Daniell C. Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066-1550

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leprosy’ which damages the nerves in the hands, feet and face, which in

turn causes sores. In the face the bone in the nose disappears, the front

teeth may fall out and palate and larynx may become affected, thus

affecting speech. The hands become paralysed and claw-like and fingers

and toes may be lost, thereby giving a ‘clubbed’ appearance. It is a nasty

disease which led to a slow death.

To modern thought the treatment of lepers was as cruel as the disease

itself. By various processes lepers were pronounced dead to the world,

either literally, or legally. The most extreme form took place in France.

During the ceremony to declare them dead they were required to stand

in an open grave. In England the ceremony was just as symbolic.

Although the Office for the Seclusion of a Leper varied from one

diocese to another, the rites used at Salisbury (known as the Sarum use)

were widely adopted. In this rite the lepers were led to the church and

made to kneel under two trestles and beneath a black cloth in the

‘manner of a dead man’. A Mass was then said. Afterwards the lepers

were led outside and had earth cast upon their feet by the priest who said

‘Be thou dead to the world, but alive again unto God’. They were then

led to the leper hospital or where they were to live.

Not only were they dead to the Church, they were also dead legally

and socially. In 1200, at the Council of Westminster, lepers were

forbidden to make a will or plead in court. Furthermore, once they had

been excluded they had to avoid churches or other crowded places.

Other injunctions stressed that they must never touch a child, must avoid

contaminating water sources or food, must go about in their leper-dress,

must wear their gloves, must only eat or drink with other lepers, and

could only talk with others if the leper was down-wind. Secluded

religiously, socially and legally from everyone apart from other lepers,

they lived a living death.

A few leper hospitals have been excavated: St Margaret’s, High

Wycombe, with twelve burials (Farley and Manchester 1989); Ilford;

South Acre (Wells 1967) and St James and St Mary Magdalene Leper

Hospital in Chichester, the largest cemetery discovered to date (Magilton

and Lee 1989). The remains of 351 individuals were recovered, revealing

the organisation of the cemetery during its use from the twelfth to the

seventeenth century. The earliest phase, in the western part of the

cemetery, had the highest concentration of leprous males (women were

technically excluded from the hospital until the sixteenth century). The

second area was the most disorganised, with graves most often bisecting

one another. The third was the most organised; and children and women

were admitted. ‘Over eighty three’ skeletons exhibited some form of

APPENDIX 1 201

leprosy, As there was a very low number of immature individuals, this

indicates that individuals were not admitted until some mutilation

through leprosy had occurred.

The importance of Jews and lepers within medieval society is that

both groups were liminal to Christian society: socially and spiritually.

The leper hospitals were placed on the outskirts of towns, marking the

beginning of a ‘no-mans land’, and lepers themselves were spiritually cut

off from society by a symbolic burial (Gilchrist 1995:115). Jews too were

physically cut off from Christian society in death by their own

graveyards beyond the confines of the town. Jews were also literally the

property of the king, who had complete control over them. Comparisons

between main-stream Christian societies and these liminal groups throw

both into sharper contrast.

202 DEATH AND BURIAL IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Appendix 2:

The Living

Two matters concerned the living: whether the funeral and actions were

for the benefit of the living or the dead, and how much the ethos of

torment and damnation of the soul in the afterlife was believed.

Theologically the soul of the deceased was the most important aspect

of funerals (which has been emphasised in this work), but there was a

consistent sub-theme of the role that funerals had for the living. This

was summed up in a statement by St Augustine, which was well known

to medieval theologians, that funerals were ‘rather comforts to the living

than helps to the dead’ (Gittings 1995:170). This sentiment was

occasionally picked up and stated in instructions for funerals: in 1425,

Bishop Wakeryng described elaborate ceremonies and processions as a

‘solace for the living’:

I want the vigils of the dead to be performed in the ordinary way

immediately after my death, without elaborate ceremonies and

processions, which solace the living, according to the blessed

Augustine, rather than help the dead.

