with a helm under his head and a bear beneath his feet, and the other of a lady in a surcot ouverte with angels holding her pillow and two lapdogs at her feet, and “one of the images holding the other by the hand”.47 The instruction to portray the effigies joining hands thus follows a list of symbolic attributes intended to personalise the sculpted figures with markers of status and identity, implicitly placing gesture in the same category as costume, symbolic attributes and heraldic insignia. The treatment of joined hands on tomb sculpture parallels the representation of this gesture in other contexts. It was not uncommon for joined hands to be separated from the body and used as a free-floating 47

Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 217–18.

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78  WOODEN CASKET, EASTERN SWITZERLAND, C. 1400— C. 1450. BASEL, HISTORISCHES MUSEUM, INV. 1870.508.

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79  INTERIOR OF WOODEN CASKET.

sign, reminiscent of the smile of the Cheshire cat after the disappearance of its bearer. A wooden casket (or Minnekästchen) from eastern Switzerland shows a man and woman exchanging vows: he declares, “I send thee fidelity”, to which she replies, “you have the same from me”.48 This verbal exchange is symbolised in the two birds that fly between them, one of which carries an “S” for stät (constant) and the other a pair of disembodied joined hands (Fig. 78). Abstracted from the body, this gestural fragment acts as pictographic shorthand for marital fidelity, equivalent to the initial “S” held in the beak of the other bird. Yet despite pointing to the same idea, the initial and the gesture belong to two very different categories of sign: the letter “S” is a symbol, its relationship to the idea of constancy pure convention, while the disembodied joined hands derive their meaning from their resemblance to the central gesture of the wedding rite. Minnekästchen were often given to brides as wedding gifts, adorned with images intended to remind her of the comportment and duties expected of a wife. For a newly married woman, the general principle of fidelity symbolised by the disembodied joined hands would have prompted recollection of the specific vows she had made to her husband on her wedding day, an oath sworn with her hand held in his. Indeed, opening the lid of the casket reveals another pair of joined hands painted on its interior, the allegory of the wedding gift encapsulated in a single sign (Fig. 79). So, while viewed in isolation the sign of joined hands seems untethered from the body, when attended to in the context of use and performance this 48 The inscription is highly abbreviated: S. TR. SE. IC. DIR/ DIE. HAST. O. V. M., which expands to stät Treue send ich dir / Die hast du auch von mir. Heinrich Kohlhaussen, Minnekästchen im Mittelalter (Berlin: Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1928), 80.

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80  GOLD ANNULAR BROOCH, C. 1350— C. 1400. DIAMETER: 26.6MM. PORTABLE ANTIQUITIES SCHEME, HESH-C63901.

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connection is re-membered. Another example can be found in the frequent use of the motif on rings and brooches, such as a heart-shaped annular brooch formed of two clasped hands discovered in Sandbach, Cheshire in 2011 (Fig. 80).49 Subtle differences distinguish the gender of the two hands: the “male” hand (on the heraldic dexter) wears a short sleeve cut at the wrist, while the “female” hand (on the heraldic sinister) has a trumpet-shaped sleeve projecting over the upper hand. Combining heart and hands plays on the connection between these body parts: there was believed to be a vein running directly from the fourth finger of the right hand to the heart, an organ that was itself recognised as the seat of a person’s affections.50 It is precisely this vascular connection that is used in Gratian’s Decretum to explain the placement of the wedding ring on the fourth finger of the bride’s right hand: the ring that the groom gives the bride is without doubt a sign of mutual fidelity, or (if you prefer) a token of the joining of their hearts. Hence the ring is placed on the fourth finger, in which there is a vein that carries blood all the way to the heart.51

Notably, the Sarum Manual cites this passage to explain its instructions for the exchange of rings in the wedding rite.52 While rings ensured that a symbol of the marital vow was impressed upon the vein leading to the bride’s heart, the Sandbach brooch would have been worn on the breast, meaning that the joined hands of the wedding rite were positioned over the heart of its wearer. Seen out of context, these brooches and rings appear to represent joined hands as an isolated sign; after all, the “arms” to which they are attached are merely a closed loop. When they were worn on the body, however, the joined hands would have become part of their wearer, re-enacting the gesture that their own hand had performed on their wedding day. These objects reveal something of the particular character of hand-joining as a form of gestural communication. In medieval art some gestures 49 Portable Antiquities Scheme, HESH-C63901 (https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/ record/id/451385). Numerous examples of rings and brooches with clasped hands survive. For brooches, see Portable Antiquities Scheme, ESS-330 581; Portable Antiquities Scheme, LVPL-9EID13. For rings, see British Museum 1857 0928.1; British Museum AF 1121; V&A 846-1871. See also Marian Campbell, Medieval Jewellery in Europe, 1100–1500 (London: V&A, 2009), 94–95; John Cherry, “Medieval Rings”, in The Ring: From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, ed. Anne Ward et al. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 51–87; Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 95. 50 Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 112. For concepts of the heart in medieval Europe, see Heather Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 51 Item, quod in primis negotiis annulus a sponso sponsae datur, fit hoc nimirum vel propter mutuae fidei signum, vel propter id magis, ut eodem pignore corda jungantur. Unde et quarto digito annulus idem inseritur, quod in eo vena quaedam, ut fertur, sanguinis ad cor usque perveniant. Decretum Gratiani: emendatum et notationibus illustratum, Gregorii XIII pont. max. Jussu editum, in Patrologia Latina, vol. 187, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Migne, 1855) secunda pars, causa xxx, quaest. v, col. 1450. 52 Collins, Manuale, 49.

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were frequently amputated from the body, such as the joining of hands and the raised middle finger and forefinger of benediction.53 Others were never represented independently. There was no attempt, for instance, to represent smiling lips without a face, nor the wringing of hands without a body. These differences can be explained in terms of the distinction between “natural” and “given” signs, as proposed by St Augustine at the beginning of book two of De doctrina christiana.54 Augustine argued that there was a categorical distinction between gestures that are involuntary expressions of emotion, such as the countenance of an angry or sorrowful man, and those deliberate bodily signs communicating perception or thought to others, which he termed “visible words” (verba visibilia).55 Both the smile and wringing of hands belong to the category of “natural” signs: they express (or at least purport to express) an inner emotional state, and thus cannot be abstracted from the person to whom they belong. It is these kinds of gestures that most concerned clerical writers in the Middle Ages, and which have occupied art historians interested in the expressivity of Gothic sculpture. Hand-joining is different: it is a deliberate act intended to communicate the will and emotions of the performer to others. This meant it could be represented independently from the body, a sign of the intention that it demonstrated. Moreover, as will be discussed in the following section, in the context of the wedding rite the joining of hands also became a sacramental gesture, reflecting and participating in the sacred conjoining of bride and groom. Hand-joining was thus effective as well as demonstrative; it did something, rather than solely communicating inner thoughts and ideas. Or, to put it in linguistic terms, it was the gestural equivalent of a performative utterance, the bodily counterpart of “I do”.56

A SACRAMENTAL SIGN As one of the seven sacraments of the Church, matrimony was understood to be a material action, instituted by God, through which men and women were granted unique access to divine grace. In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas proposed that all sacraments could be defined in terms of their “sensible sign”: a manifestation of sacred reality capable of being perceived by the senses. This commingling of divine truth and material acts meant that the significance of a sacrament always exceeded its ritual 53 Some of the most famous examples are reliquaries that take the shape of a hand, palm flat or fingers curled in benediction, amputated at the forearm. See Cynthia Hahn, “The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries”, Gesta 36, no. 1 (1997): 20–31. 54 Augustine, De doctrina christiana, II 1–7, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 56–61. See also the discussion in Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 1–2. 55 Augustine, De doctrina christiana, II 2–5, ed. and trans. Green, 56–59. 56 John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 5–6.

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elements; Aquinas often cites the Augustinian definition of a sign as “that which, over and above the form that it impresses on our senses, makes something else enter into our cognition”.57 Moreover, sacraments were causes as well as signs, meaning that they effected the divine action at the same time as declaring it.58 For the sacrament of matrimony, the words of consent exchanged between the couple were both the cause and the sensible sign of spousal union.59 In answer to the question of whether consent is the “efficient cause” of matrimony, Aquinas responds simply that “consent makes marriage” (consensus facit matrimonium), going on to explain: In every sacrament there is a spiritual operation by means of a material operation that signifies it; thus in baptism the inward spiritual cleansing is effected by bodily cleansing. Wherefore, since in matrimony there is a kind of spiritual joining together, in so far as matrimony is a sacrament, and a certain material joining together, in so far as it is directed to the office of nature and of civil life, it follows that the spiritual joining is the effect of divine power by means of the material joining. Therefore, since the joining together of material contracts are made through mutual consent, it follows that the joining together of marriage is made in the same way.60

Here Aquinas touches upon the distinctive – and problematic – status of marriage as a sacrament that is both human and divine, effecting a legal transfer of property as well as a spiritual change in its participants, a point to which we shall return later. He argues that in matrimony, just like in other forms of human relations, the essential element in making a contract between two parties is the mutual exchange of consent. The difference, according to Aquinas, in the sacrament of matrimony is that God works through these spoken vows to effect a spiritual as well as a material union. If spoken words made the marriage bond, gesture was the means by which this verbal exchange was represented and solemnised. From the end 57 Signum est enim res praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, II 1, ed. and trans. Green, 56–57. See also the discussion in Oliver-Thomas Venard, “Sacraments”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae, ed. Philip McCosker and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 270. 58 For a summary of the theology of the sacraments in Aquinas, see Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 325; Venard, “Sacraments”, 269–87. 59 Bedaux, “Reality of Symbols”, 27-28; Nichols, Seeable Signs, 280–81; Michael M. Sheehan, “Choice of Marriage Partner in the Middle Ages: Development and Mode of Application of a Theory of Marriage”, in Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children, ed. Carol Neel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 161–62, 172–73, 177–78. 60 For the Latin text, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplementum, qu. 45 art. 1, in Claude-Joseph Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 7 (Paris, 1882), 456.

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of the thirteenth century, the joining of hands is found in the rubrics of service books from England and France.61 These texts stipulate that the bride and groom join only their right hands, an insistence on the dexter which is also found on hand-joining monuments.62 According to the Sarum Manual for the wedding ceremony: He [the groom] should hold her [the bride’s] right hand in his right hand, and in this way should pledge faith to the woman through words in the present tense …63

This rite entwines gesture and speech: bride and groom are instructed to join right hands while declaring their consent, withdrawing their hands one at a time as they complete their vows.64 In theological terms, therefore, the joining of hands was a gestural indication of the oral exchange that signified and effected the sacramental bond between the couple. Such nuanced scholastic distinctions between cause and effect, sign and action, were unlikely to have been recognised by the lay witnesses, or even the bride and groom. For these men and women, the joining of hands and words of consent would have been experienced as one and the same ritual moment: the point at which bride and groom became husband and wife.65 Medieval artists also used the joining of hands as the visual sign for spoken vows.66 Images of the wedding ceremony are rare in northern Europe before 1200, but survive in increasing numbers from the late thirteenth century onwards.67 Although the earliest depictions are concentrated in compilations of canon law, the iconography soon spread to a wide range of media, including stained glass, wall paintings, textiles and monumental sculpture. 61 This observation is based on an analysis of wedding rites published in: Collins, Manuale, passim; William G. Henderson, ed., Manuale et Processionale ad usam insignis ecclesiae Eboracensis (Edinburgh, 1875); J. W. Legg, ed., The Sarum Missal, Edited from Three Early Manuscripts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916); Jean-Baptiste Molin and Protais Mutembe, eds, Le rituel du mariage en France du XIIe au XVIe siècle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974). 62 I have found only one exception to this pattern: a rite of Avignon, dating from 1363–68, in which the groom is instructed to hold the right hand of the bride with his left hand. Molin and Mutembe, Le rituel du mariage, 309, ordo XVI. 63 teneat eam per manum dexteram in manu sua dextera, et sic vir det fidem mulieri per verba de presenti …. Collins, Manuale, 47. 64 Collins, Manuale, 47–48. One of the most noticeable trends in English wedding rites of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the increasingly close connection between the ritual motion of the joining of hands and speaking of the words of consent. 65 As discussed below, lay witnesses to disputed marriages in late-medieval England often affirmed that they had observed the couple joining right hands and exchanging words of consent, implying that they understood this moment of the wedding rite to be critical in creating the contract between the couple. 66 Edwin Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck’s Double Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 40–41; Lucy Freeman Sandler, “The Handclasp of the Arnolfini Wedding: A Manuscript Precedent”, The Art Bulletin, 66, no. 3 (1984): 490–91. 67 See Hall, Arnolfini Betrothal, 37–44; Nichols, Seeable Signs, 51–63, 275–79; Philip Reynolds, “The Primordial Marriage and the Seventh Sacrament”, in Sacramentum Magnum: Proceedings of the IGM Conference in Prague, June 2012 (forthcoming), 36–38.

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By the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these images would have been familiar to a wide audience: numerous images of the marriage sacrament are found in parish churches, their position in the nave placing them in close proximity to the laymen and women who worshipped there.68 The standard iconography for matrimony comprises a priest in the centre, with the bride and groom joining right hands, and witnesses to either side; a handful of examples shift the perspective so that the couple stands to one side of the officiant.69 Although the Sarum rite stipulates that the joining of hands should take place “in front of the door of the church” (ante ostium ecclesiae), with the newlyweds later processing to the chancel for the nuptial mass, images of the sacrament tend to elide these two parts of the ceremony so as to show the bride and groom in front of an altar.70 For instance, an early fifteenth-century copy of Thomas Netter’s De Sacramentis contains a historiated initial forming the “C” of coniugium, a common term for matrimony in the Middle Ages, literally translated as “the joining together” (Fig. 81).71 Within the initial a couple stands either side of a canopied altar, the priest taking the woman’s hand in his and passing it across to the groom, who reaches across the altar with outstretched fingers.72 This interplay of word and image draws attention to the central act of the sacrament, the hands of the bride and groom caught in the split second before the first contact of skin on skin. A more direct – and bloody – connection between gesture and the sacramental character of marriage is pictured in images that combine the

81 “CONJUGIUM” FROM THOMAS NETTER’S DE SACRAMENTIS, ENGLAND (OXFORD OR LONDON), 1426—30. OXFORD, LINCOLN COLLEGE LIBRARY, MS LAT. 106, FOL. 279V.

Nichols, Seeable Signs, 51–63, 275–79. Surviving depictions of the sacrament of matrimony for a lay audience include: seven-sacrament fonts, popular in East Anglia during the fifteenth century; the nine surviving images of marriage in English stained glass at Buckland (Oxon.), Burrington (Somerset), Crudwell (Wilts), Doddiscombsleigh (Devon), Crewe (Cheshire), the Galilee Chapel in Durham Cathedral, Great Rollright (Oxon.), Leicester and Llandyrnog (Denbighshire, Wales); and the wall paintings in the parish churches of Kirton-in-Lindsey (Lincs.) and Catfield (Norfolk). 69 See, for instance, London, British Library, MS Royal 10 E IX, fol. 195. 70 This may indicate an outdoor ceremony, or one within the church porch. Collins, Manuale, 44. 71 Nichols, Seeable Signs, 274, 280–81. 72 Oxford, Lincoln College Library, MS lat. 106, fol. 279v. See Nichols, Seeable Signs, 23, 119, 172–73; Margaret Harvey, “The Diffusion of the Doctrinale of Thomas of Walden in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”, in Intellectual Life in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Margaret Gibson, ed. Lesley Smith and Benedicta Ward (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), 289. 68

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82  CRUCIFIXION AND THE SACRAMENTS FROM THE CARTHUSIAN MISCELLANY, NORTHERN ENGLAND, C. 1460—C. 1500. LONDON, BRITISH LIBRARY, MS ADDITIONAL 37049, FOL. 72V.

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Crucifixion with the seven sacraments.73 These scenes, popular in the fifteenth century, show streams of blood flowing from Christ’s crucified body to the surrounding sacraments, illustrating the Thomistic idea that the sacraments flowed from the side of Christ while He hung on the Cross, acting as conduits of God’s grace for mankind.74 In the Carthusian Miscellany, a collection of devotional texts and images most likely produced for a Carthusian community in northern England during the 1460s, the precious blood flows onto the foreheads of those receiving the sacraments of baptism, penance, holy orders and confirmation (Fig. 82).75 Matrimony, however, differs from the other scenes in that the blood flows onto the joined hands of the couple: the point at which flesh meets flesh.76 This highlights the distinctive nature of marriage as the only sacrament that effects a change in the relationship between two people, rather than between a single individual and God, embodied through His representatives in the Church. The transformative power of Christ’s Passion is signified by and acts through the union of bride and groom, an idea represented in the stream of blood flowing onto two joined hands. The artistic and ritual culture of marriage in late-medieval England linked the joining of hands to the exchange of vows. Together they formed the crucial sacramental moment of the wedding rite, the sign and instrument of the sacred bond that God was creating between the couple. For priests and parishioners, the image of a man and woman joining hands would have prompted recollection of the wedding rites they had officiated, participated in or witnessed. If the memory was hazy, they needed only to gaze upwards at stained glass windows of the sacraments, look across at a carving of matrimony on a seven-sacrament font, or glance down at the ring on their own hand. The marriage bond was, quite literally, made in a moment, but images gave permanence to this fleeting gesture, fixing the ritual in representation.

PRODUCTION AND PATRONAGE What can we say about the intentional structures guiding the production of hand-joining monuments? Like all gesture, the joining of hands is a performance, the particularities of its meaning communicated through the

Nichols, Seeable Signs, 9–18. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, part 3, qu. 62 art. 5, in Claude-Joseph Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 6 (Paris, 1882), 523–24. See also Nichols, Seeable Signs, 14–16. 75 London, British Library MS Additional 37049, fol. 72v. 76 Blood-soaked hands also feature on a fragment of stained glass in Buckland (Glos.), where a ruby-red stream terminates at the joined hands of bride and groom. See Nichols, Seeable Signs, 68, plate 9. 73

74

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speed, timing and nuances of motion.77 An inevitable shift occurs when gestural motion is translated into a static representation. Hand-joining memorials encapsulate the action of taking the hand of another (“joining hands”) in a single posture (“joined hands”). Unravelling the significance of these monumental gestures therefore involves an examination of the processes involved in their making. These encompass the material constraints and opportunities involved in chiselling, cutting and casting, as well as the respective agencies and priorities of patrons, designers and makers. It is only through paying attention to the craftedness of hand-joining memorials that we are able to avoid the temptation to overdetermine the gesture: that is, to attribute features to patronal choice that properly belong to artistic practices, or vice versa.78 Carving effigies with joined hands was far from straightforward. The earliest hand-joining memorials were brasses, incised slabs or low-relief carvings, predating the first high-relief monument by approximately eighty years.79 Whereas the depiction of joined hands in two dimensions necessitated no major changes to the process of production, carving the gesture in the round presented a number of problems. The extended arms will be weak and liable to breakages. This is demonstrated by the pattern of damage on surviving tombs: out of sixteen stone monuments, four have lost the joined hands of the effigies, broken off at the wrist or elbow.80 Even when they are intact, a number of monuments exhibit cracks across the right hands or forearms, indicating that they have been reattached at a later date.81 The methods of construction employed by medieval sculptors made the joining together of two effigies particularly difficult. Stone memorials were typically carved at the workshop – some based at quarries, and others located in urban centres – and then transported to the church for assembly.82 In the case of double tombs, each effigy would be carved from a 77 For the performance of gesture, see John Walter, “Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England”, Past and Present 203, no. 4 (2009): 98–99. 78 The masterful account of this problem is Michael Baxandall’s Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 79 See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. The earliest surviving hand-joining monuments are at Rein Abbey (Austria), incised slab c. 1293/94; Winterbourne Bassett (Wilts.), low-relief carving, c. 1310–c. 1330; Lwówek Śląski (Poland), semi-relief carving, c. 1340–c. 1350; Ingham 1 (Norfolk), brass, c. 1360–64. The first full-relief monument is Warwick 1, dating from c. 1370–c. 1375. 80 See Flamstead (Herts.), broken off at wrist of man and hand of woman; Hoveringham (Notts.), broken off at elbows; Ingham 2 (Norfolk), broken off at wrist of man and elbow of woman; Chichester (Sussex), broken off at wrist and replaced, possibly in the nineteenth century. The effigies at Ingham 2 have also lost their left arms; in all other cases, it is only the extended right arms that have broken off. 81 Cracks can be seen on the monuments at Lowick (Northants.), Macclesfield (Cheshire), Warwick 1 (Warwicks.) and Wimborne Minster (Dorset). 82 Sally Badham, “What Constituted a ‘Workshop’ and How Did Workshops Operate? Some Problems and Questions”, in Badham and Oosterwijk, Monumental Industry, 18–36; Nash, André Beauneveu, 52; Ramsay, “Alabaster”, 32; Saul, English Church Monuments, 63–71.

