'The beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire': The Church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire, and its Medieval Monuments 9781407309330, 9781407322308

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

BAR 554 2012

‘The beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire’

BADHAM & COCKERHAM (Eds)

The Church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire, and its Medieval Monuments Edited by

Sally Badham Paul Cockerham

‘THE BESTE AND FAYREST OF AL LINCOLNSHIRE’

B A R

BAR British Series 554 2012

‘The beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire’ The Church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire, and its Medieval Monuments

Edited by

Sally Badham Paul Cockerham

BAR British Series 554 2012

Published in 2016 by BAR Publishing, Oxford BAR British Series 554 'The beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire' © The editors and contributors severally and the Publisher 2012 The authors' moral rights under the 1988 UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act are hereby expressly asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied, reproduced, stored, sold, distributed, scanned, saved in any form of digital format or transmitted in any form digitally, without the written permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 9781407309330 paperback ISBN 9781407322308 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781407309330 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library BAR Publishing is the trading name of British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd. British Archaeological Reports was first incorporated in 1974 to publish the BAR Series, International and British. In 1992 Hadrian Books Ltd became part of the BAR group. This volume was originally published by Archaeopress in conjunction with British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd / Hadrian Books Ltd, the Series principal publisher, in 2012. This present volume is published by BAR Publishing, 2016.

BAR PUBLISHING BAR titles are available from:

E MAIL P HONE F AX

BAR Publishing 122 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2 7BP, UK [email protected] +44 (0)1865 310431 +44 (0)1865 316916 www.barpublishing.com

           

To the Venerable David Meara FSA President of the Monumental Brass Society 2003–2011

CONTENTS List of maps List of plans List of tables List of text figures Abbreviations Acknowledgements

iii iii iii iii x xi

Chapter 1 Introduction by Sally Badham 1.1 John Leland’s view of Boston 1.2 Medieval Boston 1.3 Previous studies of Lincolnshire and Boston 1.4 Background to the current volume

1 3 4 5

Chapter 2 Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration by Stephen Rigby 2.1 The rise of medieval Boston 2.2 Boston as a borough 2.3 Boston before the Black Death 2.4 Boston in the late fourteenth century 2.5 The ‘probi homines’ of late medieval Boston 2.6 The administration of Boston in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 2.7 The decline of Boston

8 12 14 16 19 21 23

Chapter 3 ‘The beste and fairest of al Lincolnshire’: the parish church of St Botolph, Boston by Linda Monckton 3.1 Introduction and background – Boston and the history of the English parish church 3.2 Early history of St Botolph’s 3.3 Architectural and historical contextualization of the early church of St Botolph 3.4 Architecture and design of St Botolph’s in the fourteenth century 3.5 The dating and design of St Botolph’s 3.6 Conclusions

29 31 34 35 42 46

Chapter 4 ‘He loved the guild’: the religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston by Sally Badham 4.1 Medieval religious guilds 4.2 Documentary sources for the Boston guilds 4.3 The guilds and their activities 4.4 The extent of guild membership 4.5 The major guilds 4.6 The pre-1389 minor guilds 4.7 The minor guilds established after 1389 4.8 The end of the guilds

49 50 52 56 60 69 70 72

Chapter 5 Incised slab commissions in fourteenth century Boston by Paul Cockerham 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Material and manufacture: the mechanics of the slabs 5.3 Motivation and methods of commissioning the slabs 5.4 The incised slabs as memoria 5.5 Models of memorialisation 5.6 Conclusion

74 75 79 89 95 98

Chapter 6 ‘From remembrance almost out araced’: the brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston by Sally Badham 6.1 Introduction and methodology 6.2 Commemorative choices and scale of losses 6.3 Brasses to the gentry and professions 6.4 Brasses to parochial and chantry priests 6.5 Brasses to local merchants, tradesmen and other civilians 6.6 Shroud brasses 6.7 Two lost brasses to Londoners 6.8 Conclusions

i

100 101 104 106 109 118 119 120

Chapter 7 The lost brasses and indents of Boston by Derrick Chivers and Paul Cockerham 7.1 Sixteenth-century destruction – the demise of the friaries 123 7.2 Sixteenth century destruction – the demise of the chantries 124 7.3 Sixteenth century destruction – mechanisms of monument preservation 125 7.4 Sixteenth century recycling of earlier monuments? 127 7.5 Seventeenth century destruction – Puritan zeal 129 7.6 Seventeenth century destruction – structural changes to Boston’s churches 131 7.7 Eighteenth century changes 135 7.8 Nineteenth century restoration 135 7.9 Monumental brasses: their removal, retrieval and restoration? 136 Chapter 8 Two Lincolnshire merchants: Walter Pescod of Boston and Simon Seman of Barton-upon-Humber by Jessica Freeman 8.1 Origins 8.2 Wealth 8.3 Office holding and trading activities 8.4 Simon and the London Vintners’ Company 8.5 Walter’s role in Boston 8.6 Simon’s office-holding in London 8.7 Wife, family and testamentary provision 8.8 The brass of Walter Pescod 8.9 The brass of Simon Seman 8.10 Conclusion

142 145 145 146 146 148 148 148 149 150

Chapter 9 Two alabaster effigies in St Botolph’s church by Mark Downing 9.1 Original location and condition of the effigies 9.2 Description of the effigies 9.3 Attribution of the effigies

151 151 155

Chapter 10 Conclusion by Paul Cockerham 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Memorialisation in the new church 10.3 Boston guilds and corporate remembrance 10.4 St Botolph’s as a model of urban memorialisation 10.5 Urban memorialisation as a corporation pedigree 10.6 Urban memorialisation at Boston – final thoughts

156 158 159 161 167 169

Appendix 1 Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston by Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham Section 1 – Brasses where some of the inlay survives or is recorded in antiquarian rubbings Section 2 – Indents of lost brasses (excluding examples with only an inscription indent) Section 3 – Effigial incised slabs surviving or known from antiquarian rubbings Section 4 – Cross slabs Section 5 – Relief effigies

184 198 220 223

Appendix 2 A survey of the floor monuments in St Botolph’s, Boston, undertaken in 1978–83 by Brian Gittos and Moira Gittos

226

Appendix 3 Boston wills mentioned in chapters 4 and 6

236

Bibliography

239

Index

257

ii

172

LIST OF MAPS Map 5.1 Hanseatic trade routes throughout northern Europe during the late medieval period. LIST OF FLOOR PLANS Plan 11.1 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the brasses. Plan 11.2 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the indents. Plan 11.3 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church Boston, showing the position of the slabs using Greenhill’s numbering. Plan 11.4 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the cross slabs. Plan 11.5 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the effigies. LIST OF TABLES Table 4.1 The Boston guilds. Table 5.1 Comparative costs of Tournai slabs. Table 5.2 Wholesale prices of quarried stones in Tournai in 1314. LIST OF TEXT FIGURES Fig. 1.1 St Botolph’s church tower from the new footbridge over the River Witham. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 2.1 St Botolph’s stump viewed from the Town Quay (now South End) near the Guildhall. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 2.2 Plan of Boston c.1500. Reproduced with permission from G. Harden, Medieval Boston and its Archaeological Implications. Fig. 2.3 Remains of the Dominican friary (now an art centre), Spain Lane. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 2.4 Shodfriars Hall, probably the former guildhall of the Corpus Christi guild, South End. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 2.5 St Mary’s Guildhall, South Street. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 2.6 Pescod Hall, sympathetically rebuilt in 1972, is the solar of a house which once stood within its own grounds. It was built c.1450 with a hall attached to the west wall. It was moved from north-eastern Boston to the centre of Boston’s Pescod Square shopping development. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 3.1 St Botolph’s, Boston, from the west. Drawing: William Stukeley 1708 (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Top. Gen. e 61, fol. 8). Fig. 3.2 St Botolph’s, nave interior looking east. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.3 Floor plan of St. Botolph’s church c.1725, by Stukeley. Fig. 3.4 St Botolph’s, exterior view from south east. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.5 St Botolph’s, nave tracery south nave aisle. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.6 Heckington (Lincolnshire) nave tracery. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.7 Holbeach (Lincolnshire) nave tracery. Photograph: John Goodall. Fig. 3.8 Beverley (Yorkshire) nave tracery. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.9 St Botolph’s south porch. Photograph: Matthew Woodworth. Fig. 3.10 Beverley (Yorkshire) porch. Photograph: John Goodall. Fig. 3.11 Howden (Yorkshire) exterior view of nave. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.12 Howden (Yorkshire) interior view of nave looking west. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.13 Sketch drawings to illustrate comparative nave pier profiles (not to scale). Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.14 St Botolph’s, site of Corpus Christi chapel, south nave wall. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.15 St Botolph’s, chancel interior looking east. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.16 St Botolph’s, chancel exterior from south. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.17 York Minster east window. Photograph: John Goodall. Fig. 3.18 St Botolph’s, detail chancel windows exterior. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.19 St Botolph’s, lower stage of tower. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.20 St Botolph’s, tower from south. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 3.21 Tattershall (Lincolnshire) collegiate church. Photograph: Linda Monckton. Fig. 4.1a Seal of guild of Blessed Virgin Mary. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. Fig. 4.1b Seal of guild of Corpus Christi. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. Fig. 4.1c Seal of guild of SS Peter and Paul. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. Fig. 4.1d Seal of guild of the Holy Trinity. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. Fig. 4.1e Seal of guild of St George. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. Fig. 4.2 Diagram showing proportion of wills mentioning guilds over time.

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Fig. 4.3 Diagram showing numbers of guilds mentioned per will. Fig. 4.4 Diagram showing popularity of individual Boston guilds. Fig. 4.5 Plan showing the location of some former guild chapels in St Botolph’s. Fig. 4.6 View of the south-east corner of the nave of St Botolph’s where the chapel of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary was formerly located. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.7 Sealed admission certificate to the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary issued to Thomas Baragh on 23 July 1505. BL, C.191.c.14. Copyright: British Library. Fig. 4.8 Front view of St Mary’s Guildhall in South Street, Boston. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.9 Side view of St Mary’s Guildhall in South Street, Boston, showing the depth of the building. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.10 View of the banqueting hall in St Mary’s Guildhall in South Street, Boston. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.11 View of the north-east corner of the nave of St Botolph’s where the chapel of the guild of SS Peter and Paul was formerly located. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.12 View of south aisle of St Botolph’s church, showing the blocked entry to the former Corpus Christi chapel. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.13 View from the south of the exterior of St Botolph’s church, showing the area where the chapel of the guild of Corpus Christi was located. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.14 Shodfriars Hall, Boston, formerly the guildhall of the Corpus Christi guild. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 4.15 Vignette of St Botolph’s in the bottom left-hand corner of Robert Hall’s 1741 plan of Boston showing the ‘tailors’ hall’. Fig. 4.16 Sketch of the ‘tailors’ hall’, Boston, from the Wilson collection, Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 4.17 Token of the Good Rood at the Wall in Boston found at Brothertoft. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. Fig. 5.1 Tournai marble incised slab of Adam de Franton (d. 1325) and wife Sibile, Wyberton (Lincolnshire); positive rubbing from Greenhill collection in the Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 5.2 Head of Adam de Franton (d. 1325); Wyberton (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 5.3 Head of Sibile de Franton (1325); Wyberton (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 5.4 Figure of Adam de Walsokne (d. 1349) from his brass at St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn (Norfolk); negative rubbing. Fig. 5.5 Tournai marble incised slab (FAG 11) with figures of saints inlaid in white composition (c.1325?); St Botolph’s, Boston. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 5.6 Tournai marble slab commemorating Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340), St Botoph’s, Boston. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 5.7 Upper part of Tournai marble slab sculpted in low relief, ?bishop Remigius (d. 1092 but slab probably mid-twelfth century); Lincoln cathedral. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 5.8 Tournai marble incised slab with a male and two female effigies (c.1325?); St Mary’s, Barton-uponHumber (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Cameron Newham. Fig. 5.9 Purbeck marble graveslab, dean Andrew de Kilkenny (d. 1302), Exeter cathedral (Devon); scale drawing. Fig. 5.10 Purbeck marble graveslab with indents for brasses, bishop Thomas Bitton (d. 1307), Exeter cathedral (Devon); scale drawing. Fig. 5.11 Ancaster stone slab with demi-effigy of civilian within a quatrefoil, first half of the fourteenth century; Heckington (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 5.12 View of the central aisle of the nave, St Botolph’s, Boston. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 5.13 Shield with merchant’s mark on incised slab of Adam de Franton (d. 1325); Wyberton (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 5.14 North country dark limestone slab with indents for brasses, lady Eve de Goldesburgh, mid fourteenth century; Goldsborough, (Yorkshire); scale drawing. Fig. 6.1 Diagram showing testamentary dispositions for burial and commemoration. Fig. 6.2 Diagram showing specific preferences for intra-mural burial in St Botolph’s. Fig. 6.3 Diagram showing status of those commemorated by surviving or documented brasses in St Botolph’s church. Fig. 6.4 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to unknown armoured figure and lady c.1510, in nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.5 Fens 2 brass to Sir William Ayscugh (d. 1509) and his wife; Stallingborough (Lincolnshire). Fig. 6.6 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to unknown armoured figure and lady c.1520-30, in porch of Peterborough cathedral. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.7 Indent of lost Norwich 1 brass to Thomas Flete (d. 1450), in south aisle of St Botolph’s. A rubbing of the figure of his wife Alice is placed in the indent. Photograph: Martin Stuchfield. Fig. 6.8 Rubbing of the lost figure of Alice Flete. Rubbing: collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

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Fig. 6.9 Drawing by William Stukeley of remains of brass to Thomas Flete (d. 1450), in south aisle of St Botolph’s, Boston. Copyright: Bodleian Library. Fig. 6.10 Fens 1 brass to John Strensall (d. 1408), in sanctuary of St Botolph’s. Rubbing: Derrick Chivers. Fig. 6.11 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass possibly to Alan Lamkyn (d. 1498), in north aisle of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.12 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to an unknown priest c.1500, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.13 Indent of lost York 2 chalice brass possibly to William Bond (d. 1485), in south aisle of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.14 Indent of lost Fens 1 brass to Richard Frere (d. 1424) and his wives Alice and Johanna, in the south aisle of St Botolph’s. Rubbing: Derrick Chivers. Fig. 6.15 Indent of lost brass to ?Thomas Gull (d. 1420) and wife, west end of nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.16 Indent of lost Fens 1 brass to unknown civilian and lady, c.1420; Louth (Lincolnshire). Drawing: Sally Badham. Fig. 6.17 Rubbing of lost Fens 1 brass to John Nutting (d. 1380) and wife Agnes (d. 1420), formerly at east end of nave of St Botolph’s. Rubbing: Jerome Bertram with rubbings of other plates from the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London overlaid. Fig. 6.18 Indent of kneeling civilian and lady on either side of the stem on a cross, c.1430. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.19 London D brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1470, currently stored in the library of St Botolph’s. Rubbing: collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 6.20 Indent of lost London F brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501/2) and wives Agnes (d. 1505) and Elena, in south aisle of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.21 Brass inlay of group of sons from indent of brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501/2), currently in library of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Martin Stuchfield. Fig. 6.22 Indent of lost London G brass to John Robinson (d. 1525) and wives Anne, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Eleanor, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.23 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531), and wives Elizabeth and Mary, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.24 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to unknown civilians and ladies c.1520; Tattershall (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Martin Stuchfield. Fig. 6.25 Fens 2 brass to Nicholas Robertson (d. 1498), and his wives Isabelle and Alice; Algarkirk (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.26 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531), and wives Elizabeth and Mary; Algarkirk (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.27 Fragment of indent of lost brass to unknown civilian and lady, c.1525, on west wall of nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.28 Fragment of indent of lost brass to unknown civilian and lady, c.1535, on west wall of nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.29 Indent of lost Fens 2 shroud brass to John Dale (d. 1482) and wife, in south aisle of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.30 Indent of lost Fens 2 shroud brass, possibly to John Leeke (d. 1527) and wives Alice and Joan, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.31 Indent of lost London F brass to Roger Shavelocke and wife Joan (d. 1488), in south aisle of St Botolph’s. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 6.32 Diagram showing popularity of workshops patronised by those commemorated by brasses in St Botolph’s church. Fig. 7.1 Early eighteenth century print of exterior of St Botolph’s church with floor plan from Dr William Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum. Fig. 7.2 Floor plan of St. Botolph’s church c.1725, by Stukeley. Fig. 7.3 Early eighteenth century print of the nave of St Botolph’s church from the west. Fig. 7.4 Brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398) with the right hand canopy side shaft brass being obscured by the base of the reredos. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 7.5 Saints from Walter Pescod’s brass now covered by the reredos. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 7.6 Indent with lost brass inlay to Alice Flete, c.1450. Rubbing: Derrick Chivers. Fig. 7.7 Palimpsest reverse of part of lost brass to Alice Flete, c.1450. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London.

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Fig. 7.8 Portion of a marginal inscription from a brass to a member of the Walsoken family, c.1400. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 7.9 Lost inlay from a Flemish slab (Greenhill no. 11). Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 7.10 Lost evangelistic symbols. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 7.11 Lost brass of civilian and wife, c.1470. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 7.12 Plates from the brass to Thomas Gull (d. 1420). Rubbing: Derrick Chivers. Fig. 7.13 Lost Flemish slab to an unknown priest, c.1330–40. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 7.14 Lost brass to John Nutting and his wife Alice, c.1420. Rubbing: Jerome Bertram with rubbings of other plates from the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London overlaid. Fig. 7.15 Group of children from the brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501). Photograph: Martin Stuchfield. Fig. 7.16 Remains of brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1490. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 8.1 Rubbing of brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398), St Botolph’s, Boston. Fig. 8.2 Rubbing of brass to Simon Seman (d. 1433), Barton-upon-Humber (Lincolnshire). Fig. 8.3 Pescod Hall, now in the centre of Boston’s Pescod Square shopping development. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 8.4 Remains of Pescod Hall in the 1850s. Engraving from P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston. Fig. 8.5 Patent for the guild of SS Peter and Paul, Boston (TNA: C66/344, m. 23). Reproduced by permission of The National Archives. Fig. 8.6 Engraving of lost brass to Thomas of Woodstock (d. 1397), Westminster Abbey. Engraving by Francis Sandford, Genealogical History of the kings and queens of England, and monarchs of Great Britain. Fig. 9.1 Lithographs of both Boston effigies and tomb-chests, published in 1842. Fig. 9.2 Military effigy at Boston, c.1450/60. Photograph: Mark Downing. Fig. 9.3 Detail of Boston military effigy, c.1450/60. Photograph: Mark Downing. Fig. 9.4 Effigy at Abergavenny (Monmouth), c.1450. Photograph: Mark Downing. Fig. 9.5 Effigy at Burley-on-the-Hill (Leicestershire), c.1461. Photograph: Mark Downing. Fig. 9.6 Effigy at Cheadle (Cheshire), attributed to Sir Richard Bulkeley (d. 1454). Photograph: Mark Downing. Fig. 9.7 Effigy at Tong (Shropshire), attributed to Sir Richard Vernon (d. 1456). Photograph: Mark Downing. Fig. 9.8 Female effigy at Boston, c.1450/60. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 9.9 Detail of female effigy at Boston, c.1450/60. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 9.10 Effigy at Willoughby-on-the-Wolds (Nottinghamshire), c.1450. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 10.1 Moule’s map of Boston, 1839. Fig. 10.2 Antiquarian print of St Botolph’s church and the grand sluice bridge on the River Witham, demonstrating how the church tower dominates the town and the surrounding countryside. Fig. 11.1 Brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398). Fig. 11.2 Detail of brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398). Fig. 11.3 Two rubbings of fragment of marginal inscription from brass to a member of the Walsoken family. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 11.4 Brass to John Strensall (d. 1408). Rubbing: Derrick Chivers. Fig. 11.5 Detail of brass to John Strensall (d. 1408). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.6 Lost brass to John Nutting and his wife Agnes (d. 1420). Rubbing: Jerome Bertram with rubbings of other plates from the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London overlaid. Fig. 11.7 Brass to Thomas Gull (d. 1420). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.8 Section of inlay from brass to Thomas Gull (d. 1420). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.9 Brass to Richard Frere (d. 1424). Rubbing: Derrick Chivers. Fig. 11.10 Brass to Richard Frere (d. 1424). Rubbing: Sally Badham. Fig. 11.11 Rectangular plate with effaced figure, c.1425. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.12 Lost brass to Thomas Flete (d. 1450) with rubbing of lost inlay inserted. Photograph: Martin Stuchfield. Fig. 11.13 Palimpsest reverse of lost figure to Alice Flete. Fig. 11.14 Brass to unknown person, ?c.1450. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.15 Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Mark. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 11.16 Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Matthew. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 11.17 Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Matthew. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 11.18 Brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1470. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 11.19 Remains of brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1490. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.20 Inlay of children from brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1490. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.21 Indent to Athelard Bate (d. 1501) and family. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.22 Group of sons from brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501). Photograph: Martin Stuchfield. Fig. 11.23 Disjointed fragments of brasses. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.24 Indent with cross, c.1400. Photograph: Tim Sutton.

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Fig. 11.25 Indent of unknown priest, c.1420. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.26 Indent with figures on rectangular plate, c.1425. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.27 Indent of unknown civilian and wives, c.1430. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.28 Indent with cross and kneeling figures, c.1425. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.29 Indent of unknown civilian and wife, c.1480. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.30 Indent probably commemorating John Dale (d. 1482). Rubbing: Janet Whitham. Fig. 11.31 Indent probably commemorating John Dale (d. 1482). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.32 Angels and souls from indent probably commemorating John Dale (d. 1482). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.33 Indent commemorating Roger Shavelock and wife Joan (d. 1488). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.34 Indent commemorating Alan Lamkin (d. 1498). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.35 Chalice indent commemorating unknown priest, c.1500. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.36 Indent to unknown person, c.1500. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.37 Indent of unknown person, c.1500. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.38 Indent of unknown priest, c.1500. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.39 Indent to an unknown person, c.1500. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.40 Indent to an unknown civilian and wife, c.1510. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.41 Indent to an unknown knight or esquire and wife, c.1510. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.42 Indent of unknown civilian and wife, c.1520. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.43 Indent of brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.44 Detail of indent of brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.45 Indent of brass to John Robinson (d. 1525). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.46 Details of indent of brass to John Robinson (d. 1525). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.47 Indent of unknown lady, c.1525. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.48 Indent probably commemorating John Leeke (d. 1527). Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.49 Indent to unknown civilian and wife, c.1530. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.50 Indent to unknown lady, c.1535. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.51 Indent of indeterminate date to unknown person. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.52 Slab of civilian and wife with inlays of heads, hands and inscription, c.1325–30. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.53 Inlays of heads and hands, c.1325-30. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.54 Inlays of heads and hands of male civilian figure, c.1325–30. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.55 Slab of civilian and wife, c.1325–30. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.56 Lower half of slab with man’s footrest and canopy shaft bases, c.1325–30. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.57 Slab of civilian with inlays for head, hands and inscription, c.1330–40. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.58 Base of canopy shaft on civilian slab, c.1330–40. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.59 Recessed areas of head and hands for ?mastic inlays on civilian slab, c.1330–40. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.60 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, c.1340–50? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.61 Detail of slab with recessed head and hands of female figure, mastic? inlays lost, c.1340–50? Fig. 11.62 Inscription detail of lower right-hand corner of slab, c.1340–50? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.63 Slab of the lower part of an effigy showing drapery, c.1325–40. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.64 Slab of civilian and wife with heads, hands, inscription, sword, cross and saints once inlaid, c.1325– 40. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.65 Detail of slab with the recessed head of the lady, brass inlay lost c.1325–40. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.66 Detail of slab c.1325–40 with recessed areas of cross, saints and the heads of the effigies, inlays lost. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.67 Detail of slab c.1325–40 with recessed area of the sword hilt, inlays lost. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.68 Cross slab indent in slab of Tournai marble, c.1325, St Mary’s, Barton-on-Humber (Lincolnshire). Photograph: Cameron Newham. Fig. 11.69 Rubbing of slab to priest c.1330–40, now lost or covered (Society of Antiquaries, Greenhill collection, 1929). Fig. 11.70 Rubbing of slab to priest c.1330–40, now covered or lost, by R.H. Edleston (1933). Fig. 11.71 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, c.1325–40? Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.72 Detail of the matrix of the male head with undercutting for the composition inlay. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.73 Detail of the matrix of the marginal brass fillet showing dowels and rivets. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.74 Slab of priest with inlaid head, chalice, hands and feet, c.1325–40? Photograph: Paul Cockerham.

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Fig. 11.75 Detail of rivet and lead plug in matrix of the head, c.1325–40? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.76 Upper part of slab of priest c.1325–40 with details of marginal fillet to upper left corner. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.77 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and subsidiary figures above, c.1330–40? Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.78 Detail of three subsidiary figures, c.1330–40? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.79 Head and hands of the female figure showing repair to the stone, c.1330–40? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.80 Nineteenth-century impression of the indent of the head of the female figure with the inlaid brass hands in situ, c.1330–40. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 11.81 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1325–40? Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.82 Slab of civilian and two wives(?) with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1325–40? Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.83 Detail of the heads and hands with indent for a small brass inscription plate, c.1325–40? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.84 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1325–40? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.85 Detail of the matrix of the lady’s head and hands, c.1325–40? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.86 Priest in mass vestments with various inlays, c.1325–40. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.87 Upper half of slab with priest in mass vestments with various inlays, c.1325–40. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.88 Rubbing of the slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340). Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London. Fig. 11.89 Detail of the slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340). Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.90 Slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340). Fig. 11.91 Detail of the slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340). Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.92 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1340–50? Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.93 Upper half of the slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, c.1340–50? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.94 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1350? Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.95 Upper part of slab of civilian and wife, c.1350? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.96 Lower part of slab of civilian and wife with thick marginal fillet, c.1350? Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.97 Priest in mass vestments with various inlays, c.1360–70. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.98 Detail of canopy engraving by shoulder of priest in mass vestments, c.1360–70. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.99 Civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1350–60. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.100 Detail of slab of a civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1350–60. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.101 Detail of slab of a civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1350–60. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.102 Slab of a civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1360–70. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.103 Head of male civilian showing lead plugs originally for brass inlay, c.1360–70. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.104 Hands of male civilian showing lead plug and brass rivet originally for brass inlay, c.1360–70. Photograph: Paul Cockerham. Fig. 11.105 Cross slab, c.1180–1220. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.106 Cross slab, c.1120–40. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.107 Cross slab, c.1300–50. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.108 Cross slab, c.1300–50. Drawing: Lawrence Butler. Fig. 11.109 Tomb monument to unknown man, c.1450. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.110 Detail of effigy to unknown man, c.1450. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.111 Tomb monument to unknown woman, c.1450. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 11.112 Detail of effigy to unknown woman, c.1450. Photograph: Tim Sutton. Fig. 12.1 Sample page from the 1983 notebook, showing thumbnail sketches. Brian and Moira Gittos. Fig. 12.2 Tower floor plan of St Botolph’s showing location of the slabs. Brian and Moira Gittos. Fig. 12.3 Consolidated floor plan of the nave of St Botolph’s with the piers blocked out. Brian and Moira Gittos.

