Till Death Us Do Part: Love and the Medieval Tomb Monument

Fascinating online lecture from the Churches Conservation Trust looking at how love and marriage were reflected in medieval tomb monuments.

Jessica Barker from the Courtauld Institute took as her starting point The Arundel Tomb in Chichester Cathedral which shows a couple holding hands. Although this is a 19th century reconstruction she felt this is how it would have originally have looked as there are many other examples of this around the country. She discussed a number of these and suggested that the hand holding was not a romantic gesture but a sign of a legal contact as often the women had bought land to what were controversial marriages.

She also looked at tombs reflected ideas of marriage at the time giving two examples of brass memorials to merchants which give heavy emphasis to the children born to the marriage as a sign of a life well lived in the absence of rank and wealth.

I liked the section which discussed two tombs commissioned by women, the wonderful Alice Chaucer in Ewelme and that of Margaret Holland in Canterbury Cathedral where she is shown with both her husbands, Thomas Lancaster and John Beaufort who had previously been buried by the tomb of St Thomas.

Finally she discussed two tombs which may refer to queer relationships, that of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe now in a museum in Istanbul, which shows their coats of arms impaled as was done on marriage, and that of Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenburg in Etchingham, a brass of two women who did not marry and died 30 years apart but someone still felt it was important to mark that friendship.