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83 MONUMENT TO THOMAS BEAUCHAMP, EARL OF WARWICK AND KATHERINE MORTIMER, C. 1369— C. 1380. CHURCH OF ST MARY, WARWICK (WARWICKSHIRE, ENGLAND).

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separate block of stone. Effigy blocks in alabaster could weigh up to 9 hundredweight, approximately 400 kilograms.83 The weight of the stone figures would have made two joined effigies extremely difficult to manoeuvre, as well as increasing the risk of damage during assembly. Different sculptors adopted a variety of solutions to these challenges. For instance, the alabaster monument to Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1369) and his wife Katherine Mortimer (d. 1369), probably the earliest surviving memorial to depict the hand-joining gesture in the round, has each figure sculpted from a separate alabaster slab. The joined hands were carved as part of Katherine’s effigy and then attached to Thomas’s outstretched wrist using an embedded iron rod when the two figures were placed together on the tomb chest (Fig. 83).84 The sculptor’s rendering of this gesture was extremely skilful: the connection between the two effigies is hidden under the cuff of Thomas’s sleeve; the joined hands are heavily undercut, disguising the fact that they are carved from the same block of alabaster; and a small stone strut is placed underneath to support the hands’ combined weight. Prentys and Sutton employed a similar method of construction for the monument to Katherine Clifton and Ralph Green at Lowick, albeit placing the join across Ralph’s palm, rather than at his wrist (Fig. 72). This technique was also used for the alabaster memorial at Astonon-Trent in Derbyshire, almost certainly another product of the Prentys and Sutton workshop.85 Like the Lowick memorial, the hands are carved as part of the female effigy and joined to the male effigy at the lower cuff of his left sleeve, but in this case the wide sleeves of the male effigy act as support for the joined hands, meaning that there is no need for a separate strut. In contrast, the late fifteenth-century effigies at Macclesfield, Cheshire comprise three parts: husband and wife were each carved from a separate piece of stone, while their right hands and forearms form a third piece, attached just above the elbow on the female effigy and in the middle of the forearm on the male effigy (Fig. 84). Since the entire section of projecting limbs is a separate piece, there was no need for a strut to support the weight of the joined hands. This also gave the sculptor more freedom in representing the gesture. Rather than depict the man’s hand facing palm upwards and the woman’s palm down (as found on the majority of carved hand-joining tombs), the sculptor at Macclesfield rotated the hands at the wrist in order

83 These weights are taken from records of the conservation of the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century alabaster monuments at Harewood, Yorkshire. Pauline Routh and Richard Knowles, The Medieval Monuments of Harewood (Wakefield: Wakefield Historical Publications, 1983), 62. 84 Iron rods were commonly used to attach different pieces of stone sculpture, as indicated by the Paris guild regulations of 1269 and 1391. See Routh and Knowles, Harewood, 62; Nash, André Beauneveu, 51–52. 85 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 223; Gardner, Alabaster Tombs, 89; Saul, English Church Monuments, 280. The monument at Aston-on-Trent is discussed in more detail below.

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84  MONUMENT TO SIR JOHN SAVAGE IV AND KATHERINE STANLEY, C. 1470—85. CHURCH OF ST MICHAEL, MACCLESFIELD (CHESHIRE, ENGLAND).

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to show both effigies with palms facing towards one another, resulting in a gesture more akin to a modern handshake. Here we reach the issue of how far it is possible to read symbolic or emotional allusions into the nuances in the way the gesture is represented. Peter Coss has proposed that variations in the way in which the right hands of the effigies are joined might have represented different conceptions of gender roles within the marital relationship. He draws attention to the differences between brasses in which “male dominance is lost altogether”, such as the memorial in Herne (Kent), which depicts the effigies with hands pressed against one another and fingers splayed, compared to examples of “deep hand holding”, where the woman is not entirely passive, such as the Freville brasses in Little Shelford (Cambs.), and finally those memorials, such as the brass at South Acre (Norfolk), where the woman passively rests her hand in his (compare, for instance, Figs 86 and 89).86 Coss suggests that these disparities could reflect patronal preferences (and therefore, implicitly, their ideas about spousal relationships), arguing that the mutuality of the hand-joining pose on some brasses reveals “that possibilities other than male dominance in marriage were conceivable”.87 It is notable, however, that each of the variant gestures cited by Coss was the product of a different workshop. The Herne brass was produced by a workshop termed London series D (fl. c. 1409–c. 1485),88 the brasses at Little Shelford were made by its predecessor, London series A (fl. mid1330s–c. 1409),89 whereas the memorial at South Acre was made by a different workshop, known as London series B (fl. c. 1360–c. 1465).90 In fact, when all the hand-joining brasses are considered together, it is clear that each workshop consistently followed a different model: series A brasses depict the man curling his fingers around the woman’s hand, those from series B show the woman placing her hand into the man’s open palm, and those from series D show the effigies with splayed fingers. Monumental tombs never recreate the mutuality of gesture found on series D brasses, a decision that was doubtless determined by the material properties of stone (the vulnerability of extended fingers and need to position one hand underneath to support the other), rather than the particular misogyny of their patrons. In late-medieval England the vast majority of memorials were made to a standard design, adjusted for the patron’s budget and requirements.91 Like Coss, The Lady, 97–105. Coss, The Lady, 101. 88 For the identifying characteristics of “series D”, see Emmerson, “Monumental Brasses”, 52–58; Saul, English Church Monuments, 78–80. 89 Sally Badham, “Monumental Brasses and the Black Death: A Reappraisal”, The Antiquaries Journal 80, no. 1 (2000): 207–47; Saul, English Church Monuments, 78. 90 Badham, “Monumental Brasses and the Black Death”, 223–33; Saul, English Church Monuments, 305. 91 Nigel Saul, “Patronage and Design in the Construction of English Medieval Tomb Monuments”, in Paul Binski and Elizabeth A. New (eds.), Patrons and Professionals in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2011 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2012), 319. See 86 87

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the physiognomy of the effigies or the form of their costumes, the design of the joined hands followed a workshop pattern. Perhaps certain patrons chose a particular workshop because they found its template more appealing, but in usual circumstances they would not actively direct the appearance of the gesture. What did belong to patronal agency was the decision to include the gesture in the first place. There are two surviving contracts for hand-joining effigies. One (as we have seen) was agreed on 14 February 1419 between Katherine Clifton and two Derbyshire alabaster sculptors, while the other was taken out on 24 April 1395 between Richard II and the coppersmiths Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest. Both patrons request that the effigies be depicted joining hands. Richard II instructs that the two effigies should be depicted “joining and enclosing together their right hands” (aionauntz & cloisauntz ensemble lour meyns dextres), while Katherine merely states that the effigies “hold” (tenant) one another by the hand.92 While the choice of the verb cloisauntz (enclosing) in Richard II’s contract could be read as stipulating a particular manner of hand-holding, it is more likely that the expressive language used in this contract reflects its status as a bespoke, royal commission. Conversely, the more prosaic tenant used in Katherine’s contract accords with its character as a standard document compiled from a series of stock clauses.93 Neither contract represents the full extent of patronal involvement in the design of their monument: both refer to additional documents, and Richard II’s contract also describes how the coppersmiths had been shown un patron, a pattern or drawing, to which they had affixed their seals.94 Such tantalising references draw attention to how little of the interactions between patron and artist can be recovered, even in these rare cases where written documents have survived. Yet they also underscore the significance of listing the gesture in the indenture itself – a legal document setting out the features of the memorial that had to be included in order for the artists to receive their pay – rather than relegating it to additional documents, drawings or oral discussions. Indentures for funerary monuments typically include stipulations regarding materials, dimensions and markers of identity such as heraldic insignia; the physiognomy and pose of also Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 187–236; and T. A. Heslop, “The Alabaster Tomb at Ashwellthorpe”, 333–46. 92 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 201, 217. Cloisauntz is from the verb clore (to close), while aionauntz is probably derived from aonier (to unite, flatten, straighten). Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, s.v. “clore”, “aonier” (http://www.cnrtl.fr/ definition/dmf). 93 Compare the language used in this document with that in the contract for two effigies at Bisham Priory, agreed with Prentys and Sutton on 15 July 1419. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 217, 224–25. 94 Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 201. For these patrons see Philip Lindley, Gothic to Renaissance: Essays on Sculpture in England (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1995), 51–53, 63; Saul, “Patronage and Design”, 321–22.

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the effigies is omitted, and costume is not described beyond the instruction that it should befit the deceased’s status. It is all the more striking, therefore, that the joined hands of the effigies are the third attribute to be mentioned in Richard II’s long contract, preceded only by the orders that the figures be made of “gilt copper and latten” (coper & laton endorrez) and shown “crowned” (coronez).95 As well as revealing the importance of the gesture, the contracts of Katherine Clifton and Richard II imply the nature of its perceived significance to these patrons, with hand-joining listed among markers of material wealth, noble status and familial identity. Although these are the only two documented examples, they speak to a wider pattern of close patronal involvement in the commissioning of hand-joining memorials, particularly (as one might expect) in the case of the most innovative and ambitious monuments. As we saw in chapter two, the decision to include the hand-joining gesture – unprecedented in Portugal – on the tomb of João I and Philippa of Lancaster was almost certainly directed by the queen, who would have seen the hand-joining monument to her parents, John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, in St Paul’s Cathedral at some point during the six years between its completion and her departure for Portugal.96 Gaunt’s monument, as discussed in chapter one, was among the earliest to depict the hand-joining gesture and had been commissioned by the duke some twenty-five years before his death; his close interest in its making is revealed in a series of payments between 1374 and 1380 from his own registers.97 Such a direct connection between these two hand-joining memorials, one in England and one in Portugal, points to the importance of patronal networks in the dissemination of tomb designs. As Nigel Saul has pointed out, patrons of funerary memorials tended to be instinctively conservative, following the example of friends and relatives in the choice of workshop, material and design for their monument. He called attention to a number of instances in which testators ask for their memorial to be based upon an existing one, a practice that led to the proliferation of “copycat” memorials in large institutions such as Hereford Cathedral.98 This principle also applies to hand-joining monuments: once one memorial had been erected, Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 200. Although the tomb itself was destroyed in the Great Fire of London, a description by Thomas Hawley, Carlisle Herald, written in 1530, reveals that the alabaster effigies of the duke and duchess were represented “holdyng hys hand in here hand”. Anthony R. Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages: An Inquiry into the Growth of the Armorial Function of Heralds (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 140. See also Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 16. 97 Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 9–10. For more on Gaunt’s commissioning of this tomb, see Barker, “Stone and Bone”, 121–24. 98 Saul, English Church Monuments, 102–04, 186. For more examples of patronal networks influencing the design of funerary monuments, see Ann Adams, “Revealed/Concealed: Monumental Brasses on Tomb Chests. The Examples of John I, Duke of Cleves, and Catherine of Bourbon”, in Barker and Adams, Revisiting the Monument, 163–65; Susie Nash, André Beauneveu, 62. 95

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other patrons in the local area were more likely to request the gesture for their own tomb. There were three memorials depicting the couple holding hands in the church of St Mary, Warwick, while the church of all Saints in Little Shelford, the church of St Mary on the Hill in Chester, the Trinitarian priory in Ingham and the Dominican convent at Batalha each housed two hand-joining monuments. In other cases we find a cluster of hand-joining memorials situated in churches only a few miles from one another: for instance, the monuments at Great Berkhamsted and Flamstead are only eight miles apart, around the same distance that separates the brasses at Chrishall and Little Shelford.99 As one would expect, the location of memorials often overlaps with social connections.100 An intricate web of familial and marital ties connects a cluster of previously unpublished hand-joining memorials in Cheshire, all dating from the second quarter of the fifteenth century. A manuscript from the collection of the herald Randle Holme records a pair of double tombs that once stood in the church of St Mary on the Hill, Chester.101 Both were located in a chapel to the south of the chancel, commissioned in 1433 by William Troutbeck I (d. 1444), and in 1441 designated as the site of a chantry to pray for the souls of himself and his wife, Joan Rixton.102 Although by Randle’s time the memorial to the couple had been badly damaged by the collapse of the roof, the herald transcribes an earlier description of the monument, which notes that William was depicted “holding one gauntlet in his … hand and his wife’s hand in the other”.103 The other tomb, which seems to have been largely intact, was situated on the south wall of the 99 Other examples of hand- joining monuments in close proximity are: Winterbourne Basset and Draycot Cerne (12 miles); Strelley, Hoveringham and Aston-on-Trent (both within a 15-mile radius of Strelley). 100 There are four examples in which multiple generations of the same family are commemorated by hand-joining monuments: Robert de Freville (d. 1393) with his wife Clarice (d. 1399), and their son Thomas de Freville (d. 1405) with his wife Margaret (d. 1410); John of Gaunt (d. 1399) with Blanche of Lancaster (d. 1368), his daughter Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415) with João I of Portugal (d. 1433), and their son Duarte I (d. 1438) with Leonor of Aragón; Robert Hugford (d. 1410) and his wife Joyce (d. 1414), and their son Thomas Hugford (d. 1469) with his wife Margaret; two Troutbeck tombs, probably William Troutbeck I (d. 1444) with his wife Joan Rixton, and their grandson William Troutbeck II (d. 1458) with his wife Margaret Stanley (d. 1482). I have only included direct familial ties; there are other cases where hand-joining memorials commemorate cousins or families closely linked through marriage. 101 The manuscript was compiled around the middle of the seventeenth century from notes taken in 1578 supplemented with new observations. “Randle Holme’s Antiquarian Notes”, British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16. See also J. P. Earwalker, The History of the Church and Parish of St Mary on the Hill, Chester (London, 1898), 34–37. 102 John Brownbill, “The Troutbeck Family”, Journal of the Chester and North Wales Architectural, Archaeological and Historic Society n. s., 28, no. 2 (1929): 155–56. For the rise of the Troutbeck family in fifteenth-century Cheshire see also Dorothy J. Clayton, The Administration of the County Palatine of Chester, 1442–1485 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 163–65; J. T. Driver, Cheshire in the Later Middle Ages, 1390–1540 (Chester: Cheshire Community Council, 1971), passim. 103 British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16v. See also Earwalker, Church and Parish of St Mary on the Hill, 36.

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85  MONUMENT TO SIR JOHN BOTELER AND MARGARET STANLEY, 1459/60—C. 1463. CHURCH OF ST ELPHIN, WARRINGTON (CHESHIRE, ENGLAND).

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chapel beneath the easternmost windows and showed William’s grandson, Sir William Troutbeck II (d. 1459) alongside his wife, Margaret Stanley (d. 1481), sister of the formidable Thomas Stanley, first earl of Derby (d. 1504).104 Again, the herald records that, “he is holding of his wife by the hand”.105 After William Troutbeck II was slain at the battle of Blore Heath, Margaret Stanley married Sir John Boteler (d. 1462/63), a union that required papal dispensation as the couple were related in the first and third degrees.106 Sir John Boteler is commemorated with an alabaster memorial still surviving at the church of St Elphin in Warrington, which again shows the male effigy holding the hand of his wife (Fig. 85). On the tomb chest saints alternate with heraldic shields, an unusual design that also featured on the tomb of William Troutbeck II.107 Among these shields were the arms of Troutbeck and Troutbeck impaling Boteler, commemorating the marriages of Boteler’s eldest son and both his daughters to the children of Margaret and William Troutbeck.108 The female effigy has a lamb pendent on her livery collar and rests her feet on a lamb: one of the heraldic badges of the Stanley family, the same beast that Randle records at the feet of Margaret Stanley’s effigy at St Mary’s Chester.109 This reveals – remarkably – that the female effigy at Warrington must also represent Margaret Stanley, meaning that she was commemorated on two hand-joining memorials, one at Chester and one at Warrington, each showing her alongside a different husband. We have already encountered the multiplication of monuments with the two tombs of Katherine Clifton; this example is even more striking as Margaret’s two memorials each displayed a sign of supposedly exclusive spousal fidelity. The final monument in this cluster is the tomb of Margaret’s sister, Katherine Stanley (d. 1491), who is commemorated by a hand-joining monument with Sir John Savage IV (d. 1495) in the nearby town of Macclesfield (Fig. 84).110 There are two distinctive features of the Cheshire network. Firstly, these monuments were made decades after the main cluster of hand-joining memorials, and secondly, the spread of the gesture seems to

104 British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16r. See also Earwalker, Church and Parish of St Mary on the Hill, 37. 105 British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16r. 106 Brownbill, “Troutbeck Family”, 167. 107 “Between every escutcheon is a saint carved, very curiously wrought.” British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16v. See also Earwalker, Church and Parish of St Mary on the Hill, 37; Driver, Cheshire in the Later Middle Ages, 122. 108 “Miscellaneous Antiquarian Notes”, British Library Harley MS 2129, fol. 185; William Beaumont and J. Paul Rylands, An Attempt to Identify the Arms Formerly Existing in the Parish Church and Austin Friary at Warrington (Warrington, 1878), 5. 109 British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16r; Siddons, Heraldic Badges, part 2, vol. 2, 277. 110 Stephen R. Glynne, Notes on the Churches of Cheshire, ed. J. A. Atkinson, Remains Historical and Literary Connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester 32 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1894), 90. For the political career of Sir John Savage, see Clayton, Administration of Cheshire, 179–81.