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ABBREVIATIONS AASRP Associated Architectural Societies Reports and Papers AJ

The Antiquaries Journal

ArchJ

Archaeological Journal

BL

British Library

CChR

Calendar of Charter Rolls

CClR

Calendar of Close Rolls

CFR

Calendar of Fine Rolls

CIMisc

Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous

CIPM

Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem

CLR

Calendar of Liberate Rolls

CLRO

City of London Record Office

CPR

Calendar of Patent Rolls

CPapL

Calendar of Papal Letters

CPapPet

Calendar of Papal Petitions

CSP

Calendar of State Papers

GLL

Guildhall Library, London

JBAA

Journal of the British Archaeological Association

LAO

Lincolnshire Archives Office

LHA

Lincolnshire History and Archaeology

LRS

Lincoln Record Society

MBSB

Monumental Brass Society Bulletin

MBST

Monumental Brass Society Transactions

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

SAL

Society of Antiquaries of London

TNA

The National Archives

ix

x

Acknowledgments Many people have contributed to this volume in various ways and without their help it would be very much the poorer. Chief among these individuals are those who were speakers at the Monumental Brass Society ‘Study Day’ at Boston in May 2009, all of whom agreed to produce extended written versions of their papers for this book. In addition, others have added contributions on new aspects of medieval Boston, its church and its remarkable collection of medieval tomb monuments; the authors’ individual acknowledgements are at the end of each chapter. We are also grateful to Tim Sutton, Martin Stuchfield, Cameron Newham and John Goodall for allowing their photographs to be used for this study. Through the good offices of Derrick Chivers we have been able to illustrate important antiquarian rubbings of Boston brasses and incised slabs in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London. William Lack has kindly provided illustrations of rubbings of other brasses. Judith White has assisted in sourcing the wills from The National Archives used for the database for analyses of Boston testators. Tony Carr has done us a great service in expertly indexing this complex volume. The clerical, lay staff and volunteers of St Botolph’s church, Boston, especially Ernie Napier, have been unfailingly helpful and courteous throughout many individual and group visits, enabling us to study and photograph all the monuments at our leisure. Finally, we would also like to express our gratitude to the Francis Coales Charitable Foundation and the Lincoln Record Society for generous grants which enabled this book to be illustrated in colour, and to Dr Kate Giles and Prof. Richard Marks who enthusiastically supported our applications to these bodies. Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham

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Chapter 1 Introduction by Sally Badham [and now] much lande longgith to this society. The stepil being quadrata turris, and a lanterne on it, is both very hy and faire, and a marke bothe by se and lande for all the quarters thereaboute. There is a goodly fonte, wherof part is of white marble, or of stone very like to it. [There] be 3. colleges of Freres, Gray, [Blake] and Augustines.3 There ys al[so an hos]pital for poore men, and yn the [towne, or] nere to it the late Lorde Hus[e had a] place with a stone toure.4 Al the bu[ilding] of this side of the toune is fa[yre], and marchauntes duelle yn it; and [a staple] of wulle is usid there. There is [a bridg] of wood to cum over Lindis ynto [this part] of the toune, and a pile of stone [set yn] the myddle of the river. The streame wherof is sumtymes as suifte as it we[re an arow]. On the west side of Lindis is one lon[g strete], and on the same side is the White [Freres]. The mayne se ys vi. miles of Bost[on. Dyvers good shipps and othar vessels ryde there.]5

1.1 John Leland’s view of Boston For those who study churches and their contents, John Leland is one of the unsung heroes of the sixteenth century.1 Born in the opening years of the century, he saw monasteries and churches before they were damaged or destroyed during the Reformation. When orphaned he was adopted by Thomas Myles and educated at St Paul’s school and Christ’s College, Cambridge, following which he was ordained deacon. As a result of time spent in Oxford and Paris, by 1530 he was acquainted with some of the most famous scholars of his day and had connections with the libraries then housed in the royal palaces at Westminster, Hampton Court and Greenwich. Henry VIII conferred on him the title of ‘Royal Antiquary’, an office which he was the only person to hold. In 1533 Leland received a commission from the king to search monastic and collegiate libraries for forgotten ‘monuments of ancient writers’. During the period to 1543 he travelled extensively throughout England and Wales, in the course of which he amassed a wealth of notes in support of his antiquarian and topographical researches. His ‘Itinerary of the years 1535–43’, which has appeared in several editions, provides an invaluable insight into pre-Reformation England therefore. His architectural knowledge was slight, but he took an interest in the people commemorated by the more important church monuments and added some personal impressions of the places he visited. His main account of Boston is so full and informative that he can perhaps be accounted the earliest historian of Boston. He wrote:

Elsewhere he records the town’s past glory: Mr. Paynel a gentilman of Boston tolde me that syns that Boston of olde tyme at the great famose fair there kept was brent that scant syns it ever cam to the old glory and riches that it had: yet sins hath it beene manyfold richer than it is now.6

Boptolpstoune stondith harde on the river of Lindis. The greate and chifiest parte of the toune is on the este side of the ryver, where is a faire market place and a crosse with a square toure. The chife paroche chirche was at S. John’s, where yet is a chirch for the toune.2 S. Botolph’s was but a chapel to it. But now it is so risen and adournid that it is the chifiest of the toune, and for a paroche chirche the beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire, and servid so with singging, and that of cunning men, as no paroche is in al England. The society and bretherhodde [longging] to this chirch hath caussid this,

3

Friars differ from monks in that they are called to live the evangelical counsels (vows of poverty, chastity and obedience) in service to a community, rather than through cloistered asceticism and devotion. Whereas monks live cloistered away from the world in a self-sufficient community, friars are supported by donations or other charitable support. There were four orders of friars. The Dominicans, founded c.1216, were also known as the Friars Preachers, or the Black Friars, from the black mantle (cappa) worn over their white habit. The Franciscans, founded by St Francis of Assisi in 1209, were also known as the Friars Minor or the Grey Friars. The Carmelites received papal approval in 1226 and were known as the White Friars because of the white cloak which covered their brown habit. The Augustinians, founded in 1244, were also known as the Austin Friars. Their rule is based on the writings of Augustine of Hippo. 4 This refers to Hussey Tower, situated on the east side of St John’s Street. It is believed to have been built in 1460 by Richard Berryngton, collector of custom in Boston and in 1489 was called ‘Richard Benyngton Toure’; P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), p. 243, n. 1. It was owned by the Hussey family 1475– 1537. It is one of the earliest brick-built buildings in Lincolnshire, other notable early examples being the Boston Guildhall of c.1390 and Tattershall castle, built between 1434 and 1446 for Ralph, third Lord Cromwell. 5 Toulmin Smith, Leland, 5, pp. 33–34. 6 This refers to St Botolph’s fair, which by 1353 ran for seventy-one days from June to August; see pp. 8–9. By Leland’s time the wealth of the town no longer depended on the fair as it did in the thirteenth century.

1 L. Toulmin Smith, The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 5 vols (London, 1964 edn), 1, foreword by J. Kendrick, unpaginated. 2 Little is known about the architecture of St John’s church, which was located on the east side of the river off the present St John’s Street. It was re-built in 1583 but demolished in 1626, the materials being used to repair St Botolph’s church; P. Thompson, Collections for a topographical and historical account of Boston and the hundred of Skirbeck in the county of Lincoln (London, 1820), p. 200. Linda Monkton argues persuasively that the statement that St John’s was the main church in the town and St Botolph’s merely a chapel is very likely erroneous; see pp. 31–32.

1

Introduction

Fig. 1.1 St Botolph’s church tower from the new footbridge over the River Witham. 2

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments The staple and stiliard houses yet there remayne: but the stiliard is little or nothing at alle occupied.7 There were iiii. colleges of Freres Marchauntes of the Stiliard cumming by all partes by est were wont greatly to haunt Boston: and the grey freres toke them yn a manor for the founders of their house, and many Esterlinges were buried there.8 In the Blake Freres lay one of the noble Huntingfeldes, and was a late taken up hole, and a leaden bulle of Innocentius Bisshop of Rome about his nek. Ther lay also in the Gray Freres of the Mountevilles gentilmen, and a vi. or vii. of the Withams gentilmen also. There remainith at Boston a manor place of the Tilneys by their name: and one of them began the great steple in Boston.9 And again: The Esterlinges to kept a great house and course of marchaundice at Boston ontylle such tyme that one Humfrey Litlebyri, marchaunt of Boston, did kille one of the Esterlinges there about Edward the 4. dayes; wherapon rose much controversie: so that at the laste the Esterlinges left their course of marchaundise to Boston, and syns the towne sore decayed. One Mawde Tiley layid the first stone of the goodly steple of the paroche chirch of Boston, and lyith buried under. The Tylneys were taken for founders of 3. of the 4. howses of freres of Boston.10

1.2 Medieval Boston Imagine a June day in the early 1390s. The Haven is crowded with ships, both those that ply their trade at other east and south coast ports, including Hull, Lynn and London, and heavier shipping from the Hanseatic ports of northern Europe. Due to leave port that day are the ships of Ludekin vander Heit, John Ardern, Peter Dore, and John Godpenye – just some of their names suggest an inherent internationalism.11 The first of these vessels carries mainly cloth, worth nearly £650, on which subsidy of £16 3s 9d is due. The other ships are smaller with more varied cargoes, although Godpenye’s load includes twenty-seven images and two ‘petre alabaustre’ [alabaster sculptures / devotional image tablets] valued at 76s 6d. It is a busy time for William Beale, the newlyappointed customs collector, who served alongside Philip Gernon; unlike his predecessors he is not a local man but a royal clerk and remains aloof from the local mercantile community, choosing not to join even the prestigious Corpus Christi guild.12 There is a steady stream of carts on the roads into the town, many piled high with this year’s clip of Lindsey wool, the highest quality of English wool apart from Cotswold, and a source of substantial income to the region.13 The town is thronged with people, not just locals, for accents from different regions of England and foreign tongues can be heard. Merchants from many parts of England and the Continent have come to participate in the highly profitable and large-scale export in wool. In return they have brought a wide range of luxury and other goods, including fine cloth, wine, furs, wax, timber, spices, dried fruit, pottery, glass and, even falcons, from Germany, the Low Countries, France, Spain, and Portugal, to Boston to be traded at St Botolph’s fair, held in the Market Place.14 The ringing of church bells can be heard, not just from St Botolph’s, but also from St John’s at the other end of town and the churches of the four friaries. In the Franciscan friary church near the town Quay in South End, a pair of German merchants pause at the incised grave slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh from Munster.15 They had not known him, for he died fifty years earlier, but they offer up a prayer for his soul, partly out of piety and partly in sympathy for a fellow countryman who died far from his family and home. St Botolph’s church is a hive of activity. Recently completed building work involved the extension eastwards by a further two bays of the chancel and sixtyfour choir stalls complete with fine misericords have just been installed. The tower and lantern had yet to be built and the interior also looked very different then, compartmentalised and full of colour. The sunlight

The picture Leland created is very different from modernday Boston. Many of the buildings he saw have disappeared, including the four friaries, St John’s church and the Steelyard. The rich religious life of the town is a thing of the past. St Botolph’s fair, on which the wealth of the town largely depended, is also consigned to history. The great families he mentions – the Tilneys, Husseys, Mountevilles and Withams – have died out. Modern-day Boston is a small, sleepy market town, with little of its industrial enterprises having survived into this century, and is nowadays chiefly of importance as a shopping centre for its rich agricultural hinterland. Almost alone of the landmarks of Leland’s Boston, St Botolph’s remains as a testament in stone to Boston’s glory days. It is the tallest parish church tower in the world, with a height of 83m. The nave is 74m long and 32m wide, larger than many cathedrals. It is referred to fondly by locals as ‘The Stump’, apparently because the tower was originally intended to be topped by a spire but the Pilgrimage of Grace put paid to this (Fig. 1.1).

11 S.H. Rigby (ed.), The overseas trade of Boston in the reign of Richard II, LRS 93 (Lincoln, 2005), pp. 108–09. 12 Rigby, Overseas trade, pp. 248–49. 13 N. Saul, ‘The wool merchants and their brasses’, MBST 17 (2006), pp. 315–35, at p. 320. 14 The fair was not as important in the 1390s as it had been a century earlier and a degree of ‘poetic licence’ has been indulged in here; for a more strictly accurate picture of the fair in the 1390s see p. 9 below. 15 The slab was excavated from the site of the friary church around 1813 and eventually relaid in St Botolph’s. It was moved within the church in 2009 to the chapel of SS Peter and Paul.

7

Steelyard: the community of the German hanse, or merchants’ guild, which would have had its own warehouses and residential quarters. 8 Easterlings: a term used by the English to describe the traders and others from the Baltic coast. 9 Toulmin Smith, Leland, 4, pp. 114–15. 10 Toulmin Smith, Leland, 4, pp. 181–82. In chapter 3, Linda Monkton demonstrates that the story that Maude Tilney laid the first stone of the tower of St Botolph’s is inconsistent with the architectural evidence.

3

Introduction streaming through the windows catches the colours of the stained and painted glass and projects patches of colour on the gravestones on the floor of the nave, which is totally bare - without pews or other forms of seating. Many of these gravecovers are Flemish-made incised slabs with inlays of brass, white marble or composition and there are some locally-carved cross slabs as well, but most new burials, especially those commemorating merchants, are now covered by monumental brasses, made either here in Boston or in London. Wall paintings of biblical scenes add more colour and interest, and there are many images of saints, all brightly painted to give the impression of a living person. They are surrounded by flickering lights and the donations, including jewelled objects of precious metal, of the Christian faithful. In the chancel, the domain of the clergy, Mass is reaching its most sacred climax. Incense scents the air and the choir sings the last notes of a polyphonic chant. The Sanctus Bell rings and the congregation presses closer to the Rood screen to gain a glimpse through the openings in the upper part, of the priest, John Strensall, elevating the Host.16 The carved images of the Crucifixion on the Rood screen remind them that Christ died so that they should be saved. The Doom painting above the chancel arch depicting the Last Judgement, with its vivid scenes of hell, adds fervour to their prayers.17 Other Masses are being held in the guild chapels which are selectively partitioned off from the nave and aisles with wooden panelling and arcading. In the north aisle in the chapel of the guild of SS Peter and Paul, the elderly rich merchant and former constable of the Boston staple, Walter Pescod, views with satisfaction the rich furnishings and fittings of the guild of which he is a benefactor.18 One day he will be buried here under a splendid brass ordered from the most prestigious marblers in London, but for the present his thoughts flit to the preparations being made in his home, Pescod Hall, in the north-east part of the town, for guests who will be arriving later that day.19 In the chapel of the guild of Corpus Christi, the widow of John Nutting prays for the soul of her husband who died over ten years ago.20 His grave is still unmarked, but an annual obit is said for him in September and she or their heirs will ensure that on her death they will be commemorated in some style. Elsewhere in the church Mary, Lady Roos, is examining with approval the marble stone commemorating Lady Margaret de Orby, her grandmother; in her will of 1394 Lady Roos is to specify that her own monument in Rievaulx (Yorkshire) should be made to the same design, but she is, of course, oblivious to the fact that both will have been destroyed within 200 years.21

In South End visitors to the town are admiring the newly built Guildhall of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is certainly designed to impress, being built of high-status brick and roofed with timbers from the Baltic. Despite its narrow frontage, it is spacious, running the full 71m depth of the plot on which it is built.22 There are various rooms on the ground floor, including parlour, kitchen and chapel. This last has an alabaster altarpiece depicting the Doom and two images of St Mary. The most impressive room is the dining hall on the first floor which has stained glass in the windows and is illuminated by five candelabra with hanging ‘lily pots’ symbolic of the Annunciation of the Virgin, the guild’s patroness. Fourteen long trestle tables and forms are set along the north and south sides of the hall, ready to be covered by table cloths many yards in length and then set ready for a feast.23 There are other guildhalls in the town, but this one outshines them all. Although the scene set out above is an imaginary one, with an indulgence of poetic licence as to dates, the places and people mentioned are all real. St Botolph’s, with its tower and lantern a landmark for miles around, survives to the present day, as does the Guildhall. Pescod Hall was re-built c.1450 and in the later twentieth century was moved to Pescod Square in the centre of the town, where it is now a boutique. Echoes of the demolished St John’s church, the friaries and the other guildhalls remain in street names. Yet this lost Boston can be vividly brought back to life through the research carried out by the contributors to this volume. 1.3 Previous studies of Lincolnshire and Boston Few English counties have been as badly served by historians and antiquaries as has Lincolnshire. Only four sets of manuscript notes were ever written by antiquaries on the churches of the county. The best known are those compiled by Gervase Holles between 1634 and 1648 (BL, Harley MS. 6829). 24 His information appears to have been based on notes compiled by an as yet unidentified antiquary, formerly thought to be Francis Thynne (c.1545–1608), who visited the area between 1603 and 1605 (BL, Add. MS. 36295).25 These are invaluable sources for any study of the monuments of St Botolph’s church. The notes of William Monson, written between 1828 and 1840, are in contrast of only limited value.26 Of similar date, but of greater value for the study of Boston’s monuments are the church notes and drawings made by Thomas Kerrich.27 22 K. Giles and J. Clark, ‘St. Mary’s guildhall, Boston (Lincs): the archaeology of a medieval “public” building’, forthcoming. 23 The furnishings are described in a 1533 inventory, although many must be much later than the 1390s. 24 Holles’ notes were published as R.E.G. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by Gervase Holles A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (Lincoln, 1911). 25 For the disassociation of Thynne with this manuscript, see A.V.B. Norman, ‘The effigy of a knight at Halton Holgate, Lincolnshire’, Church Monuments Society Newsletter 4.2 (1989), pp. 18–19; and P. Hebgin-Barnes, The medieval stained glass of the county of Lincolnshire (Oxford, 1996) p. xxiv. I am grateful to Julian Luxford for his observations on the authorship of the notes. 26 John, ninth Lord Monson (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by William John Monson, F.S.A. 1828–1840, LRS 31 (Lincoln, 1936). 27 BL, Add. MS. 6732, church notes of Thomas Kerrich, early 19th century,

16

For John Strensall, see p. 107 below. No evidence of the rood screen or any wall paintings survives at St Botolph’s, but what is described here was commonplace in medieval English churches. 18 For Walter Pescod, see chapter 8 below. 19 Thompson, Boston, p. 222. 20 For John Nutting’s lost brass see pp. 111–12 below. 21 J. Ward (ed.), Women of the English nobility and gentry 1066–1500 (Manchester, 1995), p. 223. 17

4

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the era of the scholarly, multi-volume county history on which so much modern research still depends, but no such study was ever published for Lincolnshire. Nor has the magnificent Victoria County History enterprise proceeded beyond a single volume on the county. The part of Holland, in which Boston lies, is to an extent better served than the other two parts of the county however. Wheeler’s History of the Fens of south Lincolnshire,28 has a promising title, but is written from the perspective of an engineering drainage expert, so is narrow in focus. Memorials of old Lincolnshire, is an eclectic collection of essays, albeit one of them taking as its subject Boston and its church, and another, the monumental brasses of Lincolnshire.29 The History of Lincolnshire project launched in 1966 by the Lincolnshire Local History Society has published a series of twelve volumes which aim to be scholarly but equally are of general interest, and cover the history of the region from pre-historic times until the 1960s. Owen’s excellent study of church and society in medieval Lincolnshire provides a useful background to the subject of this edited volume, although Boston inevitably features only in passing.30 The town and environs of Boston have probably attracted more attention than the whole of the rest of Lincolnshire, apart from Lincoln. Between 1820 and 1930 a handful of monographs were published on the town and its parish church, the chief of which, and still the standard work, being Pishey Thompson’s History and antiquities of Boston published in 1856.31 This is invaluable for a general history of the church, but has relatively little to say on the architecture and church monuments. In the late 1960s, the History of Boston project was launched, resulting in a diverse series of pamphlets, the most relevant of which to the present study is Wheeldon’s Monumental brasses in St Botolph’s church, Boston.32 This lists and describes briefly the incised slabs as well as the effigial brasses and indents. It is an invaluable guide to what then survived in the church, but sadly there have been losses since. From the 1980s onwards the economic history of the town has been the subject of a stream of publications by Stephen Rigby.33 Nonetheless, nothing more has been published on the church. It is evident from

this survey of the literature that an up-to-date scholarly review of Boston, St Botolph’s church and its monuments is badly needed. 1.4 Background to the current volume This volume results from a well attended ‘Study-Day’ organised at Boston by the Monumental Brass Society in May 2009 and forming part of the programme to celebrate St Botolph’s 700th anniversary. In addition to the papers presented on the day, others have been specially commissioned to give a thorough overview of the town in the later Middle Ages, the architectural history of St Botolph’s, the religious guilds which played such an important part of the lives of the townsfolk and, above all, the monuments. To this has been added a detailed illustrated catalogue of the medieval monuments. The various contributions show that the floor of St Botolph’s church is one of the most important parish church floors in England, and has been relatively undisturbed since the medieval period. Its monuments and their locations have never previously been recorded comprehensively. The brasses are from different production workshops (London and regional); many are fragmentary and have not been properly accounted for. Identification and attribution of the extensive number of brasses and indents, from antiquarian evidence, has led to further conclusions about the workshops that produced the lost brasses, as well as establishing a number of links between the patronage and location of monuments and their relation to the important guild network in the town. The incised effigial slabs at Boston comprise approximately one quarter of the entire number of slabs and brasses (both lost and extant) which were imported into the British Isles from Flanders in the 14th century. They are a critical but little known archaeological resource in a consideration of this Hanseatic-related trade.34 To these floor monuments must be added two effigies on tombchests and three cross-slab grave covers, the latter pre-dating the current building and thus the earliest monuments to survive in the church. The core of this volume is thus intended as an academic, yet accessible, study of the medieval monuments of Boston parish church, highlighting them as a unique collection of such artefacts. They are unique not just because of their survival, but even more importantly because many have remained in their original locations in the church floor. And they are unique yet again because of the enormous number of Flemish-made slabs which survive and which were commissioned specifically by Boston merchants using their trade links with that region.

28

W.H. Wheeler, History of the Fens of south Lincolnshire (2nd edn London, 1896). 29 E.M. Sympson (ed.), Memorials of old Lincolnshire (London, 1911). 30 D.M. Owen, Church and society in medieval Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire 5 (repr. Lincoln, 1981). 31 Thompson, Collections; [T. Marton], Descriptive and historical account of St Botolph’s church, Boston (Boston, 1842); Thompson, Boston; G. Jebb, A guide to the church of S. Botolph with notes on the history and antiquities of Boston and Skirbeck (3rd edn Boston, 1921); M.R. Lambert and R. Walker, Old Boston (England) (Boston, Massachusetts, 1930). 32 J. Wheeldon, Monumental brasses in St Botolph’s church, Boston, History of Boston Series 9 (Boston, 1973). 33 S.H. Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby in the middle ages’ (Unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1983); S.H. Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby in the middle ages: an administrative contrast’, Journal of Medieval History 10 (1984), pp. 51–66; S.H. Rigby, ‘The customs administration at Boston in the reign of Richard II’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (1985), pp. 12–24; S.H. Rigby, ‘“Sore decay” and “fair dwellings”: Boston and urban decline in the later middle ages’, Midland History 10 (1985), pp. 47–61; Rigby (ed.), Overseas trade of Boston.

34

5

See chapter 5.

Chapter 2 Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration by Stephen Rigby

Fig. 2.1 St Botolph’s stump viewed from the Town Quay (now South End) near the Guildhall.

When John Leland visited Boston around 1540, he judged St Botolph’s church to be ‘the best and fairest parish church in Lincolnshire’ (Fig. 2.1). Certainly, St Botolph’s, at this date, was one of the largest parish churches in all England.1 For the modern visitor to Boston, only the sheer scale of St Botolph’s hints at the town’s size, wealth and economic significance in the middle ages. Yet, in 1334, Boston’s tax-valuation made it the fifth richest town in England whilst at the time of the 1377 poll tax it was the tenth largest town in the country.2 In order to comprehend the development of St Botolph’s, of its architecture and monuments, we need to understand the history of medieval Boston, including its rise in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (sections 2.1 and 2.2, below) and the changes its trade underwent in the fourteenth century (sections 2.3 and 2.4). We also need to appreciate the nature

of Boston’s leading inhabitants in the later middle ages (section 2.5) and their part in the administration of the town (section 2.6). Finally, we need to examine the fortunes of the town in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (section 2.7). In particular, how accurate were the claims which John Leland made about Boston’s ‘sore decay’ and lost ‘glory and riches’ following his visit to the town?3 Did the later middle ages, the very period when Boston’s famous Stump was being constructed, witness the ruin of the town as a result of the collapse of its wool export trade or have historians simply been misled by the light remarks of a passing traveller?4 The survival of the records of the royal customs service and the lack of a borough archive for the period before the town’s incorporation in 1545 mean that we are much better informed about Boston’s overseas trade than about its craft

1 L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, parts 9–11, (London, 1910), p. 33; N. Pevsner and J. Harris, The buildings of England: Lincolnshire (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 463. 2 A. Dyer, ‘Ranking lists of English medieval towns’, in D.M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, volume 1 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 747–70, at pp. 755, 758.

3

Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, parts 7 and 8, pp. 114, 181. E.M. Carus-Wilson and O. Coleman, England’s export trade, 1275–1547 (Oxford, 1963), p. 32; A.R. Bridbury, Economic growth: England in the later middle ages (Brighton, 1975), p. 81; A.R. Bridbury, ‘English provincial towns in the later middle ages’, Economic History Review, second series 34 (1981), pp. 1–24, at p.1; J.A.F. Thomson, The transformation of medieval England (London, 1983), p. 49. 4

6

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 2.2 Plan of Boston c.1500. Reproduced with permission from G. Harden, Medieval Boston and its Archaeological Implications.

7

Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration London.9 It was in this period that the basic outline of Boston’s medieval topography was established. Boston benefitted from being sited on an island of higher land in an area prone to flooding at what was then the lowest bridging point of the River Witham.10 The centre of the town lay to the east of the bridge, which may have been built in 1142 at the same time as the sluice in the Witham (see below) and which was certainly in existence by the early thirteenth century. The road across the bridge led to St Botolph’s church, which was the only parish church in the town, and to the marketplace, the first reference to which comes in the early thirteenth century but which was probably founded far earlier.11 The eastern boundary of the town was defined by the Barditch, a ditch and bank, and this was in place by about 1160.12 Beyond the Barditch at the south end of the town, there was also the Hospital of St John with its own chapel. The hospital, which was in existence by 1218, was owned by St Mary’s abbey, York until 1480 when it passed into the hands of the Knights Hospitallers who, as we have seen, in that year also acquired the advowson of St Botolph’s.13 The growth of Boston in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was partly an expression of the commercialisation, monetarisation and urbanisation of the English economy – indeed of the European economy as a whole – in this period.14 Whilst national population may have doubled or trebled between Domesday Book and the start of the fourteenth century, the proportion of England’s inhabitants living in its towns increased even faster, from around 10% of the total in 1086 to 15% or even 20% by the early fourteenth century.15 This expansion in urbanisation was achieved not only by the growth of England’s existing

production, its role in retailing and local marketing or its administrative history. 5 Nevertheless, if the bulk of the town’s inhabitants were artisans, retailers and labourers, it was the wealth generated by its overseas trade which distinguished Boston from other market towns and which ultimately, provided much of the wealth which paid for the construction and furnishing of St Botolph’s. The history of the town’s trade in the late medieval period, when the present church was being built, can be divided into four main periods. First, at the start of the fourteenth century, the town had the pattern of trade which had come into being during its phenomenal rise in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Then, during the first half of the fourteenth century, the scale of this trade seems to have shrunk. Third, in the period after the Black Death, the town’s trade was revived and restructured. Finally, in the fifteenth century, this new pattern of trade itself went into decline until, by the early sixteenth century, Boston’s overseas trade was of minor significance. 2.1 The rise of medieval Boston The structure of Boston’s overseas trade in 1300 was the product of the growth of the port over the two previous centuries. Boston does not appear by name in Domesday Book (1086) and the earliest reference to the town comes in a charter of Count Alan of Brittany, lord of the honour of Richmond which, throughout the middle ages, was the owner of the main part of Boston which lay on the east side of the River Witham. For a plan of the town see Fig. 2.2. The charter, dating from between 1088 and 1093, grants property in Boston, including the church of ‘St Botulph’s’, to the Benedictine abbey of St Mary, York.6 The abbey retained the advowson of the church until Edward IV’s reign, when it was surrendered to the king who, in 1480, granted it to the Knights Hospitallers in return for property in Leicestershire. 7 Of the original parish church, nothing is now visible above ground although the foundations of what was identified as the Anglo-Norman church, which was approximately half the size of the current building, were uncovered during building work at St Botolph’s in the nineteenth century.8 Yet, if Boston scarcely existed at the time of Domesday Book, by the time of the duty of a fifteenth levied on overseas trade at the start of the thirteenth century it was second only to London amongst the ports of the south and east coasts. Indeed, when Lincoln’s payment is added to Boston’s, the value of the trade of these two Witham ports at this date was even greater than that passing through

9 D.M. Stenton (ed.), The great roll of the pipe for the sixth year of the reign of King John, Pipe Roll Society, new series 18 (1940), p. 218; T.H. Lloyd, The English wool trade in the middle ages (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 9–10. 10 A. Mattinson, ‘Topography and society in Boston, 1086–1400’, (Unpublished University of Nottingham M.Phil. thesis, 1996), pp. 12–19. 11 G. Harden, Medieval Boston and its archaeological implications (Sleaford, 1978), pp. 18–20; LAO: MCD 234, Deeds 212, 307, 413, 438, 624, 875. 12 D.M. Owen, ‘The beginnings of the port of Boston’, in N. Field and A. White (eds), A prospect of Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1984), pp. 42–45 at p. 43. See also LAO: 3 ANC 2/1. 13 W.P.W. Phillimore (ed.), Rotuli Hugonis de Welles, episcopi Lincolniensis, AD MCCIX–MCCXXXV, volume 1, LRS 3 (1912), pp. 115, 171–72; CPR, 1476–85, p. 235; N. Bennett (ed.), The register of Henry Burghersh, 1320–1342, volume 1, LRS 87 (1999), p. 86. Most of St John’s was demolished in 1584, leaving only the chancel, which was itself taken down in 1626; see P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), p. 242. For early charters to the hospital, see John Rylands University Library, Manchester, Latin MS. 221, fols 385, 394r, 394v. 14 S.H. Rigby, English society in the later middle ages: class, status and gender (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 63–80. For the effects - and limits - of commercialisation, see S.H. Rigby, ‘Social structure and economic change in late medieval England’, in R. Horrox and M. Ormrod (eds), Cambridge Social History of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 1–30, at pp. 23–29. 15 S.H. Rigby, ‘Urban population in late medieval England: the evidence of the lay subsidies’, Economic History Review 63 (2010), pp. 393–417, at p. 393.