(Tanner 1984:99)

When taken to extremes, the living could totally dominate the funeral

with hardly any reference to the recently deceased at all. The heraldic

funeral, run by the College of Heralds, was the supreme example. The

first such funeral was in 1463. Throughout the sixteenth century they

gained in number. Anyone who had the right to a coat of arms was

required to have the heralds to control the funeral—even down to

which mourners could be present. A rule stated that the chief mourner

should be of the same sex as the deceased, so the spouse could not even

be the principal mourner (Gittings 1995:177). The heraldic funeral was

concerned with the legitimate transfer of status and property from the dead

to the living. The whole performance therefore revolved around the

living, with the dead person playing little part. Thomas More

complained:

Much superfluous charge used for boast and ostentation, namely

devised by the dead before his death, is of God greatly disliked;…

as how we might be solemnly borne out to burying, have gay

and goodly funerals, with heralds [herawdes] at our hearses, and

offering up our helmets, setting up our escutcheons and coat

armours on the wall…

(More 1557:335, Owst 1926:266)

In her excellent summary of these funerals, Gittings poses the question,

which of the living were these funerals for? She makes a very strong case

that the funerals were ‘part of the crown’s control over its subjects’

(Gittings 1995:178) as the heralds were crown servants. Elizabeth I took

a personal interest in many of the funerals. Only in the seventeenth

century did the heralds lose their power over funerals (James I took less

interest). As a reaction against the heraldic funerals a new fashion

appeared of burial at night (Gittings 1995:180).

The second matter is the frequent assumption that death pervaded

every sphere of life in the Middle Ages, and that the whole mentality of

the time focused upon it. There is a large amount of material to support

this view and much of this book is based upon that assumption. As a

corrective, however, to a potentially unnecessarily bleak view, it is worth

reflecting evidence to the contrary. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas

stated: ‘It is not necessary for one always to be thinking of one’s ultimate

end whenever one desires or does something: any more than a traveller

needs to think of his destination at every step’ (quoted by Tristram 1976:

159). At the gentry level there was also a lack of dread about death. One

of the best-documented fifteenth-century gentry families, the Pastons,

lived life to the full. They

were not prone to morbidity, being about as opposite as one could

readily imagine to those psychological wrecks with whom some

historians populate the Middle Ages…[they were] not oppressed

by the so-called burdens of late Medieval religion. Anxiety…is not

to be detected in them.

(Richmond 1984:195)

This lack of anxiety manifested itself in various ways, such as not

founding the required perpetual chantry, and not founding the college of

204 APPENDIX 2

priests and poor men at Caister specified by Sir John Fastolft, and not

hurrying to build a magnificent tomb for John Paston (it took over

twelve years: the money eventually left for it by the son was ungenerous

and it may never have been built) (Richmond 1984:195–6). A similar

lack of angst was detected after an analysis of 355 fifteenth-and early

sixteenth-century wills from Hull. They give a broad overview of the

religious consensus of the will-making population.

In very few wills indeed are there any signs of that torment about

the fate of the soul and none of that morbid anxiety so long regarded

as the late-medieval norm. The assumption that most medieval

people were anguished by the prospect of the horrors awaiting

them in the next world rests particularly upon the frequent and

vivid portrayals of purgatory and hell in literature, sermons,

paintings and stained glass of the period; yet may not their

frequency and intensity…simply testify to their futility and

neglect?

(Heath 1984:228)

In the heavily religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages it is all too easy

to forget that during their soul’s transitory life on earth medieval people

were human, had fun and enjoyed living.

DEATH AND BURIAL IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND 205

206

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

BIHR=Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York.

Chapter 3

John Beisby 1535 BIHR Probate vol.11, 147v

John Chambelleyne 1516 BIHR Probate vol.9, 32v

Bartram Dawson 1515 BIHR Probate vol.9, 39v

Robert de Crosse 1395 BIHR Probate vol.1, 83v

Thomas Glasyn 1531 BIHR Probate vol.11, 9r

William Huby 1531 BIHR Probate vol.11, 9r

Robert Lee 1513 BIHR Probate vol.11, 250v

John Mason 1537 BIHR Probate vol.9, 16r

Richard Olyver 1535 BIHR RI vol.28, 168

Ralf Pullan 1540 BIHR Probate vol.11, 529r

John Shaw 1515 BIHR Probate vol.9, 26r

John Shawe 1538 BIHR Probate vol.11, 276r

John Wirrall 1517 BIHR Probate vol.9, 74r

William Wylson 1517 BIHR Probate vol.9, 52r

Chapter 4

Thomas Catlynson 1498 BIHR Probate vol.3, 331r

Chapter 5

Numbers of male and female burials from parish churches:

Male Female

Rivenhall 31 40

Barton Bendish 33 14

All Saints, Norfolk 13 5

St Nicholas Shambles 90 71

St Helen-on-the-Walls 338 394

North-East Bailey, Norwich 39 22

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