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have been directed primarily by connections among female patrons.111 The initial impetus for the hand-joining gesture on the memorial of William Troutbeck II and Margaret Stanley may have come from William’s grandfather, but it was Margaret who then took this gesture to the memorial with her second husband, and Margaret’s sister, Katherine who seems to have brought it to her own tomb. Such agency in directing the design of their husbands’ memorials is a reflection of the growing importance of the Stanley family in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, when Katherine and Margaret’s brother, Thomas Stanley, earl of Derby (d. 1504), occupied a central position in the Yorkist then Tudor court.112 Typical of the Stanley family, such ties cut across the factional allegiances of the Wars of the Roses. William Troutbeck II was killed fighting for the Lancastrians at the battle of Blore Heath and wears a collar of SS, whereas Sir John Savage displays his Yorkist affinity with a collar of suns and roses.113 Yet both effigies are also shown joining hands with their wife, expressing their spousal connection to the Stanley sisters. For this cluster of memorials, the hand-joining gesture not only bound together the couples commemorated, it also signified the marital connections between three prominent Cheshire families.114 Hand-joining spread vertically as well as horizontally, travelling down ties of lordship and service. Robert Hatfield (d. 1417), controller of John of Gaunt’s household and one of the principal agents in establishing the duke’s chantry at St Paul’s Cathedral, is depicted joining hands with his wife Ade (d. 1409) on a modest brass in Owston (Yorkshire, West Riding).115 Moreover, an alabaster memorial at Aston-on-Trent, depicting a man in a distinctive brimmed hat and high-collared robe with wide sleeves, almost certainly represents Thomas Tickhill (d. before 1431), an attorney and administrative official for the duchy of Lancaster.116 Although Tickhill acquired a landed estate near Aston-on-Trent, much of his legal career was based in London; it is possible that Gaunt’s hand-joining memorial at Old St Paul’s also provided the impetus for the inclusion of 111 Although less closely related, another memorial might be added to the cluster: the brass of Sir Robert del Bothe (d. 1460) and his wife Douce Venables (d. 1458) at the church of St Bartholomew in Wilmslow. Sir Hugh Venables (d. 1459) was married to Elizabeth Troutbeck, sister of William Troutbeck II. See Brownbill, “Troutbeck Family”, 164; Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Cheshire, 186. 112 Driver, Cheshire in the Later Middle Ages, 19–20. For more on the politics of the Cheshire gentry during the Wars of the Roses, see Clayton, Administration of Cheshire, passim; Malcolm Mercer, The Medieval Gentry: Power, Leadership and Choice during the Wars of the Roses (London: Continuum, 2010). 113 Driver, Cheshire in the Later Middle Ages, 20, 122. 114 At the Battle of Bosworth Field (22 August 1485), Sir John Savage and William Troutbeck III (the son of Margaret Stanley) both followed Thomas, Lord Stanley and Sir William Stanley in lending support to Henry VII. See Clayton, Administration of Cheshire, 115. 115 David Griffith, “A Living Language of the Dead? French Commemorative Inscriptions in Late Medieval England”, The Mediæval Journal 3, no. 2 (2013): 81–84; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 25, 27. 116 Saul, English Church Monuments, 280.

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the gesture on his own tomb.117 The magnificent alabaster memorial to Thomas Beauchamp, eleventh earl of Warwick, and Katherine Mortimer in the collegiate church of St Mary, Warwick, also acted as a model for those of lesser rank. In the sixteenth century, the antiquary William Dugdale recorded the hand-joining brasses to the Warwick retainers Robert Hugford (d. 1411) and Thomas Hugford (d. 1469), situated in the south transept and south aisle of St Mary’s respectively.118 Robert Hugford’s monument proclaimed his ties to the earls of Warwick through the muzzled bear (the badge of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick) beneath the male effigy’s feet, and an inscription that made reference to “the most honoured lord, the earl of Warwick”.119 Ties of service may also explain the appearance of the gesture on the monument to a serjeant-at-law at Flamstead, Hertfordshire, which Saul has linked to Thomas Frisby (d. c. 1408), another retainer of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick.120 For these administrators and lawyers, the adoption of the hand-joining motif may have been another means of signalling their affiliation to the noble family to whom they owed their status. While the appearance of the joined hands was determined by workshop patterns and (in the case of monumental tombs) the practicalities of joining together and supporting the hands of the two effigies, the decision to incorporate the gesture itself was a matter of patronal choice, a feature deemed significant enough to be written into the two surviving indentures for hand-joining monuments. Like other aspects of memorial design, the gesture spread through political, familial, social and geographic networks. Even with imperfect survivals and patchy documentary evidence, it is possible to identify distinct constellations among hand-joining tombs. These clusters represent more than a means of dissemination; they suggest that the gesture acquired additional layers of meaning across time and within different social groups. For the gentry families of Cheshire during the turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses, the hand-joining motif became 117 The tomb was almost certainly made by the Chellaston alabaster sculptors Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, against the former of whom Tickhill brought a series of debt suits. Maureen Jurkowski, “Lancastrian Royal Service, Lollardy and Forgery: The Career of Thomas Tykhill”, in Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Rowena Archer (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), 33–38. 118 Griffith and Woodger both claim the Hugford brass was located at Emscote parish church, a misreading of Dugdale’s account, which clearly places them “in the south part of the collegiate church”. William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire (London, 1656), 186–89. See also Griffith, “A Living Language of the Dead?”, 85–86, 133; L. S. Woodger, “Hugford, Robert (d. 1411), of Emscote, Warws.”, in History of Parliament Online (https:// www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1386-1421/member/hugford-robert-1411). 119 treshon(ur)e seign(ur) le counte de warewik. See Griffith, “Living Language of the Dead”, 85. 120 Nigel Saul, “The Early Fifteenth-Century Monument of a Serjeant-at-Law in Flamstead Church (Hertfordshire)”, Church Monuments 27 (2012): 7–21. See also Saul, “The Sculptor of the Monument of a Serjeant-at-Law at Flamstead (Hertfordshire): A Sequel”, Church Monuments 29 (2014): 7–21.

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another means to advertise their alliances. For retainers and administrators, it demonstrated familiarity with their lord’s memorial and alignment with their commemorative tastes. Compared to inscriptions or heraldic insignia, gestural imitation was an indirect way of advertising these ties, but its obliqueness may have been part of its attraction: in order to understand the connection, one needed knowledge of the tombs to which it referred. Hand-joining tombs were more, however, than a means of displaying the status and connections that the deceased had enjoyed during their lifetimes. As we will see, these memorials could also play a far more active role in the pursuit of power, asserting the legal rights of the surviving spouse and their descendants. Indeed, it is striking that the gesture of joined hands was often used on tombs commemorating men or women whose position depended to an unusual extent on lands, money and privileges they had acquired through marriage, acquisitions that were in some cases contested by other claimants. In this sense, the gesture was closer to a modern handshake than the clasped hands of two lovers, a means of displaying and validating a legal contract between two parties.

THE LEGAL DIMENSION In his study of the gestural culture of France in the Middle Ages, JeanClaude Schmitt points to the importance of gesture in transmitting political, religious and economic power.121 Gesture was vital to medieval law for pragmatic reasons (it effected a transaction without the need for a written charter), as well as for symbolic ones (it made the transaction manifest to the assembled witnesses).122 According to Schmitt, by making legal actions public and visible, gesture transformed the bodies of the participants into “evidence” for the transaction they had performed.123 In this sense, Schmitt brings the gestural theories of Hugh of Saint Victor out of the monastery and into the courtroom: Hugh characterised gesture as the means of transforming the body into a “figure” of the inner movements of the soul, while for Schmitt “gesture gave legal actions a living image”.124 Hand-joining functioned in precisely this way: it both displayed and enacted the joining together of marriage, which was a legal as well as sacramental contract. This was particularly pertinent in cases of disputed marriage, where one party claimed to be married, while the other argued their relationship had operated on a more casual basis. When these cases were brought before ecclesiastical courts, witnesses in support of the Schmitt, La raison des gestes, passim. Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 14–16; Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures”, 60. 123 Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures”, 60. 124 Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures”, 60. See also Burrow, Gestures and Looks, 11–39; Cynthia Neville, Land, Law and People in Medieval Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 27–31. 121

122

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alleged marriage often affirmed that they had observed the couple joining right hands and exchanging words of consent.125 For instance, in May 1469 John Bramanger, a draper and citizen of London, testified to the validity of the marriage between John Randolf and Lucy Braggis, reporting that he had witnessed John Randolf taking Lucy by the hand and saying to her, “I John take you Lucy to be my wife, and thereto I give you my faith,” and afterwards released her hand. Lucy then took John by the hand and, after she repeated the same vow, the couple kissed.126 Testimonies in support of the union between John Arnold and Mariana Fildors, another clandestine marriage, likewise vouched that the couple had exchanged vows while John held Mariana’s hand in his.127 For these deponents and the courts that heard their testimony, the critical evidence for the legal validity of a marriage was the sacramental wedding vows and the gesture that accompanied them. Tomb monuments could also act as witnesses in legal disputes.128 Julian Luxford has drawn attention to the records of three cases from the Court of Chivalry (Scrope v. Grosvenor, 1385–90; Lovell v. Morley, 1386–91; Grey v. Hastings, 1407–17), in which litigants and deponents regularly cite tombs as evidence for the right of an individual to bear a particular coat of arms.129 One of these litigants was John, Lord Lovell (d. 1408), who brought a case against Thomas, Lord Morley in 1386 over the right to bear the arms of Burnell. The testimonies in support of Lovell include a detailed description of the tomb of Philip Burnell at the church of the Austin Friars in Oxford, which featured a recumbent knightly effigy wearing a hauberk painted with the contested arms.130 While deponents cited many different categories of objects as evidence, often the first question asked of ecclesiastical witnesses was whether an ancestor of either litigant was buried in their religious house and, if so, where and how they were interred.131 This line of questioning implies that tombs were understood to possess particular value as legal evidence. One way of explaining this would be in terms of the direct, 125 Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 28; Nichols, Seeable Signs, 281–82. For further examples, see Barbara Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law and Economy in Late-Medieval London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 80; Frederik Pedersen, Marriage Disputes in Medieval England (London: Hambledon Press, 2000), 75. 126 London Metropolitan Archives DL/C/205, fols 241r–241v. Quoted in McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture, 27–28. 127 Guildhall Library (London Metropolitan Archives) London Commissary Court Act Books MS 9064/1, fol. 137. Quoted in Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives, 80. 128 For a discussion of the possible function of funerary monuments as legal evidence, see Julian Luxford, “Tombs as Forensic Evidence in Medieval England”, Church Monuments 24 (2009): 7–25. 129 Luxford, “Tombs as Forensic Evidence”, 13–17; Luxford, “Art, Objects and Ideas in the Records of the Medieval Courts of Chivalry”, in Courts of Chivalry and Admiralty in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Anthony Musson and Nigel Ramsay (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018). See also Maurice Keen, Origins of the English Gentleman: Heraldry, Chivalry and Gentility in Medieval England, c. 1300–c. 1500 (Stroud: Tempus, 2002), 25–70. 130 Luxford, “Art, Objects and Ideas”, 60–62. 131 Luxford, “Tombs as Forensic Evidence”, 15.

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86 BRASS MEMORIAL TO SIR JOHN HARSICK AND KATHERINE CALTHORPE, C. 1384. CHURCH OF ST GEORGE, SOUTH ACRE (NORFOLK, ENGLAND).

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corporeal and sustained connection between a funerary monument and a particular individual, an intimate entanglement between object and identity that made memorials broadly analogous to legal devices such as seals. However, as Luxford argues, the forensic utility of memorials is more likely to have been due to the fact that they were perceived to be “situationally reliable”; in other words, there was a relatively stable association between the tomb – with its attendant heraldry – and a particular context, both spatial and temporal.132 Tombs were thus a means of establishing historical co-ordinates, connecting certain individuals to a specific place at a particular moment. Aside from the Court of Chivalry records, there is little evidence of funerary monuments actually being cited in legal disputes. However, as Luxford points out, the idea that medieval patrons believed their memorials might possess a legal function is more important than whether they were actually used in this way.133 It is notable that the design of tomb monuments – in particular their treatment of heraldry – echoes that of other legal objects. On a brass at the church of St George, South Acre (Norfolk), the effigy of Sir John Harsick (d. 1384) bears the heraldic arms of Harsick on his coat armour, while the gown worn by his wife, Katherine, is emblazoned with the arms of Calthorpe (her paternal family) impaling Harsick (Fig. 86).134 Katherine’s right hand is brought across the Calthorpe half of her dress into the Harsick half in order to meet the right hand of her husband. According to heraldic convention, the arms of the husband’s family should impale those of his wife; reversing these rules for the blazon on Elizabeth’s gown allows the two effigies to be read as a single heraldic shield, with the couple’s joined hands uniting the two halves of the escutcheon. 132 133 134

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Luxford, “Art, Objects and Ideas”, 70. Luxford, “Tombs as Forensic Evidence”, 20–21. Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry, 251, no. 141.

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87 MARRIAGE CONTRACT BETWEEN JEAN DE BERRY AND JEANNE DE BOULOGNE, 5 JUNE 1389. PARIS, ARCHIVES NATIONALES, AE II 411.

In its alignment of the act of joining hands with the impaling of two blazons, the South Acre brass echoes the design of seals and charters. For instance, on a charter contracting the marriage between Jean, duke of Berry (d. 1416) and Jeanne, countess of Auvergne (d. c. 1424), dated on 5 June 1389, the two vertical lines of the initial “A” are formed from the bodies of the bride and groom, while the horizontal line is made with their joined right hands (Fig. 87).135 Flanking the gesture are two escutcheons: the arms of Berry above, and the arms of Berry impaling those of Auvergne below, the division between the two halves of the impaled shield aligned precisely with the overlapping fingers of Jean and Jeanne. Likewise, a seal belonging to Maud Holland (d. 1428), wife of John, Lord Lovell (whom we encountered as one of the litigants at the Court of Chivalry) depicts a shield hanging from a tree with the impaled arms of Lovell and Holland, flanked by two pairs of disembodied joined hands (Fig. 88).136 These objects blur the distinction between gesture and heraldry, body and symbol, so that the joining of hands is symbolised in the impaled shield, while the impaled shield is enacted through the joining of hands. Heraldry and gesture are revealed 135 Paris, Archives nationales, AE II 411. See Ghislain Brunel, Images du pouvoir royal: Les chartes decorées des archives nationales, XIIIe–XV siècle (Paris: Centre historique des Archives nationales, 2006), 236, fig. 1. 136 The seal survives in three impressions: London, National Archives, DL 27/297 (1408–09); DL 27/153 (1412); E 42/278 (1414–15). See also Roger Ellis, Catalogue of Seals in the Public Record Office: Personal Seals, vol. 1 (London: HMSO, 1978), no. P494.

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88  SEAL OF MAUD HOLLAND AFFIXED TO A GRANT TO PETER KYNKENHALL, 1408—09. LONDON, THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES DL 27/297.

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as complementary signs, each of which enhances the authority of the other. Just as seals and contracts provided public evidence of a marital alliance, so the combination of joined hands and impaled arms at South Acre declared the enduring legitimacy of the couple’s union. A significant proportion of hand-joining monuments commemorate heiresses, whose marriages involved the transfer of money, lands and titles to a new family.137 A study by Simon Payling points to the growing importance of heiresses in the transmission of property in England in the wake of the Black Death, with the proportion of inheritances passing to or through daughters rising from less than 20 per cent in the first half of the fourteenth century to over 30 per cent in the second half.138 As we noted earlier, the perceived legal utility of funerary monuments was tied to their close and enduring relationship to a particular spatial context. In the case of hand-joining memorials, this sometimes involved situating the tomb in a church that was itself located on or adjacent to lands that had been acquired by the husband through his marriage. For instance, a brass memorial in Herne (Kent) commemorating Elizabeth Waleys, an heiress, and her husband, Peter Halle, features an inscription at the feet of the effigies which focuses almost exclusively on Elizabeth: Here lies Peter Halle, knight, and Elizabeth his wife, daughter of Sir William Waleys, knight, and Dame Margaret, his wife [and] daughter of Sir John Seynclere, knight …139 137 Hand-joining memorials to heiresses include: Joan Rixton and William Troutbeck I at the church of St Mary on the Hill, Chester (Cheshire); Joan de Cobham and Sir John de la Pole at the church of the Holy Trinity, Chrishall (Essex); Margaret Incent and Richard ­Torryngton at the church of St Peter, Great Berkhamsted (Herts.); Elizabeth Waleys and Peter Halle at the church of St Martin, Herne (Kent); Joan de Ingham and Sir Miles de Stapleton at the Trinitarian priory at Ingham (Norfolk); Margaret Honing and Sir Roger de Boys, also at Ingham; Blanche of Lancaster and John of Gaunt at St Paul’s Cathedral (London); Elizabeth Abbot and Sir Walter Mauntell at the church of SS Peter and Paul, Nether Heyford (Northants.); Katherine Calthorpe and Sir John Harsick at the church of St George, South Acre (Norfolk); and Douce Venables and Sir Robert del Bothe at the church of St Bartholomew, Wilmslow (Cheshire). 138 Simon Payling, “The Economics of Marriage in Late Medieval England: The Marriage of Heiresses”, The Economic History Review n. s., 54, no. 3 (2001): 414. 139 Hic iacet Petrus Halle Armig’ et Elizabeth uxor eius filia dni Willi Waleys militis & dne Margarete uxis ei’ filie dni Johis Seynclere militis. J. R. Buchanan, Memorials of Herne, Kent, 3rd edn (London, 1887), 35–37.

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Elizabeth’s lineage, paternal and maternal, is also proclaimed in a large escutcheon, displaying the arms of Halle impaling the arms of Waleys and Seynclere quartered (Fig. 89).140 Peter had acquired the manor of Hawe (or Haghe), part of the lands that formed the parish of Herne, through his marriage to Elizabeth.141 The Waleys lands had been the subject of much quarrelling and litigation: there was a bitter dispute between Elizabeth’s father, Sir William Waleys, and eldest brother, John, between 1402 and 1406, the eventual settlement of which included an instruction for John to pay 40 marks towards Elizabeth’s marriage.142 Further disputes broke out in 1418 following the death of all surviving male heirs and the subsequent division of the Waleys estates between Elizabeth’s four nieces and their nearest male relations.143 With its emphasis on Peter and Elizabeth’s marriage and Elizabeth’s Waleys descent, the brass at Herne acted as a monument to Peter’s claim on the manor of Hawe, placed within a church situated in close proximity to lands he had acquired through his bride. Similar motivations may have lain behind the commissioning of the memorial to Sir Robert del Bothe (d. 1460) and his wife Douce Venables (d. 1458) in the church of St Bartholomew, Wilmslow (Cheshire), mentioned in chapter one.144 As co-heiress to her father’s estates, Douce brought Robert extensive holdings in Bollin, Bowdon and Thornton, facilitating his eleva-

89 BRASS MEMORIAL TO PETER HALLE AND ELIZABETH WALEYS, C. 1430. CHURCH OF ST MARTIN, HERNE (KENT, ENGLAND).

Buchanan, Memorials of Herne, 23, 37. Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, vol. 9 (Canterbury, 1800), 86–87; L. S. Woodger, “Waleys, Sir William (d. c. 1408), of Glynde, Suss.”, in History of Parliament Online (https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/ volume/1386-1421/member/waleys-sir-william-1408). 142 J. L. Kirby, ed., Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (1399–1422) (London: HMSO, 1978), 38, no. 83; Calendar of the Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry IV, vol. 2 1402–05 (London: HMSO, 1929), 127. See also Woodger, “Waleys, Sir William”, History of Parliament Online. 143 Woodger, “Waleys, Sir William”, History of Parliament Online. 144 L. M. Angus-Butterworth, “The Monumental Brasses of Cheshire”, 83–87; Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Cheshire, 186–87. 140 141

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tion to a knighthood in 1433 and appointment as sheriff of Cheshire from 1441 until his death.145 He also became one of the lords of Wilmslow.146 Sir Robert was active in pursuing his legal claims: in 1433 he fought successfully for his right to half the manors of Dunham Massey and Altrincham, both of which had been held by the Venables of Bollin.147 Given the financial and social rewards that Robert had accrued from his marriage, it is hardly surprising that their brass memorial places such emphasis on their union. As well as showing the couple hand in hand, Douce is depicted as a bride with loose hair flowing to her waist (Fig. 24). Like the brass to Peter Herne and Elizabeth Waleys, this memorial commemorates a marriage from which the husband had profited substantially, and was also situated in close proximity to assets that the heiress had brought to her spouse: the parish church at Wilmslow is only a quarter of a mile from the manor house of Bollin Hall, a residence which Robert had acquired through Douce.148 Women might also accrue substantial financial rewards through marriage, albeit ones they had to defend more vigorously than their male counterparts. Historians have emphasised the potential wealth available to widows in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but also the difficulties they experienced in acquiring their inheritance, with widows often forced to go to court to defend their jointure or dower.149 The need to defend her assets may have played a part in Katherine Clifton’s decision to be portrayed holding hands with her late husband. Ralph Green provided Katherine with a handsome settlement after his death, made at the expense of his younger brother and heir, who promptly sued the trustees of Ralph’s estate at the court of Chancery.150 It is notable that Katherine’s settlement included the manor of Lowick and the advowson of its parish church.151 Lowick had been the principal residence of Ralph’s father, Sir Henry Green – a minister of Richard II so unpopular that he was summarily executed during Henry Bolingbroke’s invasion of 1399 – who rebuilt the chancel and north nave aisle of the church in around 1390.152 He also commissioned an extensive heraldic scheme in the windows of the chancel, comprising more than sixty 145 On 8 March 1443 this appointment was emended to include Sir Robert’s son, William, who was appointed joint sheriff for life, with Sir Robert and William granted the power to act together or separately. Clayton, Administration of Chester, 173. 146 Clayton, Administration of Chester, 173. 147 Clayton, Administration of Chester, 173. 148 The brass is now located in the south chapel. Angus-Butterworth, “Monumental Brasses of Cheshire”, 84; Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Brasses of Cheshire, 186. 149 Mavis E. Mate, Women in Medieval English Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81–82; Rosenthal, Patriarchy and Families of Privilege, 204. 150 William Page, ed., “Parishes: Lowick”, in The Victoria History of the County of Northampton, vol. 3 (London: St Catherine Press, 1930), 238; Rawcliffe, “Green, Ralph”, History of Parliament Online. 151 Page, Victoria History of the County of Northampton, 3: 238. 152 Heslop argues that the north chapel belonged to a slightly later campaign, sometime between the completion of the chancel and Ralph’s death in 1417. Halstead, Succinct Genealogies, 228–29; Heslop, “Alabaster Tomb at Ashwellthorpe”, 339–40.