5 S.H. Rigby (ed.), The overseas trade of Boston in the reign of Richard II, LRS 93 (2005), discusses the variety of records produced by the customs service. 6 C.W. Foster and T. Longley (eds), The Lincolnshire Domesday and the Lindsey survey, LRS 19 (1921), 12/67; W. Farrer (ed.), Early Yorkshire charters, volume 1 (Edinburgh, 1914), p. 265. 7 CPR, 1475–85, pp. 230, 241; CClR, 1476–85, pp. 215–16; 219; Rotuli parliamentorum, 6, pp. 210–15; G. O’Malley, The Knights Hospitaller of the English langue, 1460–1525 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 77, 139. 8 G. Jebb, A guide to the church of S. Botolph with notes on the history and antiquities of Boston and Skirbeck (Boston, 1896), p. 33.

8

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments towns but also by the creation of new ones and, amongst these new urban foundations, Boston was one of the most successful. Unfortunately, we do not have any sources for the town’s population in the pre-plague period which would allow us to trace its growth from the hamlet of 1086. At the time of the poll tax of 1377, Boston may have had around 5,500 inhabitants.16 However, some indication of Boston’s relative size in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when national population was at its peak, may be given by the extent of the area from which it drew the migrants which fuelled its growth. The place-name surnames listed in Boston’s 1327 and 1332 taxation rolls suggest a primary catchment area extending twenty-five miles from the town compared with seven miles for the villages and small market towns of Nottinghamshire, ten miles for Leicester, fifteen for Nottingham and Grimsby, twenty for Lincoln, Norwich, Winchester and York, twenty-five for Bristol and forty for London.17 Another indication of Boston’s importance in this period is the fact that it was one of only a dozen towns in England which had four friaries, all of which were founded in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.18 Of these four houses, only the partial remains of the town’s Dominican friary now stand above ground (Fig. 2.3).19 The growth of Boston in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was not simply an expression of the general commercialisation and urbanisation of the English economy in this period but, more specifically, was both a cause and an effect of the reclamation of the Holland Fens which took place during this period. If Domesday Book is to be believed, the Fenland in 1086 was one of the poorest and least populous areas of Lincolnshire. Yet, by the early fourteenth century, a ‘revolution in economic geography’ meant that the Fens were now one of the wealthiest and most densely populated areas in Lincolnshire, indeed in the whole of England.20 Pasture was an important element of

the agriculture of this newly-colonised area but it is not surprising that arable products dominated in the wapentake of Skirbeck itself, where the large and growing population of the town of Boston had to be fed. 21 Boston also benefitted from its situation as the outport for the city of Lincoln, thirty miles upstream and as the trans-shipment point where commodities were transferred between sea-worthy vessels and the river-going craft which carried goods to and from Lincoln. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, Lincoln stood behind only London, York and Winchester in its size and wealth and it was still the ninth richest English town in 1334 and the sixth largest in 1377.22 A jury at an inquisition of 1316 claimed that in 1142 Alan de Croun had built a sluice in the River Witham at Boston to improve the flow of the river, which was said to silt up through tidal flooding, and that this sluice had increased the flow of water from Lindsey, Holland and Kesteven to the sea.23 Even if this sluice did not cause the Witham to shift its main course to Boston, as Hallam suggested, it may well have improved the port there.24 Boston’s potential as a port had also been enhanced by the re-opening of the Foss Dyke in 1121.25 This Roman canal linked the Witham at Lincoln with the River Trent at Torksey and so placed Boston at the entrance to an important system of inland waterways, giving access to the Trent, the Humber and the Ouse, to Nottingham, York and Hull. Another key factor in the development of Boston in this period was the rise of St Botolph’s fair which was one of the largest and most important fairs in England at a time when the country’s trade was based on a succession of such wholesale marts.26 The earliest reference to the fair comes in the confirmation of Count Alan’s charter to St Mary’s abbey by Count Stephen of Brittany in the period 1125–35 (and probably after 1132) when the monks were given the right to take their profits in the time of the fair, both in and out of the churchyard at Boston.27 Before 1218, the fair lasted only a week, from St Botolph’s day to the Feast of St

16

Boston’s buoyancy in the period after the Black Death makes it difficult to use 1377 as a base-line from which to calculate its pre-plague population as its prosperity means that we cannot assume that any decline in the town’s population was necessarily in line with the fall in the national total. See below, sections 4 and 7. 17 TNA: E179/135/13; E179/135/14; S.H. Rigby, ‘Urban society in early fourteenth-century England: the evidence of the lay subsidies’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 72 (1990), pp. 169–84, at pp. 180–82. 18 The earliest reference to the Boston Franciscans comes in 1268, for which see Placitorum in domo capitulari Westmonasteriensi asservatorum abbreviatio (London, 1811), p. 176. The Dominicans were established in Boston by the time of the 1288 fire, which destroyed their friary (see references in note 29, below). The Carmelites were present in the town by 1293; see R.M.T. Hill (ed.), The rolls and register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280–1299, volume 4, LRS 52 (1958), pp. 113, 127–28. They were the only mendicants to have a house in Boston on the west side of the river although they may only have transferred their site there in 1307; CPapL, 2, p. 30; CPR, 1307–13, pp. 17, 149. Finally, the Austin friars built their friary in Boston around 1317; CPR, 1313–17, p. 607; CPR, 1317–21, pp. 79, 326; CClR, 1318–23, pp. 124–25. For the Boston friaries, see W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Lincoln, volume 2 (London, 1906), pp. 213–17. 19 For excavations at this site, see S. Moorhouse, ‘Finds from excavations in the refectory at the Dominican friary, Boston’, LHA 7 (1972), pp. 21–53. 20 H.C. Darby, The medieval fenland (Newton Abbot, 1974), pp.

141–42; S.H. Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby in the middle ages’ (Unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1983), p. 227; B.M.S. Campbell and K. Bartley, England on the eve of the Black Death: an atlas of lay lordship, land and wealth (Manchester, 2006), maps 18.5–18.16. 21 H.E. Hallam, Settlement and society: a study of the early agrarian history of south Lincolnshire (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 195–96. 22 Owen, ‘The beginnings of the port of Boston’, pp. 42–44; Dyer, ‘Ranking lists’, pp. 750–54, 755, 758. 23 LAO: Monson 7/27, fol. 1. 24 Hallam, Settlement and society, pp. 41, 105, 219; H.E. Hallam, The new lands of Elloe (Leicester, 1954), p. 4; Owen, ‘The beginnings of the port of Boston’, p. 43. For other suggestions about the early course of the Witham, see S.H. Miller and S.B.J. Skertchley, The Fenland past and present (London, 1878), pp. 180–81; Harden, Medieval Boston, pp. 5, 7. 25 T. Arnold (ed.), Symeonis Monachi opera omnia, volume 2, Rolls Series (London, 1885), p. 260. 26 CPR, 1232–47, p. 239. 27 C.T. Clay (ed.), Early Yorkshire charters, volume 4, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, extra series 1 (1935), p. 10; D.M. Smith (ed.), English episcopal acta, 1: Lincoln 1067-1185 (Oxford, 1980), no. 284.

9

Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration

Fig. 2.3 Remains of the Dominican friary (now an art centre), Spain Lane. John the Baptist (i.e. 17 to 24 June), but in this year it was extended for another eight days.28 Thereafter, Boston fair was gradually extended so that by 1232 the practice of merchants staying on in the town after the official end of the fair was said to be damaging of the fair at Lynn, which began in early July. By 1275 Boston fair was still open on 8 July whilst in 1288 the arson attack which burnt down the greater part of the fair, and which chroniclers claimed sent streams of molten gold and silver flowing into the sea, took place on 26 July. 29 By the early fourteenth century, merchants were said to be unsure of the dates of the fair and an inquisition into this issue in 1331 claimed that, in the previous year, the earl of Richmond had held the fair from 17 June to 13 October, although in earlier years, the fair had also ended on 24 August, 14 September or 29 September.30 Much of the prosperity of St Botolph’s fair and of the importance of Boston as a port can be explained by its role

in England’s wool export trade. The records of the royal customs, which survive from 1279, indicate that, at this date, Boston was the leading port for what was then England’s major export and Boston was the main fair involved in the wool trade.31 Landlords, such as the abbot of Chester, sold their own wool at the fair as did merchants of towns such as Leicester and many monastic houses possessed property in Boston so as to sell their wool and make their purchases at the fair.32 St Botolph’s fair was also often a delivery point for wool which had been purchased years in advance from landlords, such as the monks of Pipewell, Louth Park or Meaux, who also acted as middlemen for the peasant producers.33 England’s wool exports had grown rapidly in the twelfth century, based on the needs of the Flemish cloth industry.34 Up to the 1270s, Flemish merchants, from towns such as Bruges, Ypres and Douai, seem to have dominated the wool export trade.35 However, from the late 1270s,

28

31

CPR, 1216–25, p. 157; TNA: C66/18, m. 3. E.W. Moore, The fairs of medieval England (Toronto, 1985), pp. 11, 17; CPR, 1225–32, p. 488; CClR, 1272–79, p. 321; H.H.E. Craster and M.E. Thornton (eds), The chronicle of St Mary’s abbey, York, Surtees Society 148 (1933), p. 20; A. Gransden (ed.), The chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, 1212–1301 (London, 1964), p. 91; CPR, 1281–92, pp. 319, 329–30, 330, 397, 401–03, 439, 474; CClR, 1289–96, pp. 18, 61, 76, 86–87, 95, 105–06; CIPM, 5, p. 241; Rotuli parliamentorum, 1, p. 60; H.T. Riley (ed.), Thomae Walsingham Historia Anglicana, volume 1, Rolls Series (London, 1863), p. 30; J. R. Lumby (ed.), Chronicon Henrici Knighton, volume 1, Rolls Series (London, 1899), pp. 280–81. 30 CIPM, 2, 1221; TNA: C145/117/12.

Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 36–37; A.R. Bell, C. Brooks and P.R. Dryburgh, The English wool market, c.1230–1327 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 47–50, 56–58. 32 CPR, 1281–92, pp. 25, 70; M. Bateson (ed.), Records of the borough of Leicester, volume 1 (London, 1899), pp. 79–80, 94, 226; D.M. Owen, Church and society in medieval Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1971), p. 68; Moore, The fairs of medieval England, pp. 95, 152–53. 33 CClR, 1272–79, p. 321; TNA: SC1/10/116; Bell, Brooks and Dryburgh, The English wool market, pp. 47, 79, 82, 99. 34 Lloyd, The English wool trade, chapter 1. 35 Rotuli hundredorum, volume 1 (London, 1812), pp. 249, 259, 276, 308, 314–15, 321, 328, 333, 349, 353, 357, 384–86, 388, 390, 393–94.

29

10

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Italian merchants, particularly those of Florence and Lucca, took an increasing share of the trade. 36 Whilst Boston sometimes drew on the wool of the northern counties and of East Anglia, Hull and Lynn were the natural outlets for the wool of these regions. Wool exported through Boston thus came primarily from the Welsh borders and west Midlands (Flintshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire), although London was a rival here, and, above all, from the counties immediately west of the port: from Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Warwickshire and Nottinghamshire, as well as from Lincolnshire (Holland, Lindsey and Kesteven) itself.37 The evidence of the deliveries of wine purchased at Boston fair by the Crown produces a similar impression of the hinterland served by the port. Wine was imported through Boston from Anjou and from the Rhineland but, as in England as a whole, Gascony was the main source of wine sold at the fair in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.38 Boston fair was the main fair involved in the trade and it was here that the royal wine cellars in the north were stocked and where the magnates of the north made their wine purchases. The Gascons themselves, particularly the men of Bordeaux and Toulouse, dominated the trade at Boston, unlike that of the south- and west-coast ports where denizen merchants played a much greater role.39 Boston fair was also central to England’s cloth import trade. Much of this cloth was manufactured in Flanders from English wool. The men of Ypres and Douai loomed large in the trade and both had their own houses in Boston which acted as the centre of their dealings. However, a range of other types of cloth were also available at the fair, from hair shirts to silk and cloth of gold.40 Other merchants

from the Low Countries who attended the fair were from Holland, Zealand and Brabant, whilst from France came the woad dealers of Picard towns such as Amiens and Cambrai as well as Normans and Bretons from towns such as Caen. From further south, the Gascon wine importers were joined by merchants from towns such as Montpellier and Cahors and even merchants from Spain.41 Goods were also shipped to Boston from Scandinavia and eastern Europe with men from Gotland and Norway importing wax, furs and hawks.42 Increasingly, however, the Scandinavian and Baltic trades were dominated by the merchants of the Hanseatic League. Merchants from Cologne brought cloth and wine to Boston fair but the Cologne men mainly conducted their English trade through London. 43 It was the ‘Esterlings’, from towns such as Lübeck, Hamburg, Rostok, Wismar, Stralsund and Danzig, who were particularly prominent in Boston. 44 Leland reported that the Boston Greyfriars had taken the Hansards as their founders ‘in a manner’ and that many Esterlings were buried there.45 Hanseatic imports included wax, furs, fish oil and, above all, stockfish (i.e. dried cod) brought from the Hansard’s Bergen kontor.46 When the king wished to purvey fish, he sent to Yarmouth for herring but to Boston for stockfish.47 With their profits on these imports, foreign merchants purchased a variety of English commodities which were brought to the fair by men from a wide range of English towns. For instance, an assault on Flemish cloth merchants at Boston fair in 1240 involved merchants from Winchester, Beverley, York, Northampton, London, Oxford and Lincoln. 48 Cloth and clothing was sold by merchants, concerning the law merchant, 1239-1633, volume 2, Selden Society 46 (1930), pp. 65–66. 41 TNA: E101/126/25; CClR, 1302–07, pp. 14, 52, 152; H.T. Riley (ed.), Liber Albus: the White Book of the city of London (London, 1861), p. 361; CClR, 1227–31, p. 358; CPR, 1247–58, pp. 80, 371; CPR, 1258–66, p. 565; CPR, 1266–72, p. 386; CLR, 1245–51, pp. 193, 320; CLR, 1267–72, 1675; CClR, 1257–59, p. 56; CClR, 1302–07, p. 520; CClR, 1313–17, p. 52; Registrum honoris de Richmond, Appendix, p. 39; Rotuli litterarum clausarum in Turri Londinensi asservati, 1224–27 (London, 1844), p. 170; Rotuli hundredorum, volume 1, p. 386; Lloyd, The English wool trade, p. 259; TNA: C241/7, mm. 48–50, 55–58, 109, 110, 157, 160; C241/8, m. 352. 42 CLR, 1245–51, pp. 261, 273; CLR, 1260–67, p. 141; CClR, 1234–37, p. 423; CClR, 1242–47, p. 26; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, p. 184. 43 CClR, 1227–31, pp. 338, 367; CPR, 1232–37, p. 130; CLR, 1245–51, p. 366. 44 P. Dollinger, The German Hansa (London, 1964), p. 243. 45 Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, parts 7 and 8, p. 114. The incised grave-slab of Wisselmus de Smalenbergh of Münster, who died in Boston in 1340, was found on the site of the Franciscan friary in Boston and was moved to St Botolph’s Church in 1897; see Paul Cockerham’s account in chapter 5 and appendix 1. For links between the Franciscans and the Hansards, see M. Archer, The register of Bishop Philip Repingdon, volume 1, LRS 57 (1963), pp. 114–15; M. Robson, The Franciscans in the medieval custody of York, Borthwick Paper 93 (York, 1997), p. 26. 46 TNA: E122/5/9; E122/6/5; Fowler (ed.), Extracts from the account rolls of the abbey of Durham, volume 2, p. 532; CPR, 1324–27, p. 25, Moore, The fairs of medieval England, pp. 58–59. 47 CPR, 1338–40, p. 347. 48 Curia Regis Rolls, 1237–42, no. 1285; L.F. Salzman, ‘A riot at Boston fair’, The History Teachers’ Miscellany 6:1 (1928), p. 2 at p.2.

36

Lloyd, The English wool trade, pp. 25, 39; TNA: E101/126/73. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 40–41. 37 TNA: E101/126/7, mm. 13–23; F. Palgrave (ed.), Parliamentary writs, volume 1 (London, 1827), p. 396; CPR, 1338–40, pp. 30, 562, 563, 586; CPR, 1340–43, p. 538; CClR, 1337–39, pp. 507, 544; CClR, 1339–41, pp. 302, 358, 562, 563, 586; CClR, 1341–43, pp. 195, 429, 518; CClR, 1343–46, pp. 138–42, 145–46, 154–55, 192–94; Rotuli parliamentorum, 2, p. 396; A. Bell, C. Brooks and P. Dryburgh, Advance contracts for the sale of wool, c.1200–c.1327, List and Index Society 315 (2006), 2, 3, 5–18, 11, 14, 16, 24, 28, 35, 51, 61, 67, 87, 97, 110, 114, 133–34, 141, 145, 159, 161–62, 192, 206–14, 216–17, 221–22, 228. 38 Calendar of liberate rolls, 1226–72, 6 vols, passim, provides information on the destination of royal wine purchases. See also Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 183, 189–90, 194–95. 39 M. K. James, Studies in the medieval wine trade (Oxford, 1971), pp. 73, 101, Appendix 10; D. Oschinsky (ed.), Walter of Henley and other treatises on estate management and accounting (Oxford, 1971), p. 318; Moore, The fairs of medieval England, p. 54; CPR, 1247–58, p. 412; CClR, 1313–18, p. 560; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 182–83, 189. 40 Moore, The fairs of medieval England, pp. 29–35, 71–73; CLR,1245–51, pp. 320, 385; CLR, 1251–60, pp. 97, 384; CLR, 1260–67, pp. 162, 164; CLR, 1267–72, 1130; CPR, 1232–47, p. 480; CPR, 1272–81, p. 307; CClR, 1256–60, p. 98; Registrum honoris de Richmond (London, 1722), Appendix, p. 39; H.G. Richardson and G. Sayles (eds), Rotuli parliamentorum hactenus inediti, 1279–1373, Camden Society, third series 51 (1935), p.1; J.T. Fowler (ed.), Extracts from the account rolls of the abbey of Durham, volume 1, Surtees Society 99 (1898), pp. 495–96; Ibid., volume 2, Surtees Society 100 (1898), p. 495; I. Kershaw, Bolton priory: the economy of a northern monastery (Oxford, 1973), pp. 136–37, 148; H. Hall (ed.), Select cases

11

Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration mercers, drapers and tailors from towns such as Lincoln, Leicester, Northampton, Norwich, York, Beverley, Newcastle, Banbury, Colchester, Bury, and London, although the scale of exports of English cloth did not rival that of Flemish imports.49 Apart from wool and cloth, the other major English product available at the fair was Derbyshire lead. Lead was usually shipped to the north through Hull but also went southwards via Boston, where it was used in building works at the Tower of London, Westminster abbey, Westminster palace, Dover castle and Winchester.50 However, salt may have overshadowed lead in Boston’s export trade, if not at the fair itself.51 By 1300 Lincolnshire was the leading salt producing area of England and Boston was the pre-eminent port in the trade, being able to draw upon the product of the Norfolk salt-industry, as well as those of the Lindsey marshland and the Holland Fenland.52 Finally, in addition to wool, wine, cloth, salt, lead, wax, furs and fish, many other goods (both imported and home-produced) were available at the fair or were shipped through Boston. These included manufactured goods, such as the flasks, chests and knives bought by the Durham monks and brass pans and ‘batteryware’ from Dina.53 Other commodities dealt with at the fair or traded through Boston were building materials, including tin and steel for the castles of Wales and timber for Westminster abbey, foodstuffs (including English butter, cheese and grain) and a wide variety of spices, which featured, alongside cloths and furs, amongst the purchases made in Boston by the monks of Bolton Priory (Yorkshire).54 The

crowds of merchants and customers present at the fair also attracted prostitutes which, in 1291, led the bishop of Lincoln to forbid the letting of lodgings to ‘harlots’ in the time of the fair, under pain of excommunication.55 However, if most of our surviving sources for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries relate to Boston fair then, as the case of St Ives (Cambridgeshire) shows, a fair alone, even one as important as that of St Botolph, was not in itself sufficient to explain the rise of the town in this period. As we have seen, Boston also profited from the fact that it was the outport for Lincoln and was the major outlet for one of the wealthiest and most densely populated areas of England. The town was also the site of the only major English fair which was held at a port. Like Lynn, on the other side of the Wash, which was also founded in the late eleventh century, Boston benefitted from the advantage of being established early on in this process of urban expansion.56 The town must also have had a weekly market from its early days, even though the first surviving reference to it dates from the early thirteenth century and it was only formally recognized by a chartered grant in 1308.57 Here were sold horses, oxen, cows, pigs, wethers and other commodities which were far more mundane than the wool, lead, cloth and wine which loom large in the royal records which provide most of our evidence for Boston’s trade.58 Agricultural produce also played an important part in the port’s coastal trade with the cereals and dairy produce of south Lincolnshire and of Boston’s Midland hinterland being shipped, as they were in the fourteenth century, to Newcastle, Berwick and London.59

49 CLR, 1240–45, pp. 303-4; CLR, 1245–51, pp. 261, 352; CLR, 1260–67, pp. 164, 201; Bateson, Records of the borough of Leicester, volume 1, pp. 75, 79–80, 83–5, 95–6; TNA: E356/2; E122/5/7; E122/6/22; LAO: MCD 234, Deeds 307, 413, 875; Moore, The fairs of medieval England, pp. 25–30, 63–68. 50 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Derby, volume 2 (London, 1907), pp. 323–49; CLR, 1226–40, pp. 133, 394; CLR, 1240–45, pp. 240, 245; CLR, 1245–51, p. 62; CLR, 1251–60, p. 232; CLR, 1260–67, p. 46; H.M. Colvin (ed.), The building accounts of Henry III (Oxford, 1971), pp. 124, 154, 458; TNA: E372/99; Westminster Abbey Muniments: WAM 16000 (a, f). See I.S.W. Blanchard, ‘Derbyshire lead production, 1195–1505’, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 91 (1971), pp. 119–40; Moore, The fairs of medieval England, p. 55. 51 For instance, in the eleven months from Michaelmas 1308, lead exports made up less than 5% of the miscellaneous exports liable to the ad valorem duty of threepence in the pound shipped by alien merchants through Boston; TNA: E122/6/2. 52 TNA: E122/5/7; E122/6/2; A.R. Bridbury, England and the salt trade in the middle ages (Oxford, 1955), pp. 20–21; E.H. Rudkin and D.M. Owen, ‘The medieval salt industry in the Lindsey marshland’, Lincolnshire Architectural and Archaeological Society Reports and Papers, new series 8 (1959–60), pp. 76–84; H.E. Hallam, ‘Salt making in the Lincolnshire fenland during the middle ages’, Ibid., pp. 85–112. 53 Fowler (ed.), Extracts from the account rolls of the abbey of Durham, volume 2, p. 503; TNA: E122/5/9; E122/6/5; Westminster Abbey Muniments: WAM 28050. 54 Moore, The fairs of medieval England, p. 57; Fowler (ed.), Extracts from the account rolls of the abbey of Durham, volume 1, p. 25; Ibid., volume 2, pp. 495, 512; Kershaw, Bolton priory, p. 151; E. King, Peterborough abbey (Cambridge, 1973), p. 136; CLR, 1245–51, pp. 319, 320; CPR, 1281–92, p. 25; BL, MS. Sloane 783.B. fol. 146; TNA: SC6/1116/9, m. 3; C241/7 mm. 136, 164; I. Kershaw, D.M. Smith and T.N. Copper (eds), The Bolton priory compotus, 1286–1325, together with a priory account roll for 1377–1378, Yorkshire Archaeological

2.2 Boston as a borough Town growth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was not only a product of the commercialisation of England’s economy but was also encouraged by the development of the privileges which historians now associate with the ‘borough’. These privileges not only gave towns the right to hold fairs and markets but also guaranteed their inhabitants security of property, freedom from arbitrary manorial impositions, freedom to buy and sell land, control of their own time, and freedom from tolls. The earliest reference to Boston as a ‘borough’ comes in an extent of the Richmond

Society Record Series 154 (2000), pp. 38, 89, 91–93, 104, 106, 146–47, 164, 180, 195, 213, 231, 250–51, 290–91, 338, 362, 383, 404–05, 424, 443, 462; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 200–01. See also J. Greatrex (ed.), Account rolls of the obedientiaries of Peterborough, Northamptonshire Record Society 33 (1984 for 1983), p. 110. 55 R.M.T. Hill (ed.), The rolls and register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280-1299, volume 1, LRS 29 (1948), pp. 112–13. 56 M. Beresford, New towns of the middle ages (London, 1967), p. 270; E.M. Carus-Wilson, ‘The medieval trade of the ports of the Wash’, Medieval Archaeology 6–7 (1962–63), pp. 182–201. 57 LAO: MCD 234, Deeds 212, 875; CChR, 1300–26, pp. 122–23. 58 CPR, 1327–30, p. 460. 59 CPR, 1330–34, p. 425; CPR, 1350–54, p. 374; CPR, 1358–61, p. 543; CFR, 1347–56, pp. 274-5; CIPM, 2, 1575; Rotuli litterarum clausarum, 1204–24, p. 124; Rotuli litterarum clausarum, 1224–27, p. 108; CClR, 1313–18, p. 181; CClR, 1318–23, p. 4; CClR, 1402–05, p. 456; Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi et in domo capitulari Westmonasteriensi asservati, volume 2 (London, 1819), p. 159.