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escutcheons displaying his lineage and alliances.153 By commissioning a magnificent double tomb, Katherine placed her marriage to Ralph at the centre of this celebration of the Green family, asserting the importance of their union among the other relationships proclaimed in the surrounding windows. Although none of the monument’s painted heraldry has survived, it almost certainly included references to Katherine and her connections: the contract states that the shields on the tomb chest were to be painted according to the deuise provided by Katherine.154 Long after Katherine had remarried and joined her second husband at his principal residence in Norfolk, her alabaster effigy at Lowick, hand in hand with her first husband, enabled her to persistently present her claim to Ralph’s lands. In the age of high mortality and rapid reverses of fortune that prevailed in the aftermath of the Black Death and during the Hundred Years War, marriage began to rival patrilineal inheritance as the primary vehicle through which money and land changed hands. This placed new importance on the commemoration of marital ties as a means of recording and authenticating the transfer of property. Double tombs became a kind of monumental charter, their potential legal value heightened by the fact that they could be situated within the lands that had been acquired through the union, thereby linking marriage and property. This was a strategy adopted by women as well as men: as we saw in chapter three, Margaret Holland gathered her two husbands together on their memorial in Canterbury Cathedral in order to proclaim her multiple lines of connection to the Lancastrian throne, and thereby buttress the position of her sons at the court of Henry VI. Joined hands took on a new importance in this context because of their legal status, the gesture acting as evidence for the validity of a marriage in the eyes of the Church, and therefore the State. This re-approaches, from the opposite direction, the two-fold quality of marriage as outlined by Aquinas in his discussion of the sacraments. According to Aquinas, marriage involves not only a spiritual joining, insofar as it pertains to its status as a sacrament, but also a material one, insofar as it is directed towards the office of nature and civil life (officium naturae et civilis vitae). Yet the natural and civil aspects of marriage are not separate from its spiritual qualities; rather, the sacrament of marriage occurs as divine grace operates through the form of a material contract (materialium contractuum), elevating a legal ritual to a manifestation of sacred reality.155 Returning to the theological significance of marriage is not to deny that many patrons commissioned a hand-joining tomb with material motivations at the forefront of their mind, but rather to 153 Sir Henry Green’s glazing scheme now extends into the north chapel, but this glass was probably moved from the chancel. Heslop, “Alabaster Tomb at Ashwellthorpe”, 340; Marks, Stained Glass of Northamptonshire, 126–29, 131–33. 154 Ralph Green’s tabard is carved with the arms of Mauduit (his mother’s family), impaling Green. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 217–18. 155 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplementum, qu. 45 art. 1, in Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 7 (Paris, 1882), 457.

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draw attention to the fact that the potency of the gesture as a legal image was inextricably bound to its sacramental performance. Property transactions and sacramental transformation, civil life and divine grace, were two facets of the same gesture.

RITUAL AS IMAGE

90 SEAL IMPRESSION (L) AND MATRIX (R), EITHER MELUN (ILE-DE-FRANCE) OR MEAULNE (ALLIER, FRANCE), THIRTEENTH CENTURY. LENGTH: 37MM; WIDTH: 23MM. BRITISH MUSEUM, ACCESSION NO. 1867,1115.11.

This entanglement of symbolic sign and ritual performance is exemplified in a range of objects associated with the legitimation of marriage. For instance, a seal from thirteenth-century France depicts a pair of disembodied joined hands, flanked by a fleur-de-lis above and a six-point star below.156 A marginal Latin inscription describes it as “the seal of the church of St Martin of Melun/Meaulne, for the weddings” (Fig. 90).157 Its most likely function would have been to authenticate charters recording the marriages that took place within the church. References to a “marriage charter” (carta sponsalicii) occasionally appear in rubrics to the wedding rite from France: a twelfth-century rite from the cathedral of Albi (Occitan) instructs the priest to read from the marriage charter before blessing the rings.158 Another rite, in this case from the diocese of Lyon and dated 1498, describes how a charter and a ring were to be blessed by the priest and held by him as he prayed over the couple’s joined hands. After the priest finished these prayers, the groom was to give the charter to the bride, place the ring on the fourth finger of her right hand, and then take her hand again.159 Whereas historians often oppose gesture and written record, here the joining of hands and the marriage charter operate in tandem: the charter authenticates the gesture, just as the gesture authenticates the charter.160 The marriage seal from the church of St Martin fixes this juxtaposition of joined hands and charter in wax, acting as a lasting witness to the correct legal and sacramental performance of the marriage rite. London, British Museum, 1867,1115.11. +S. ECCE. SCI. MARTINI. MELN’ AD MATRIMONIV. 158 Molin and Mutembe, Le rituel du mariage, ordo VII, 293. 159 Molin and Mutembe, Le rituel du mariage, ordo XVIII, 315. 160 While Schmitt himself comments on the problematic binary between ritual and literacy, his argument nevertheless implies that ritual transactions in some way substituted for written charters, with the development of literacy eventually limiting the scope of gestural culture. Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures”, 60, 69 and passim. For the interpenetration of literacy and oral culture in medieval England, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 156 157

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Wedding rings were another category of object that both participated in and represented the marriage rite. As we saw earlier, a common design in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was to have the bezel formed of two joined hands, a type now known as “fede” rings.161 These often feature inscriptions referring to fidelity and mutual possession. A gold ring found near Peterborough (Cambs.) comprises a flat band with a bezel cast in the shape of two interlocking hands, each of their cuffs formed of a rosette with a heart inside, itself inscribed with the word gi (mine) (Fig. 91). Another black-letter inscription on the inner band reads sauns failer (without fail).162 Read together, word and image offer a commentary on the act of joining hands: a gesture that signifies the exchange of hearts, an act of enduring mutual fidelity. Another ring, more humble in its material (silver gilt) and craftsmanship, has the clasped hands engraved on the back of the band. The applied bezel is formed of a crowned heart issuing leaves, while the outer band is inscribed with mon cor avez (have my heart).163

91  GOLD FEDE RING, ENGLAND, FIFTEENTH CENTURY. HEIGHT: 24MM; WIDTH: 22MM. LONDON, VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, ACCESSION NO. M.204-1975.

Campbell, Medieval Jewellery, 94–95; Cherry, “Medieval Rings”, 60, plate 114; 64, plate 125; 83, plate 195; Gilchrist, Medieval Life, 95. 162 London, Victoria & Albert Museum, M.204-1975. 163 London, British Museum, 1865,0408.61. 161

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Although it is impossible to say for certain whether these rings were used in the wedding ceremony, the connection they both make between hands, hearts and oaths is strongly reminiscent of the marriage rite. The rubric to the giving of the ring in the Sarum Manual instructs the priest to bless the wedding band before handing it to the groom, who should then place the ring on the right hand of the bride with his right hand, blessing her thumb, index finger and middle finger in the name of each person of the Trinity before finally securing it on her fourth finger.164 A wedding ring formed of two joined hands, worn on the same hand that had been joined to that of her husband, might have encouraged a wife to continue to see her own body as a sacramental sign long after the ceremony itself. As an image of the action in which they had participated, wedding rings, like the marriage seal, blurred the boundary between gesture performed and represented. Moreover, the ring was also a sign of speech: the rubric to the giving of the ring in sixteenth-century editions of the Sarum Manual describes how “the inner affection, which ought always to be fresh between them, is signified by the ‘ring’ (sonoritate) of the silver”.165 The word sonoritate plays on the dual meaning of “ring” in English as both sound and object, alluding to the wedding band as a material sign of the exchange of spoken vows. While hand-joining monuments could not participate in the wedding ceremony in the same way as seals or rings, their design often encourages an imagined connection with ritual performance. A brass commemorating John Boville (d. 1467) and his wife Isabel in the church of St Peter, Stockerston (Leics.) depicts the couple turned to face one another, their right hands joined and left hands extended with palms outwards, seemingly frozen in the act of exchanging vows. At the church of SS Peter and Paul, Nether Heyford (Northants.), a brass to Sir Walter Mauntell (d. 1485) and Elizabeth Abbott, dating from the end of the fifteenth century, conveys the same impression of enunciative action with the effigies turned to look at one another and left hands raised to signify speech (Fig. 92).166 In this instance the male effigy balls his left hand into a fist and presses it against his chest in a manner that suggests the making of a heartfelt pledge. The act of oath-making is also evoked in hand-joining monuments that depict the effigies placing their left hand, palm downward, on their chest, as seen on the brass to Richard Torryngton and Margaret Incent at Great Berkhamsted (Fig. 73).167 Although none of these brasses give an indication of the Collins, Manuale, 48–49. et in sonoritate argenti designatur interna dilectio que semper inter eos debet esse recens. The earliest appearance of this rubric I have found is in an edition of the Sarum Rite published in Rouen in 1516. Collins, Manuale, 49. 166 A lost fifteenth-century brass at Thornton (Bucks.) and a sixteenth-century brass at Stanstead Abbotts (Herts.) also depict the figures with the left hands raised, palms outwards. See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. 167 The effigies at Draycot Cerne (Wilts.), Flamstead (Wilts.), Great Berkhamsted (Herts.) and Winterbourne Bassett (Wilts.) are also shown with their left hand on their chest. See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. 164 165

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92 BRASS MEMORIAL TO SIR WALTER MAUNTELL AND ELIZABETH ABBOT, C. 1495. CHURCH OF ST PETER AND ST PAUL, NETHER HEYFORD (NORTHAMPTON­ SHIRE, ENGLAND).

content of the couple’s speech, for those conversant with the wedding rite the combination of joined hands and oath-making would almost certainly have prompted associations with the exchange of vows.168 These signs of speech were not the only feature of hand-joining monuments that suggest a desire to evoke the ritual dynamics of the wedding ceremony. The Sarum Manual instructs the groom to be the active agent in the joining of hands: teneat eam per manum dexteram in manu sua dextera (he is to take her right hand in his right hand).169 Most hand-joining monuments also show the man taking the woman’s hand in his. At South Acre, the brass to Sir John Harsick and Katherine Calthorpe depicts the male effigy taking hold of his wife’s outstretched hand with his thumb pressed over her fingers (Fig. 86). A more vigorous gesture is depicted at Lowick, but again it is the male effigy that is shown in the position of agency, with Ralph Green curling his thumb and fingers around the back of Katherine Clifton’s hand (Fig. 72). The South Acre brass was made in around 1384 by a London-based brass workshop under the direction of Henry Lakenham (now known as “series B”); the Lowick tomb was commissioned more than 168 The exception is the brass to Peter Halle and Elizabeth Waleys at Herne, which has the same combination of right hands joined and left hands placed on the chest but with the addition of two speech scrolls inscribed with the prayers: mater dei memento mei, and miserere mei deus, the sacramental vows of the wedding rite thereby replaced by pleas for God’s mercy 169 Collins, Manuale, 47.

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thirty-five years later from the Chellaston-based sculptors Prentys and Sutton.170 Although, as we have already seen, the particular way in which the hands were joined was determined by workshop patterns and the practicalities of making, the active stance of the male effigy cut across different forms of the gesture, different workshops and different materials. With a few exceptions, hand-joining monuments do not represent a mutual joining of hands, but rather the man taking hold of the woman. The importance of this gestural dynamic – the man as the holder and woman as held – is revealed in the fact that it necessitated a reversal of the typical positions for the male and female effigies. Whereas the vast majority of double tombs position the man to the right of his wife, all but four hand-joining monuments made before the second half of the fifteenth century place the man on the left, thus reversing the usual ordering of the spouses.171 If he were to lie to the right of his spouse, it would be anatomically impossible for the man to place his right hand beneath his wife’s right hand, as demonstrated by three atypical monuments, two of which commemorate heiresses, where the husband is positioned on the right and thus the wife has to take his hand.172 On monuments made in the latter half of the fifteenth century the couple turn to face one another, or else rotate their forearms, enabling the man to return to the prime position while also retaining an active stance (Fig. 84).173 As we saw in chapter three, during the Middle Ages the respective placement of men and women was more than a matter of heraldic niceties: it was believed to reflect a divine ordering, echoing the creation of Eve from Adam’s left rib. A reversal of these placements would not have been undertaken lightly; the fact that the majority of men on hand-joining monuments relinquished their position on the dexter suggests a pressing desire to more accurately reflect the gestural exchange of the wedding rite. The connection between the performance of joining hands and its representation was far more intimate than has previously been recognised. Rather than merely “picturing” gesture, objects such as rings and seals inserted a representation of joining hands into the very act itself. The waxy impression of two joined hands was affixed to a charter held over the joined hands of the bride and groom; a ring made of two joined hands was placed on the bride’s right hand moments after her groom had held that same hand during the exchange of vows. Furthermore, the gesture of joining hands was itself believed to be an image (or, to use Hugh of Saint Victor’s term, For Prentys and Sutton, Badham and Oosterwijk, Monumental Industry, 221–24; For series B, see Sally Badham, “Monumental Brasses and the Black Death: A Reappraisal”, The Antiquaries Journal 80, no. 1 (2000): 223–33. 171 The four exceptions to this pattern are: Rein Abbey (Austria), Shrewsbury (Salop.), Chrishall (Essex) and Strelley (Notts.). See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. 172 These are at Chrishall (Essex) and Wilmslow (Cheshire), both commemorating an heiress, and Strelley (Northants.). See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. 173 Out of the eleven memorials made after 1450, six place the woman on the sinister: Macclesfield, Cheshire; Nether Heyford, Northants.; Stockerston, Leics.; Thornton, Bucks; Warwick 3; Wilmslow, Cheshire. See the gazetteer of hand-joining monuments. 170

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a figuratio) of the invisible conjoining that God was enacting between the bride and groom. In this sense, therefore, representations of joined hands drew attention to the fact that the bodies of the man and woman, as they engaged in the sacrament of marriage, were themselves a kind of representation: the gestural comportment of the bride and groom made manifest the invisible operation of the wedding rite. Hand-joining monuments can thus be understood as static images of a performative act, itself an image of spiritual reality. In some cases their design evoked the sounds and movements of the wedding rite, either by including symbolic markers of speech or by paying close attention to the gestural dynamics of the man taking the woman’s hand in his. Yet the relationship between monument and performance was even more potent than this. These memorials were embedded within the ritual environment of the church, a situation that offered occasions in which the joined hands of the effigies might acquire a new symbolic force.

SITUATION AND SPECTATORSHIP While the spoken vows were the only essential part of the sacrament of matrimony, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Church sought to bring the wedding rite more fully into its remit, stressing the necessity of a public ceremony within a church to guarantee the religious and legal validity of the union.174 As we saw in chapter one, images of licit marriage from this period always include a priest, and often have witnesses; depictions of illicit marriage are distinguished by their absence.175 This has led some scholars to reason that, since hand-joining monuments lack the priest and witnesses, they must represent the state of matrimony, rather than the wedding ceremony.176 In his article on the hand-joining monument to John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, Oliver Harris concludes: “on tombs the cleric is absent and what is symbolised can neither be the rite nor the sacrament of marriage, but may perhaps be the estate of matrimony”.177 The problem with this argument lies in its assumption that the tomb was a self-contained entity. Embedded within the architectural and ritual fabric of the church, funerary monuments were designed to interact with their environment, often in ingenious and opportunistic ways. In her discussion 174 For the tensions between the Church and the laity for the control of marriage, see Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 417–546; Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, passim; R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 187–89; Sheehan, “Choice of Marriage Partner”, 175–80. 175 See Nichols, Seeable Signs, 283–86; Lucy Freeman Sandler “Arnolfini Wedding”, 488–91. 176 Grzybkowski, “Grabmal in Löwenberg”, 67; Freeman Sandler, “Arnolfini Wedding”, 489. The exception is Pamela Tudor-Craig, who argues in “Effigies with Attitude” (136) that the handclasp on funerary monuments “reflects the marriage vows to which they [the couple] have been faithful”. 177 Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 27.

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of the bronze floor tomb of Giovanni di Bartolomeo Pecci (d. 1427) in Siena Cathedral, designed by Donatello, Geraldine Johnson demonstrated how its evocation of the funeral ceremony could only be “activated” by someone standing at the foot of the bishop’s bier, a position suggested by the memorial’s perspectival construction and the orientation of its inscription.178 Since Pecci’s memorial was originally located directly in front of the high altar, the person most likely to occupy this viewing position was the priest celebrating Mass, who would have turned west to face the tomb when the congregation approached to receive the Host, as well as when he censed the choir and communicants.179 This meant that the priest was co-opted into the memorial’s representational sphere, each Mass performed at the high altar thereby transformed into a Requiem Mass for Pecci’s soul.180 While the Pecci tomb stands out for the inventiveness of its design, it was far from alone in attempting to orchestrate a strategic connection with the altar and its celebrants. Kim Woods has drawn attention to the trend for kneeling effigies in fifteenth-century Castile, suggesting that their appeal lay in the appearance of active participation in the Mass. One of the earliest examples is the memorial to Alonso de Velasco (d. 1477) and his wife Isabel de Cuadros in the pilgrimage church of Guadalupe, which features two effigies set within a niche but facing outwards towards the altar; in the 1467 contract for the effigies, the sculptor Egas Cueman was instructed to carve the figures kneeling with open books, “as if they were reciting from the said books with their hands together”.181 Although less common, memorials of this type can also be found in England. For instance, at Tewkesbury Abbey, the kneeling effigy of Edward Despenser (d. 1374), situated in an open tower above his chantry chapel, gazes down on the high altar with his hands clasped in prayer.182 Medieval monuments were site-specific constructions, their function and significance made “complete” by their architectural environment, surrounding performances and passers-by. There may not have been a priest or witnesses depicted on hand-joining tombs, but this does not mean that these figures were absent. This intimate entanglement of monument, altar and ritual is exemplified in the tomb of João I and Philippa of Lancaster at the Dominican convent in Batalha, as discussed in chapter two. João’s will of 1426 stipulates that the friars at Batalha were to say or sing masses of the Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary daily for the souls of himself and Philippa, while every Monday they 178 Geraldine Johnson, “Activating the Effigy: Donatello’s Pecci Tomb at Siena Cathedral”, The Art Bulletin 77, no. 3 (1995): 445–59. 179 Johnson, “Activating the Effigy”, 457. 180 Johnson, “Activating the Effigy”, 458–59. 181 Kim Woods, “The Activation of the Image: Expatriate Carvers and the Kneeling Image in Late Gothic Spain”, The Sculpture Journal 26, no. 1 (2017): 11–13. For other examples of kneeling effigies, see Laura D. Gelfand and Walter S. Gibson, “Surrogate Selves: The ‘Rolin Madonna’ and the Late-Medieval Devotional Portrait”, Simiolus 29, nos 3/4 (2002): 135. 182 Lindley, “Later Medieval Monuments”, 169–71.

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were to perform the Office of the Dead and a Requiem Mass, and an additional versicle was to be sung for the queen after the friars had completed the daily offices and before they went to eat.183 These performances would have taken place at the altar that once stood at the eastern end of the tomb, described by travellers in the eighteenth century, complete with a wooden altarpiece featuring a gilded low-relief carving of the Crucifixion.184 This means that a priest celebrating Mass at the altar, turning west to administer the Host or cense the congregation, would have faced the effigies of João and Philippa, thereby creating a spatial relationship between altar, priest and couple similar to that depicted in images of the wedding rite. From the elevated position of the altar platform, the sculpted bodies of the royal couple would have been largely concealed by the corbels at their feet. Indeed, the most visible part of the effigies from this perspective is their joined hands, a prompt for the priest to concentrate his attention upon this (seemingly disembodied) sign of João and Philippa’s marital rite (Fig. 45). For the purposes of prayer, the effigies of the king and queen were reduced to the gesture that unites them. Memorials did not require their own altar to stand before a priest; hand-joining monuments could also be positioned in front of an existing altar in the church. At the church of St George in Trotton (Sussex), the memorial to Thomas, Lord Camoys (d. 1421) and Elizabeth Mortimer (d. 1417) is located in the centre of the chancel, its stone chest built into the altar-steps in order to situate the monument as close as possible to the high altar (Fig. 93).185 The two brass effigies, set into a Purbeck marble slab, would have been most visible from the perspective of the priest celebrating Mass while standing on the raised altar platform. By situating their memorial as close as possible to the high altar, or building their own altar as an appendage to their tomb, the patrons at Batalha and Trotton co-opted the body of the priest into the representational and ritual scheme of their monument. As we have seen, hand-joining memorials were far from the only tombs to be situated in close proximity to the altar. For those who could afford it, this was the pre-eminent location for burial, placing the deceased in the midst of the Mass and its accompanying intercessory prayers. Yet the hand-joining gesture added another layer of significance to the proximity of the priest; the cleric standing before the joined hands of the effigies now

For more on the commemorative rites at Batalha, see chapter two. See Harrison, The Tourist in Portugal (London: Robert Jennings, 1839), opposite 232. See also Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views, 33, 35; Pitt, Observations in a Tour, 135. 185 For Trotton see Katey Powell, The Parish and Church of St George, Trotton (Trotton, 1989); Powell, “Trotton: A Camoys Mausoleum” (Conservation Report, Wall Paintings Department, Courtauld Institute of Art, n.d.); David Park, “Wall Paintings at Trotton”, Newsletter of the Friends of Sussex Churches Trust (2002): 6–7; Nigel Saul, “Chivalry and Art: The Camoys Family and the Wall Paintings at Trotton Church”, in Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen: Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen, ed. Peter Coss and Christopher Tyerman (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), 97–101. 183

184

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93 MONUMENT TO THOMAS, LORD CAMOYS AND ELIZABETH MORTIMER, C. 1421. CHURCH OF ST GEORGE, TROTTON (WEST SUSSEX, ENGLAND).

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echoed the priest standing before the bride and groom at the moment they exchanged sacramental vows. As we saw in chapter one, funerary monuments also sought to capture the attention of the laity. The principal purpose of the medieval tomb was to elicit intercessions for the deceased in order to shorten their time in Purgatory, meaning that patrons went to great lengths to ensure that their monument would catch the eye of the living and move them to prayer. For those who could afford it, establishing a chantry was the most reliable way to guarantee a captive audience. For instance, the statutes of God’s House, the almshouse founded by Alice Chaucer, stipulate that the paupers and their master were to gather round the tomb of her parents, Thomas Chaucer (d. 1434) and Maud Burghersh (d. 1437), every day after Mass to recite the psalm Deus misereratur.186 Less affluent patrons had to rely on the contingency of passers-by, and thus jostled to position their monuments on the most important thoroughfares in the church. At the church of St Mary in Childrey, the brass memorial to Elizabeth de Chelrey and William Fynderne, originally located in the centre of the chancel, has a marginal inscription with a direct appeal to those about to receive the Host: “you who from this side approaches the altars on hurrying feet / Let flow forth loving prayers!”187 This desire to be seen – and prayed for – acquired a new layer of significance in the case of hand-joining monuments. A French inscription on the brass to Robert Hatfield and his wife Ade in Owston (Yorks.) draws attention to the couple’s gesture: Robert de Hatfield lies here and Ade his wife with him, buried in righteous love. May God have mercy on their souls.188

Rather than dwell upon the couple’s acts of piety or Robert’s illustrious career as administrator for John of Gaunt and Henry IV, this short inscription relies wholly on the spouses’ bond of affection to appeal to the sympathies of its readers.189 As Saul has pointed out, the word “righteous” (droiturel) must be a pun on the effigies’ clasped right hands, linking their moral character to their married state.190 In different ways, gesture and inscription both point to the marital pledge between Robert and Ade. Just as the priest at the altar supplied the role of officiant in the wedding rite, so the viewers Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme, 235. Istac qui properis pedibus conscendis ad aras / funde preces caras. The translation and transliteration is from Lamp, “William Fynderne”, 164–65. 188 Robert de Haitfeld gist ycy et Ade sa fe[m]me ouesque lui en droiturel amo[r] foies plein / dieu de louir aumes eit m[er]cy. With thanks to Professor Daron Burrows for advising on this translation. 189 David Griffith, “A Living Language of the Dead? French Commemorative Inscriptions in Late Medieval England”, The Mediæval Journal 3, no. 2 (2013), 83–84. 190 Nigel Saul, “’Till Death Us Do Part: Robert de Hatfield and his wife Ada at Owston, Yorks.”, Monumental Brass Society Bulletin 85 (2000): 505–06; Saul, English Church Monuments, 304. 186 187

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94  DETAIL OF INSCRIPTION ON THE NORTH FACE OF THE MONUMENT TO JOÃO I AND PHILIPPA OF LANCASTER, BATALHA.

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of the tomb – whether lay or clerical, chantry priest or passing stranger – took on the part of witnesses to the marriage. At Batalha this act of witnessing is recorded on the monument itself. The tomb chest is notable for the Latin epitaphs of extraordinary length inscribed on its north and south sides.191 Almost a third of the text is taken up with an extended description of the burials, exhumations and reburial of the royal corpses in the Founder’s Chapel at Batalha.192 For each funeral procession, the names and titles of those members of the royal family in attendance are recorded, painstakingly listed in order of precedence. These lists of names appear at the end of the text block on both the north and south sides of the tomb chest, much like witness lists appended to the end of legal charters.193 Indeed, the layout of the text is more reminiscent of a document than an inscription, featuring a margin and lines for the letters, ornamental capitals to mark new sections of the text, line fillers and (in the case of the epitaph on the north side) a heading (Fig. 94).194 This visual analogy alerts us to a functional correspondence; much like witnesses to a charter, the names on the Batalha epitaph record those who had seen the events described and could thus attest to the accuracy of the text. The inscribed names are placed directly below the effigies of the king and queen, a juxtaposition that encourages the reader to associate the list of names – and the authenticity it denotes – with the sculptures of the royal couple, and perhaps in particular their 191 For an analysis of these inscriptions, see Jessica Barker, “The Sculpted Epitaph”, The Sculpture Journal 26, no. 2 (2017): 235–48. 192 Barker, “Translation and Transcription”, lines 64–80 [77–93], 144–76 [157–89]. See also Barker, “Sculpted Epitaph”, 238–39. 193 For further discussion of the Batalha epitaphs as a type of charter, see Barker, “Sculpted Epitaph”, 242–43. 194 For the decoration of chancery documents, see Jessica Berenbeim, Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2015).

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gesture of joined hands. As discussed in chapter two, the validity of João and Philippa’s marriage had been questioned throughout their reign, giving a particular political urgency to the re-enactment of their wedding rite. With its own altar at the east end and a list of witnesses inscribed on the tomb chest, the memorial to João and Philippa evoked both priest and witnesses: figures who were absent from the imagery of the tomb but present within the chapel. Hand-joining memorials were more than images that evoked the sacramental rite; their relationship with ritual was both more complicated and more potent. Priest and witnesses did not need to be depicted on the hand-joining memorials themselves as both these roles were performed by individuals within the church. Under the gaze of priest and parishioners, the effigies of the spouses, hands joined for eternity, continually re-enacted their sacramental marriage bond. Just as the prayerful attitude of Despenser’s kneeling figure at Tewkesbury Abbey and the low-relief effigy of Pecci at Siena Cathedral took on new resonance during the celebration of Mass at the high altar, so the effigies of husband and wife, her hand held in his, were “activated” by the presence of clerical celebrants and lay witnesses around their memorial.

WHAT WILL SURVIVE OF US IS LOVE? Monuments depicting the effigies hand in hand have too often been explained in purely romantic terms, characterised as expressions of the affective relationship between the spouses. Such interpretations do not take sufficient account of the historical and cultural contingency of gesture, as well as the particular inflection it acquires when incorporated into a funerary monument with its attendant artistic, legal and ritual contexts. According to medieval theories of gesture, the joining of hands was not a spontaneous expression of emotion, but rather a demonstrative act, pertaining primarily to intention and its communication. Analogous to a modern handshake (albeit far more formal), it both symbolised and effected an agreement between two parties. During the wedding ceremony it made manifest the exchange of vows, which was understood to be the efficient cause and the sensible sign for the sacrament of matrimony. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, it was this combination of speech and gesture, performed in the presence of priest and witnesses, which came to define a legitimate union. Joined hands thus became a recurring motif in images of matrimony as well as on objects that participated in the wedding rite, such as rings and seals. When represented on funerary monuments, the gesture gained a new potency. Embedded within the ritual performances of the church, hand-joining monuments co-opted priest and congregation into their representational sphere, enabling the marriage sacrament to be repeatedly re-enacted.

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However, the theological and sacramental meanings that joined hands denoted is only part of what is at stake. An awareness of the gesture’s significance cannot fully explain why a small (and diverse) group of medieval men and women chose to include it on their memorials. To answer this question we need also to consider patterns and networks of patronage. Heiresses represent a significant proportion of the women who were commemorated on hand-joining memorials; in these cases, patrons had particular incentive to emphasise their marital bond because of the lands, money and titles they had acquired through the union. Others seem to have adopted the gesture because they had seen it on another tomb they admired, belonging to a relative, friend or social superior. Over time the meaning of the gesture became increasingly entwined with the social connections it came to connote. In the act of imitation, clusters of copycat memorials themselves became meta-monuments to the ties between families and individuals, marks of allegiance to a political group and expressions of refined taste.195 This is not to say that these patrons did not recognise the sacramental implications of joined hands, but rather that in certain cases the appeal of the gesture shifted from its content to its social cachet. Worn out by its social iterations, the joining of hands is in danger of becoming a purely arbitrary and reflexive sign, no more than a means of “quoting” another tomb. This casts a different (albeit complementary) light on debates regarding gesture and the expressivity of Gothic sculpture. It underlines the fact that the meaning of gesture was both situational and occasional. The joining of hands could be laden with dense layers of theological and legal significance; alternatively it could be emptied out to become little more than a fashionable flourish, or, to use Philip Larkin’s description of the joined hands of the effigies on the Arundel Tomb, “just a detail friends would see”.196 Such mutability belongs to the particular character of gesture as a form of communicability rather than communication. Indeed, the word “gesture” (or gestura) derives from the Latin verb gerere, meaning “to support or carry”, indicating its function as a bearer of things, rather than the thing itself.197 Aquinas touches on a similar idea when he states that the material actions of the wedding ceremony are the “medium” (mediante) for the spiritual operation of divine grace.198 Joined hands can, therefore, be understood as a medium of connection with the potential to forge linkages of many different kinds simultaneously: bride to groom; humans to God; retainer to lord; elites to elites; individual to the legal apparatus of Church and state; monument to priest and congregation. 195 Pamela King proposes a similar dynamic for the spread of cadaver tombs among certain social groups in fifteenth-century England. See King, “Contexts of the Cadaver Tomb”, 486 and passim. 196 Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb”, 45. 197 As discussed in Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”, 56–57. 198 oportet quod mediante materiali fiat spiritualis virtute divina. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplementum, qu. 45 art. 1, in Drioux et al., Summa Theologica S. Thomae Aquinatis, vol. 7 (Paris, 1882), 456.

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I

n April 2013 a story was picked up by blogs, broadsheets and tabloids in Europe and the United States: a pair of skeletons had been discovered holding hands.1 The couple in question were found during excavations of the courtyard of a former Dominican convent in Cluj-Napoca in modern-day Romania; since the convent had been founded in the middle of the fifteenth century and was secularised in the middle of the sixteenth, the two skeletons must have been interred at the end of the Middle Ages. Far from being a lone occurrence in the media landscape, a glance at Google reveals a cluster of news stories detailing the excavation of skeletons engaged in various forms of embrace: all, seemingly inevitably, compared to Shakespeare’s tragic lovers Romeo and Juliet.2 The fascination exerted by these skeleton sweethearts speaks to the same experience described by Philip Larkin in “An Arundel Tomb”, the poem with which this book began.3 Just as the joined hands of the two effigies seem to prove “our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love”, so the joined hands of the two skeletons are eagerly taken up as evidence of the possibility of enduring companionship in the grave and even, perhaps, the afterlife. When approaching double tombs, our “almost-instinct” has tended to lead away from historical explanations involving broader artistic, political, economic or religious trajectories, and towards particular, individual and emotional concerns. Part of the desire to read these memorials as a sign of love’s ability to outlast death is to want them to be in some sense ahistorical: 1 See, for instance, “Medieval Skeletons Found Holding Hands in Romania,” History Blog, 24 April 2013 (http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/24838); “Romanian Skeletons Found Buried Holding Hands In Cluj-Napoca”, Huffington Post, 22 April 2013 (https:// www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/22/romania-skeletons-holding-hands-cluj-napoca_n_3133860.html); “The Romanian Romeo and Juliet: Mystery of the Young Couple Buried Holding Hands in Courtyard of Monastery”, Daily Mail Online, 22 April 2013 (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312967/Skeletons-discovered-holding-hands-coffin-Romanian-Romeo-Juliet-monastery-courtyard.html). 2 For another example of the “sweetheart skeletons” trend, see a Neolithic couple discovered on the outskirts of Mantua in 2007. “Hugging Couple Excavated but Still Together,” Reuters, 13 February 2007 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-archaeology-italy-embrace/ hugging-couple-excavated-but-still-together-idUSL12831255020070213). 3 Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb”, 45–46.

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representations of emotion that transcend the moment of their making, allowing them to be immediately recognisable to modern-day viewers in a way that heraldry or inscriptions are not. My agenda in returning to such contemporary reflections on post-mortem love is to reassert the strangeness of double tombs, the ways in which they speak to styles of thought and categories of experience that are radically different from our own. In doing so, I suggest some possible implications for our broader understanding of, and approach to, the artistic, emotional and social histories of late-­medieval Europe.

ARTIFICE AND EMOTION Unlike the handholding skeletons at Cluj-Napoca, a hand-joining tomb is a crafted image intended for display. As such, its appearance was governed by material constraints and artistic conventions as much as by the intentions of the patron, romantic or otherwise. Medieval tombs were often (although not always) beautiful and elaborate sculptures, but their appearance was ultimately yoked to their purposefulness. These monuments were tasked with persuading onlookers to pray for the souls of the deceased in order to shorten their time in Purgatory, as well as performing more prosaic functions such as charting lines of inheritance, asserting legal claims to titles and property, aggrandising the social status of the deceased and marking political affiliations. Gestures of affection, whatever else they might have meant, offered a kind of “advantage” in the crowded space of the late-medieval church, an effective means of capturing the attention and sympathies of onlookers.4 With this in mind, the relationship between the double tomb and emotion has to be reframed. Rather than treating these memorials primarily as markers of the emotional relationship between two individuals, they are better understood as symptoms of a broader shift in the perceived social value of spousal love, its modes and occasions of expression. The growing popularity of double tombs speaks to the changing dynamics of what Barbara Rosenwein has termed the “emotional community”, defined as the ideas shared within a particular social group about the types of emotional expression that are expected, celebrated, tolerated or deplored, including the recognition of certain forms of affective bond and the denial of others.5 By the second half of the fourteenth century, marital affection had come to be seen as an aspect of life that was both appropriate and desirable for commemoration; it was one of the aspects of an individual worthy of being remembered, as well as a persuasive rhetorical trope to stir the compassion of onlookers. 4 The idea of gesture offering an “advantage” to the image is indebted to Binski, “Gothic Smile”, 352. 5 Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotion”, 842.

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GENDER AND CONVENTION What opportunities did the rhetoric of spousal love offer to women in particular, or to those whose relationships fell outside the categories acceptable to the emotional community? Studies of female experience in the Middle Ages have tended to focus on women defined by the absence of men, such as nuns or widows. In terms of funerary programmes this means that female agency has been discussed primarily in relation to monuments that show women alone, whereas women on double tombs have been described as mere “adjuncts” to their male companions.6 As Sherry Lindquist has pointed out, this speaks to past assumptions about a kind of monolithic and inviolate male authority that admits no female agency in its presence.7 In fact, women were often the patrons of double tombs, and if married multiple times they might even commission more than one. Very occasionally these monuments exhibit a radical departure from the conventions of their male peers. More often, however, there is nothing that distinguishes the appearance of a double tomb commissioned by a woman from a double tomb commissioned by a man. In these cases, excavating female agency is entirely dependent on understanding the particular circumstances of a monument’s patronage, location and function. This challenges the implicit assumption that in order to embody female agency medieval artworks need to display apparently “feminine” traits, such as a preponderance of female saints, or a particular interest in the body and affectivity. Double tombs speak to a gender dynamic in which women might appropriate commemorative conventions that were originally devised for the aggrandisement of men, in order to redeploy them for their own legal, financial or religious gain. The conservative appearance of the tomb can thus be seen as an essential tool of female agency, enunciating power in a visual language that was both comprehensible and acceptable within a patriarchal system. A similar argument could be made in terms of the handful of “queer tombs” that have so far been identified, which adapt the designs of monuments for married couples in order to assert the particular and enduring bond between two men or two women.