12

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments honour in 1280.60 In practice, however, the townsmen must have possessed the free tenure and fixed money rents which historians see as the lowest common denominator of borough ‘status’ long before this date whilst, as tenants of the honour of Richmond, they also enjoyed freedom from toll throughout England.61 In addition to possessing tenurial freedom and economic privileges, many medieval English towns went on to acquire further liberties, liberties which allowed them a large degree of self-government and administrative freedom. These privileges included the right to elect officials such as mayors, bailiffs and chamberlains, control of the town finances by means of a fixed ‘fee-farm’ (an annual lump sum paid in lieu of other financial demands), the existence of a common chest to manage communal finances, and a borough court run by the townsmen's elected representatives. By these means, townsmen were able to limit the interference of sheriffs and other royal officials and justices in their affairs.62 Typically, it was the royal boroughs, including even relatively minor towns such as Grimsby, which enjoyed the greatest degree of self-government. By contrast, the towns owned by aristocratic and ecclesiastical landlords had more varied administrative arrangements and often (although not always) failed to achieve the same degree of independence. This lack of formal self-government certainly seems to have been the case at Boston which, prior to 1545, had no corporate status of its own. Instead of constituting a unified, self-governing borough, medieval Boston was comprised of a number of separate manors each with its own officers, courts and finances. Even self-governing boroughs could face rivals within them in the form of private sokes and jurisdictions, like that of the abbot of Wellow at Grimsby or those of the castle and the cathedral at Lincoln. At Boston, such private jurisdictions were not merely enclaves within a larger area ruled by the townsmen. Rather the town consisted of, and was administered by, a number of distinct private jurisdictions. On the east side of the Witham there were two main jurisdictions: that of the honour of Richmond and the franchise of the abbot of St Mary’s, York, with its own court which freed the abbey’s tenants from suit to the courts of the hundred and shire.63 On the west side of the river were the Croun and Tattershall fees, each of which had its own court, officers and finances.64 By far the most important of these jurisdictions in terms

of its size was the ‘soke’, ‘manor’ or ‘lordship’ of the honour of Richmond.65 The Richmond honour enjoyed a similar independence in relation to the Crown and its officials to that enjoyed by self-governing boroughs such as Grimsby. Thus, its tenants enjoyed exemption from the hundred and shire courts as the honour possessed the right of holding sheriff’s tourns, the assize of bread and ale, and views of frankpledge and of trying criminals caught red-handed.66 The honour’s administrative autonomy was also enhanced by its right to have its officers return royal writs without the interference of the sheriff.67 As a result, its officials received many of the same royal orders as those received by the bailiffs of Grimsby.68 However, whereas in towns such as Grimsby the exclusion of outside officials meant self-government by the burgesses, at Boston it merely posed another question: that of the relationship of men of the town to the officers and courts of the honour of Richmond and of the town’s other lordships. The first indication of the liberties enjoyed by the honour’s tenants came in 1204 when the honour was in the king’s hand. The Crown issued a charter to the sokemen of the honour in Boston which granted them the right to choose a bailiff from amongst themselves to answer at the Exchequer for all pleas and issues as they had when the honour was in the earl of Richmond’s hands and that no sheriff or other royal minister would interfere with them.69 This may mean that the men of the honour in Boston were farming the Richmond manor at this date as the honour allowed the townsmen to do at its borough of Richmond.70 However, if the 1204 charter did grant the townsmen the right to hold Boston at farm, it soon seems to have become a dead letter and was never invoked again, in marked contrast to boroughs such as Grimsby with their repeated confirmations and extensions of their earlier charters. As a result, whereas most towns tended to expand their liberties and powers of self-government over the centuries, Boston may actually have enjoyed a greater independence in the years immediately before and after 1204 than it did in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. From the early thirteenth century through to the fifteenth century, the honour’s manorial accounts specify the fluctuating income taken by the honour from the town’s rents, courts and tolls and give no indication that the town was held at farm.71 Nor is there 65

CClR, 1321–24, p. 31; CPR, 1461–67, p. 227. Rotuli hundredorum, volume 1, p. 285; Rotuli originalium in curia scaccarii abbrevatio, volume 1 (London, 1805), p. 44; CClR, 1232–42, p. 351; CClR, 1256–59, p. 62; CFR, 1430–37, p. 267; CPR, 1436–41, pp. 181, 435. 67 Registrum honoris de Richmond, p. 197; CClR, 1251–53, p. 283; CClR, 1323–27, p. 592; CChR, 1341–1417, p. 236; CFR, 1430–37, p. 267. 68 See, for instance, CClR, 1296–1302, pp. 77, 101, 121, 216, 391, 481, 483, 489. 69 Rotuli chartarum in Turri Londinensi asservati (London, 1837), p. 118. 70 M. Maynard, ‘The borough of Richmond’, in W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of York: North Riding, volume 1 (London, 1914), pp. 17–35, at pp. 24–25. 71 D.M. Stenton (ed.), The great roll of the pipe for the thirteenth year of the reign of King John, Pipe Roll Society, new series 28 (1953 for 1951–52), p. 130; Registrum honoris de Richmond, Appendix, pp. 66

60

TNA: C133/26/6. S.H. Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby in the middle ages: an administrative contrast’, Journal of Medieval History 10 (1984), pp. 51–66, at p. 54; CClR, 1256–59, p. 64. 62 S.H. Rigby and E. Ewan, ‘Government, power and authority, 1300–1540’, in Palliser (ed.), Cambridge urban history, volume 1, pp. 291–312, at pp. 292, 298–300. 63 For the franchise of St Mary’s, see Liber feodorum: The book of fees commonly called the testa de Nevill, volume 1 (London, 1920), p. 195; Ibid., volume 2 (London, 1923), pp. 1010, 1477; Farrer (ed.), Early Yorkshire charters, volume 1, pp. 265, 270; Clay (ed.), Early Yorkshire charters, volume 4, pp. 3, 8–11; CPR, 1313–17, p. 556; Placita de quo warranto (London, 1818), p. 413; Rotuli hundredorum, volume 1, p. 349. 64 Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 104–05. See also below, section 2.6. 61

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Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration any evidence after 1204 that the townsmen retained the right to elect their own officers, something which was the basis of town administration in self-governing boroughs such as Grimsby and Lincoln.

Significantly, the Bolton Priory accounts cease to note purchases at the fair after 1319.77 It is telling too that, from 1350, the city of London no longer sent its own wardens to Boston fair to hear court cases involving its citizens, a right it had enjoyed since 1268.78 Between 1334 and 1353, the opening of the fair had changed from 17 June to 4 August although it still lasted for 71 days.79 When Leland visited the town in the sixteenth century, he was told that the fair had dwindled after the great fire of 1288.80 In fact, the decline of Boston fair was part of a wider change within the structure of England’s trade as other leading fairs, including St Ives, Northampton and Winchester, also shrank in this period. Indeed, if anything, Boston fair seems to have been able to retain its appeal to the royal buyers, the Londoners, foreign merchants and the great landlords for longer than other fairs were able to do. The decline of England’s traditional cloth-making towns, the disruption to the Flemish trade from the 1270s to the 1320s caused by Anglo-Flemish and Anglo-French hostilities (and by the resulting trade embargoes and war taxation), by warfare between France and Flanders and social conflict within Flanders itself, the staple system, and the opening up of London’s trade to alien and provincial merchants from 1285 may all have contributed to the decline of the fair system, although, as is shown by the fortunes of the fairs of Champagne in this period, this decline was also a more general trend within the European economy. Some fairs, such as those of Stourbridge and St Bartholomew in London, continued to be of importance in the later middle ages but the country’s wholesale trade was no longer structured around such periodic fairs as it had been in the thirteenth century but rather took place in London and the larger towns.81 The customs accounts for the early fourteenth century certainly confirm the claim made in 1334 that alien

2.3 Boston before the Black Death If Boston failed to hold onto or to extend the political privileges which seem to have been on offer in the charter of 1204, there is no evidence that the town suffered as a result since, unlike the basic tenurial and economic freedoms which its inhabitants enjoyed, urban political autonomy was hardly essential for urban prosperity. On the contrary, despite its lack of self-government, Boston in the early fourteenth century was one of the wealthiest towns in the country, as is shown by its 1334 tax valuation which, as we have seen, was the fifth largest of any town in England. As before, overseas trade remained central to Boston’s eminence in this period. Indeed, of the eleven wealthiest English towns in 1334, six were sea- or estuary-ports (London, Bristol, Newcastle, Boston, Yarmouth and Lynn) and a further three (York, Norwich and Lincoln) were inland ports.72 The extension of customs duties to most alien imports and exports as a result of the introduction of the New Custom of 1303 provides us with statistical information on alien imports and exports in this period, although we have to wait for the cloth custom of 1347 and the subsidy of tunnage and poundage of the second half of the fourteenth century for an equally detailed picture of the trade of English merchants. What the customs evidence reveals is that, in the opening decade of the fourteenth century, wool exports through Boston were as high as in the previous twenty years, even though the port was now second to London in the trade. In the capital, denizen merchants already controlled over half of the trade but at Boston aliens were still responsible for 60% of wool exports.73 Similarly, Boston was second only to London in the scale of its alien wine imports, alien cloth imports, and its miscellaneous alien imports and exports liable to the 1303 duty of 3d in the pound.74 Boston was also only behind the capital in the scale of its alien wax imports, a trade in which the Hansards had a virtual monopoly at this date.75 The port thus drew on a wide range of foreign markets, from Scandinavia and the Baltic, through Germany and the Low Countries to Gascony. However, the volume of imports and exports passing through Boston was not to be maintained in the first half of the fourteenth century. This was partly the result of the declining fortunes of St Botolph’s fair, of which, it was said in 1334, ‘foreigners do not come as they used to’. 76

77

Kershaw, Bolton priory compotus, p. 462. See also P. Nightingale, ‘Norwich, London and the regional integration of Norfolk’s economy in the first half of the fourteenth century’, in J.A. Galloway (ed.), Trade, urban hinterlands and market integration, c.1300–1600 (London, 2000), pp. 83–101, at p. 85; C. Dyer, ‘Trade, towns and the church: ecclesiastical consumers and the urban economy of the west Midlands, 1290–1540’, in T.R. Slater and G. Rosser (eds), The church in the medieval town (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 55–75, at p. 61. 78 R.R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of letter books of the city of London: letter book ‘A’ (London, 1899), pp. 12, 31, 40, 115, 122, 125, 127, 149; Letter book ‘B’ (1900), p. 219; Letter book ‘C’ (1901), pp. 98–100; Letter book ‘D’ (1902), p. 233; Letter book ‘E’ (1903), pp. 286, 291, 303; Letter book ‘F’ (1905), p. 215; Letter book ‘I’ (1909), p. 159; H.T. Riley (ed.), Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis, vol. 2, part 1: Liber Custumarum, Rolls Series (London, 1860), pp. 179, 181–83, 252; A.H. Thomas (ed.), Calendar of plea and memoranda rolls of the city of London, 1323–64 (Cambridge, 1926), pp. 66, 88; C. Gross (ed.), Select cases concerning the law merchant, volume 1, Selden Society 23 (1908), p. xxiii. 79 TNA: C145/117/12; E368/157 Status et visus, Michaelmas, m. 10d. 80 Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, parts 7 and 8, p. 114. On the fire, see the references in note 29, above. 81 Moore, The fairs of medieval England, pp. 54, 204–22, 289–90; R.H. Britnell, The commercialisation of English society, 1000–1500 (Manchester, 1996 edn), p. 90; P. Nightingale, A medieval mercantile community: the Grocers’ Company and the politics and trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven, 1995), pp. 99, 106–07; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 202, 374.

37–40; TNA: SC6/1116/9; SC6/909/4; SC6/1116/10; SC6/909/23; DL29/639/10376; SC6/Henry VII/1771. 72 Dyer, ‘Ranking lists of English medieval towns’, p. 755. 73 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 40–41. 74 James, Studies in the medieval wine trade, p. 96; TNA: E356/2; T.H. Lloyd, Alien merchants in England in the high middle ages (Brighton, 1982), appendix I. 75 Dollinger, The German Hansa, pp. 156–57; T.H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, 1157–1611: a study of their trade and commercial diplomacy (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 38–39; TNA: E356/2. 76 CIPM, 7, 625.

14

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments merchants were not attending the fair as they had in the past. From an average of 130 cloths a year recorded for the New Custom in the years 1303 to 1309, alien exports of cloth had declined by 90% by the years 1332–37.82 Many of the towns which had provided Boston with cloth, including York, Lincoln, Leicester and Northampton, were complaining of a decline in their woollen industries in the early fourteenth century.83 Nor does this decline in exports liable to the custom specifically levied on cloth seem to have been compensated for at Boston by a growth in the amount of cloth paying the ad valorem duty of 3d in the pound. On the contrary, these exports themselves fell by two thirds between 1303–08 and 1322–27. The make-up of this miscellaneous export trade (mainly cloth, followed by salt, a variety of other foodstuffs, such as wheat, malt, oats, honey and butter, and by lead), remained similar to that at the start of the century but the trade was now on a much smaller scale.84 Even more importantly, wool exports, always the mainstay of Boston’s trade, also underwent a partial decline in the first half of the fourteenth century. The first decade of the century had seen a boom in wool exports following the end of war between England and France (with its accompanying piracy, wool prises and maltotes) and between France and Flanders. However, the annual average of over 10,000 sacks a year exported from Boston in this period was never to be matched again. A series of sheep murrains from 1313 and the renewal of Anglo-French hostilities in 1315 and the outbreak of civil war in Flanders meant that wool exports slumped and they remained at about a half of this level in the next quarter century. At first, the absolute increase in the level of Boston’s wool exports in the first decade of the fourteenth century had masked the fact that, from the mid-1290s, London had overtaken Boston as the country’s leading port for wool exports as naval warfare and piracy encouraged the use of shorter cross-Channel sea-routes. Additionally, the 1303 Carta Mercatoria again opened up the capital’s trade to aliens and an overseas staple was created at St Omer in 1313.85 As wool exports declined nationally, Boston suffered particularly badly as it was the alien wool trade, always more significant in Boston than in the capital, which shrank most in this period. The opening of the Hundred Years War in 1337 and Edward III’s wool schemes led to a massive disruption of the wool trade and to the virtual breakdown of

the customs system. From 1343, the wool custom was farmed and figures are not available for wool exports again until after 1350.86 Nor was this decline in Boston’s alien export trade compensated for by a growth of imports. Firstly, alien cloth imports were hit as the Flemish industry was affected by interruptions in the supply of English wool, by trade embargoes by France and England, by the decline of the Champagne fairs, by the growth of English cloth production and by internal social conflict. The years after 1328, when Flanders was temporarily relieved of war and class conflict, saw alien cloth imports at Boston reach their recorded peak, with an average of over 4,200 cloths a year in five years from 1327. However, the long-term trend was one of decline, a decline accelerated by the temporary ban on wool exports and the prohibition of cloth imports in 1337. Even though, in practice, the king could issue licences to allow cloth imports, from this date onwards cloth alien imports were of little significance at Boston. Alien imports liable to the ad valorem duty of 3d in the pound also declined in this period, if not as rapidly as exports, falling from almost £9,000 a year in 1303–08 to an average of around only £5-6,000 a year from 1322–34. As with exports, the composition of this reduced trade, which consisted mainly of fish and fish oil from Bergen, eastern European goods such as timber, fur and hawks, and metal goods such as steel, swords, and ‘batteryware’, remained as it had before.87 The alien wine trade also suffered in the first half of the fourteenth century although the decline in Boston’s wine imports set in slightly later than that in the other branches of its trade. From 1326–32 alien merchants shipped an average of 1,137 tuns of wine through the port but by 1333–37 this had fallen to 583 tuns and imports then plummeted with the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. The Anglo-French truce of the early 1340s allowed a recovery of alien imports to around 300 tuns per annum but the renewal of the war in 1345 and the confusion caused by the Black Death further disrupted the trade and no alien imports at all were recorded from 1348–53. Boston was affected by the national re-organization of the Gascon wine trade in this period by which English merchants came to control imports and increasingly shipped them through London and the ports of the south-west, such as Plymouth, Exeter and Bristol, where denizen merchants had always played a more important role in the wine trade than they had in the ports of the east coast. Thus, from 28 February 1350 to 24 September 1351 when alien merchants made no wine imports through Boston, denizen merchants imported only 342 tuns through the port – only a quarter of the level achieved by alien merchants in 1327–32.88 Finally, wax imports also declined in the first half of the fourteenth century, falling from an average of

82

TNA: E356, Enrolled Customs Accounts. Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, p. 204; J.H. Munro, ‘The “Industrial Crisis” of the English Textile Towns, c.1290–c.1330’, in M. Prestwich, R. Britnell and R. Frame (eds), Thirteenth-Century England, volume 7, (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 103–41. For Lincoln, see CPR, 1348–50, p. 120. 84 TNA: E356 Enrolled Customs Accounts; E122/7/4. 85 P. Nightingale, ‘The growth of London in the national economy’, in R. Britnell and J. Hatcher (eds), Progress and problems in medieval England: essays in honour of Edward Miller (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 89–106, at pp. 91–99; P. Nightingale, ‘The lay subsidies and the distribution of wealth in medieval England, 1275–1334’, Economic History Review 57 (2004), pp. 1–32, at p. 25; Idem, A medieval mercantile community, p. 133; Idem, ‘The rise and decline of medieval York: a reassessment’, Past and Present 206 (2010), pp. 3–42, at pp. 10, 12. 83

86

Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 42–46; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 208–09. 87 TNA: E356 Enrolled Customs Accounts; TNA: E122/7/4; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 205–06. 88 James, Studies in the medieval wine trade, p. 94, Appendices 13–15; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 206–08; M. Kowaleski, ‘Port towns: England and Wales, 1300–1540’, in Palliser (ed.), Cambridge urban history, volume 1, pp. 467–94, at pp. 480–81.

15

Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration although Boston itself was not one of them.94 Yet despite – or perhaps because of – this decline in population, England’s trade flourished in the second half of the fourteenth century. Certainly, Boston’s overseas commerce prospered in this period, although this was to prove an Indian summer before the decline of the port in the fifteenth century. As before, the town’s connections with Lincoln, which as we have seen was the sixth largest town in England in 1377, were central to its trade. For instance, in 1353 when home staples were set up for wool exports, Boston was specified as the export port for the Lincoln staple and Lincoln men remained active in Boston’s trade even after the transfer of the staple to the port in 1369.95 In 1377, for instance, ten Lincoln merchants and twenty-two from Boston were granted a monopoly of wool exports at Boston as part of the repayment of a royal loan, whilst in 1380–81 Lincoln men accounted for over a third of the 3,303 sacks of wool exported through Boston.96 Lincoln men, such as the brothers John and Robert Sutton, were customs collectors and officers of the staple at Boston and their trade involved the main commodities of the port: wool, cloth, wine, dyes and canvas.97 As we have seen, the fluctuations of the wool trade were crucial for Boston’s fortunes and, in turn, it was government policy which determined the level and structure of the trade. As late as 1376, alien merchants still accounted for a half of the wool shipped through the port. However when the Crown decided to give control of the trade to the Staplers, a monopoly company of English exporters who were obliged to send their wool to the staple at Calais, alien exports through Boston collapsed and then, from 1399, virtually disappeared. By contrast, the government’s policy meant that, at first, exports by denizen merchants remained buoyant. Thus, whilst total wool exports from Boston in the years 1392–97 were at only half of the levels of the 1330s, denizen merchants exported similar amounts in both periods. Indeed, the average of 4,138 sacks of wool annually exported by denizen merchants in the years 1377–82 was only bettered in the peak years at the start of the fourteenth century.98 Cloth exports, which are perhaps the best-known example of English economic growth in the period after the Black Death, also contributed to Boston’s prosperity in this period. No longer was England simply exporting raw wool as a raw material to other countries but was itself becoming a major manufacturer and exporter of woollen cloth. In particular, Boston’s trade was stimulated by the emergence of Coventry as one of the leading cities and cloth producers in the country. Despite the sharp fall in national population levels after the Black Death and its subsequent stagnation or

320 quintals a year in the five years from 1303 and a peak of 425 quintals a year from 1322–27 to only 244 quintals a year from 1332–36 and less than 40 quintals a year thereafter.89 In short, whilst the nature of the commodities imported and exported through Boston in the first half of the fourteenth century did not fundamentally alter, the volume of the port’s trade - or at least that of the alien merchants which is revealed to us by the royal customs accounts – underwent a dramatic decline. Wool exports, alien cloth and miscellaneous exports and alien imports of wine, wax, cloth and miscellaneous goods all fell from the levels which they had enjoyed at the start of the fourteenth century. A combination of local factors, such as the decline of Lincoln’s cloth industry – as well as the silting of the Foss Dyke which was first noted in 1335 – and of national and international trends (including the decline of England’s fairs, the decline of the wool export trade, and the shift of the wine trade to the ports of the south and south-west) may all have contributed to the decline of the port of Boston in this period.90 Nevertheless, despite this relative decline in its overseas trade, particularly that of the alien merchants, Boston was still one of the largest and wealthiest towns in the country in this period and the volume of the port’s wool exports by denizen and alien merchants remained substantial. We can see the individual prosperity of some of the town’s inhabitants from its tax returns of 1327 and 1332.91 Being taxed on even £5 of movables was a sign of substantial wealth at this date but at Boston the highest assessments in 1332 were the £70 of John Tumby and the £30 of John Brasse, the value of their taxable goods together exceeding the combined wealth of all 79 taxpayers who were listed for taxation in the town of Grimsby that year.92 It was this wealth which funded the construction of the present nave and aisles of St Botolph’s church. This work can probably be dated to the 1320s, on the basis of the dating of the earliest Flemish incised slabs inlaid in the floor as Paul Cockerham argues below (Chapter 5 and Appendix 1), or, alternatively, to the 1340s, when licences were granted to John Baret, the parson of St Botolph’s, to acquire land in mortmain so that the churchyard could be extended. 93 2.4 Boston in the late fourteenth century If Boston’s overseas commerce declined in some respects in the first half of the fourteenth century, this contraction did not continue after the Black Death. The disease arrived in Lincolnshire in 1349, when eight out of thirty-four benefices in the Holland deanery were vacated by death, 89

TNA: E356 Enrolled Customs Accounts. On the Foss Dyke, see fn.180 below. 91 TNA: E179/135/13; E179/135/14. 92 TNA: E179/135/16. Unfortunately, there were two Boston men called John Tumby during this period (CPR, 1317–21, p. 128; CIPM, 2, 361; CClR, 1337–39, p. 425), making it difficult to ascribe particular references to Boston’s wealthiest 1332 taxpayer. Brasse was probably John Brasse ‘the elder’ who was a royal searcher for illegal imports and exports of money: CFR, 1327–37, p. 453; CFR, 1337–47, p. 453; CClR, 1337–39, p. 396. 93 CPR, 1340–43, p. 481; CPR, 1345–48, p. 74. 90

94

A.H. Thompson, ‘Register of John Gynewell, bishop of Lincoln for the years 1347–50’, ArchJ 68 (1911), pp. 301–60, at pp. 319, 339, 342. 95 For the functions of the Boston staple, see section 2.6, below. 96 Rigby, The overseas trade of Boston, pp. 3–27; TNA: E368/154, Status et visus Michaelmas. 97 S.H. Rigby, ‘“John of Gaunt’s palace” and the Sutton family of Lincoln’, LHA 35 (2000), pp. 35–39. For the will of Robert Sutton, see M. Archer, The register of Bishop Philip Repingdon, 1404–19, volume 3, LRS 74 (1982), pp. 27–31. 98 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 47–55.

16

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments even further decline, Coventry may actually have increased its population in the period before 1440.99 Much of the woad imported through Boston must have been used for dyeing the famous Coventry ‘blues’. Coventry men had previously been infrequent visitors to Boston but after around 1350 Coventry clothiers, drapers and hosiers were regularly trading through the town. In 1385, for instance, men of Coventry and Boston were associated in their joint claim for compensation for goods seized in Prussia. In turn, Boston merchants were to be found in Coventry as guild members, as landowners and as debtors to Coventry merchants and drapers.100 The introduction of the national custom on cloth exports in 1347 allows us to track the rise of the cloth export trade in detail. Thus, whereas alien merchants had made no cloth exports at Boston in the period 1347 to 1353, by the last two decades of the century they were exporting an annual average of over 2,000 cloths a year through the port. This trade was almost entirely in the hands of Hanseatic merchants. London, Hull and Boston dominated the Hanseatic cloth export trade but, of these, Boston was, at first, pre-eminent with 60% of Hanseatic cloth exports from these three ports passing through Boston in the years 1382-7. The Hansards, particularly the men of Lübeck, who based their English distribution of stockfish in Boston, traded directly between Boston and Bergen and between Boston and the Baltic but there was also a triangular trade taking cloth from Boston to the Baltic, grain from the Baltic to Bergen and stockfish from Bergen to Boston.101 Denizen cloth exports also grew, if not as rapidly as those of the Hansards. From no recorded shipments in the years 1347–53, denizen exports of cloth at Boston had risen to around 800 cloths a year in the 1380s and 1390s, although this was still less than a third of all the cloth exported through the port.102 The rise of the denizen export trade was partly the result of the penetration of the Baltic,

particularly Danzig and Stralsund, by English merchants although this led to conflicts with the Hansa. In 1388, for instance, twelve Boston merchants complained of the arrest of their goods in Prussia and it was these merchants who helped to pay the costs of an embassy in the following year which won the right for English merchants to have their own ‘factory’ at Danzig under their own governor. 103 Boston’s links with the Baltic were not entirely commercial. When Henry Bolingbroke left England for Prussia in July 1390 to fight on the side of the Teutonic Knights, he and his men sailed from Boston in two German ships.104 Apart from wool and cloth, very little else was exported through Boston in the second half of the fourteenth century. In the opening decade of the fourteenth century, exports had accounted for a quarter of the alien trade liable to the ad valorem duty of 3d in the pound whereas by the 1380s and 1390s, exports made up only 5% of the trade. Salt, which had been second only to textiles in this trade in the early fourteenth century, had disappeared from alien exports by the 1390s. By this date, rising wages, the availability of cheap imports of ‘Bay’ Salt, and the flooding of the Lincolnshire turbaries which provided the fuel for the industry, had undermined the viability of English salt-making and put an end to Boston’s salt exports. The early fourteenth century had seen considerable exports of foodstuffs, particularly cereals, but by the late fourteenth century, cereals and dairy products had also virtually disappeared from Boston’s alien exports. Other alien exports, including Derbyshire lead (whose output plummeted in the century after the Black Death) and Nottinghamshire alabaster, calfskins, rope, blankets and canvas, did not compensate for their decline, nor did exports by denizen merchants make up for the fall in the miscellaneous alien exports. For instance, from December 1383 to Michaelmas 1384, denizen merchants exported only £88 of calfskins, butter, hose and linen, twice the level of alien exports but of little significance compared with the £3,200 of miscellaneous goods imported by denizens during this period.105 In contrast to the miscellaneous export trade, Boston’s import trade remained relatively buoyant in this period. At the start of the fourteenth century, the alien trade liable to the New Custom of 3d in the pound was worth almost £12,000 a year with imports making up around £8,500 of

99

C. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a city: Coventry and the urban crisis of the late middle ages (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 33–35. 100 Die recesse und andre akten der Hansetage, Bund 3 (Leipzig, 1875), 404, A.1 (72); J.B. Sheppard (ed.), Literae Cantuarienses: the letter books of the monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury, volume 3, Rolls Series (London, 1889), p. 975; CPR, 1429–36, p. 220; TNA: SC8/104/5183; A. Beardwood (ed.), The statute merchant roll of Coventry, 1392–1416, Dugdale Society 17 (1939), pp. 12, 20, 21, 23, 31, 72; M.D. Harris (ed.), The Coventry leet book, part 1, Early English Text Society 134 (1907), p. 86; M.D. Harris (ed.), The register of the guild of Holy Trinity, St Mary, St John the Baptist and St Katherine of Coventry, Dugdale Society 13 (1935), pp. 67, 85, 93; CClR, 1389–92, p. 350; Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, 4, A9458; Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, 5, A12114; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, p. 224. 101 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 75–88, Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 242; J.B. Fudge, Cargoes, embargoes and emissaries: the commercial and political interaction of England and the German Hanse, 1450–1505 (Toronto, 1995), pp. 32, 61; S. Jenks, England, die Hanse und Preussen: Handel und Diplomatie, 3 vols (Köln, 1992), 1, pp. 427–30. Boston’s pre-eminence in the cloth export trade in this period is, however, exaggerated in the period before 1390 by the practice of valuing non-standard cloths of assize for the custom of threepence in the pound, rather than for the 1347 cloth custom, as this trade was of a greater significance at London than at Boston (Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, pp. 70, 83, 97, 368). 102 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 75–87.