BODILY METAPHORS In the Middle Ages the union of husband and wife was believed to be a symbol for the eternal marriage between Christ and the Church. This metaphor was more than a theological gloss on social practice, nor was it a mere ideological carapace masking lived experience. In the words of David Parsons, ‘“Commemorations of English Queens”, 332–33, 337. Sherry Lindquist, “Gender”, Studies in Iconography 33, Special Issue Medieval Art History Today – Critical Terms (2012): 115. 6 7

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d’Avray, marriage symbolism was a “generative” metaphor; it contained an internal logic that could be expanded and elaborated in new and unexpected directions, with the potential to be a powerful influence on thought and action.8 The force of the analogy between marriage and union with God derives from the fact that marriage is often one of the strongest experiences in people’s lives, with many diverse elements that can be employed to elucidate different aspects of a relationship with the divine.9 The ultimate implication of this sort of metaphorical thinking was the conversion of the individual into a sign; the bride and groom were not only a couple but also an image of a sacred conjoining, a figuration to which they were encouraged to conform themselves as closely as possible. Images and rituals were a means of mapping these metaphors onto the body. Women in particular were encouraged to understand their own body as a kind of symbolic topography. A ring, itself formed of two joined hands and placed on the same hand that had been joined to her husband’s during the wedding ceremony, transformed a woman’s hand into a living symbol of her marital oath. This was such a potent and enduring metaphor that widows had to cover their right hand when they remarried. Likewise, the loose hair and coronet worn by brides on their wedding day aligned them with images of the Virgin, that other symbol for the bride of Christ. Indeed, the prominence of bridal imagery in funerary culture – the gesture of joined hands, the depiction of female effigies as brides, bridal references in epitaphs, the act of being buried with one’s wedding dress – suggests the symbol of the “Bride” had acquired a particular appeal for some women, so much so that this became the role they decided to perform in death. Marriage participated in a broader symbolic discourse on the body, one that has been brilliantly elucidated by scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum and Ernst Kantorowicz.10 Bodily metaphors might be used to make abstract concepts comprehensible (such as the “body politic”), or larger forces might be mapped onto the body in order to expose the porous connection between individual and world (such as the zodiac signs projected onto its members). The mystery of bodily resurrection, implying material continuance but formal disjunction, was explained by theologians through the analogy of a seed’s relationship to a plant.11 Marriage symbolism was distinctive in that it was fundamentally relational: a woman’s body was only a sign for the Church insofar as it was bound to her husband’s, a sign for Christ. Double tombs offered a particularly potent embodiment of this metaphor because they marked the conjoining of two bodies in the grave, two bodies that had become “one flesh” on their wedding day. One way of understanding these monuments, therefore, is as the culmination of a process of assimilation d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 17. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage, 17. 10 See Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, passim. 11 Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christendom, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 8

9

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between body and sign, one that began on the couple’s wedding day and ended with the interment of their corpses within the tomb. None of this precludes the possibility, even probability, that in some cases the motivation for commissioning a double tomb was an affective relationship of unusual force. To argue, as I have done, that the phenomenon of the double tomb was rooted in broader artistic, theological and social trends is not to claim that these monuments are reducible to these forces. As Larkin so eloquently explores in “An Arundel Tomb”, double tombs challenge us to recognise both the existence and the unknowability of the emotional lives that lie behind them.

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95 MAP OF

1.

HAND-HOLDING

2.

MONUMENTS, LISTED

3. 4.

ALPHABETICALLY.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

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Aston-on-Trent, church of All Saints Barlow, church of St Lawrence Batalha, Portugal Chester, church of St Mary on the Hill (both monuments lost) Chichester Cathedral (originally Lewis Priory) Chrishall, church of the Holy Trinity Dartmouth, church of St Saviour Dodderhill, church of St Augustine (lost) Draycot Cerne, Church of St James Elford, church of St Peter Flamstead, church of St Leonard Great Berkhamsted, church of St Peter Herne, church of St Martin

14. Hoveringham, church of St Michael 15. Ingham, Trinitarian Priory (brass lost) 16. Kirkby-in-Cleveland, church of St Augustine 17. Little Shelford, church of All Saints 18. London, St Paul’s Cathedral (lost) and Westminster Abbey 19. Lowick, church of St Peter 20. Lwówek Śląski, Poland 21. Macclesfield, church of St Michael 22. Nether Heyford, church of SS Peter and Paul 23. Owston, church of All Saints 24. Rein Abbey, Austria 25. Rochester Cathedral 26. Salisbury, church of St Edmund

27. Santarém, Igreja de Santa Maria da Graça 28. Shrewsbury, church of St Alkmund (lost) 29. South Acre, church of St George 30. Stockerston, church of St Peter 31. Strelley, church of All Saints 32. Thornton, church of St Michael (lost) 33. Trotton, church of St George 34. Warrington, church of St Elphin 35. Warwick, church of St Mary (both brasses lost) 36. Wilmslow, church of St Bartholomew 37. Wimbourne Minster 38. Winterbourne Bassett, church of St Katherine

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GAZETTEER OF HAND-JOINING MONUMENTS This Gazetteer lists all the known hand-joining monuments made before 1500. The entries are arranged in alphabetical order by location. Each monument is catalogued using this template: Location (Map ref. 00)

• Name and date of death of commemorated , H. (if the woman is an heiress) • Material (lost or surviving) • Date of manufacture • Workshop; patron • Location of monument in church (relocated?) • Position of female effigy relative to male (sinister or dexter) • Gesture of the man’s left hand/gesture of the woman’s left hand • Other notes Bibliographic references If the information is not known, then this part of the entry is omitted. Uncertain information is indicated by a question mark. The bibliographic references are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather comprise a selection of the most relevant published material. The following abbreviations are used: Esq. Esquire H. Heiress LH/RH: left hand/right hand N./S./E./W. north/south/east/west Orig. Originally Reloc. Relocated

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ENGLAND BUCKINGHAMSHIRE Thornton, Church of St Michael (Map ref. 32)

• George Ingleton (d. 1493/94) and his wife Sibyl (d. after 1493/94) • Brass (lost) • ?c. 1493/94 • London Series F ; ?Sibyl • Chancel • Woman on sinister • LH raised with palm outwards/LH holds ?shield. • Inscription gave George’s date of death and referred to Sibyl as a vidua (widow), suggesting Sibyl is the patron; both figures bore shields with their coat of arms.

Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Monumental Brasses of Buckinghamshire, 212.

CAMBRIDGESHIRE Little Shelford (1), Church of All Saints (Map ref. 17)

• Sir Robert de Freville (d. 1393) and his wife Clarice (d. 1399) • Brass • c. 1410 • London Series A; ?Margaret de Freville • S. chapel (formerly in nave) • Woman on dexter • LH holds sword belt/LH palm downwards on chest • Robert was the father of Thomas de Freville (Little Shelford 2): it is likely that the two brasses were commissioned as a pair.

Lack Stuchfield and Whittemore, Brasses of Cambridgeshire, 208. Little Shelford (2), Church of All Saints (Map ref. 17)

• Sir Thomas de Freville (d. 1405) and his wife Margaret (d. 1410) • Brass • c. 1410 • London Series A; ?Margaret de Freville • S. chapel (formerly in nave) • Woman on dexter • LH holds sword belt/LH palm downwards on chest • Thomas was the son of Robert de Freville (Little Shelford 1): it is likely that the two brasses were commissioned as a pair.

Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Brasses of Cambridgeshire, 208.

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CHESHIRE Chester (1), Church of St Mary on the Hill (Map ref. 4)

• William Troutbeck I, Esq. (d. 1444) and his wife Joan Rixton (d. 1452), H. • Alabaster monument (lost) • c. 1448–58 • Troutbeck chapel (S. of chancel), centre • LH ?held gauntlet • Randle notes a shield on the south side of the tomb chest recording the

marriage of William’s grandson to Margaret Stanley in 1448. Other shields record the alliances of William’s son John, and so cannot be later than his death in 1458.

“Randle Holme’s Antiquarian Notes”, British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16; Brownbill, “The Troutbeck Family”, 156–57; Earwalker, St Mary on the Hill, Chester, 36–39. Chester (2), Church of St Mary on the Hill (Map ref. 4)

• Sir William Troutbeck II (d. 1459) and Margaret Stanley (d. 1482) • Alabaster monument (lost) • c. 1459/60–63 • ?Margaret Stanley • Troutbeck chapel (S. of chancel), S. wall. • Randle records the impaled arms Troutbeck/Stanley at the head of the tomb

and Boteler impaling Troutbeck on the side of the tomb. This suggests Margaret Stanley commissioned the monument after her re-marriage to John Boteler in 1459/60, and the subsequent marriage of Joan Troutbeck (her daughter with William Troutbeck) to Sir William Boteler. Margaret is also commemorated with a hand-joining monument at Warrington.

“Randle Holme’s Antiquarian Notes”, British Library Harley MS 2151, fol. 16; Brownbill, “Troutbeck Family”, 168; Earwalker, St Mary on the Hill, Chester, 37–38. Macclesfield, Church of St Michael (Map ref. 21)

• Sir John Savage IV (d. 1495) and Katherine Stanley (d. 1498) • Alabaster monument • c. 1470–85 • Chancel, S. wall (orig. against N. wall of chancel) • Woman on sinister • LH holds gauntlet, sword belt and ?knot/LH rests at waist • Savage wears a Yorkist collar of suns and roses, Katherine has a collar with roses only. Along with the style of the effigies this suggests a date prior to 1485.

Gardner, Alabaster Tombs, 89; Lysons and Lysons, Magna Britannia, 2: 450.

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Warrington, Church of St Elphin (Map ref. 34)

• Sir John Boteler (d. 1463) and Margaret Stanley (d. 1482) • Alabaster monument • 1459/60–c. 1463 • Regimental Chapel, N. choir aisle (reloc.) • Woman on dexter • LH holds gauntlet/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Tomb chest features heraldic shields alternating with saints (female

beneath Margaret and male below John, the Assumption of Virgin below Margaret and the Crucifixion below John); effigies wear ?Yorkist collars, Margaret’s with a lamb pendant; the escutcheons included the arms of Troutbeck and Troutbeck impaling Boteler, commemorating the marriages of Boteler’s eldest son and both his daughters to the children of Margaret and William Troutbeck; was also commemorated with a hand-joining monument at Chester (2).

“Miscellaneous Antiquarian Notes”, British Library Harley MS 2129, fol. 185; Beaumont and Rylands, Parish Church and Austin Friary at Warrington, 5. Wilmslow, Church of St Bartholomew (Map ref. 36)

• Sir Robert del Bothe (d. 1460) and Douce Venables (d. 1453), H. • Brass • c. 1460 • ?London Series B • S. chapel (orig. in chancel) • Woman on sinister • LH palm downwards on chest/LH ?palm downwards on chest • Douce wears a flowing dress and has uncovered hair, Robert displays a ring on his LH; dates of death are given for both spouses.

Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Brasses of Cheshire, 186; Saul, English Church Monuments, 307.

DERBYSHIRE Aston-on-Trent, Church of All Saints (Map ref. 1)

• ?Thomas Tickhill (d. c. 1430) and his wife • Alabaster monument • c. 1430 • Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton • Nave, N. aisle (reloc.) • Woman on dexter • LH ?at side/LH ?on chest

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• Effigies rest their head on the same long pillow, supported by an angel

at each side; below the feet of the effigies on the tomb chest there are two flying angels supporting a shield of impaled arms; stylistically very similar to Lowick, suggesting it is a product of the same workshop.

Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 223; Gardner, Alabaster Tombs, 89; Saul, English Church Monuments, 280. Barlow, Church of St Lawrence (Map ref. 2)

• Robert Barley (d. 1467) and his wife Margaret • Incised alabaster slab • c. 1467 • ?Margaret • Lady chapel, W. wall (reloc.) • Woman on dexter • LH holds gauntlet/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Robert wears a Yorkist collar; date of death for Robert given but not for

Margaret – only a brief exhortation to pray for her soul; relocated several times but probably orig. in Barlow chantry chapel, where the slab would have taken up most of the floor space.

DEVON Dartmouth, Church of St. Saviour (Map ref. 7)

• John Hawley (d. 1408), first wife Joan (d. 1394) and second wife Alice (d. 1403)

• Brass • c. 1408 • London Series A • Chancel • Male effigy holds hand of his first wife, on his dexter • LH holds sword belt/LH of woman on dexter palm downwards on chest • Dates of death for all three spouses are given in the inscription. Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 28; Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Monumental Brasses of Devonshire, 96; Saul, “Medieval Monuments”, 175.

DORSET Wimborne Minster (Map ref. 37)

• John Beaufort, duke of Somerset (d. 1444) and Margaret Beauchamp (d. 1482)

• Alabaster monument • ?c. 1450s

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• ?Margaret Beauchamp • Chancel, S. of high altar • Woman on dexter • LH holds gauntlet/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Both effigies wear collars of SS; dating is disputed; no record of Margaret being buried at Wimbourne Minster.

Duffy, Royal Tombs, 229–33; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 25.

ESSEX Chrishall, Church of the Holy Trinity (Map ref. 6)

• Sir John de la Pole (d. 1380) and Joan de Cobham (d. before 1380), H. • Brass • c. 1380 • London Series B • Nave, S. aisle, W. end (orig. at E. end of S. aisle) • Woman on sinister • LH holds sword belt/LH palm downwards on chest Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Brasses of Essex, 1: 158; Saul, English Church Monuments, 132; Saul, “Will of Sir John de la Pole”, 626–28.

HERTFORDSHIRE Flamstead, Church of St. Leonard (Map ref. 11)

• ?Thomas Frisby (d. 1408) and wife • Freestone (Totternhoe) monument • c. 1400–c. 1410 • Local workshop • Nave, N. aisle • Woman on dexter • LH palm downwards on chest/LH palm downwards on chest Saul, “Monument of a Serjeant-at-Law”, 7–21. Great Berkhamsted, Church of St Peter (Map ref. 12)

• Richard Torryngton (d. 1356) and Margaret Incent (d. 1349), H. • Brass • ?c. 1380–c. 1390 • London Series C • Nave, S. aisle (orig. in the central aisle of the nave) • Woman on dexter • LH palm downwards on chest/LH palm downwards on chest

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• The style of the effigies suggests the brass was made around 30 years after the deaths of Richard and Margaret.

Lack, Stuchfield and Whittemore, Brasses of Hertfordshire, 96; Saul, English Church Monuments, 252.

KENT Herne, Church of St. Martin (Map ref. 13)

• Peter Halle, Esq., and Elizabeth Waleys, H. • Brass • c. 1420–c. 1430 • London Series D • Woman on dexter • LH palm downwards on chest/LH palm downwards on chest • Inscription focuses on Elizabeth’s family alone. Buchanan, Memorials of Herne, 23, 35–37; Tudor-Craig, “Effigies With Attitude”, 135, plate 5. Rochester Cathedral (Map ref. 25)

• Sir William Arundel (d. 1400) and his wife Agnes (d. after 1401) • Brass (only indent survives) • 1400–01 • London Series A; ?William and Agnes • Chancel, behind the high altar • Woman on dexter • LH ?holds sword belt/LH ?on chest • Sir William’s will specifically requested the position behind the high altar for his burial

Sadler, Indents, 2: 22–23; Saul, “Medieval Monuments”, 174–75.

LEICESTERSHIRE Stockerston, Church of St Peter (Map ref. 30)

• John Boville, Esq. (d. 1467) and his wife Isabel • Brass • c. 1467 • London or Midlands workshop • Woman on sinister • LH raised palm outwards/LH raised palm outwards Norris, Monumental Brasses: The Memorials, 1: 193; Norris, Portfolio Plates, no. 192.

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LONDON St Paul’s Cathedral (Map ref. 18)

• John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (d. 1399) and Blanche of Lancaster (d. 1368), H.

• Alabaster monument (lost) • 1374–80 • Henry Yevele; John of Gaunt • Choir, N. side, adjacent to high altar • Woman on dexter Dugdale, “Book of Monuments”, London, British Library Additional MS 71474, fol. 183; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 7–35. Westminster Abbey (Map ref. 18)

• Richard II, King of England (d. 1400) and Anne of Bohemia (d. 1394) • Purbeck marble tomb chest and cast copper-alloy effigies • 1395–99 • Henry Yevele and Stephen Lote (tomb chest), and Nicholas Broker and Godfrey Prest (effigies and statuettes); Richard II

• Confessor’s Chapel, S. W. bay, near shrine altar • Woman on dexter

Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 200–16; Binski, Westminster Abbey, 200–02; Lindley, “Absolutism and Regal Image”, 61–85.

NORFOLK Ingham (1), Trinitarian Priory (Map ref. 15)

• Sir Miles de Stapleton (d. 1364) and Joan de Ingham, H. • Brass (lost) • c. 1360–64 • London Series B; ?Miles de Stapleton • Chancel, in front of high altar • Woman on dexter • LH holds sword hilt/LH palm downwards on chest • Miles and Joan were co-founders of the priory at Ingham; the inscription was in French, without dates of death.

Badham, “Beautiful Remains. Part 1”, 14–17; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 25; Norris, Monumental Brasses: The Memorials, 1: 53, 60. Ingham (2), Trinitarian Priory (Map ref. 15)

• Sir Roger de Boys (d. after 1390) and Margaret Honing (d. 1365), H. • Freestone (clunch) monument • c. 1390–c. 1395

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• ?Roger de Boys • Nave, S. aisle (orig. on N. side of altar in St Mary’s Chapel) • Woman on dexter • Extensive traces of polychromy on the effigies and tomb chest. Badham, “Beautiful Remains. Part 2”, 23–35. South Acre, Church of St George (Map ref. 29)

• Sir John Harsick (d. 1384) and Katherine Calthorpe (d. after 1384), H. • Brass • c. 1384 • London Series B • Chapel of the Assumption • Woman on dexter • LH holds sword hilt/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Katherine’s mantle features the impaled arms of herself and her husband (with hers on the dexter).

Alexander and Binski, Age of Chivalry, 141; Blomefield, “Hundred of South Greenhoe: South-Acre”, in Topographical History 6 (1807), 77–87.

NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Lowick, Church of St Peter (Map ref. 19)

• Ralph Green (d. 1417) and Katherine Clifton (d. 1460) • Alabaster monument • 1419–20 • Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton; Katherine Clifton • Chancel, N. of high altar • Woman on dexter • LH holds gauntlet/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Traces of polychromy on both effigies. Badham and Oosterwijk, “English Tomb Contracts”, 217–24; Marks and Williamson, Gothic, 442. Nether Heyford, Church of St Peter and St Paul (Map ref. 22)

• Sir Walter Mauntell (d. 1485) and Elizabeth Abbot, H. • Brass • ?c. 1495 • London workshop, variation of F Series • Woman on sinister • LH balled into fist and pressed against chest/LH raised palm downwards • Elizabeth was a co-heiress (a fact that is emphasised in the inscription); prominent impaled arms.

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Haines, Manual for the Study of Monumental Brasses, 71; Hampton, Memorials of the Wars of the Roses, 139; Norris, Monumental Brasses: The Craft, fig. 204.

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE Hoveringham, Church of St. Michael (Map ref. 14)

• ?Sir Robert Goushill (d. 1403) and ?Elizabeth Fitzalan (d. 1425) • Alabaster monument • ?c. 1420s • Woman on dexter • LH holds gauntlet/LH ?fingers clasp of mantle • Both effigies wear collars of SS. Gardner, Alabaster Tombs, 96. Strelley, Church of All Saints (Map ref. 31)

• A Strelley knight (Sir Sampson, d. 1391, or Sir Nicholas, d. 1430) and his wife

• Alabaster monument • ?c. 1415–c. 1420 • Chancel, in front of high altar • Woman on sinister • LH holds gauntlet/LH palm downwards on chest with one finger raised • Often attributed to Prentys and Sutton but much cruder in execution, joined hands attached in a different way (as a separate piece joined at the wrists); identity of effigies uncertain – their style seems to belong to the fifteenth century but with some archaic details, such as the man’s moustache.