103 Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 74; CPR, 1381–85, p. 61; CClR, 1385–89, pp. 68, 141, 566; Die recesse und andre akten der Hansetage, Bund 3, 404 A.1 (72), 404 B.1 43–54; A.H. Thomas (ed.), Calendar of select plea and memoranda rolls of the City of London, 1381–1412 (Cambridge, 1932), p. 143. 104 L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land made by Henry, earl of Derby, Camden Society, new series 52 (1894), pp. xiv–v, xxiii, xxvii, 4, 19, 20, 22–25, 27, 29, 32, 35, 37–38. 105 TNA: E122/7/13; E122/7/22; E122/8/2; E122/8/4; E122/8/7; E122/8/18; E122/212/3; I.S.W. Blanchard, ‘Economic change in Derbyshire in the late middle ages, 1272–1540’ (Unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1967), chapter 7; Bridbury, England and the salt trade, pp. 94–106; Hallam, ‘Salt making’, p. 112.

17

Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration

Fig. 2.4 Shodfriars Hall, probably the former guildhall of the Corpus Christi guild, South End. Whilst the Hanseatic merchants who dominated Boston’s alien import trade mainly shipped stockfish and oil from their Bergen kontor to Boston, the goods imported to the port from the east by denizen merchants largely consisted of ‘Prussian merchandise’. These were the goods of Scandinavia and eastern Europe available in the Baltic ports, particularly Danzig, such as osmund (i.e. iron) and copper from Sweden, forest products such as pitch, bitumen, timber (including boards, wainscot and bowstaves), rye and Prussian canvas. Yet, despite the growth in this trade in goods imported from the Baltic, denizen imports were dominated by goods shipped from the Low Countries, which were worth twice the value of Prussian goods. The Low Countries acted as an entrepot through which goods from southern Europe and Asia Minor, such as Castilian soap and Spanish iron, were re-exported. However, the major commodities imported by denizens in this period were dyestuffs for use in England's expanding cloth industry. Woad, the blue dyestuff from Amiens and Picardy, was particularly important but other imported dyes included madder (a red dye) from Flanders and Brabant, and litmus (another blue dye), whilst alum, a mordant for fixing dyes, was also imported. Also significant were imports of canvas

this. By the middle years of the century, the total trade had fallen by two thirds but, as with cloth exports, the creation of the monopoly of alien wool exports in the 1350s, although in itself short-lived, seems to have stimulated the alien trade at Boston which reached around £9,000 a year in the decade from 1377. Whereas miscellaneous exports were negligible in this period, the level of alien imports was still around the same level as at the start of the fourteenth century, although the total then fell to around £6,000 a year in the years 1387–1407.106 Increasingly, the alien import trade was made up of Hanseatic imports from Bergen and the Baltic rather than goods imported from the Low Countries. Alien cloth imports had dried up in the face of the rise of the English industry, the difficulties of the Flemish manufacturers (including heavy duties on English wool exports) and bans on importing cloth into England. The importation of metals and miscellaneous manufactured goods also declined and their place was taken by the Hansards’ imports of fish, oil, furs and timber which, by the start of the fifteenth century, made up over 80% of miscellaneous alien imports.107 106 107

TNA: E356 Enrolled Customs Accounts. TNA: E122/8/2; E122/8/4; E122/8/8; E122/8/18.

18

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments used for sail-cloth and for packing wool.108 At one time, wine imports looked as if they might share in the growth of alien imports after 1353 but their revival was short-lived and by the 1390s, alien wine imports at Boston stood at only 2% of their level in the period 1322–27. The victory of the denizen merchants and of the ports of London and the south-west was now complete. Certainly, native merchants had come to control the wine import trade at Boston although the 330 tuns of wine annually imported by them in the 1390s hardly compensated for the disappearance of the 1,100 tuns or more which alien merchants had imported there in the 1320s. Alongside wine from Gascony came other goods from southern Europe, including Spanish iron and Cordovan leather, whilst in return Gascony, with its reliance on viticulture, needed to import English wheat.109 By 1400 therefore, Boston’s trade was in many respects different from that of a century earlier. The alien trade in wine, wool and wax had almost disappeared and the town’s fair was no longer of any significance. Italian merchants had also disappeared and wool exports were now dominated by the native Staplers. Men from the Low Countries, who had once imported cloth to Boston, were now much less frequent visitors as the Hansards came to control the alien import trade. Denizen merchants now dominated the trade in wool and wine, although the total level of these branches of trade was much reduced, but the growth of England’s woollen industry and of the cloth export trade was helping to stimulate Boston’s commerce, including the penetration of the Baltic by English merchants and encouraging the import of dyestuffs. Boston’s trade remained prosperous and buoyant at a time when England was benefitting from rising per capita productivity and prosperity as a result of the Black Death and subsequent plagues. It is not surprising that this period of prosperity for the town also saw the building of St Mary’s Guildhall (which has recently been re-dated to c 1390), the construction of the Perpendicular eastern-most bays of the chancel of St Botolph’s and, perhaps, the beginning of work on the Stump.110 The late fourteenth century seems also to have been the period when a number of the surviving timber-framed buildings (often hidden behind later frontages) in Boston were constructed, most notably ‘Shodfriars Hall’, probably the hall of the Corpus Christi guild, which was rebuilt in the nineteenth century (Fig. 2.4).111

monumental brasses was produced in Boston is based upon the distribution of the surviving brasses rather than on any documentary evidence of the presence of such a workshop in the town.112 The twenty different occupational surnames listed in Boston’s 1327, 1332 and 1340 taxation returns (Barber, Carter, Corduner, Couper, Forestere, Foulere, Glovere, Goldsmyth, Littester, Litser, Mylner, Pistor (i.e. Baker), Spycer, Tannor, Taverner, Teynturer, Toller, Typeler) offer some indication of the range of crafts and services in the town as surnames were not yet fully hereditary.113 The town’s 1381 poll tax return also specifies the occupations of a number of the taxpayers, including those of baker, carpenter, smith, ‘potter’, fuller, weaver, tailor and shoemaker whilst the foreigners in the town liable to the alien poll taxes of the 1440s and 1450s included cordwainers, shoemakers, tailors and weavers and a beer-brewer. However, these sources hardly provide exhaustive lists of the craftsmen needed to provide food, drink, clothing and shelter to the town’s inhabitants.114 The rich pastoral area of the Fens may have stimulated Boston’s leather industry. Certainly, as the 1389 guild certificates reveal, the cordwainers in the town had their own guild in the town which was dedicated to St John the Baptist.115 As a port, Boston’s inhabitants were naturally to be found in maritime occupations, including the two pilots from the town who guided Henry Bolingbroke back across the North Sea after his expedition to Prussia.116 The guild of Saint Simon and Saint Jude was founded by eight mariners of Boston, one of its purposes being to support a priest to pray for those in danger on the sea and a number of ‘mariners’ and ‘shipmen’ appear in the town’s alien poll tax return of 1440.117 Inevitably, the men who are most prominent in our surviving sources are the probi homines of medieval Boston, the leading townsmen such those who, in 1388, were amongst the ‘gentlest and ablest’ men of the shire who were required to swear an oath to support the Lords Appellant who had just triumphed over Richard II in the ‘Merciless Parliament’.118 Eleven Boston men are listed in the return of those considered important enough to swear the oath in Lincolnshire, including John Rochford, the richest of the town’s taxpayers in the surviving part of its 1381 poll tax return. 119 At least four of the Boston oathtakers (John Harsik, James Skirbeck, Robert Norwode and John

112

S.F. Badham, ‘The Fens I series: an early fifteenth-century group of monumental brasses and incised slabs’, JBAA 142 (1989), pp. 46–62. For metal workers in Boston, see N. Merritt, ‘The pewterers and braziers of Boston’, Journal of the Pewter Society 17 (2002), pp. 3–14, at pp. 3–6. 113. TNA: E179/135/13; E179/135/14; E179/135/30. 114. For 1377, see TNA: E179/135/83. The text is printed in C.C. Fenwick (ed.), The poll taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381, part 2 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 17–25. ‘Potter’ could mean brazier at this date. For the alien poll taxes, see TNA: E179/136/206; E179/136/243; E179/136/249. 115. TNA: C47/39/85. 116. Toulmin Smith (ed.), Expeditions to Prussia, p. 143. 117. TNA: C47/39/89; E179/136/206. 118. CClR, 1385–89, p. 405. 119. TNA: C255/20/1; Rotuli parliamentorum, 3, pp. 400–03; TNA: E179/135/83.

2.5 The ‘probi homines’ of late medieval Boston As always, the lack of a borough archive means that we know far more about Boston’s overseas trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than we do about the economic activities of the bulk of its inhabitants. It is significant that the claim that the ‘Fens 1’ series of 108

TNA: E122/7/13; E122/7/22; E122/8/25. James, Studies in the medieval wine trade, appendices 14, 15. 110 M. Spurrell, ‘The first stone’, in The first stone and other papers, History of Boston Series 1 (1970), pp. 1–8, at p. 2. 111 N. Kerr, ‘Timber framed buildings in Boston’, East Midlands Archaeology 2 (1986), pp. 70–78, at pp. 72, 77. 109

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Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration Holmeton) were wool exporters.120 In addition, Gregory Mille, John Belle and John Rochford, who were all officials of the staple at Boston, were also probably wool exporters. 121 Belle and Harsik were also both cloth exporters whilst Harsik imported pitch, tar, boards, iron osmond and wax from the Baltic; these two men also imported canvas (perhaps for packing wool exports) and herring from the Low Countries. Harsik took wheat to Bordeaux whilst Holmeton also exported wheat via Hull.122 However, despite their involvement in overseas trade, none of the Boston oathtakers of 1388 is referred to in our sources as a shipowner. Merchants generally preferred to distribute their cargoes amongst a number of ships in order to spread the risks involved, as in 1377 when John Harsik divided his wool exports amongst 11 of the 13 ships which left Boston for Calais on 22 October. Boston men could be shipowners (the ‘la James’ of Boston was one of the ships in the 1377 wool fleet) but they were not usually leading townsmen.123 If ship-owning was not a significant source of income for Boston’s elite then landowning most certainly was. Most of their holdings were to be found in the town and fields of Boston itself and in the nearby villages of Skirbeck wapentake. However, they also held property in the other Holland wapentakes and in the villages and towns of the wapentakes bordering on Holland.124 Some even held land further north along the Lincolnshire coast in village such as Welle and Alford and in Alesby, Healing and Great Cotes, near Grimsby. 125 The Boston oathtakers also appear as landowners when alienating property in mortmain to the Boston guilds. Nine guilds from the town have surviving 1389 guild returns; of these, the guilds of St Mary and Corpus Christi, both of which had their own chapels at St Botolph’s, were the wealthiest. 126 Nine of the eleven Boston oathtakers of 1388 are listed as members in the register of the Corpus Christi guild. Three of them (Skirbeck, Rochford and Belle) were chamberlains of the guild whilst Philip Gernoun, Rochford and Belle served as aldermen of the guild.127 We are not so well informed about

the membership of the other Boston guilds but Belle, Gernoun, Rochford and Skirbeck were not only members of the Corpus Christi guild but also of the guild of St Mary whilst Belle, in addition, was a member of the guild of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which also had its own chapel in St Botolph’s.128 For the surviving guildhall of St Mary’s guild see Fig. 2.5.

Fig. 2.5 St Mary’s Guildhall, South Street. The leading men of Boston at this date provide a contrast with those of the much smaller port of Grimsby, further north along the Lincolnshire coast. Here the 1388 oathtakers were local merchants and were involved in coastal trade, dealing in turves, coal, corn, malt and herring. They were also often brewers and shipowners but rarely owned land outside Grimsby. Even a craft-occupation, such as being a skinner or weaver, could give a man a relatively high status in Grimsby at this date.132 In Boston, by contrast, the leading townsmen were, as we have seen, international merchants dealing in wool, cloth, iron, wax and canvas and were landowners in the county as well as in the town itself.

120

Rigby, The overseas trade of Boston, pp. 3–27; TNA: E122/7/13; CClR, 1377–81, p. 168. 121 TNA: C67/22; C67/23. 122 TNA: E122/7/17; E122/7/19; E122/7/21; E122/7/22; E122/59/23. 123 TNA: E122/7/13; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, p. 300. 124 See, for instance, TNA: CP25(1)/142/138, m. 22; CP25(1)/142/141; m.3; CP25(1)/143/146, mm. 10, 16; CP25(1)/143/147, m. 19; CP25(1)/143/148, mm. 2, 39; CP25(1)/144/149, mm. 2, 4; CP25(1)/144/150, m. 53; CClR, 1381–85, p. 126; CPR, 1391–96, p. 68. 125 TNA: CP25(1)/143/145, m. 13; CClR, 1381–85, p. 125; CClR, 1385–88, p. 20. 126 1389 returns survive for the guilds of the Ascension (TNA: C47/39/82), of Corpus Christi (C47/39/83), of St James (C47/39/84), of St Katherine (C47/39/86), of the Blessed Virgin Mary (C47/39/85), of SS Peter and Paul (C47/39/88), of SS Simon and Jude (C47/39/89) and of the Trinity (C47/39/90). For the wealth of the guilds, see C. Cross, ‘Communal piety in sixteenth century Boston’, LHA 25 (1990), pp. 33–38 and C.W. Foster and A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘The chantry certificates for Lincoln and Lincolnshire returned in 1548 under the act of parliament of 1 Edward VI’, AASRP 36/2 (1922), pp. 183–294, at pp. 255–71. See also chapter 4. 127 BL, Harley MS. 4795. For Skirbeck’s alienation of property to the guild, see CPR, 1391–96, p. 68.

128 CPR, 1391–96, pp. 192, 217; CPR, 1396–99, p. 19. Belle also had his own private chapel in his house in Boston (Archer, The register of Bishop Philip Repingdon, volume 1, p. 38). 132 S.H. Rigby, Medieval Grimsby: growth and decline (Hull, 1993), pp. 73–77.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments steward who was the nominal head of the earl’s court, was an honorial official. Like the honour’s bailiffs, they were appointed rather than elected and, like the bailiffs, could serve for years, or even for life, rather than for an annual term.136 Like the bailiffs they could be local notables but they could also be total outsiders, members of the gentry or even of the peerage, who regarded the position merely as one of a number of sources of income and who actually performed the office by deputy.137 There is no evidence at Boston for a ‘portmoot’ of the townsmen separate from the manorial court, as there was at Leicester and in other seigneurial boroughs. Other officers in the town, such as the clerk of the court, the auditor and the keeper of the crane, were also honorial appointments, again a contrast with the municipal employees who performed such tasks in a self-governing borough such as Grimsby or Lincoln.138 Similar administrative arrangements seem to have characterised the Croun and Tattershall lordships on the west side of the river in Boston, the Croun fee eventually passing to the Roos family and the Tattershall fee to the Cromwells. 139 Like the Richmond manor, these jurisdictions both had their own bailiffs to collect rents and other manorial income and to expend the issues on the maintenance of their lords’ properties.140 Each fee had its own court presided over by its own appointed steward.141 Like the Richmond bailiffs and stewards, the officers of these fees were appointed estate administrators, who often had responsibilities outside Boston, rather than elected town representatives and often performed their office in Boston by means of a deputy.142 It is easy to assume that the relationship between lords and burgesses in seignorial boroughs would inevitably be one of conflict particularly when, as in monastic boroughs such as St Albans and Bury St Edmunds, the lords were unwilling to grant self-government to their tenants. 143 However, the only evidence for such conflict in Boston came in 1347, when disturbances broke out in the town and rebels elected their own mayor and made ‘quasi-royal proclamations’. The revolt, in which the rebels boarded ships in the port which were laden with grain, was probably the result of the high grain prices of this year which led to

2.6 The administration of Boston in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries The return of Lincolnshire oathtakers for 1388 not only allows us to identify some of the leading townsmen of Boston at this date, its lay-out also provides us with a clue about how the town was administered in this period. The list of the county’s oathtakers is divided into three parts. At its head, are the knights of the county; at the end of the roll, are the oathtakers from the boroughs of Lincoln, Grimsby, Grantham and Stamford. In between are the names of hundreds of individual oathtakers from the county, many of whom are not identified by their place of origin. It is scattered amongst these names that those of the Boston oathtakers appear, reflecting the fact that, for all its size and wealth, the town lacked the corporate identity and privileges of self-government which, by this date, had come to be associated with borough ‘status’. As we have seen, although the charter of 1204 granted the men of the honour of Richmond the right to elect their own bailiff, this grant soon seems to have become a dead letter. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the town’s bailiffs seem to have been appointed honorial officials who might simultaneously hold other Richmond posts, such as being the bailiff of the sokes of Mumby and Kirton or of the manor of Skirbeck, and who actually carried out their duties in Boston by means of a deputy.133 Certainly, when the honour was in the king’s hand, bailiffs were appointed in this way. Furthermore, unlike the local men who served as mayors, bailiffs and chamberlains of towns such as Grimsby, the Boston bailiffs could, like Edmund de Stokes, king’s servant, who was appointed as bailiff in 1382, be complete outsiders to the town.134 Even when prominent townsmen were appointed as bailiffs in Boston, as John Belle was in 1380, they were still responsible to the earl rather than to their fellow townsmen. Whereas the bailiffs of Grimsby were annually elected so as to spread the burden of office and to prevent control of the town’s affairs falling into the hands of a narrow clique, Boston’s centrally-appointed bailiffs could serve for years or even, like Edmund Stokes, be appointed for life. For men such as John Belle, who served as bailiff in Boston for three years from 1380, who went on to become receiver for the honour of Richmond in Lincolnshire and then chief bailiff of the honour in the county, appointment to office as a town bailiff could be a stepping stone to promotion within the honorial administration.135 Doubtless the honorial court in Boston acted as an assembly where common affairs could be discussed and local ordinances passed; this was, after all, true even of manorial courts in the countryside. However, whereas a self-governing town like Grimsby ran its court through its own elected mayors, bailiffs and coroners, at Boston the

136

S. Armitage-Smith (ed.), John of Gaunt’s register, volume 1, Camden Society, third series 20 (1911), 288; CPR, 1381–85, p. 492; CPR, 1476–85, p. 74. 137 Placitorum in domo capitulari Wesmonasteriensi asservatum abbrevatio, p. 242; CPR, 1436–41, p. 401; CPR, 1446-52, p. 425; CClR, 1429–35, p. 215; TNA: DL29/639/10376; SC6/Henry VII/1771. 138 TNA: DL29/639/10376; CPR, 1399–1401, pp. 6, 138. 139 Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 104-5. 140 For the Tattershall fee, see the account rolls preserved amongst the De L’Isle manuscripts at Kent Archives Office, Historical Manuscripts Commission. Report on the manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle and Dudley preserved at Penshurst Place (London, 1925). Accounts which are useful for Boston include U1475 E73; U1475 M93; U1475 M94; U1475 M96. For the Roos fee, see TNA: SC6/909/5. 141 Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 130-1; SC6/909/5; CIPM, 8, 474. 142 CPR, 1476–85, p. 74; TNA: SC6/909/5; Kent Archives Office: U1475 M94. 143 Rigby, English society in the later middle ages, pp. 165–69; J.C. Whittle and S.H. Rigby, ‘England: social conflict and popular politics’, in S.H. Rigby (ed.), A companion to Britain in the later middle ages (Oxford, 2003), pp. 65–86, at pp. 78–79.

133

TNA: SC6/Henry VII/1771. CPR, 1381–85, p. 104; CPR, 1399–1401, pp. 149, 386; TNA: SC6/909/4; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, p. 113. 135 For biographies of Belle, see Rigby, The overseas trade of Boston, pp. 244–46; and J.S. Roskell, L. Clark and C. Rawcliffe, The House of Commons, 1386–1421, volume 2: members A–D (Stroud, 1992), pp. 176–79. 134

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Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration disturbances in a number of towns and which constituted the earliest-known wave of food riots in English history.144 It is significant, however, that the revolt in Boston did not involve the leading townsmen. Of the forty-three men pardoned for their part in the disturbances, only two were of any standing in the town.145 As in many other seignorial towns, co-operation between lord and townsmen, rather than conflict, seems to have been the norm. The town had, after all, been established and promoted by its lords who had a common interest in the town’s well-being. Thus the earls of Richmond protected their tenants from attempts by outsiders to impose tolls on them and obtained grants of pavage for them.146 The lords of the town, including John of Gaunt and his wife Blanche, entered the Corpus Christi guild as ‘brothers and sisters’ of the leading townsmen whilst in 1466, Humphrey Bourchier, Lord Cromwell, the holder of the Tattershall fee, was even alderman of the guild.147 The earl of Richmond’s administration of the main part of Boston may not have allowed the townsmen the independence which was collectively enjoyed by the burgesses of towns such as Grimsby and Lincoln but it did grant office and rewards to individual Boston merchants. The men of Boston had other potential outlets for corporate organization apart from the courts of the lords of the town. There is no specific evidence to support Pishey Thompson’s claim that the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary was Boston’s ‘guild merchant’, which would have meant that it enjoyed some formal administrative or economic role within the town. 148 Nevertheless, as Sally Badham has comprehensively demonstrated in chapter 4, guilds such as the Boston guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary did function as clubs for leading townsmen and could even become ‘shadow governments’ within seignorial boroughs. 149 Certainly, it is likely that the relatively early foundation date of 1260 claimed in the St Mary guild 1389 return reflected the desire of the townsmen to have their own forum.150 The creation of the Boston staple in 1369 (in place of Lincoln) may also have offered the richer townsmen a potential outlet for corporate organization since the staples acted as assemblies of merchants which elected their own mayors

and constables.151 Walter Pescod, for instance, whose brass remains in St Botolph’s, was constable of the staple in 1390.152 Once Calais was established as the sole staple through which English wool exports had to be channelled, the home staples became courts where recognizances of debt were recorded and where cases between merchants were heard.153 However, as was the case with religious guilds, membership of the Boston staple was not confined to Boston men. Merchants from elsewhere in Lincolnshire as well as from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire were members of the staple and citizens of Lincoln retained a firm interest in its offices even after the staple was transferred from Lincoln to Boston.154 It was not only as mayors and constables of the staple that Boston’s leading inhabitants enjoyed administrative responsibilities with a regional importance, as when they were chosen as collectors of royal customs and subsidies in the port.155 Moreover, whereas the Grimsby oathtakers of 1388 could expect to be chosen as borough mayors, bailiffs, coroners, chamberlains and members of parliament, they were rarely appointed as royal commissioners outside the borough. By contrast, the Boston oathtakers were appointed to collect royal taxes in Holland and as commissioners of array, of wallis et fossatis and of oyer and terminer. The Grimsby oathtakers could expect to serve as jurors at the sessions of the peace but the richer inhabitants of Boston could themselves receive commissions of the peace alongside the county’s knights and notables.156 Such men mixed with, or even aspired to join, the county’s gentry. William Spaigne, for instance, who was a wool exporter, a Lincoln staple official and a Boston customs official who died in office in 1385, served as sheriff of Lincoln and was also an official of the duchy of Lancaster, rising from being feoder in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire to being a member of John of Gaunt’s council, his steward in Lincolnshire and surveyor of all other bailiffs and feoders in the county. Although Boston, with its lack of corporate identity, did not have parliamentary representation as a borough, Spaigne was chosen as a Lincolnshire knight of the shire in 1380 and 1382.157

144

2.7 The decline of Boston Whilst men such as William Spaigne personify the relative prosperity of Boston in the late fourteenth century, this success was not to be maintained in the fifteenth century. On the contrary, Boston’s population and overseas trade

CClR, 1345–48, p. 35; TNA: KB27/350, m.101; B. Sharp, ‘The food riots of 1347 and the medieval moral economy’, in A. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds), Moral economy and popular protest: crowds, conflict and authority (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 33–54; R.C. Palmer, English law in the age of the Black Death, 1348–1381 (Chapel Hill, 1993), pp. 26, 55. 145 CPR, 1348–50, pp. 52–53, 292; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, p. 136. 146 CClR, 1256–59, p. 64; CPR, 1272–81, p. 462; CPR, 1358–61, p. 38; Rotuli parliamentorum, 1, p. 165; F.W. Maitland (ed.), Records of the parliament holden at Westminster (London, 1893), p. 94. See also A. Hannan, ‘Tewkesbury and the earls of Gloucester: excavations at Holm Hill, 1974-5’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 115 (1997), pp. 79–231, at pp. 81, 221. 147 BL, MS. Harley 4795, fols 7, 10v, 14, 35, 42v, 44r–v, 45r–v. 148 Thompson, Boston, p. 134; J. Masschaele, Peasants, merchants and markets: inland trade in medieval England, 1150–1350 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 79. 149 Rigby and Ewan, ‘Government, power and authority’, pp. 294–95. 150 TNA: C47/39/85. For the administrative structure of the guild, see J. Stokes (ed.), Records of early English drama: Lincolnshire, volume 2 (Toronto, 2009), pp. 387–88.