Gardner, Alabaster Tombs, 97; Routh, Alabaster Tombs in Yorkshire, plate 37; Saul, English Church Monuments, 119.

SHROPSHIRE Shrewsbury, Church of St Alkmund (Map ref. 28)

• Unknown knight and lady • Brass (lost) • ?c. 1380 • Woman on sinister • LH holds sword belt/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Effigies crowned by an elaborate canopy; dating based on costume and hairstyles of figures; tomb slab was large (8 ft by 3 ft 7 in.); reused for sixteenth-century tomb, no inscription or heraldry recorded when discovered in 1793.

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Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, 1: 286–87; Stephenson, “Monumental Brasses in Shropshire”, 77–79.

STAFFORDSHIRE Elford, St Peter (Map ref. 10)

• Sir Thomas Arderne (d. 1408) and his wife • Alabaster monument • ?c. 1408 • ‘Stanley’ Chapel (?reloc.) • Woman on dexter • LH holds sword hilt and gauntlet/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Substantial recarving (incl. hands); monument was restored by Edward

Richardson in the 1840s, who scraped the surface and removed original pigments; both effigies wear collars of SS; tomb chest post-medieval.

Gardner, Alabaster Tombs, 99.

SUSSEX Chichester Cathedral (orig. Lewes Priory) (Map ref. 5)

• Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (d. 1376) and Eleanor of Lancaster (d. 1372) – although disputed

• Limestone monument • ?c. 1380 • Nave, N. aisle (reloc.) • Woman on dexter • LH holds gauntlet/LH fingers clasp of mantle • Substantial recarving (incl. hands); monument was restored by Edward

Richardson in 1843; female effigy crosses legs; knight’s coat armour carved with a lion rampant; tomb chest post-medieval.

Lankester, “Notes and Queries”, 15–18; Tummers, “Church Monuments”, 211. Trotton, Church of St George (Map ref. 33)

• Thomas, Lord Camoys (d. 1421) and Elizabeth Mortimer (d. 1417) • Brass • c. 1421 • London Series D; ?Thomas Camoys • Chancel, in front of high altar • Woman on dexter • LH holds hilt of sword/LH palm downwards on chest. • A miniature effigy of a male child stands in front of Elizabeth; the date of death for Thomas is incorrect (XIX not XXI); both effigies wear a collar

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of SS; Thomas wears the Order of the Garter below his left knee and has a Garter encircling his heraldic arms. Marks and Williamson, Gothic, 194; Saul, “Chivalry and Art”, 97–111.

WARWICKSHIRE Warwick (1), Church of St Mary (Map ref. 35)

• Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1369) and Katherine Mortimer (d. 1369)

• Alabaster monument • c. 1369–c. 1380 • Chancel, in front of high altar • Woman on dexter • LH holds sword belt/LH lost Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 318; Dugdale, “Book of Monuments”, London, British Library Additional MS 71474, fol. 48r; Gough, Description of Beauchamp Chapel, 1–4; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 25; Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship, 104–05. Warwick (2), Church of St Mary (Map ref. 35)

• Robert Hugford (d. 1410) and his wife Joyce (d. 1414) • Brass (lost) • ?c. 1400–c. 1410 • S. transept aisle • Woman on dexter • LH ?holds sword belt/LH ?holds book • Robert was a Warwick retainer, the father of Thomas Hugford (Warwick 3); inscription in French with dates of death for both spouses left blank.

Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 186–89; Dugdale, “Book of Monuments”, London, British Library Additional MS 71474, fol. 42r; Griffith, “A Living Language of the Dead?”, 85–86; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 25, 34n147. Warwick (3), Church of St. Mary (Map ref. 35)

• Thomas Hugford (d. 1469) and his wife Margaret • Brass (lost) • ?c. 1469 • S. aisle • Woman on sinister • LH ?rests on thigh/LH ?rests at side

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• Thomas was a Warwick retainer, son of Robert Hugford (Warwick 2);

Latin inscription gives date of death for Thomas only, also references Margaret’s lineage; prayer scrolls in English.

Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 186–89; Dugdale, “Book of Monuments”, London, British Library Additional MS 71474, fol. 42v; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 25, 34n147.

WILTSHIRE Draycot Cerne, Church of St James (Map ref. 9)

• Sir Edward Cerne (d. 1393) and his wife Elyne (d. 1418) • Brass • c. 1393 • Chancel • Woman on dexter • LH palm downwards on chest/LH palm downwards on chest • Inscription in French without dates of death; the manor of Draycot Cerne passed to Elyne after Edward’s death.

D. A. Crowley, ed., “Parishes: Draycot Cerne”, in Victoria History of Wiltshire, 14: 75–82; Griffith, “A Living Language of the Dead?”, 123. Salisbury, Church of St Edmund (Map ref. 26)

• Brass (indent) • Unknown knight and lady • S. aisle

Kite, Monumental Brasses of Wiltshire, 13. Winterbourne Bassett, Church of St Katherine (Map ref. 38)

• Unknown civilian and wife • Low-relief slab • ?c. 1310–c. 1330 • Nave, N. aisle (reloc.) • Woman on dexter • LH palm downwards on chest/LH palm downwards on chest

Saul, English Church Monuments, 102; Tummers, Early Secular Effigies, plate 185.

WORCESTERSHIRE Dodderhill, Church of St Augustine (Map ref. 8)

• ?Beauchamp knight and lady • Stone monument (lost)

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• ?S. aisle • Possible link to the Beauchamp monument at St Mary’s; the heraldic arms of the Beauchamp earls were recorded in the south aisle of the church; Nash compared the male effigy to a painting of lord Beauchamp and his wife in the church at Hadnor.

Nash, History of Worcestershire, 1: 335.

YORKSHIRE Kirkby-in-Cleveland, Church of St Augustine (Map ref. 16)

• Unknown knight and lady • Freestone monument • ?c. 1400 • Churchyard (reloc.) • Woman on dexter • Monument is extremely weathered and the effigies have lost their arms

below the elbow; position of the remaining stumps suggests that they were holding hands, although it is unclear whether they joined RH to RH or the man took the woman’s LH with his RH.

Gittos and Gittos, Interpreting Medieval Effigies, 29, plates 4, 37. Owston, Church of All Saints (Map ref. 23)

• Robert Hatfield (d. 1417) and his wife Ade (d. 1409) • Brass • c. 1409 • Robert Hatfield • Woman on dexter • LH fingers clasp of belt/LH fingers clasp of mantle • French inscription with date of death for Ade but not Robert; Robert was an administrator for John of Gaunt, who was commemorated with a hand-joining monument at St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Griffith, “A Living Language of the Dead?”, 81–84; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 27; Stephenson, “Monumental Brasses in the West Riding”, 38; Saul, English Church Monuments, 304; Saul, “’Till Death Us Do Part”, 505–06.

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EUROPE AUSTRIA Rein Abbey, Styria (Map ref. 24)

• Ulrich von Lass (d. c. 1295) and his wife Berchta (d. before 1293/94) • Incised slab • c. 1293/94 • ?Ulrich von Lass • Woman on sinister • LH holds shield/LH fingers clasp of mantle Bauch, Das Mittelalterliche Grabbild, 113; Puschnig, “Das Erbbegräbnis des Ulrich von Lass”, 23–38.

POLAND Town hall, Lwówek Śląski (orig. Franciscan church) (Map ref. 20)

• Unknown knight and lady • High-relief slab • ?c. 1340–c. 1350 • Woman on dexter • LH holds shield/LH on chest, fingers rosary

Bauch, Das Mittelalterliche Grabbild, 114; Grzybkowski, “Grabmal in Löwenberg”, 59–69; Harris, “Tomb and Chantry of John of Gaunt”, 24.

PORTUGAL Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha (1) (Map ref. 3)

• João I, King of Portugal (d. 1433) and Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415) • Limestone monument • Begun after 1426, completed in 1434 • João, completed by his eldest son, Duarte I • Founder’s chapel, with altar immediately to the east • Woman on dexter • LH holds baton of command/LH holds book

da Silva and Redol, Monastery of Batalha, 75–80; Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views, 33–35, 56–57; Ramôa and da Silva, “O retrato de D. João I”, 77–95. Dominican convent of Santa Maria da Vitória, Batalha (2) (Map ref. 00)

• Duarte I, King of Portugal (d. 1438) and Leonor of Aragón (d. 1445) • Limestone monument • Unfinished chapel, easternmost bay (orig. in front of high altar in central apse)

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• Woman on dexter • LH holds baton of command/LH holds book • A direct copy of the monument to João and Philippa; poor quality of the effigies makes the monument difficult to date and argues against royal patronage; tomb chest post-medieval.

da Silva and Redol, Monastery of Batalha, 105–12; Murphy, Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views, 32; Ramôa and da Silva, “O retrato de D. João I”, 92–95. Santarém, Igreja de Santa Maria da Graça (Map ref. 27)

• Pedro de Meneses (d. 1437) and Beatriz Coutinho • Limestone monument • 1455–62 • Leonor de Meneses, their daughter • Nave, S. aisle chapel • Woman on dexter • LH raised over chest (attached object missing)/LH holds book • Lower left side of tomb chest features the arms of Pedro’s two wives, Beatriz (2) and Dona Margarida de Miranda (1).

Ramôa and da Silva, “O retrato de D. João I”, 88–92.

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INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES References to illustrations are in bold. Abbott, Elizabeth (married name Mauntell)  264, 290, 92 Abbotsbury Abbey  41–43 Alfonso VIII, king of Castile  96 Alfonso X, king of Castile  98 Aljubarrota, battle of  61, 132–33, 142 Ambrose, saint  158 Anjou, Blanca of, queen of Aragon  98 Anjou, Marie of, queen of France  102– 03, 32 Anne, saint  68, 125–26, 131, 151 Aquinas, Thomas on love   14–15 on marriage  65, 157–59, 237, 261, 274 on the sacraments  236–37 on the soul   36 Aquitaine, Eleanor of, queen of France and England   31–32, 36, 6 Askerswell see Abbotsbury Abbey Aragón, Leonor of, queen of Portugal  104, 152, 295 Arnold, John  255 Arroteia, Fernando de  145 Arundel, collegiate church of the Holy Trinity  164, 166, 169, 53 Aston-on-Trent, church of All Saints  252, 284–85 Augustine of Hippo, saint  on gesture  236 on marriage  67–68, 69, 72 Balliol, Dervorguilla, lady of Galloway 93–94 Balliol, John  93

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Baptist, John the, saint  126–27, Bavaria, Isabelle of, queen of France 102–03, 32 Beauchamp, Richard, earl of Warwick  77 Beauchamp, Richard, earl of Worcester  77, 171–72 Beaufort, Henry, bishop of Winchester and cardinal   178–79, 198, 57 Beaufort, Joan, countess of Westmorland (married names Ferrers, Neville)  190, 193, 215, 63 Beaufort, John, earl of Somerset  57 death and burial in the Trinity Chapel, Canterbury  178, 202, 210–11, 58 relationship with Canterbury Cathedral 182–83 political career  175, 178 heraldry  182–83, 186, 188, 192–93, 195, 205, 61, 63, 67, 70 marriage to Margaret Holland  175, 178 monument in the Holland Chapel, Canterbury  175–99, 212–13, 55, 56, 60, 63 Beaufort, John, the younger, duke of Somerset   198–99, 286, 57, 59 Beaufort, Thomas, count of Perche  198, 57, 59 Beauneveu, André  102 Bertlot, Richard  200 Bisham Priory  53, 169 Bohemia, Anne of, queen of England  37, 43 chastity  124–28, 130, 147

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compared to St Anne  125–26, 131 funeral effigy  106, 33 marriage to Richard II  pp. 113–14, 116, 120, 152 monument at Westminster Abbey  104, 109–110, 112–31, 137, 140, 147, 150–52, 162–63, 197, 220, 247–48, 288, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41 supporter of pregnant women  21, 125, 128, 153 relationship with her brother, Wenceslaus IV, king of Bohemia   120, 128 Bolingbroke, Henry see Henry IV Boston, church of St Botolph  41 Boteler, Sir John  251, 283–84, 85 Boulogne, Jeanne de, duchess of Berry, countess of Auvergne and Boulogne 257, 87 Bourbon, Jeanne de, queen of France  102, 109, 31, 32 Bourne Abbey  183 Boville, John  264, 287–88 Boville, Isabel  264, 287–88 Brabant, Marie of, queen of France  94 Braga Cathedral  137, 140, 45 Braggis, Lucy  255 Bramanger, John  255 Bredon, church of St Giles  43, 46–47, 16 Brienne, Gauthier VI de  77 Brienne, Jeanne de, countess d’Étampes 77 Brightwell Baldwin, church of St Bartholomew  69, 72, 87, 21 Broker, Nicholas  114, 247, 288, 34 Browne, John  24–26, 4 Bruley, Amice  69, 72, 21 Brunswick, collegiate church of St Blaise 36–39, 10 Burghersh, Maud (married name Chaucer) 271 Burgos abbey of Las Huelgas  96 Cartuja de Miraflores  104 Calthorpe, Katherine (married name Harsick)  256, 265, 289, 86 Camoys, Thomas, Lord Camoys  269, 292, 93 Canterbury Cathedral  63, 58

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Holland Chapel  22, 157, 175–99, 205, 213–14, 261, 59 Lancastrian patronage  182–83, 186, 198 Trinity Chapel  50, 108, 162–64, 185, 190, 210–11, 214 Cantilupe, Isabel  154, 156, 51 Castile, Constanza of, duchess of Lancaster  56, 132 Castile, Eleanor of, queen of England  108, 112, 36 Castile, Eleanor of, queen of Navarre  103 Ceuta, siege of  61, 142 Charles III, king of Navarre  103 Charles IV, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor  113 Charles IV, king of France  95, 99–100, 102, 104, 28 Charles V, king of France  102–03, 109, 31, 32 Charles VI, king of France  102–03, 106, 179, 32 Charles VII, king of France  102–03, 32 Chartres cathedral  35, 141, 8 Chaucer, Alice, duchess of Suffolk (married names Phelip, Montagu, de la Pole)  53, 168–74, 183, 189, 211, 212–15, 271, 54 Chaucer, Geoffrey  79, 168 The Clerk’s Tale 75 The Franklin’s Tale 68 Legend of Good Women 124 Wife of Bath’s Tale 159–60 Chaucer, Thomas  271 Chelrey, Elizabeth de  57–60, 271, 19 Chester, church of St Mary on the Hill  249, 251, 283 Chichester Cathedral   2–3, 225, 291 Childrey, church of St Mary  57–60, 87, 271, 19 Chrishall, church of the Holy Trinity  249, 286 Christopher II, king of Denmark  98–99, 30 Clanvowe, Sir John  79–84, 85, 25 Clare, Gilbert de, earl of Hertford and Gloucester 93 Clifton, Sir John  216 Clifton, Katherine (married names Green, Felbrigg)  burial at Norwich  167–68, 173, 212, 217, 251

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marriage to Simon Felbrigg  166–67, 217 marriage to Ralph Green  216–17 monument at Lowick  167, 173, 212, 217–18, 220, 228, 231, 244, 247–48, 251, 260–61 265–66, 289, 71, 72 widowhood  167–68, 217, 260 Clopton, Joan  73–74 Cluj-Napoca, Dominican church  275–76 Cobham, Joan, lady of  189 Colt, Jane (married name More)  200 Confessor, Edward the, saint  81, 126–27, 131, 151 Constantinople see Istanbul Cooksey, Walter  174 Cottusmore, John  69, 72, 21 Cork, Christ Church  93 Creton, Jean  56–57, 61 Cromwell, Ralph, Lord Cromwell  216 Cuadros, Isabel de (married name Velasco) 268 Cueman, Egas  268 d’Étampes, Jeanne see Brienne, Jeanne de d’Évreux, Jeanne, queen of France  95, 99–100, 102, 104, 28 d’Évreux, Louis I, comte d’Étampes  77 d’Évreux, Philippe, king of Navarre  94 d’Orléans, Jean, count of Angoulême 198 Davenport, Adam  136 David I, king of Scotland  227–28, 74 de la Pole, William, duke of Suffolk  168– 69, 171, 211 del Bothe, Sir Robert  75, 259–60, 284, 24 Despenser, Edward, Baron Despenser 268 Despenser, Isabella, countess of Worcester and Warwick (married name Beauchamp) monument at Tewkesbury Abbey  172–73, 183 wedding dres  77–78 Dinis, king of Portugal  143, 203 Dorchester Abbey  43, 14 Duarte I, king of Portugal  authorship of the Leal Conselheiro 146 commemoration of his parents 145–46

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monument at Batalha   104, 152, 295 Duke of Berry see John de Valois, duke of Berry and duke of Auvergne Dymoke, Margaret  154, 156, 51 Edward I, king of England  112, 128, 36 Edward II, king of England  75, 91–93, 106, 185 Edward III, king of England marriage to Philippa of Hainault 89–90 monument at Westminster Abbey  112–13, 124–25, 36, 41 rituals of homage  226 represented holding hands with David I, king of Scotland  227–28, 74 Enger, church of St Dionysius  30 England, Leonor of, queen of Castile  96 Eric VI, king of Denmark  98 Etchingham, church of the Assumption and St Nicholas  84–86, 26 Etchingham, Elizabeth  84–86, 26 Evesham chronicler  114, 126 Ewelme, church of St Mary  169, 171, 189, 214, 54 Felbrigg, Sir Simon burial at Norwich  167–68, 173, 212, 217, 251 marriage to Margaret of Silesia  166 marriage to Katherine Clifton  166– 68, 217 monument at Felbrigg  167 Felbrigg, church of St Margaret  167, 57 Fernando III, king of Castile  98 Fildors, Mariana  255 Fitzalan, Alice, countess of Kent (married name Holland)  175, 57 Fitzalan, Richard, 3rd Earl of Arundel marriage to Eleanor of Lancaster  6 monument at Chichester Cathedral   2–4, 291, 1, 2, 3 Fitzalan, Thomas, earl of Arundel  164, 166, 53 Flamstead, church of St Leonard  249, 253, 286 Fontevraud Abbey  31–33, 37 France, Isabella of, queen of England, consort of Edward II burial in her wedding dress  75, 77, 91, 94

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INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES

France, Isabella of, queen of England, consort of Edward II (continued) monument at the Greyfriars, London  92, 93, 94, 185 France, Isabella of, queen of England, consort of Richard II  115 Franton, Adam de  40–41, 12 Franton, Sibile de  40–41, 12 Frisby, Thomas  253, 286 Froissart, Jean  on André Beauneveu  102 on the death of Philippa of Hainault   89–90 on swearing fealty  226, 228 Fynderne, William  57–60, 271, 19 Gaunt, John of, duke of Aquitaine and duke of Lancaster, styled king of Castile and León  43, 57 alliance with Portugal  131–33 monument at St Paul’s Cathedral  6, 54–57, 136, 185, 248, 252, 267, 288, 18 Gloucester Abbey  91, 185 Gower, John  136 Gratian, canonist on the sacrament of marriage  67 on the wedding ring  235 Green, Sir Henry  216, 260–61 Green, Ralph marriage to Katherine Clifton  216–17 monument at Lowick  167, 173, 212, 217–18, 220, 228, 231, 244, 247–48, 251, 260–61 265–66, 289, 71, 72 Guadalupe, basilica of Our Lady  268 Hainault, Philippa of, queen of England  89–90, 95, 112, 185 Halle, Peter  258–59, 287, 89 Harcourt, Maud  174 Harsick, Sir John  256, 265, 289, 86 Hatfield, Ade  252, 271, 294 Hatfield, Robert  252, 271, 294 Hatfield, William of  185 Harpur, Alice (married names Middleton, More)  200 Henry II, king of England   17, 31–32, 6 Henry III, king of England  32, 52, 112, 36 Henry IV, king of England  175, 178, 185–86, 271, 57