151

TNA: C67/22. TNA: C67/23; and see Jessica Freeman’s account of him in chapter eight. 153 E.E. Rich, ‘Mayors of staples’, Cambridge Historical Journal 4 (1932–34), pp. 120–42; C.D. Liddy, War, politics and finance in late medieval English towns: Bristol, York and the Crown (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 116–31. 154 Rotuli parliamentorum, 2, p. 322; TNA: C67/22; C67/23. 155 S.H. Rigby, ‘The customs administration at Boston in the reign of Richard II’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (1985), pp. 12–24. 156 Rigby, Medieval Grimsby, pp. 73–77; Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby’, pp. 303–04. 157 On Spaigne see Rigby, The overseas trade of Boston, pp. 228–29, 245–46. 152

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments were to fall dramatically and the town suffered a decline in its economic significance relative to that of other English towns. A key measure of this decline is provided by the fall in the level of the town’s population and by its inability to attract the migrants needed to maintain the number of its inhabitants, or at least to maintain its size relative to national population or to that of other towns. In 1377, 2,871 Boston townspeople paid the first poll tax of 1377, a total which, in theory, included all laymen and women in the town over the age of fourteen, apart from beggars. 158 In addition, the town’s clerical poll tax return of 1381 lists sixty members of the clergy, including the rector of St Botolph’s, two parochial chaplains and the chaplain at St John’s. 159 Depending on what multiplier we use in order to convert the town’s taxpayers into its total population, Boston at this date would have between 4,300 and 6,300 inhabitants. If we adopt the commonly-accepted multiplier of 1.9, this would give Boston a population of around 5,500.160 The absence of complete 1524–25 lay subsidy returns for Boston means that the next source with which we can estimate the town’s population is the 1563 diocesan household survey which recorded that there were 471 households in the parish of Boston, a very similar total to the 458 ‘houses’ returned for the town by the Piracy Commissioners in 1565.161 Phythian-Adams has claimed that in 1563 the town must have had a maximum population of only 2,000, i.e. a decline by 50% or more since 1377.162 Other estimates, which presume larger households and allow for a substantial underestimation of the number of households in 1563, would produce totals as high as 3,200 at this date.163 Nevertheless, even this higher figure for the town’s population in 1563 would still be a quarter less than the lowest estimate of the number of its inhabitants in 1377. Thus, whilst England’s total population may have been about the same in 1377 and 1563, and may even have risen between these dates, Boston’s population may have fallen by up to a half in this period.164

Nor was the decline in Boston’s population which was evident by 1563 simply the product of the sixteenth century. Rather, the falling income received from the leasehold properties of the honour of Richmond, most of which were leased out for annual farms of 13s 4d to 33s 4d, shows that a fall in demand for property within the town was well under way in the later middle ages. Thus, in 1434–35, the income from such farms came to £98 0s 5d after deducting decayed rents (although these already amounted to £70 2s 7d) but by 1493–94, these farms brought in only £46 4s 0d, a decline of more than 50% in sixty years.165 As we have seen, much of Boston’s prosperity before 1400 was based on the port’s prominence in England’s international trade but this role was to be undermined by a number of general shifts in the structure of England’s imports and exports in the course of the fifteenth century. Central to this change was the decline of the wool trade. Even in the late fourteenth century, denizen exports of wool, at around 3,000 sacks a year, remained buoyant at Boston and even as late as the 1420s the port was still exporting around 2,500 sacks of wool a year. However, from 1429 exports slumped in the face of royal bullion ordinances and Burgundian trade embargoes and, despite periodic revivals, the trade never again reached these levels. At Boston, as nationally, the volume of wool exports fell by a half in the fifteenth century and this decline accelerated even further after 1500 when London was taking an increasing share of England’s shrinking wool exports. By the 1540s, Boston exported less than 200 sacks of wool a year, a striking contrast with the 3,000 sacks a year of the 1390s, let alone the 10,000 sacks a year of the early fourteenth century.166 Nationally, the decline in the volume of England’s raw wool exports was more than made up for by the increase in the value of exported woollen cloth. Yet Boston did not benefit from this trend. On the contrary, whereas denizen merchants were exporting about 800 cloths a year through Boston around 1390, they were shipping only about fifty cloths a year a century later. In the course of the fifteenth century, denizen cloth exports from England had grown five-fold; at Boston they had fallen by over 90%. As we have seen, Hanseatic merchants monopolised alien cloth exports through Boston in the late fourteenth century, where they were exporting around 2,500–3,000 cloths a year, more than at London and Hull combined. The fluctuations of their trade in the fifteenth century, which consisted of a series of catastrophic declines followed by partial recoveries, reflected the complicated history of Anglo-Hanseatic relations in this period which involved a series of diplomatic disputes, piracy and eventual naval warfare.167 After the Treaty of Utrecht (1474) and the resolution of Anglo-Hanseatic differences to the satisfaction of the Hanse, Hanseatic cloth exports from England reached new peaks so

158

TNA: E359/8B, m. 18. A.K. McHardy (ed.), Clerical poll taxes of the diocese of Lincoln, 1377–81, LRS 81 (1992), nos 134, 1399, 1942. 160 Rigby, ‘Urban population in late medieval England’, pp. 398–99. 161 A. Dyer and D.M. Palliser (eds), The diocesan population returns for 1563 and 1603 (Oxford, 2005), pp. xxxiv, 197. 162 Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a city, pp. 17, 244. 163 For discussion of the problems of converting 1563 households into a total population figure, see N. Goose, ‘The ecclesiastical returns of 1563: a cautionary note’, Local Population Studies 34 (1985), pp. 46–47; A. Dyer, ‘The bishops’ census of 1563: its significance and accuracy’, Local Population Studies 49 (1992), pp. 19–37; J.S. Moore, ‘Canterbury visitations and the demography of mid-Tudor Kent’, Southern History 15 (1993), pp. 36–85, at p. 44; N. Goose, ‘Bishops’ census of 1563: a re-examination of its reliability’, Local Population Studies 56 (1996), pp. 43–53; E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (London, 1981), p. 569; Dyer and Palliser (eds), Diocesan population returns, pp. xxxiv-l; N. Goose and A. Hinde, ‘Estimating local population sizes at fixed points in time: part II - specific sources’, Local Population Studies 78 (2007), pp. 74–88, at pp. 81–82. 164 Estimates for national population in 1377 vary between two and three million (Rigby, ‘Urban population’, p. 397); estimates for 1563 are usually around 2.6–3.0 million (Goose, ‘The ecclesiastical returns of 1563’, p. 47; Dyer, ‘The bishops’ census of 1563’, pp. 24–26). 159

165

TNA: SC6/1116/10; SC6/Henry VII/1771. Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 53–74. 167 M. Burkhardt, ‘One hundred years of thriving commerce at a major English sea port: the Hanseatic trade at Boston between 1370 and 1470’, in H. Brand and L. Müller (eds), The dynamics of economic culture in the North Sea and Baltic region (Hilversom, 2007), pp. 65–85; Jenks, England, die Hanse und Preussen, passim. 166

23

Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration that, by the early sixteenth century, their exports were four times the level of a century earlier. Yet, even though the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht included the establishment of Hanseatic ‘Steelyards’ at Boston and Lynn, the Hansards seem henceforth only to have been an intermittent presence in Boston. Certainly, their cloth exports through the port never recovered to their old levels and totally came to an end from 1502, the offer of favourable treatment made to the Hansards in 1505 by Lady Margaret Beaufort, holder of the honour of Richmond, evidently failing to lure them back. When Leland visited Boston he found the Hanseatic Steelyard ‘little or nothing occupied’ although the Hanse’s buildings in the town were said to have been dilapidated as early as 1481, as they were so noted again in 1484 and 1505. Exports by other aliens did not compensate for the decline of the Hanseatic trade even though, nationally, this trade was also reaching new heights. From 1502–07, aliens exported only twenty-two cloths a year – less than 1% of the level exported by the Hansards in the 1390s.168 If Boston exported little but wool and cloth at the end of the fourteenth century then the following century did not see the emergence of any new exports to compensate for the decline of these trades. For instance, denizens exported only £45 of miscellaneous goods in the year from Michaelmas 1490, £16 in 1522–23 and £30 in 1531–32. These mainly consisted of animal products, such as tallow, calf- and lamb-skins, butter and beef, along with some grain and legumes and small amounts of lead and sea-coal: the output of the reviving Derbyshire lead industry was more likely to be shipped through Hull, London or even Lynn than through Boston.169 Miscellaneous alien exports were also on a minor scale, usually accounting for less than 5% of the total value of miscellaneous alien imports and exports. Small amounts of beef, calfskins, tallow and cereals were exported in the fifteenth century as well as hemp, mustard-seeds, calf-skins and sea-coal in the early sixteenth century but these goods were only a minor part of a declining trade.170 Nor was the decline in Boston’s export trade compensated for by any growth in imports. Firstly, the port’s wine import trade collapsed in the course of the fifteenth century. In the 1390s, 250–300 tuns a year had been imported through Boston; by the end of the 1440s, less than twenty tuns a year were being imported, even though nationally the trade had remained stable. Whereas the level of wine imports into England slumped as a result of the final stages of the Hundred Years War and the subsequent hostilities between England and France, at Boston they virtually disappeared. After 1485, wine imports revived nationally and by 1500 had even exceeded the levels of a century earlier. However, most of this trade passed through

London and Bristol and even at the height of this revival, in the 1530s, Boston imported only 120 tuns of wine a year, a far cry from the 300 tuns of the 1390s let alone the 1,100 tuns imported by aliens alone around 1330. 171 Small amounts of sweet Mediterranean wine and even occasional tuns of Gascon wine were imported to Boston via the Low Countries but the bulk of the trade was shipped by denizen merchants directly from Gascony.172 The trade in miscellaneous goods carried out by denizen merchants underwent a similar disastrous decline. For instance, whereas denizens had imported over £3,000 of goods from December 1383 to Michaelmas 1384 and £1,311 of goods in less than six months from April to September 1413, by 1522–23, only £139 of denizen imports were made at Boston. Even in exceptionally good years, such as 1531–32 when there were £498 of denizen imports, the level of trade was nowhere near that of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.173 Denizen imports from the Baltic had disappeared even before the Anglo-Hanseatic naval warfare of the late 1460s and the subsequent decline in denizen trade with the Baltic. The customs accounts of the early 1460s include none of the ‘Prussian merchandise’, such as osmund, canvas, timber and firs, which were the typical imports of the late fourteenth century.174 Even more important was the decline in imports from the Low Countries which had always outweighed the denizen trade from the Baltic. In 1413, over £1,200 of goods had been imported at Boston by denizen merchants from the Low Countries, imports at this time being dominated by woad, madder, soap and canvas. By the 1460s, imports from the Low Countries were valued at less than £100 a year and increased only slightly thereafter. By this date those denizen imports that remained were dominated by the trade in white herring (i.e. salted, as opposed to red, smoked herring) which made up around two thirds of these imports in 1466–67 and in 1522–23. Denizens also imported a wide range of other goods including foodstuffs from the Low Countries such as garlic, onions and hops, along with re-exported goods such as figs, raisins, Bay salt, sugar, Rhenish wine. In addition, a wide variety of manufactured goods were imported, including linen, wicker bottles, trenchers, nails, shovels, glass, gloves, leather belts, and paving tiles. Nevertheless, despite their diversity, such goods were of little total value.175 The alien miscellaneous import trade underwent a similar decline. From around £9,500 a year of goods liable to the ad valorem duty of 3d imported and exported in the decade from 1377, this trade fell to around £6,000 a year from 1387 and then to around £4,000 a year in the two decades from 1407. As with Hanseatic cloth exports, the late 1420s and early 1430s were catastrophic for Boston’s alien miscellaneous trade. Trade in this period was affected

168 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 84–119; Fudge, Cargoes, embargoes and emissaries, pp. 74, 105, 156–57; Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, parts 7 and 8, p. 114; Thompson, Boston, p. 247. 169 TNA: E122/11/4; E122/12/3; E122/12/10; Blanchard, ‘Economic change in Derbyshire’, p. 433. 170 TNA: E122/12/3; E122/12/5; E122/12/6; E122/12/8; E122/12/10.

171

James, Studies in the medieval wine trade, Appendix 16; TNA: E356 Enrolled Customs Accounts. 172 TNA: E122/10/7; E122/12/1l; E122/12/10. 173 TNA: E122/7/17; E122/8/25; E122/11/10; E122/12/3; E122/12/10. 174 TNA: E122/212/3; E122/10/1; E122/10/4; E122/10/7. 175 TNA: E122/7/17; E122/8/25; E122/10/1; E122/10/4; E122/10/7; E122/12/1; E122/12/3; E122/12/10.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments by war between Denmark and the Hanse and the average annual total of imports and exports for the six years from 1427 was only £216. 176 The alien miscellaneous trade never re-attained its previous levels and from 1427 to 1548 was usually worth less than £2,000 a year. Occasionally the trade would slump, as it did following the English seizure of the Hanseatic Bay fleet in 1449 or during the Anglo-Hanseatic warfare of 1468–74, and then recover, as it did following the Anglo-Hanseatic truce of 1454 or after the Treaty of Utrecht of 1474, but, as with cloth exports, each recovery was smaller and more partial than the last. As opposed to an annual average of around £9,500 imported and exported by aliens the decade from 1377, the trade was worth less than £700 by the early sixteenth century.177 For the last forty years of the fifteenth century, the Hansards accounted for three quarters or even more of the miscellaneous alien import trade and, as before, their trade was dominated by imports of stockfish and oil from the Bergen kontor which made up over 90% of miscellaneous alien imports in the 1460s. 178 As late as 1491–92, the Hansards were responsible for 96% of miscellaneous alien imports and exports but as the Hansards disappeared from the port, their place was taken by men from Holland and Zealand whose imports, like those of denizen merchants were dominated by salted herring.179 If the richness of the Exchequer customs accounts makes it relatively easy to describe the decline of Boston’s overseas trade, explaining this decline is rather more difficult. The shift of overseas trade away from Boston was partly the result of local factors. Firstly, from 1335, when it was said that the Foss Dyke was so obstructed that boats could not pass between Lincoln and Torksey, until the sixteenth century, there was a series of complaints about the condition of the canal connecting Lincoln to the Trent.180 Rising sea levels on England’s east coast may also have led to the silting of the Witham. Certainly, in 1500 Boston itself was said to be ‘in nigh point of destruction’ from the ‘great rage and surflowing of the sea’ and so Mathew Hake of Gravelines was employed to build a sluice at Boston to contain the inflow of the Witham and prevent flooding.181 Complaints about the condition of the port were made throughout the early modern period. In 1635, for instance, the townsmen of Boston claimed that the port and sluice were in decay and that the haven was almost ‘landed up’.182

The collapse of Boston’s overseas trade also went hand in hand with the decline of Lincoln in the later middle ages. Although the men of Lincoln could regard Boston as a rival, in fact, as we have seen, the fortunes of the city and its outport were closely bound up with each other. The city’s population may have shrunk by 40% between 1377 and 1524, a much greater decline than that in national population. From ninth richest town in 1334 and sixth largest in 1377, Lincoln had fallen to twenty-fourth richest and twelfth largest by 1524.183 As we have seen, the rise of Coventry may, at first, have helped to insulate Boston from the effects of the decline of Lincoln but Coventry itself may have declined from the mid-fifteenth century, a decline which accelerated in the early sixteenth century. Besides, Coventry could export its textiles through London as easily as through Boston so that, with the re-orientation of England’s cloth export trade, an increasing share of the city’s cloth must have been shipped through London.184 However, too much emphasis should not be placed on these local factors. After all, despite the complaints about the condition of the Foss Dyke from 1335, Boston’s overseas trade was still buoyant in the late fourteenth century. Moreover, the trade of London had grown not only at the expense of Boston but even of Bristol and Hull, ports better placed than Boston to take advantage of England’s expanding cloth industry within which the West Riding and the West Country were leading centres of production. For instance, the Hanseatic trade with England prospered in the early sixteenth century when Hanseatic merchants exported more cloth than ever before. Yet this trade was centred increasingly on London. Whereas in other countries the Hanseatic trade tended to spread out from an initial centre, in England the opposite occurred as the Hansards left the ports of the east coast for the capital. 185 In the years 1382–87, Boston accounted for 60% of cloth exports by Hansards from England but this had already declined to a third of total exports by 1390–95 and, by the end of the following century, Boston accounted for less than 1% of Hanseatic cloth exports. 186 Leland believed that the Hansards left Boston following the murder of an Esterling by Humphrey Littlebury in Edward IV's time.187 In fact, Boston’s Hanseatic trade had been in decline long before the reign of Edward IV, with the long conflict between England and Lübeck following the attack on the Hanse Bay fleet in 1449 (as well as the renewal of conflict in the years 1468–74) particularly affecting its trade. Besides a similar

176 M.M. Postan, ‘The economic and political relations of England and the Hanse from 1400 to 1475’, in E. Power and M.M. Postan (eds), Studies in English trade in the fifteenth century (London, 1933), pp. 91–153, at pp. 114–16; Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, pp. 165–66. 177 TNA: E356 Enrolled Customs Accounts. 178 TNA: E356/22; E122/10/1; E122/10/4; E122/10/7. 179 TNA: E356/23, m. 8; E122/12/3; E122/12/5; E122/12/6; E122/12/8; E122/12/10. 180 CPR, 1334–38, p. 148; CPR, 1364–67, p. 138; CPR, 1381–85, p. 500; CPR, 1429–36, p. 202; C.T. Flower (ed.), Public works in medieval law, volume 1, Selden Society 33 (1915), p. 292; Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, parts 1–3, p. 29. 181 LAO: Monson 7/27. On the building of the sluice, see M.K. Jones, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort, the royal council and an early Fenland drainage scheme’, LHA 21 (1986), pp. 11–18. 182 S.H. Rigby, ‘“Sore decay” and “fair dwellings”: Boston and urban

decline in the later middle ages’, Midland History 10 (1985), pp. 47–61, at pp. 52–53. 183 Rigby, ‘Urban population’, p. 397; Dyer, ‘Ranking lists’, 755, 758, 761, 765; J.W.F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge, 1948), chapters 12, 13. 184 C. Dyer and T.R. Slater, ‘The Midlands’, in Palliser (ed.), Cambridge urban history, volume 1, pp. 609–38, at p. 635; Phythian-Adams; Desolation of a city, pp. 19–20, 33–39. 185 Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 316. 186 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England’s export trade, pp. 84–119. 187 Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, parts 7 and 8, p. 181. Littlebury was a Boston customs collector from June 1483 to August 1485 (TNA: E356/22, mm. 4, 4d; CFR, 1471–85, 721, 723, 745, 748), during which time a Humphrey Littlebury of Kirton, esquire, joined the Corpus Christi guild of Boston (BL, Harley MS. 4795, fol. 49v).

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Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration decline in the trade of the Hansards was to be found in other east coast ports in this period, although Boston seems to have suffered more than any other port, certainly more than Lynn and Hull.188 Nevertheless, the story of Littlebury may be symbolic of the hostility expressed against the Hansards by the merchants of towns such as Boston who resented the Hansards’ privileges in England and who had long demanded reciprocal privileges in the Baltic. The Hansards may have faced less hostility in the capital since the Londoners were more concerned about competition from the Italian merchants.189 Boston’s Hanseatic trade was also affected by the decline of the Hansards’ Bergen kontor: in 1400, there were over 300 houses on Bergen’s German quay but by 1520 this had fallen to 120. The rise of the Icelandic fisheries hit the Norwegian stockfish trade and by the 1480s London was the main port for stockfish imports, even though the trade did not attain the levels of its Boston heyday.190 Anglo-Hanseatic trade was now controlled by the merchants and shippers of Hamburg and Danzig rather than by the Lübeck ‘Bergenfahrer’ who had once dominated Boston’s Hanseatic trade.191 Moreover, the shift of the Hanseatic trade to London was only part of a more general trend in the later middle ages for England’s overseas trade to be channelled through the capital. With raw wool exports nationally experiencing a decline (although, as we have seen, those that remained increasingly went through London), it was vital for Boston’s prosperity that the port retained and expanded its cloth export trade. As late as the mid fifteenth century, less than a half of England’s cloth exports were shipped from London; a century later, London accounted for about 90% of cloth exports. Increasingly, England’s trade was funnelled through London to the Low Countries and, especially after 1490, to the fairs of Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom. Londoners now dominated the business of the Calais Staple Company and the Merchant Adventurers. 192 A combination of factors, ranging from a national shortage of bullion and the availability of credit in London to periodic naval warfare and the government’s policy in the wool trade all tended to benefit the capital at the expense of the trade of the provincial ports.193

With the decline of the wool trade nationally, the shift of the remaining wool exports to London and the growing dominance of the capital in the cloth export trade, there was now less reason for alien merchants to come to Boston and little left for denizen merchants to ship from the port to overseas markets. It has been suggested that the decline in the overseas trade of the port of Boston may actually have been compensated for by a rise in its coastal trade. 194 Certainly, as Kowaleski has warned, it would be wrong to judge a port’s fortunes simply on the basis of the overseas trade recorded in the Exchequer customs accounts. At Exeter, for instance, ‘coastal trade accounted for about 70 per cent of all shipping activity through the port’ in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. 195 Undoubtedly, there was much traffic along the east coast. Coal had long been shipped from Newcastle to Boston for local use or for re-export. It was also necessary to ship timber to the Fenlands and grain from the midlands was sent to London or Newcastle via Boston. Coastal trade in salt (from the Firth of Forth), fish and coarse cloths certainly continued long after the decay of the port’s overseas trade. The problem is that we do not have any way of assessing Boston’s coastal trade in the middle ages as the Crown’s customs officials did not have to account for coastal trade until the second half of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, although there was much trade along the east coast, it did not necessarily have to pass through Boston. Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and north Lincolnshire had the alternative outlet of the Humber, the Thames competed for the trade of the south Midlands, and Lynn, with its harbour closer to the sea, seems to have been better able than Boston to attract shipments of pewter, hides and lead from northern England. A large inland area could carry on its trade without recourse to Boston with its difficult harbour a long way from the sea. This was certainly the case in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Boston’s trade was of ‘minor’ significance. At Hull, a growing coastal trade did help to compensate for the decline of overseas trade but this seems not to have been the case at Boston. In 1550, there were thirty-five ships owned at Hull whereas in 1565 there were only eight ships owned at Boston.196 Certainly, the income received by the honour of Richmond from its market and fair courts, from the rent of stalls during the fair and from the fees used for the crane at Boston does not suggest that the decline of the port’s overseas trade (which anyway is usually seen as the most profitable branch of medieval trade) was made up for by a buoyancy in coastal trade. In both 1353 and 1461, the fair was said to last for seventy-one days but it certainly no longer had the national significance which it enjoyed in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The honour’s market and fair court perquisites declined from almost £48 in 1427–28 to just over £13 in 1461–62. Stallage rents also

188 Fudge, Cargoes, embargoes and emissaries, pp. 87, 98–100, 105, 145–49, 156, 163, 167–71. 189 Rigby, ‘“Sore decay”’, p. 51; W.I. Haward, ‘The trade of Boston in the fifteenth century’, AASRP 41 (1932–33), pp. 169–78, at pp. 174–75; Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, pp. 138, 160, 165, 168, 225–28. 190 Dollinger, The German Hansa, pp. 313–14; Lloyd, England and the German Hanse, p. 275; Fudge, Cargoes, embargoes and emissaries, pp. 100, 145, 163–64. 191 Fudge, Cargoes, embargoes and emissaries, pp. 163–68. 192 Rigby, ‘“Sore decay”’, pp. 51–52. 193 Nightingale, ‘The growth of London’, pp. 100–06; Nightingale, A medieval mercantile community, pp. 483–85; Nightingale, ‘The rise and decline of medieval York’, pp. 29–30, 36–41; J.I. Kermode, ‘Merchants, overseas trade and urban decline: York, Beverley and Hull, c.1380–1500’, Northern History 23 (1987), pp. 51–73; J.I. Kermode, ‘The greater towns, 1300–1540’, in Palliser (ed.), Cambridge urban history, volume 1, pp. 441–66, at pp. 447–49; J.A. Galloway, ‘Town and country in England, 1300–1570’, in S.R. Epstein (ed.), Town and country in Europe, 1300–1800 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 106–131, at p. 130.

194

Bridbury, ‘English provincial towns’, p. 8. M. Kowaleski, Local markets and regional trade in medieval Exeter (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 225–32; Kowaleski, ‘Port towns’, pp. 480–81. 196 Fudge, Cargoes, embargoes and emissaries, p. 105; Rigby, ‘“Sore decay”’, pp. 53–54. 195

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 2.6 Pescod Hall, sympathetically rebuilt in 1972, is the solar of a house which once stood within its own grounds. It was built c.1450 with a hall attached to the west wall. It was moved from north-eastern Boston to the centre of Boston’s Pescod Square shopping development. actually have been built in the mid-fifteenth, or even, as in the case of Shodfriars Hall, the late fourteenth century.199 Similarly, in 1527, ten Boston merchants were rich enough to qualify for the fourth consecutive year of royal taxation by possessing £50 or more of moveable goods compared with only one in Grimsby.200 If it was no longer one of the leading ports in the country, Boston was still a regional

fell by more than a half in the period between 1434–35 and 1461–62. Similarly, the income received by the honour for the use of the crane in the port declined from £9 in 1425–26 to only 10s in 1493–94.197 On the eve of its incorporation in 1545 Boston no longer enjoyed the prominence amongst English towns that it had possessed in the fourteenth century: as the Stump rose higher and higher, Boston sank ever lower down England’s urban hierarchy. Nevertheless, this relative decline did not necessarily mean impoverishment for all of the town’s inhabitants. After all, even Leland, who reported on the town’s ‘decay’ also referred to the many ‘fair’ buildings in the eastern part of the town although, as has been suggested in the case of Pescod Hall (Fig. 2.6), some of these may

199

Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, parts 9–11, p. 34; Kerr, ‘Timber framed buildings’, pp. 72, 77. On Pescod Hall see Pevsner and Harris, Lincolnshire, p. 165; Mattinson, ‘Topography and society’, pp. 80–81; Thompson, Boston, pp. 205–06, 222; Harden, Medieval Boston, p. 34. For the fifteenth-century Hussey Tower, see T.P. Smith, ‘Hussey Tower, Boston: a late-medieval tower-house of Brick’, LHA 14 (1979), pp. 31–36; A. Emery, Greater medieval houses of England and Wales, 1300–1500, volume 2 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 223–24. 200 TNA: E179/136/337.

197 TNA: SC6/1110/10; SC6/909/23; DL29/639/10376; SC6/Henry VII/1771.

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Medieval Boston: Economy, Society and Administration centre and the only town of any size in one of the richest areas of early Tudor England.201 Acknowledgements In writing this paper I have benefited greatly from the advice of Rosalind Brown-Grant and from the detailed comments provided on an earlier draft by Maryanne Kowaleski.

201 A.R.H. Baker, ‘Changes in the later middle ages’, in H.C. Darby (ed.), A new historical geography of England before 1600 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 186–247, at p. 196.

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Chapter 3 ‘The beste and fairest of al Lincolnshire’: the parish church of St Botolph, Boston by Linda Monckton Many of these studies mention St Botolph’s, Boston, most especially with regard to two of its most distinctive architectural features – the plan and the tower – as well as its association with the wool trade (in the most general of terms), and occasionally reference is made to its overall prominence within the town. Yet while the enduring value of these books is in providing an overview of some key concepts across the country, they inevitably tell us little about the individual churches. In particular, although Howard long ago argued that ‘It is very little use to attempt to study the architectural history of a church in detail before having seen some of the neighbouring churches’,3 it is just this contextual analysis which is often missing from this body of literature. It is largely through an analysis of this context that some sense of either the commonalty or the exceptionality of the church at Boston can be discerned. That the church is exceptionally large is obvious. What is less apparent is what circumstances led to this, and whether this reveals anything exceptional about the nature of the parish. In approaching the history of a parish church in terms of its surviving physical form there are a number of accepted principles and common features that may be said to characterise a particular period of church building, and to which these books stand testament. These features can be considered at a macro level – for example, the construction of early stone churches, the addition of aisles, the rebuilding of chancels, the enlarging of naves and the addition of clerestories. Appraisal at a micro level is also feasible, when the analysis of moulding profiles associated with every aspect of a church can be assessed and considered within a national or regional context. This latter, formalist, approach is currently out of favour with many students of parish churches as it is has rarely been linked successfully to the social history of the parish and its parishioners. However, the issue of architectural analysis remains, in many cases, a valid and vital tool when faced with the material evidence of a parish church and a relative lack of documentary material. It is not uncommon – and Boston is no exception to this – for there to be potential contradictions between the evidence base provided by the fabric of the building and the archival sources associated with it. There are two key factors to take into consideration in attempting to resolve such contradictions. First, the purpose of the original document(s) – which may be recording an event after it occurred, or with a specific purpose in mind – has to be taken into account. Secondly, information is sometimes mis-quoted, is repeated, and then becomes established as if it were fact. A large number of well-regarded histories of parish churches are dependent upon the exemplification of early modern antiquaries and historians, some of whom had advantages over us in having access to now lost medieval documents,

3.1 Introduction and background – Boston and the history of the English parish church St Botolph’s, Boston is a late medieval building with a remarkably consistent architectural appearance and its plan is often quoted as that of a ‘model’ parish church.1 This gives the impression of a single, or model, building campaign, perhaps implying simplicity to the process of teasing out its architectural history. It also, however, raises questions about the nature of the patronage that enabled it, especially as the construction of St Botolph’s went ahead when the town’s prosperity was slowly diminishing. A particular problem here is the later addition of the tower, as the most architecturally ambitious and arguably frivolous element of the building, which was erected in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at a time when Boston’s trade was even further depressed. The apparent continuation of the contradiction between prosperity and local patronage which is first evident in the fourteenth century needs some consideration, and it is also valuable to contextualise St Botolph’s within the contemporary and regional church rebuilding programme. These issues relate closely to our understanding of the development of parish church architecture – and the way in which it has previously been approached by architectural historians – as well as examining the nature of patronage. Who built St Botolph’s; how and why? How was it funded and what kind of institution did it serve? How does the building, as material evidence, contribute towards our understanding of the history of Boston and its people? Parish churches have, on the one hand, had what might be considered rather good coverage in the literature, albeit often in the form of rather dated architectural guides to the buildings. Parish church studies have, however, taken a rather different direction in recent years and have been the focus for historians rather than architectural historians.2 This has greatly increased our understanding of the way that parishes evolved and were used, and how the architectural frame with which we are now left integrated with the social framework and liturgical needs of the parish. Of the series of older texts on parish churches there is a common approach in many of them in seeking to address the evolution of the church and to cover aspects of its development, notably planning, materials, architectural style, internal layout, and sometimes including burial and documentary references. Some include elements of the historical background about the basic structure of the parish and associated patrons; others offer a more detailed formal analysis of the characteristics associated with each traditionally recognised ‘style’ of architecture throughout the middle ages.