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burial 210 heraldic insignia  192–93, 195 monument at Canterbury Cathedral  104, 108, 136, 162–64, 52 reaction to the tomb of his parents  57, 61 Henry VII, king of England  104, 121 Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria  36–39, 40, 47, 10, 11 Hereford Cathedral  248 Herne, church of St Martin  246, 258–59, 287, 89 Hertford Castle  92 Holland, Edmund, earl of Kent  188 Holland, Eleanor, countess of Salisbury (married name Montagu)  53, 169, 215 Holland, John, duke of Exeter  166, 214 Holland, Maud (married name Lovell) 257, 88 Holland, Margaret, duchess of Clarence (married names Beauchamp, Lancaster) children   179, 198–99, 57 exhumation of husbands’ bodies 210–13 heraldic insignia  186–89, 194–98, 203–205, 214, 61, 64, 66 marriage to John Beauchamp  175, 178, 57 marriage to Thomas of Lancaster  178–79, 197, 202, 57 monument in the Holland Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral  22, 175–99, 261, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62 patron of The Clarence Hours   188, 203 relationship with Canterbury Cathedral –180, 182–83, 186, 202 relationship with Syon Abbey  179, 202–03 Holland, Thomas, earl of Kent  175, 57 Holwierde, church of St Stephen  35–36, 9 Hugford, Robert  253, 292–93 Hugford, Thomas  253, 292–93 Hungary, Elizabeth of, saint  143 Incent, Margaret  221, 264, 286–87, 73 Inchmahome Priory  228, 230–31, 76

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INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES

Ingeborg, queen of Denmark  98 Ingham, Trinitarian Priory  249, 288–89 Ingleton, Robert  154, 156, 51 Isabelle of Angoulême, queen of England 31–32, 6 Istanbul, Galata, church of SS Paolo and Domenico 79–84, 24 Jaume II, king of Aragon  98 Jean IV, duke of Brittany  164 Jean V, duke of Brittany  164 Jerome, saint  158 João I, king of Portugal alliance with England  131–32. foundation of the convent of Batalha  133, 141–42 marriage to Philippa of Lancaster  131, 133, 146–47, 43 monument in the Founder’s Chapel, Batalha  60–62, 104, 109, 112, 131, 133, 135–52, 221, 248, 268–69, 272–73, 295, 42, 46, 49, 50, 94 Juan II, king of Castile and León  104 Kidderminster, church of St Mary 173–74 Knighton, Henry  126 Kniveton, Nicholas  74–75, 23 Kyngeston, Sir John  58–59 Lancaster, Blanche of, duchess of Lancaster anniversary services  54, 56 monument at St Paul’s Cathedral  6, 54–57, 136, 185, 248, 252, 267, 288, 18 Lancaster, Duke of see Gaunt, John of Lancaster, Eleanor of, countess of Arundel (married names Beaumont, Fitzalan) marriage to Richard Fitzalan  6 monument at Chichester Cathedral  2–4, 291, 1, 2, 3 Lancaster, Philippa of, queen of Portugal marriage to João I  131, 133, 142, 145–47, 152, 157, 43 monument in the Founder’s Chapel, Batalha  60–62, 104, 109, 112, 131, 133, 135–52, 221, 248, 268–69, 272–73, 295, 42, 46, 49, 50, 94 sanctity 143–45

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ties to England  112, 136–37, 140 Lancaster, Thomas of, duke of Clarence  57 burial in the Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral  50, 210–11, 58 burial in the Holland Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral  210–11 heraldic insignia   186–88, 192–93, 195–98, 205, 214, 61, 65, 68, 69 marriage to Margaret Holland  178– 79, 202 military campaigns  179, 193, 197–98, 205 monument in the Holland Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral  175, 183–86, 192–95, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62 relationship with Canterbury Cathedral 182–83 Larkin, Philip  1–3, 6, 16, 274–75, 279 Leukenore, John de   43, 14 Lewes Priory   3, 291 Liège, Jean de   90, 95, 28 Linwood, church of St Cornelius  69, 72, 86, 22 Lister, Clemens  154, 156, 51 Little Shelford, church of All Saints  246, 249, 282–83 Lome, Jehan  103 London, church of All Saints  200 Greyfriars 91 palace of Sheen  106, 113–14 St Paul’s Cathedral  6, 54–57, 137, 248, 252, 288 Syon Abbey  179, 188, 202–03 Westminster Abbey  52, 54, 56, 89, 95, 99, 106, 108, 112, 116, 121, 126, 128, 130, 185, 288, 36 Lopes, Fernão  145–47 Lote, Stephen  114, 288, 34 Louis IX, king of France   33, 104 Lovell, John, Lord Lovell  255, 257 Lowthorpe, collegiate church of St Martin 46, 17 Luda, Eleanor de   42, 13 Luda, Thomas de   42, 13 Lyndewode, Alice  69, 72, 22 Lyndewode, John  69, 72, 22 Lyndewode, William  72

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INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES

Macclesfield, church of St Michael  244– 45, 251, 283, 84 Magdalene, Mary, saint  172–73, 185 Maidstone, Richard  125 Malesherbes, church of St Martin  34–36, 7 Marshal, Isabel, countess of Hertford and Cornwall (married name de Clare) 93 Maubisson Abbey  95, 99–100 Mauleverer, Joan  74–75, 23 Mauntell, Sir Walter  264, 290, 92 Mautby, Margaret (married name Paston) 189 Medici, Lorenzo de’  78 Merseburg Cathedral  30 Middleton, Alice see Alice Harpur Monreale Cathedral  29 Montagu, Thomas, earl of Salisbury  52, 168–69, 212–15 More, Sir Thomas  200, 212 Morley, Thomas, Lord Morley  255 Mortimer, Elizabeth (married name Camoys)  269, 292, 93 Mugginton, church of All Saints  74, 23 Navarre, Blanche of  95 Navarre, Jeanne de, queen of Navarre 94 Navarre, Joan of, queen of England (married names de Montfort, Lancaster)  104, 108, 162–64, 185–86, 190, 192, 52 Nether Heyford, church of SS Peter and Paul  264, 290, 92 Neville, Ralph, earl of Westmorland  190, 193, 215, 63 Neville, Sir William  79–84, 85, 25 Norwich, Blackfriars  167, 217 Norwich, church of St Etheldreda  168 Odivelas, monastery of  61, 144 Otto the Child, duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg 36–38. Oxenbridge, Agnes  84–86, 26 Oxford, church of the Austin friars  255 Owston, church of All Saints   252, 271, 294 Palermo Cathedral  29 Pamplona Cathedral  103

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Paris basilica of Saint Denis  33, 77, 90, 94–95, 99–103, 32 Franciscan convent  94 Dominican convent  94 Sainte-Chappelle 115 Paul, saint and apostle  15, 67, 140, 158, 160 Payn, Robert  136 Payn, Thomas Elie  136 Pecci, Giovanni di Bartolomeo, bishop of Grosseto 268 Pecock, Reginald, bishop of Chichester 225 Pedro I, king of Portugal  132 Petronius 202 Phelip, Sir John  168, 174 Philippe III le Hardi, king of France  94 Philippe VI, king of France  226 Plantagenet, Matilda, duchess of Saxony  36–39, 40, 47, 10, 11 Pomerania, Elizabeth of, queen of Bohemia 113 Pomerania, Euphemia of, queen of Denmark 98–99, 30 Portugal, Beatrice of, countess of Arundel (married names Fitzalan, Holland)  164, 166, 173, 53 Portugal, Elizabeth of, saint see Isabel of Portugal Portugal, Isabel of, saint  143, 145 Portugal, Isabella of, queen of Castile and León 104 Prest, Godfrey  114, 247, 288, 34 Quinton, church of St Swithin  73–74 Randolf, John  255 Rheinfelden, Rudolf of, duke of Swabia 30–31 Richard I, ‘The Lionheart’, king of England 31, 6 Richard II, king of England  226, 37, 43 chastity 124–28 grief  113–14, 121, 123 devotion to St Edward the Confessor 127 marriage to Anne of Bohemia  113– 14, 116, 120, 152 monument at Westminster Abbey  104, 109–110, 112–31, 137, 140, 147,

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INDEX OF NAMES AND PLACES

150–52, 162–63, 197, 220, 247–48, 288, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 34, 35 Ringsted Cathedral  98 Rixton, Joan (married name Troutbeck)  249, 283 Rome, Giles de  146 Saint Victor, Hugh of on gesture  224–25, 231, 254, 266–67 on the sacrament of marriage  68, 78 Santes Creus, abbey  98 Savage, Sir John IV  283–84, 251–52, 84 Scotland, Margaret of, saint  143 Seville Cathedral, Capilla Real  96–97 Siena Cathedral  268 Silesia, Margaret of (married name Felbrigg) 166–67 Sintra, Rodrigo de  147 Søro Abbey  99 South Acre, church of St George  246, 256–58, 289, 265, 86 Stafford, Margaret, countess of Westmorland (married name Neville)  190, 193, 63 Stamford church of All Saints  24, 73 Greyfriars   183 Stanley, Katherine (married name Savage)  283–84, 251–52, 84 Stanley, Margaret (married names Troutbeck, Boteler)  251–52, 283–84, 85 Stanley, Thomas, earl of Derby  251–52 Stewart, Mary, countess of Menteith  228, 230–31, 76, 77 Stewart, Walter, earl of Menteith  228, 230–31, 76, 77 Stockerston, church of St Peter  264, 287–88 Stokes, Agnes  24–26, 60, 73–74, 4 Swabia, Beatriz of, queen of Castile  98 Sweetheart Abbey  93 Swynford, Katherine, duchess of Lancaster 175, 57 Tewkesbury Abbey  93, 171–72, 268, 273 Thornton, church of St Michael  154, 282, 51 Tickhill, Thomas  252, 284–85

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Trézan see Malesherbes, church of St Martin Torryngton, Richard  221, 264, 286–87, 73 Trotton, church of St George  269, 292, 93 Troutbeck, William I  249, 283 Troutbeck, Sir William II  251–52, 283–84 Ubaldus, Baldus de  105 Usk, Adam  113–14 Urban VI, pope  113, 126, 147 Valois, John de, duke of Berry and duke of Auvergne  257, 87 Velasco, Alonso de   268 Venables, Douce  75, 259–60, 284, 24 Waleys, Elizabeth (married name Halle)  258–59, 287, 89 Waleys, John  259 Waleys, Sir William  258–59 Walsingham, Thomas  113–14 Walton, Petronilla  200 Wantone, Helen  43, 15 Wantone, Sir John  43, 15 Warrington, church of St Elphin  251, 284, 85 Warwick, church of St Mary  40, 249, 253, 292–93, 83 Wenceslaus IV, king of Bohemia and king of Germany  113, 120, 128 Westwell, church of St Mary  127 Whitchurch Canonicorum see Abbotsbury Abbey Widukind of Saxony   30–31 Wilmslow, church of St Bartholomew  75, 259–60, 284, 24 Wimbish, church of All Saints  43, 15 Wyberton, church of St Leodegar  40–41, 12 Wynter, Simon  203, 212 Wyntoun, Andrew of  93–94 Yevele, Henry  114, 220, 288, 34 York, Elizabeth of, queen of England  104, 121 York Minster  185

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THEMATIC INDEX

Affectivity affective piety  13–14 marital affection  1–2, 12, 15, 16, 21, 23, 25–26, 72–73, 78, 88, 91, 114, 130, 150, 153, 222, 264, 271, 276 Bigamy alterations to the wedding rite  158–59 differences for men and women  157, 159–62 discussed by the Wife of Bath  159–60 in medieval theology  67, 157–61 in practice  157, 160–61 represented on tomb sculpture 162–75 Bride as religious metaphor (Song of Songs, sponsa Christi, ecclesia)  24–25, 39, 73–74, 78, 87, 123–24, 131, 152, 157–59, 174, 201–02, 267, 278 as female identity  24–25, 73–78, 87, 91–92, 260, 264, 278 as ceremonial role  75, 158–59, 174, 235, 238–39, 262, 264 Burial practices burial of entrails  95, 99–100, 28 exhumation and reburial  22, 27, 61–62, 143–44, 175, 179, 210–13, 272 heart burial  92–95, 100, 27 location of the corpse (tomb chest vs. vault) 51–53 time between death and interment  19, 21, 27, 54–64, 67, 154, 194, 200 spousal hierarchies  169, 212–13 Class administrators  20–21, 72–73, 252–54, 271, 294 aristocracy  40, 72–73, 153

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gentry  47, 72–73, 216–17, 249–54 merchants  20–21, 24–26, 40–41, 47, 69, 72–73, 221, 286–87, 4, 12, 22, 73 lawyers  20–21, 69, 72–73, 252–54, 284–85, 286, 21 royalty  21, 29, 31–33, 38, 60–62, 76–77, 90–91, 95–96, 99, 104–112, 146, 152–53, 162–63, 168, 185, 193, 195–96, 199, 226–28 Coronation of the Virgin  123, 140–41, 162, 40, 48 Emotion and gesture  1–2, 6–7, 13–14, 222–23, 236, 273, 275–76 histories of  2, 7, 8, 11–14, 16, 23, 275–76 medieval theories of  14–15 Gesture and emotion see Emotion, and gesture and Gothic sculpture  13–14, 222–24, 276 legal force  147, 254–62 medieval theories of  224–26, 236–38, 254 representation of  7, 226–36, 238–41, 242–47 Hands and the wedding ring  235, 241, 262–64 as disembodied sign  231–36, 257–58, 262–64, 78, 79, 80, 88, 90, 91 as an indication of speech  237–41, 264–65 connection to the heart  235, 263–64 gestures   7, 220, 228, 231, 244, 246–47, 265–66 gloved 159

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THEMATIC INDEX

Heart burial see Burial practices, heart burial connection to the hand see Hands, connection to the heart symbolism  92–94, 235, 263–64 Heraldry badges  118, 120, 152, 164, 186, 188, 192–93, 196–98, 251, 253, 38, 39, 65 collars  164, 189–92, 252 costume  194–95, 256, 64, 86 impalement  81–82, 127, 162–63, 168, 188, 205, 214, 256–58 topography (dexter vs sinister) 81, 83–84, 174, 228, 235, 238, 266 Homosexuality  28, 79–86, 277 Inheritance disputes  147, 258–61 female inheritance (heiress)  57, 173, 183, 189, 214, 258–60, 266, 274 through marriage (dower and jointure)  168, 174, 260 Jewellery rings  235, 241, 262–64, 266, 278, 91 brooches 235, 80 collars see Heraldry, collars coronets  74–75, 169, 189, 192, 278 Law Court of Chivalry  82, 255–56, 257 legal personhood  105–06, 123, 168, 173 disputed marriage   6, 147–48, 254–55 tombs as legal evidence   255–56 wedding charters  257, 262, 266, 272, 87 wedding seals  262, 264, 266, 90 Love amor  14–15, 39, 82, 201 dilectio  14–15, 82, 264 marital affection see Affectivity, marital affection romanticisation of the Middle Ages  1–2, 6–7, 16, 23, 275–76 Marriage and the Resurrection  199–200, 212 as metaphor  11, 22, 25, 73–74, 78, 87–88, 90–91, 123, 156–61, 174, 201–02, 212, 277–78 as sacrament  65, 67–68, 73, 147, 157–60, 236–39, 241, 254, 261–62, 264, 267, 273–74, 82

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chaste marriage  68, 124–28, 143 married saints  68, 124–25, 143 remarriage see Bigamy ritual see Wedding, ceremony Motherhood  75, 108, 126, 143, 145–47, 173, 198–99 Patronage female  22, 57–60, 100, 104, 161–75, 182, 213–15, 217–20, 251–52, 277 of hand-joining tombs  217–20, 241–54, 258–61, 273–74 Pregnancy childbirth  21, 125–26, 131, 142, 153 childlessness  84, 125–26, 128, 147 miscarriage 128 Portraiture and emotion  48–49, 109 and double tombs  28–29, 48–49 royal  48, 90, 109 Royal body  21, 90–92, 95–96, 99, 105–06, 108–09, 116, 131, 143, 153 matchmaking  21, 146 motherhood  108, 126, 143, 145–47, 173, 198–99 portraiture see Portraiture, royal queenship  92, 106–08, 114, 124–26, 136, 142–43, 145, 150, 152, 162–64 tombs  20–21, 91, 95, 99, 106, 108–09, 131, 152–53 Segregation   50–51, 174 Tombs double  19–20, 26–29, 33–34, 40, 47–49, 52–54, 62–64, 86–88, 95–96, 99, 104, 108–09, 152–53, 275–79 effigies 28–31 empty see Burial practices, cenotaph entrail see Burial practices, burial of entrails heart see Burial practices, heart burial multiple tombs to the same individual  166–68, 251 relationship to performance  19, 40, 62, 148, 171, 267–73 relationship to time  19, 27, 60, 62–64, 87, 194 royal see Royal, tombs spouse as viewer of  27, 54, 56–60

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THEMATIC INDEX

Tombs (continued) transi  63–64, 169, 172 queer see Homosexuality with three or more spouses  154–57, 214–15 Tree of Jesse  46, 48 Trinity  46–47, 48, 205, 210, 264, 16, 67 Virginity  74–75, 143, 157, 213 War battle of Baugé  179, 197–98, 205 battle of Aljubarrota  61, 132–33, 142 Hundred Years’ War  77, 179, 197–99 siege of Ceuta  61, 142 Wars of the Roses  251–54 Wedding

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ceremony  65, 67, 158–59, 237–39, 262, 264–65, 267, 273 charters see Law, wedding charters coronet see Jewellery, coronets dress  75, 77–78, 87, 91–92, 94, 278 ring see Jewellery, rings seals see Law, wedding seals Widowhood as identity  24, 60, 73–74, 156, 169, 171, 213 social and economic status  156–57, 168, 178, 199, 201–02, 260 responsibilities to the deceased 200–03 vows not to remarry (vowess)  74, 203–04

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JESSICA BARKER

M

edieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side, and hand in hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Phiilip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb later described as their ‘stone fidelity’. This first full account of the ‘double tomb’ places its rich tradition into dialogue with powerful discourses of gender, marriage, politics and emotion during the Middle Ages. As well as offering new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval tombs, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, it draws attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe, providing an innovative vantage point from which to reconsider the material culture of medieval marriage. Setting these twin effigies alongside wedding rings and dresses as the agents of matrimonial ritual and embodied symbolism, the author presents the ‘double tomb’ as far more than mere romantic sentiment. Rather, it reveals the careful artifice beneath their seductive emotional surfaces: the artistic, religious, political and legal agendas underlying the medieval rhetoric of married love. J ESSIC A BARKER is a Lecturer in Medieval Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London

S T O N E f i d e l i t y

Cover image: Detail of joined hands, monument to Sir John Boteler and Margaret Stanley, 1459/60–c. 1463. Church of St Elphin, Warrington (Cheshire, England). Photo: author. Cover design: www.stay-creative.co.uk

MARRIAGE AND EMOTION IN MEDIEVAL TOMB SCULPTURE