1 G.H. Cook, The English medieval parish church (London, 1954), p. 110. 2 For example see C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The Parish in late medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 14 (Donington, 2006).

3 F.E. Howard, The mediaeval styles of the English parish church (London, 1936), p. 7.

29

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

Fig. 3.1 St Botolph’s, Boston, from the west. Drawing: William Stukeley 1708 (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Top. Gen. e 61, fol. 8).

30

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments although this does not always mean that their interpretation of them is either correct or accurate. For instance, certain extrapolations from fragments of evidence may be valid, but these have then been repeated and eventually become incorporated into the acknowledged history of a building. This is particularly the case at Boston where, on the one hand, there is a long held antiquarian view of when it was built, which conflicts, on the other hand, with an historically-based architectural analysis of the church. This chapter attempts to resolve this dichotomy.

churches with its priest is a veiled reference to an establishment at Boston.9 Stephen Rigby has shown in chapter 2 that St Botolph’s church (Fig. 3.1) was founded by the lateeleventh century; a charter, dating from between 1088 and 1093, grants property in Boston, including the church of ‘St Botulph’s’, to the Benedictine abbey of St Mary, York.10 This was made by the earl of Brittany and Richmond who had been granted the lands by the Conqueror. The lordship of the honour of Richmond remained the dominant landowner in the town until the late-fifteenth century, and within it were included the large majority of the town’s inhabitants. This charter was confirmed under count Stephen of Brittany (c.1125–35) at which time it is stated additionally that the monks (of St Mary’s) might carry on trade in the time of the fair in all their land in the town both within and without the cemetery of the church. In one reference specific mention is made of the granting to the monks of the abbey permission to trade in the churchyard during the time of the fair,11 which is particularly significant in demonstrating that the church in Boston had the right of burial by the early-twelfth century. The abbey owned a twelfth of a knight’s fee in the town,12 as well as the hospital of St John the Baptist, which Rigby has already shown was founded by 1218. As Skirbeck was recorded in Domesday it is usually considered to be the parish centre or mother church of the Skirbeck-Boston area. This association of St Botolph’s with a dependent chapel status appears to emanate from Leland, who in c.1542 described it as follows: ‘The chife paroche chirche was at S. John’s where yet is a chirche for the toune. S. Botolph’s was but a chapel to it’.13 Pishey Thompson, writing in 1856, struggled with this lack of clarity over the status of St Botolph’s and how Leland’s comment related to its origins. He concluded that it is ‘impossible to say whether this church was one dedicated to St Botolph, or the parish church of St

3.2 Early history of St Botolph’s At the outset it must be recognised that the origins of the church at Boston are far from clear. Tradition suggests that Botolph, a seventh-century Saxon, requested permission of Ethelmund, king of East Anglia, to found a monastery in Icanho (Ox Island), although whether this refers to Boston (Lincolnshire), or elsewhere, is debateable.4 Botolph apparently died at this location in 680 A.D., perhaps fuelling a tradition that, despite the absence of any explicit reference in the Domesday Book, Boston contained a pre-conquest small chapel or oratory dedicated to St Botolph.5 Certainly, the lack of documentary evidence referring to St Botolph’s does not necessarily mean that it, or at least something structural, did not exist. St Michael’s, Coventry (Warwickshire), for example, is wholly absent from Domesday, and yet a good case for its origins as a pre-conquest chapel dependent on the adjacent Minster of the Holy Trinity has recently been made.6 The same could be true of St Botolph’s therefore, particularly as Skirbeck quarter is mentioned in Domesday, and historians have commonly accepted that Boston was located within this assessment.7 Skirbeck is in fact described as having two churches and two priests,8 and it has been assumed that one of these

4

Bede states that in A.D. 654 ‘Botolph began to build that minster at Icanhoe’, for which see The Anglo-Saxon chronicle Part 1 A.D. 1–748 (London, 1912 edn); [available as Online Medieval and Classical Library Release #17 at http://omacl.org/Anglo/part1.html accessed on 31 July 2011]. However the location of that ‘minster’ remains elusive and two sites compete for recognition; one is Boston and the other is Iken (Suffolk), favoured by A.T. Gaydon and R.B. Pugh (eds), The Victoria history of the county of Shropshire, volume 2 (London, 1973), p. 38 and footnote 2, citing F.S. Stevenson, ‘St Botolph (Botwulf) and Iken’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 18.1 (1922), pp. 29–51. The unresolved nature of the debate is also highlighted by P. Dover, The early medieval history of Boston AD 1086–1400, History of Boston Series 2 (Boston, 1970), p. 1, although like most authors on Boston he tends to favour the Lincolnshire interpretation in the main text, describing the Suffolk interpretation as ‘not universally attractive’. 5 E. Trollope, ‘Boston and other churches, &c., visited by the society, on the 16th and 17th of June, 1870’, AASRP 10 (1870), pp. 175–218, at p.176. Also see, for example, G. Jebb, A guide to the church of S Botolph with notes and antiquities of Boston and Skirbeck (Boston, 1896). 6 S. Bassett, Anglo-Saxon Coventry and its churches, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 41 (2001). 7 J.W.F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge, 1948), p. 314, states that ‘Boston is not mentioned in Domesday. It is surrounded, east of the Witham, by Skirbeck, and in 1086 was evidently comprised therein.’ 8 See C.W. Foster and T. Longley (eds), The Lincolnshire Domesday and the Lindsey survey, LRS 19 (Lincoln, 1921), p. 69.

9

For example see Dover, Medieval history of Boston, p. 1. See W. Farrer (ed.), Early Yorkshire Charters, Volume 1 (Edinburgh, 1914), p. 265. This is also set out in P. Thompson, History and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), p. 36, that Alan son of Eudo earl of Brittany gave the church of St Botolph in 1090 to the abbey of St Mary, York. In footnote 2 he relates that confirmation of the grant temp. Henry II has conditions attached: ‘Concedo etiam praefatis monachis, ut in tempore nundinarum in cimeterio praedictae ecclesiae sancti Botulphi, et extra cimeterium suum in tota terra sua ejusdem villae, commodum situm sine aliquo impedimento mei vel meorum pro libito suo faciant in perpetuum (taken by Thompson from R. Dodsworth and W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum… [London, 1655], p. 391); and also see Thompson, Boston, p. 161. 11 Hill, Medieval Lincoln, p. 315 and also cited in Dover, Medieval history of Boston, p.21. Hill refers to the 1125–35 confirmation charter to St Mary’s by Count Stephen (the first one was by Count Alan) which adds a grant that the monks can ‘carry on their trade in the time of the fair at Boston, both within and without the cemetery of the church’. His reference is C.T. Clay (ed.), Early Yorkshire charters, volume 4, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, extra series 1 (1935), p. 8. Also see S.H. Rigby, ‘Boston and Grimsby in the Middle Ages’ (Unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1983), p. 169, who suggests the following interpretation, that the monks ‘take their profits in the time of the fair, both in and out of the churchyard’. 12 Hill, Medieval Lincoln, pp. 317–18. 13 L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 5 vols (Carbondale, 1964 edn), 5, p. 33. 10

31

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

Botolph’s town’.14 In fact Leland, Thompson, and their followers, were missing the point, in that the church at St John’s was not the church at Skirbeck but that of an independent hospital foundation, and could never have been a parochial church in itself. Considering the early history of Boston, and discarding for the moment the perspective of Leland, who was after all writing at a distance of over 400 years from the Domesday entry, a different interpretation is more likely. First, as suggested above, the absence of Boston in Domesday is hardly sufficient evidence to conclude that there was in fact no church there, and as we know from Rigby’s chapter, some form of urban settlement definitely existed there by the early-twelfth century.15 Secondly, the early grant to St Mary’s specifically concerned ‘ecclesiam Sancti Botulphi’,16 challenging Leland’s assumption that it is Skirbeck that was the main focus of the grant. It is, however, true that the hospital of St John in Skirbeck was also granted to St Mary’s abbey, and doubtless this has been a source of the past confusion. The foundation of the church or chapel of St Botolph’s therefore must be explicitly linked to the development of the town, and its expansion linked to the presence of the fair. Its close relationship with the market and fair is evident on three counts: primarily it formed a physical location from which the cure of souls could be exercised for traders; secondly, it benefited from a clear topographical relationship with the market place; and thirdly, as shown above, it had a physical relationship with the fair through the use of stalls erected around the curtilage of the cemetery. The church was, therefore, surely founded by the late-eleventh century, and most likely by the landowner – the earls of Richmond – and served as the focus for the traders already known to be there by this time. Rigby in chapter 2 sets out the earlytwelfth-century factors that contributed to the town’s rapid growth, including the improvements to the River Witham and the development of the fair,17 such that the links between the town’s economy and the church could not be clearer. This relationship remained crucial to the development of the church throughout the middle ages, as it is impossible to distinguish between the institutions and individuals that operated as Boston’s prime movers of religious and commercial life. Having considered the evidence for the foundation of an ecclesiastical building in Boston, what of its status? According to Pishey Thompson the earliest reference to an independent rector is not until 1321,18 and although he does list a parson in 1309, as will be shown below, this latter is most likely a spurious date. What has perpetuated is a view in the secondary literature that Boston ‘became parochial’ in (or by) the fourteenth century.19 All the thirteenth-century and later documents make it quite clear

that St Botolph’s was already a parish church and that the advowson belonged to St Mary’s abbey, York. In particular, a series of confirmatory references emerges in the 1290s. The clergy of the parish church of Boston are identified in the registers of the bishops of Lincoln in the 1290s, when a number of colourful notices indicate clearly the presence of a parish church, not least in 1291 when the clergy of the parish church of Boston are ordered to forbid the letting of lodgings to harlots on pain of excommunication.20 In the same year the Calendar of Papal Registers records an indulgence to all those who visited the church on St Botolph’s day (which was of course also the first day of the fair, so was surely aimed at traders).21 Specific reference to the rector is found in 1293 when master Giffred de Vezano, rector of the parish, consented to the Carmelites having church houses and a churchyard in his parish;22 and in 1298 the parochial churchyard is mentioned in the context of a mandate to the ‘dean of Holland to compel the parishioners of Boston to fence their churchyard against pigs and other animals which were rooting it up’.23 It seems that instead of a shift from dependent chapel to parochial status, St Botolph’s followed the characteristic route of lordly foundation in the Anglo-Saxon or early Norman period, subsequently enjoying a clear association with the development of its surrounding settlement, which was known to be a wealthy trading centre by the early-thirteenth century.24 Consequently, when the wider parochial structure was becoming clearly defined in the early-thirteenth century, it was inconceivable that St Botolph’s would fail to become the focus of a parish based on its existing boundaries and status.25 The story of the status of Boston is, however, further confused by Thompson’s reference to a priory, but there is no evidence to support his claim.26 More tantalising is 20 R.M.T. Hill (ed.), The rolls and register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280–1299, volume 3, LRS 48 (1954), p. 112. 21 ‘Relaxation of one year and forty days of enjoined penance to penitents who visit the church of Boston, in the diocese of Lincoln, on the feast of St. Botulph, on those of the Blessed Virgin, and in their octaves’; from ‘Regesta 46: 1291–1292’, CPapL, 1198–1304, pp. 527– 57; [available online at http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=96040&strquery=Boston accessed 22 May 2011]. 22 R.M.T. Hill (ed.), The rolls and register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280–1299, volume 4, LRS 52 (1958), p. 113. 23 R.M.T. Hill (ed.), The rolls and register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280–1299, volume 6, LRS 64 (1969), p. 113. 24 S. Rigby, ‘“Sore Decay” and “Fair Dwellings”: Boston and urban decline in the later middle ages’, Midland History 10 (1985), pp. 47–61, at p. 48. 25 This progression followed the pattern in late-eleventh-century England of moving towards a system of local churches, as opposed to one based on a pastoral system (administered from Minsters and monasteries), and, hence, the formal creation of the parochial system in the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries. John Blair has explicitly stated, in other contexts, that until this time the concept of the parish church should be kept separate from the foundation of the church in a particular location. New parishes themselves were rarely created after this date (until the nineteenth century). See J. Blair, ‘Churches in the early English landscape: social and cultural contexts’, in J. Blair and C. Pyrah (eds), Church Archaeology: research directions for the future, Council for British Archaeology research report 104 (York, 1996), pp. 6–18, at p. 12. 26 Thompson, Boston, p. 47; Jebb, Church of S Botolph, p. 34. Thompson’s note is taken from an Inquisition Post Mortem published in an early-nineteenth-century calendar of them (Calendarium

14

Thompson, Boston, p. 161. Hill, Medieval Lincoln, pp. 317–18; and Liber feodorum: The book of fees commonly called the Testa de Nevill, volume 1 (London, 1920), p. 195. 16 Farrer (ed.), Yorkshire charters, volume 1, p. 265. 17 Rigby, this volume pp. 8–12. 18 Thompson, Boston, p. 170. 19 P. Draper, The formation of English Gothic: architecture and identity, 1150–1250 (New Haven and London, 2006), pp. 175–96. 15

32

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments another note by Thompson that in 1428 the king was petitioned by the bishop of Lincoln for a licence to St Mary’s abbey, York, to found a college of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St Botolph’s in the church at the town of St Botolph’s, comprising a dean, precentors and prebendaries, at the bishop of Lincoln’s discretion, but there is no indication at all that such a foundation was ever actually established.27 Firmer evidence exists regarding the question of additional religious institutions which were founded and developed in the growing town concurrently with St Botolph’s. Boston was well appointed with religious institutions. The hospital of St John was founded by 1218, and from the late-thirteenth century the town became the home for four new religious houses of the mendicant orders (for their locations, see Fig. 2.2) as by 1318 the Friars Minor, the Dominicans, the Carmelites, and the Austin Friars had firmly established themselves in Boston.28 The presence of all of the main orders is significant in that it reflects the status and wealth of the town, even though the arrival of mendicant houses in England’s urban centres at this time was not unusual. The Dominicans, for example, had arrived in England in 1221 and experienced a relatively rapid expansion throughout the thirteenth century: by c.1260 they had 35 houses, by 1272 they had 43, and by 1347 a total of 57. The Friars Minor had quickly followed the Dominicans to England, arriving in 1224, and enjoyed an even more rapid expansion, reaching 50 friaries by 1260.29 However only seven towns in England could claim to be the home of all four major mendicant houses, eight towns claimed five, and four (London, Newcastle, Norwich and Cambridge) had six such houses. 30 Boston therefore sits among the top rank of English towns with regard to the number of its religious institutions, alongside other trade-based towns and ports such as Ipswich, Kingston-upon-Hull and Yarmouth, and established cities such as Winchester. This abundance of religious organisations is one manifestation of the scale of the town and its urban character and wealth. These ‘begging’ orders relied completely on the patronage of the local population to

develop, largely through gifts, burial fees and the sale of intercessory prayer. Their foundation and significant wealth came largely therefore from people who could afford such largesse, namely a combination of gentry and merchant families, and sometimes, as in the case with the Augustinians at Boston, they were blessed with royal favour.31 There is good evidence for the early expansion of the new orders in Boston,32 for example in 1305, 1307 and 1350 licences are granted by the bishop for the White Friars to transfer new plots granted by local men for the purposes of building works.33 Despite the dependence of these new orders on donations, the hierarchy of religious institutions established within the town is clear from an indenture that recorded the foundation of the Carmelite house. The document is an agreement between the prior and convent of the Carmelites of Boston and master Geoffrey de Vezano, papal nuncio and rector of Boston, dated 28 October 1293. The Carmelites were to have a church and churchyard for burying their own and for those who specifically requested it, in return for which they would give the rector one third of all offerings in money and in kind made at the time of burials, to hand over to the rector any offerings made on feast days, and to encourage the parishioners to pay tithes to the rector.34 These were not unusual conditions, as the relationship between the ‘established’ religious institution of the parish church of St Botolph, and the ‘new’ ones of the mendicants, could be fraught with difficulties. In particular, the parish would have seen money that it would once have acquired now distributed among more recipients, especially in the competition for gifts and fees associated with burial. The integration of the mendicants into the hierarchy of religious establishments is demonstrated by the will evidence of Bostonians, as examined by Sally Badham in chapter 4, such that even if burial were sought at the parish church, the friars were often requested to attend the funeral in large numbers and duly rewarded for their intercessory prayer. Her work reveals that it was also commonplace for these testators to include bequests to the four orders of friars with churches in the town, even if they chose burial elsewhere. Yet more particularly there were small groups of especially prolific patrons in urban society who seemed to have played a role in founding a

Inquisitionum Post Mortem sive Escaetarum [London, 1806-28] in 4 large volumes) which is generally acknowledged to contain numerous errors. Further work, outside the scope of this chapter, would be required to investigate Thompson’s claim, but it is far more likely that the inquisition refers to a ‘prior and brethren’ of one of the mendicant houses than directly relating to St Botolph’s. I am very grateful to Stephen Rigby for his interpretation of this reference. 27 Thompson, Boston, p. 162. Technically, there is no reason to question a new college attaching itself to an existing parish church; in a list of 45 colleges, Cook (English medieval parish church, p. 49) identifies twothirds of them as associated with parish churches, referring to A.H. Thompson, English colleges of chantry priests (London, 1943), passim. However, although the petition is known to exist, as it is recorded in Rotuli Parliamentorum, 4, p. 363b–364b, the fact that there are references to individual rectors of St Botolph’s later on in the fifteenth century suggests that it was not acted upon. Once again I am indebted to Stephen Rigby for his guidance on this point. 28 Friars Minor by 1268; Black Friars by 1288; Carmelites in 1293; Austin Friars in 1319: for these see W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Lincoln, volume 2 (London, 1906), pp. 213–17. 29 D. Knowles and R.N. Hadcock, Medieval religious houses in England and Wales (London, 2nd edn 1971), pp. 33–35. 30 Knowles and Hadcock, Medieval religious houses, passim.

31 ‘To the prior provincial and friars of the order of Hermits of St. Augustine in England. Faculty at the king’s request to receive the place at Boston given to them by the king, and to build thereon oratories, and whatever is necessary for dwelling and celebrating divine offices’; from ‘Regesta 70: 1319–1320’, CPapL, 1305–1342, pp. 191–207; [available online at http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=96079&strquery=Boston accessed 22 May 2011]. 32 The Friars Minor have recorded enlargements of their dwelling house in 1322, land added in 1348; the Austin Friars constructed dwelling houses in c.1316–18 and enlargements of land and property in 1327 and 1361: for which see Page (ed.), Lincoln, volume 2, pp. 213–17. 33 For example in ‘1307: To the bishop of Lincoln. Mandate to license the Carmelite prior and brethren of Boston (de Sancto Botulpho), to transfer themselves to the place in the same parish given to them by William de Ros’; from ‘Regesta 54: 1307’, CPapL, 1305–1342, pp. 22– 32; [available online at http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=96064&strquery=Boston accessed 22 May 2011]. 34 Hill (ed.), Bishop Oliver Sutton 1280–1299, volume 4, p. 113.

33

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

number of institutions. In fourteenth-century Coventry (Warwickshire), for instance, a time of enormous physical expansion of the town’s religious and civic buildings, several generations of the Botoner family played a prominent role in the founding of new institutions, such as the Carmelites and Greyfriars, as well as supporting the expansion of the parish church of St Michael which acted as the main focus for the religious zeal of the town’s merchants.35 In Boston it was the Tilney family that was associated with significant ecclesiastical patronage. The Tilneys and the Botoners knew each other through trade connections, and while a direct link between their patronage is not being suggested here, comparable patterns of patronage and the closeness of the two towns’ trading operations is noteworthy. The Tilneys were, like the Botoners, identified by Leland – if he is to be believed – as founders of three of the four friars’ houses at Boston; but despite his further reference to Margaret Tilney’s involvement in the founding of St Botolph’s (for which see below), the precise nature of the parochial patronage of this family is unclear.36 3.3 Architectural and historical contextualisation of the early church of St Botolph In 1851 the architect G.G. Place carried out excavations in the church of St Botolph, these works most likely undertaken before the interior of the church was refloored and pewed later in the 1850s. They show evidence of a nave floor four feet below the current floor level (25 by 60 feet); aisles (12 by 60 feet) and a chancel, as well as a tower (9 feet square).37 Place’s report also stated that one pillar base of that fabric remained below the third pillar from the west of the existing south aisle.38 These excavations have been interpreted as demonstrating that the ‘original’ chapel was a building of the eleventh or twelfth century, confirming the documentary evidence set out above. One might also speculate that this building could have been constructed after a series of natural disasters in the area, namely, the breaking of a sea bank in 1178 when the whole fen was deluged by sea, and just 7 years later in 1185, an earthquake occurred, which certainly destroyed a church in Lincoln.39 There is no specific mention of Boston in this last account, but there are suggestions that the town and its buildings were directly affected by further floods which occurred on a regular basis in the late-thirteenth century.

Fig. 3.2 St Botolph’s, nave interior looking east. However, other than Pishey Thompson quoting Place’s excavation report, which also revealed that he believed the remains he found to indicate an early church comparable to that at Sibsey (Lincolnshire), nothing is known of the present church’s predecessor(s). Without evidence from the excavations themselves the information itself cannot be verified. It should not, for example, be assumed that this aisled church was of all one phase, although without revisiting the remaining pier fragment it is impossible to determine whether or not the church was expanded in the thirteenth century with the addition of aisles. The town which takes its name from St Botolph had already experienced phenomenal growth by the early-thirteenth century and so, circumstantially at least, it seems highly unlikely that the eleventh- or twelfth-century church would have remained unaltered at this time. The growth of urban churches in the thirteenth century is a topic which has been addressed in some detail by Peter Draper,40 and the evidence of other large late medieval churches tends to support the hypothesis that this century was a time of considerable urban church building. Significant thirteenth-century structures appear to have existed in Bristol (St Mary Redcliffe), Coventry (St Michael’s), and Nottingham (St Mary’s), to name just a few examples of major churches that were subsequently

35

Adam Botoner is recorded as trading through Boston at this time (1377–78) using the same ships as Frederick Tilney; see S.H. Rigby (ed.), The overseas trade of Boston in the reign of Richard II, LRS 93 (2005), especially pp. 5–23. 36 Toulmin Smith, Leland, 4, p. 182. 37 Thompson, Boston, pp. 161ff.; Jebb, Church of S Botolph, p. 33. 38 Ibid. 39 Thompson, Boston, p. 37.

40

34

Draper, The formation of English Gothic, p. 176.

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 3.3 Floor plan of St. Botolph’s church c.1725, by Stukeley. and substantially rebuilt in the later middle ages. The lack of recognition of these thirteenth-century urban churches by architectural historians writing several decades ago, is in fact partly the product of the often wholesale replacement of such structures in the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. This latter period is seen as the great rebuilding of the English medieval parish church, and numerous examples, especially in the east of England, can be cited to support this. The concept of the ‘merchants’ church’ is associated primarily with this period therefore, when prosperous trading centres acting as a focus for mercantile activity have an associated rebuilding of a parish church on a significant scale, with evidence of collective and individual patronage from the merchant class. This concept has almost evolved into a description of a ‘type’ of church, as they often have common architectural traits, notwithstanding regional variation. While the veracity of this claim as a late medieval phenomenon remains essentially acceptable therefore, it rather underplays the role of the thirteenthcentury builder and patron in the evolution of the form in the first place (Fig. 3.2). 3.4 Architecture and design of St Botolph’s in the fourteenth-century Accepting the lack of evidence for the pre-fourteenth century history of the building, the established building history of the current church is, on the face of it, relatively straightforward. Its commencement is traditionally ascribed to 1309, and it is likely to have progressed from east to west, with work continuing until the 1390s, resulting in a two-bay chancel (later extended), and a nave (Fig. 3.3). A rood screen spanned the nave

Fig. 3.4 St Botolph’s, exterior view from south east. 35

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

seemingly two bays from its eastern end. At some point in the fifteenth century the chancel was extended or altered, as seen in the change of tracery design for the eastern bays. Thompson suggests, both without clear evidence and unconvincingly, that the east wall of the fourteenth century church was retained and moved eastwards when the chancel was extended.41 After this the tower was commenced, possibly between 1425 and 1430, its construction stretching into the first decade of the sixteenth century. John Harvey suggested that the master mason Reginald of Ely (fl. 1438–71) may have been the designer of the tower but no firm evidence of this seems to exist.42 However, a better understanding of this conjectural chronology of construction is achieved by locating in their regional context the fourteenth-century architectural features of St Botolph’s, and drawing out the influences that contributed towards its current appearance.

church within the town and the Holland area of the fens, St Botolph’s is especially distinctive for its large traceried windows, soaring nave arcades and the proportions of its elevation (Fig. 3.4). The tracery is in many ways the most impressive part of the building, with huge aisle windows, and an almost continuous band of windows comprising the clerestory (Fig. 3.5). The nave aisle windows alternate in design, although each contains four lights. One style has four, two-centred lights grouped into two pairs under an ogee form, the ogees flowing upwards to create an oculus in the head of the tracery in which are found three mouchettes, or petal-like forms, also found in the spandrels of the window. The whole is decorated with cusping. The lights of the alternate design are themselves ogees which extend to create a smaller oculus under a two-centred arch as a means of pairing the lights, and large mouchettes almost drape over these in the head of the window. A variation on these themes is found in the westernmost bays of the chancel. The clerestory windows are, by contrast, almost diminutive in size, but retain the same principles of design, with two lights surmounted by petal forms, again alternating. Broadly speaking, the pattern of alternation operates both along the length of each aisle, and across the building with its facing aisle window.

Fig. 3.5 St Botolph’s, nave tracery south nave aisle. The architecture of the church itself can be characterised by a number of features, and assessing these in the milieu of fourteenth-century church rebuilding is fruitful. Setting aside the sheer scale and presence of the Fig. 3.6 Heckington (Lincolnshire) nave tracery. 41

Thompson, Boston, 175. J.H.H. Harvey, English mediaeval architects: a biographical dictionary down to 1550 (Stroud, 1984 edn), p. 98. Harvey states that Reginald was a member of the St Mary’s guild and speculates a possible link with him as a mason, but there is no further evidence of a direct connection.

A comparison with the tracery design of the windows of other fourteenth-century churches shows clearly that Boston was part of an oeuvre rooted in Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire dating from around the

42

36

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 3.7 Holbeach (Lincolnshire) nave tracery. second quarter of the fourteenth century. Good parallels for the designs can be found, in part, in a number of churches in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, notably Heckington (reconstructed 1307–36) (Fig. 3.6), Hawton (c.1331) and the fourteenth-century nave and chancel at Holbeach (Fig. 3.7).43 They all make use of petal forms and fully curvilinear designs. The last in particular uses a distorted version of the double ogee over two lights, a feature which dominates the tracery at Boston. This form is again found in the nave of Beverley Minster (Yorkshire) (c.1311–30), which incorporates on the north side, windows of four lights set under two ogees, with a dropped leaf design and round shapes for the quatrefoils and mouchettes (Fig. 3.8). There are also close similarities between the lower stage of the south porch at Boston and that at St Mary’s Beverley (Figs 3.9 and 3.10). Further counterparts to the Boston designs are found at York Minster, dating from the 1320s to 1335. Given Boston’s patronage by the abbey of St Mary in York and its geographical proximity and trading links to Lincoln, it is quite appealing to consider either or both of these areas as having a specific resonance for Boston. The presence of the architectural similarities in York, however, may be misleading, as Nicola Coldstream has already shown that at this time York drew many of its ideas for flowing tracery from Lincolnshire. Hence, Lincolnshire rather than York is arguably the heartland of the Decorated style’s most exuberant phase, so it is clear

that Boston’s windows fall firmly within a closely regional tradition that was emerging rapidly in the earlyfourteenth century. What is harder to determine is how architectural patterns travelled between buildings. The construction periods of all of these churches are close in date and without convincing documentary evidence it would be difficult to be certain whether or not, for example, Heckington or Boston was constructed first. However, the alternating pattern of the aisle and the clerestory windows at Boston is employed in a carefully planned fashion so that the designs alternate across the space as well as along it; this idea stems from St Mary’s abbey, York (1271–95) and later became popular in churches with large and elaborate tracery patterns of the 1340s such as Patrington (Yorkshire). Such a concept most likely spread either directly or through an intermediary, perhaps identifiable as Howden (Yorkshire), to Boston therefore. Howden might also be the source of the presence and form of the clerestory, that is the arrangement of having two windows within each bay, a form which was commonly adopted in the later middle ages. Howden was endowed as a collegiate church in the late-thirteenth century and a rebuilding programme began with the nave in 1265. The windows of the nave aisles have alternating tracery patterns, which Coldstream has already associated directly with St Mary’s abbey, York.44 The nave clerestory is relatively small compared to the nave arcade, which has slender piers (Figs 3.11 and 3.12), but like other late-thirteenth century buildings, such as Selby abbey (Yorkshire), Howden has a two

43 All Saints, Holbeach, was restored in the nineteenth century by Ewan Christian; N. Pevsner and J. Harris, The buildings of England – Lincolnshire (2nd edn revised by N. Antram, London, 1989), pp. 383– 84. The current tracery has some distinct similarities to the Boston windows although with very broad lights; however, the author has not yet investigated the degree to which Christian reused existing architectural forms.

44 N. Coldstream, ‘St Peter’s church, Howden’, in C. Wilson (ed.), Medieval art and architecture in the East Riding of Yorkshire ,British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions for the year 1983 (1989), pp. 109–20, at p. 111.

37

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

Fig. 3.8 Beverley Minster (Yorkshire) nave tracery.

Fig. 3.10 St Mary’s Beverley (Yorkshire) porch. storey elevation with a suppressed wall passage, which provides a different function and effect of the elevation. After Boston it is clear that this overall form was routinely employed for new naves, for example in the 1360–70s rebuilding of Sleaford (Lincolnshire).45 Moreover, it is especially noteworthy that Coldstream identifies the piers at Howden as anticipating a design which was to become standard in late medieval parish churches,46 although at Boston a more complex version was developed. Overall, Howden was a likely influence on the elevation and fenestration of Boston, again with

Fig. 3.9 St Botolph’s, south porch.

45 46

38

Pevsner and Harris, Lincolnshire, pp. 650–51. Coldstream, ‘St Peter’s church, Howden’, pp. 112–13.

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments common complex pier form in Early English parish churches’ and was established as a type in the thirteenth century, particularly in Nottinghamshire and parts of Lincolnshire.47 The surviving evidence shows that by the end of the thirteenth-century Lincolnshire had established its own regional preference for rolls with fillets and hollows between the rolls, and this feature distinguished many of the designs from nearby buildings in Yorkshire. On the one hand then, the Boston nave may be seen as a continuation of this architectural form, but on the other, the hollow chamfers between the cardinal roll and fillets are replaced with smaller roll and fillets. This almost gives the impression of a ‘reduced’ clustered shaft (of eight shafts) such as those found in thirteenth-century Nottinghamshire at North Collingham, South Collingham, and Laneham,48 albeit these examples have somewhat different proportions to Boston, both in the size of the shafts and the size and height of the arcade pier. What they demonstrate is the importance of thirteenth-century piers to the fourteenth-century mason engaged in the business of rebuilding a parish church; yet in Boston it is impossible to determine the structural and artistic influence of the piers of the earlier church of St Botolph on the masons rebuilding it in the fourteenth century, as we have no idea what the church looked like in the thirteenth century. Is Boston making reference not just to a Lincolnshire tradition but to a local building tradition within its own history? Self-reference and sometimes historicism are not uncommon in the later middle ages, but here a lacuna in knowledge about the building’s earlier history rather thwarts a detailed application of this principle. Some idea of a thirteenthcentury church building close to Boston is provided by, firstly, Moulton, where a six-bay Early English nave has piers of four rolls attached to a central round core, together with evidence of a thirteenth-century clerestory (although the current windows are later medieval); and secondly, Spalding, which employs a simple quatrefoil pier throughout its nave surmounted by double chamfer arcade arches, which together form a relatively lofty nave arcade (Fig. 3.13). At Boston the overall principles of the quatrefoil pier and arcade arches of two moulded orders are essentially retained from a thirteenth-century format, but they are updated with fourteenth-century details: hollows have become fillets in the pier form, and the chamfers that would have been commonplace in the thirteenth-century arcade arch are here replaced with flowing wave mouldings, a distinctive early-fourteenthcentury form. Examples of this urban merchants’ church model later than Boston tend towards more complex pier profiles, as at St Mary’s, Nottingham, for example, or in the arcade arches, such as St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, but these details aside, what really distinguishes Boston from thirteenth-century models is of course its size.

Fig. 3.11 Howden (Yorkshire) exterior view of nave.

Fig. 3.12 Howden (Yorkshire) interior view of nave looking west. Boston enhancing the format. If Boston was one of its earliest followers perhaps it was here that the format was established in a parish church context Inevitably though, the potential influence of Howden cannot explain all the architectural features at Boston, and as the character of St Botolph’s interior is determined by the slender piers and enormous arcades, it is worth considering these in more detail. The profiles are essentially quatrefoil piers, that is, four rolls and fillets set on the cardinal points separated not by hollow chamfers, which is a more commonly applied form, but by tiny rolls and fillets. ‘The quatrefoil pier form was by far the most

47

Numerous local examples testify to this statement made by Larry Hoey: L. Hoey, ‘The early Gothic parish church architecture of Nottinghamshire’, in J.S. Alexander (ed.), Southwell and Nottinghamshire – medieval art, architecture and industry, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 21 (1998), pp. 73– 82, at p. 75. 48 See Hoey, ‘Parish church architecture of Nottinghamshire’, pp. 76– 77.

39

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

Bony states that the two main types of church emerging from mendicant design were the hall church and the clerestoried, which he identified as illustrating a ‘bypassing of all such subtleties of taste’, and that Boston exemplified the second of these types;52 his judgment on ‘taste’ could be challenged as much as that of others who dismiss these buildings as unconventionally functional structures. Additionally however, another vital area of commonalty was burial. The mendicants challenged the role of the parish church as the premier burial location, and as the income from burial fees formed a significant proportion of church revenue, this was an important factor in the distribution of wealth amongst various institutions. At Boston this financial threat to the parish church was reduced at least in part by the payment of portions of burial income to the parish centre. Going on from this, however, perhaps in a realisation of this potential loss of burial fee income, and hence a desire to equalise the proportions of the church to mimic those of the mendicants, the breadth of the nave at Boston surely provided sufficient altar space and generous chapel provision for its parochial and guild requirements, as well as the capacity for a significant number of burials within the church.53 The potential mendicant influence on the plans and rebuilding schemes of late medieval parish churches applies well beyond Boston; other great urban churches such as Holy Trinity, Hull (Yorkshire), and St Thomas, Winchelsea (Sussex), as well as the once urbanised Hedon (Yorkshire), are among many probably influenced by the mendicants, in particular promoting the thinwalled structure and ‘lightness’ of the building, along with the plan, and in the case of Boston the sheer scale and proportions of the nave. Particularly influential mendicant buildings were those of the Dominican and Franciscan orders in London (their popularity and scale of construction no doubt aided by their royal patrons). One feature derived from these buildings is the use of quatrefoil piers. It is unclear how much this architectural style directly influenced late-thirteenth century parish church tradition, or how much the form was already in use in parish church building campaigns, and was thereafter adopted equally by parish churches and mendicants alike. Perhaps, more significantly, the mendicants provided an alternative model to the great Benedictine abbeys for builders of parochial churches. The latter, as St Mary’s abbey, York, so amply demonstrated, are essays of great and complex architecture, hard to emulate in a much smaller building. Parish churches had to develop their own more appropriate forms, sometimes alluding to greater models, but often best seen as the architectural response to the requirements and patronage of a different kind of institution. Mendicants, who were generally known for a more ‘simplified’ architectural aesthetic than the

Fig. 3.13 Sketch drawings to illustrate comparative nave pier profiles (not to scale). Fundamentally, St Botolph’s has a spaciousness and apparent consistency that suggests a complete unified rebuilding, not an accumulation of parts. However, the unity apparent in the church today, through the open nature of its layout, should not be misinterpreted, as the compartmentalised nature of the medieval church interior would have produced something which was visually, aesthetically and architecturally quite different in character. The broad north aisle, for example, was almost entirely occupied by five of church’s nineteen guilds accommodated in a series of chapels and there were also guild chapels in the south aisle.49 It was inevitable that screens existed within the architectural frame and particular evidence for this is found in the south aisle where the door to a loft remains. However, even with these internal chapels Boston remains an unusually large nave, and other reasons must have driven the community to this end, including the possible impact of the mendicant orders on parish churches generally. A comparison of large scale parish churches with those of the mendicants suggests that the lofty proportions and open planning were inspired by the architecture of the mendicants and their remit for preaching halls, and that this was potentially reproduced in many important early fourteenth-century churches in Yorkshire.50 This ‘openness’ of the naves of mendicant churches, which is often associated with the need for preaching space, is exemplified by the Norwich Blackfriars.51 Jean

52 J. Bony, The English Decorated style – Gothic architecture transformed 1250–1350 (Oxford, 1979), p. 59. 53 In chapter 5 Paul Cockerham examines the possible mendicant influence on the choice of the Boston merchants in the second half of the fourteenth century to be commemorated by Tournai incised slabs, the Bostonians doubtless seeing the slabs set in the floors of the mendicant houses in Flanders.

49

See S. Badham in this volume, pp. 52–53. 50 J. Maddison, ‘The architectural development of Patrington church and its place in the evolution of the Decorated style in Yorkshire’, in Wilson (ed.), East Riding, pp. 133–48, at p. 147. 51 L. Monckton, ‘Norwich Blackfriars’, in T. Ayers (ed.), The history of British art 600–1600 (London, 2008), pp. 110–11.

40

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments established Benedictine houses, may therefore have contributed towards a set of models with greater applicability in the context of a parish church. Ultimately, it is hard to imagine that the great wave of new churches by these new orders had no impact at all on the religious landscape of a busy cosmopolitan place such as Boston.54 This debate also affects our interpretation of thirteenth-century buildings such as Howden, which, as discussed above, was a significant influence on Boston’s overall elevation – yet it is another church influenced by mendicant architecture.55 A simple concept such as ‘the influence of the Mendicants’ could be taken to mean that there is such a thing as a ‘Mendicant architectural style’; but there is no known mendicant policy towards architecture and it is unlikely that one existed.56 The appearance of their buildings may be just as much to do with function and finances as an architectural conformity, so we should be cautious in suggesting a corollary between what is currently perceived as functionalist ‘bare’ architecture and St Botolph’s, Boston, in that, not only was the interior wholly different at the time of its construction, but there can be little doubt that the church was also built to impress. The nave is indeed relatively plain, but the tracery, the scale, the elevation, and later on the tower, were built to serve the piety and demonstrate the wealth of the church’s patrons. While the complexities of the relationship between mendicant buildings and parish architecture are fairly elusive therefore, even more so is an assessment of any specific influence from local mendicant buildings. The Greyfriars had been founded in Boston before 1268 and the Blackfriars by 1288, with clear documentary evidence of their expansion and growth supporting archaeological evidence of their building works carried out between 1288 and 1309. The Carmelites, founded in 1293, had land gifted for the enlargement of their houses and later for the enlargement of their dwelling houses and graveyard in 1305, 1308, 1315, and 1350. The Greyfriars were located in the south-east part of the town and had a strong link with the merchants of the Steelyard; their dwelling house was enlarged in 1322 and land added in the 1322 and 1348. There is a similar pattern for the establishment and expansion of the Austin Friars.57 Little or nothing is currently known of the appearance of the Greyfriars’ and Carmelites’ houses, but being within half a mile of St Botolph’s it seems highly likely that the appearance of these newly built and expanding friary buildings within sight of St Botolph’s, was not lost on the patrons of the parish church.

The church at Boston served a large population; it was the town’s church. In this way Boston is in complete contrast to early towns like Norwich or Chichester with their multiple small parishes. This situation had a twofold impact on the rebuilding of Boston church. First, there was little competition between churches vying for patronage from the wealthy merchants of Boston, and in this respect Boston can be compared to other similar ports and wool towns such as Holy Trinity, Hull (Yorkshire), and St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. Secondly, the building was the focus of religious activities for a large parish. There are issues, however, about this description of the church of St Botolph as parochial. Clearly it was, but this term, despite its obvious simplicity, rather veils the character of the religious institution that flourished in Boston. Clive Burgess and Stacy Boldrick have both done much to elucidate the nature of liturgical and other practices in the parish context. Burgess in particular has written extensively on the need to perceive the development of the parish church in the late middle ages, when it increasingly benefited from direct lay patronage and took on a collegiate character.58 The accommodation of chantry priests associated with perpetual masses for both individuals and the guilds at Boston led to a significant expansion of the numbers of secular priests serving the church and an associated expansion in its liturgical richness, as Badham discusses in chapter 4. In 1392 at the time of its incorporation the St Mary’s guild had 2 chaplains; by 1547 it had 9 chaplains and 12 clerks, this expansion necessitating the provision of a chantry house located to the south of the guildhall in the fifteenth century.59 It is this increase in numbers of clerks that went a long way to the development of liturgy and of a strong musical tradition. An example of the nature of the place, and of the real impact of this development of complex liturgy associated with an exponential rise in priests and clerks is perhaps given by the reputation of the church’s musical tradition. The choir school set up by St Mary’s guild is renowned for having John Taverner as its master in the 1530s, who built up the 30-strong choir. The development of polyphonic music in the parish church context cannot be disassociated from the increasingly involved clerical structures that operated within them.60 Furthermore the importance of music is demonstrated through an indulgence of 1401 when Pope Boniface IX granted 100 days off purgatory to guild members who attended mass celebrated with music in the

58 For example see C. Burgess, ‘Time and place: the late medieval English parish in perspective’ in Burgess and Duffy (eds), Parish in late medieval England, pp. 1–28; and C. Burgess, ‘An institution for all seasons: the late medieval English college’ in C. Burgess and M. Heale (eds), The late medieval English college and its context (York, 2008), pp. 3–27. 59 K. Giles & J. Clark, ‘St. Mary’s guildhall, Boston (Lincs): the archaeology of a medieval “Public” building’, forthcoming. 60 R. Bowers, ‘Taverner, John (c.1490–1545)’ ODNB (Oxford, 2004; online edn, 2010) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27004, accessed 1 Aug 2011]. Taverner is recorded as a guest singer at St Botolph’s in 1524 while Master at Tattershall college, and then, after four years at Cardinal college [later Christ Church], Oxford, during which time he recruited singers from Boston amongst other places, he was employed by St Mary’s guild in 1530 for their choir of between eighteen and twenty men, and eight to ten boys.

54 In fact until an assessment of the existing (largely unpublished) evidence concerning mendicant houses in England is undertaken, a fuller appreciation of this important topic is not really possible. 55 See both Bony, Decorated Style, p. 59; and Coldstream, ‘St Peter’s Church, Howden’, pp. 112–13. 56 Coldstream, ‘St Peter’s Church, Howden’, pp. 112–13. In some cases the first mendicant churches were aisleless buildings and any shift to the preaching nave approach appears to be of the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, possibly influenced by the Dominicans’ house in Oxford, which was the head of the province; see S. Ward, ‘The friaries in Chester, their impact and legacy’ in A. Thacker (ed.), Medieval archaeology, art and architecture at Chester, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 22 (2000), pp. 121–31, at p. 124. 57 See notes 28, 32 and 33 above.

41

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

chapel.61 Moreover, the activities within the church were not restricted to the sacred. Boldrick discusses how the ‘untidy’ secularised church came into conflict with the ideals of the fourteenth general council at Lyons II which decreed that behaviour inside the church must conform to ideals of holiness and peacefulness. Constitution 25 on the ‘Immunity of churches’ called for the cessation of ‘discussions, assemblies and public meetings … idle talk and gossip … foul and profane language … the conduct of business matters, and whatever’. These ‘might disturb the divine offices or offend the eyes of the divine Majesty’. Boldrick concludes that this call for changes in behaviour within the church suggests that the merchants’ business exchanges took place alongside endowed mass celebrations.62 Ultimately therefore, how does the architecture of St Botolph’s relate to this developing liturgical environment? Something is known of the provision to accommodate the guilds inside the church and this gives us some impression of how, despite its almost ‘barn-like’ appearance in the present day, the enormous floor plan was subdivided into grand and elaborate chapels, partitioned by screens and housing the altars at which guild chaplains said (or sang) mass. Having considered in outline the architectural milieu in which Boston developed, the issue of how it fits into this liturgical world is best assessed by trying to refine when it was built and how it developed.

front, implying that the tower was a secondary feature to the original design. Thirdly, and fundamentally, there are reasons to doubt that even the main body of the church was begun at this date. The date 1309 sits uncomfortably with the architectural evidence therefore. Mark Spurrell raised similar concerns in 1970, but as far as I am aware is the only author who has committed these to print and attempted a reconciliation of the issues.64 As he sets out, the information on the date of the foundation stone is based on two slightly variant accounts dating from the early years of the eighteenth century, the one by Robert Gass and the other by William Stukeley. Spurrell considers two hypotheses: is this reference accurate but referring to a tower built on a different location, or is it a misquoting of the date? He broadly concludes that the tower was intended to be placed in the location of the current Cotton chapel (south-west of the south aisle), and that an older tradition of referring to it as the ‘Founder’s Chapel’ provides a reason to link it with a reference to Margaret Tilney’s burial place. Spurrell also suggests possible areas of easy misinterpretation, largely to do with which of several Margaret Tilneys was associated with the church’s foundation. Spurrell’s hypothesis that the tower was planned to be off centre and then a temporary chapel built as plans for the tower were abandoned, is an interesting one although it is not one I favour. The evidence of the west front is crucial in determining whether or not a tower was intended to be constructed at the west end. Currently it seems that the stair turrets to the roof were provided with little windows most of which were blocked when the tower was built, thereby indicating that the tower was a subsequent phase. It is also worth emphasising Leland’s account of the Tilney family and what he perceived to be their role in the foundation of St Botolph’s. In one location he refers to the Tilney family and states that ‘one of them began the great steple in Boston’,65 although in another place he is more specific: ‘One Mawde Tilney layid the first stone of the goodly steple of the paroche chirch of Boston, and lyith buried under’.66 However, the fact remains that even with this second, more specific association, there is nothing to link this Mawde Tilney with a date of 1309. There are a number of Margaret Tilneys appearing in the records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries so it is likely that later commentators assumed one of these as the foundress, and then sought others’ names (such as the parish priest) to verify their story and expand upon it. One Margaret Tilney, for instance, was not born until 1430, was married to John Copuldyk, one time sheriff of Lincoln, appears to have gifted a font to St Botolph’s in the 1480s and ultimately was buried under the chancel floor. This fifteenth-century Margaret de Tilney most likely postdates the foundation of the tower and is clearly not buried under it. Yet there are earlier Margaret Tilneys, because as Spurrell sets out, in the reign of Edward I, Sir Philip de Tilney’s son, Frederick married Margaret, daughter of Sir John Rocheford, and who is the one referred to by Stukeley and Gass. Their son, Philip,

3.5 The dating and development of St Botolph’s The first dilemma is establishing with any certainty when the building was designed and work commenced. The date which is often given for the foundation is 1309. This is derived from Stukeley (and others), who on the basis of a manuscript source which no longer exists, states that in ‘Anno 1309 … on the Munday after Palm Sunday the Miners began to digg the foundation of Boston Steeple at Midsummer following they were gott 9 foot below the Havens bottom, where they found a bed of stone, upon one of Sand which lay upon a bed of clay whose thicknesse could not be found. The Munday following St John Baptists day was laid the first stone by Dame Margery Tilney who gave 5 li Sterling, as alsoe Sir John Truesdale then Parson, & Rich: Stevenson a Marchant of Boston which were the greatest gifts at the time’.63 There are three reasons for questioning the veracity of this claim. First, the current tower is clearly a later structure than the body of the church, and it is highly unusual to lay a foundation stone for a tower and then ignore its construction for a hundred years. Secondly, there is some debate concerning the nature of the west 61

Badham in this volume, pp. 60–61. S. Boldrick, ‘The rise of the chantry space in England from ca. 1260 to ca. 1400’, (Unpublished University of Manchester Ph.D. thesis, 1997), p. 52. 63 Stukeley’s notebook, dated 1701: Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Top. Gen. e 61, fol. 5v. Slightly different wording is given in an account by Robert Gass dated 1708, framed and in St Botolph’s church. M. Spurrell, ‘The first stone’, in Idem, The first stone and other papers, History of Boston Series 1, (Boston, 1970), p. 1 suggests that Stukeley and Gass independently translated a Latin chronicle which has not been traced. 62

64

Spurrell, ‘The first stone’, pp. 1–8. Toulmin Smith, Leland, 4, p. 115. 66 Toulmin Smith, Leland, 4, p. 182. 65

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments had issue a son, Frederick, who also married a Margaret, and it is this Margaret de Tilney who could satisfy a latefourteenth-century connection to the tower as one possible interpretation of Leland’s comment.67 The latefourteenth-century branch of the de Tilneys were fairly consistent patrons of aspects of the church but they were also closely involved with the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary; this was the most successful of the Boston guilds, founded in 1260. The de Tilneys were instrumental in the guild’s licence of incorporation being granted in 1392, and with the associated construction of its guildhall, recently re-dated to the 1390s.68 Philip de Tilney also gave further lands to the guild in this decade. One last piece of evidence in favour of a late-fourteenth-century interpretation of this 1309 reference is the fact that a Richard Stevenson, as mentioned in the account by Stukeley and Gass, is known to have been guardian of the guild of SS Peter and Paul in 1389,69 and is clearly a merchant active in Boston in the 1370s and 1380s.70 One might speculate that he and Margaret Tilney were not of 1309 therefore but c.1389. Is this a straightforward misreading of a now lost text, or an antiquarian retrospective construction of a story around the name Tilney? Either way, the proposition here is that 1309 foundation story is something of a myth. Any suggestion about the start date for the building of the tower must be tentative – it is usually attributed to c.1425–50 on stylistic grounds, but if a late-fourteenthcentury date is presumed, how would this fit in with the possible dating and sequence of build for the rest of the church? If one discards the 1309 date and bases an interpretation on medieval sources rather than eighteenthcentury accounts, as well as on an assessment of the architectural design, a slightly different picture emerges. Firm indicators of building activity taken from documentary sources are later than 1309. The most convincing evidence that large scale building is underway is the licence, dated 3 July 1342, for the alienation in mortmain to Master John Baret, parson, of parcels of land for the enlargement of the churchyard. These are by no means insignificant areas of land, as four gifts alone comprise 80 by 20 feet, 120 by 20 feet, 49 by 39 feet, and 10 by 16 feet, all owned by local men. A further enlargement was made in 1346 of an area 60 by 21 feet.71 Although it is assumed that the usual progress of east to west was adopted there is little evidence to confirm the progress of the build. What can be said is that the south side of the church was nearing completion in the 1350s as the register for the Corpus Christi guild records the decoration of their chapel commissioned by Gilbert Alilaunde before 1354 (Fig. 3.14).72 That works were ongoing in the 1360s is clear from a reference in the Calendar of Papal registers. On 3 March 1363 there is recorded ‘a relaxation, during ten years, of a year and

forty days of enjoined penance to penitents who visit and give alms for the repair of the church and chancel of St Botulph in Hoyland (Boston) in the diocese of Lincoln’.73 One might speculate that this indulgence is evidence that the work was in need of some assistance, or that it was taking longer or costing more than originally envisaged. More significantly, however, it shows that the chancel, which was the responsibility of St Mary’s abbey, York, and the nave works, were contemporary. It suggests a scheme for rebuilding the entire church, all at once perhaps, which is certainly the impression given by the architecture itself, notwithstanding some later insertions of new tracery windows.

Fig. 3.14 St Botolph’s, site of Corpus Christi chapel, south nave wall. The analysis above shows that while the ideas for the form of the church may originate from late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century buildings, the architectural context into which St Botolph’s most comfortably fits is from c.1330–50 and the design could conceivably have been anytime within this frame. This certainly coincides neatly with the documentary records of 1342 and 1346 of the need to enlarge the churchyard. The initiation of the main building campaign therefore might be reasonably ascribed to the 1330s extending perhaps into the 1370s. This is not the end of the story for St Botolph’s however, as there are two further significant additions, the chancel works and the tower. The chancel has Perpendicular windows at its east end which are fifteenthcentury in date and have distinctive tracery designs which are in remarkable contrast to the Decorated works to their west (Fig. 3.15). Pishey Thompson even suggests that the east wall of the fourteenth-century chancel was retained

67

Spurrell, ‘The first stone’, p. 2. Giles and Clark, ‘St. Mary’s guildhall’, forthcoming. 69 Spurrell, ‘The first stone’, p. 3. 70 See Rigby (ed.), Overseas trade, pp. 5–23. 71 CPR, 1340–43, p. 481; CPR, 1345–48, p. 74. 72 H. Fenning, ‘The guild of Corpus Christi’, in W.M. Ormrod (ed.), The guilds in Boston (Boston, 1993), pp. 35–44, at p. 43; and also discussed by Badham in this volume, pp. 67–68. 68

73 ‘Regasta 253: 1363–1364’, CPapL, 1362–1404, pp. 36–47; [available online at www.british-history.ac.uk/ accessed 20 August 2009].

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The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

Fig. 3.15 St Botolph’s, chancel interior looking west.

Fig. 3.17 York Minster east window. This affinity of design between Boston and York has perhaps favoured the proposal that the chancel was extended in the fifteenth century, perhaps relating to the putative foundation of the ‘college’ in 1428. However, two factors militate against an argument for expansion at this time. One is the uncertainty over the actual foundation of the college in 1428 and the almost complete certainty that the scheme never got off the ground.76 Secondly, in view of the lack of clarity from the documentary record there is also an architectural indicator that the chancel was not extended at this time: while the surviving eastern tracery is clearly much later that the western chancel bays, the window frames and mouldings of these windows are identical to the adjacent fourteenth-century ones (Fig. 3.18). Copying of earlier architectural features occurs in other places, but it is usually associated with reproducing overall design forms in an attempt to emulate an earlier aesthetic, and not at the detailed level of moulding templates; it is, therefore, the difference in mouldings that usually betray a later copy. Moreover, the mouldings here include small wave forms, which were almost exclusively the purview of early- to mid-fourteenth-century masons. Potentially therefore, it might be considered that this is not a later extension of the chancel but a refenestration of fourteenth-century windows. Keeping the original frames,

Fig. 3.16 St Botolph’s, chancel exterior from south. and moved outwards, being reconstructed further east as part of these works.74 While the picture is confused by the decision of the nineteenth-century restorers to redesign the east window in the Decorated style, the fact remains that this and the easternmost windows are fifteenthcentury. Architecturally one can point to the east window and later eastern transepts at York Minster as a source for the overall design of the fifteenth-century windows at St Botolph’s. The reconstruction of the Lady Chapel at York Minster was begun in the late-fourteenth century and Sarah Brown has argued that the east window, showing signs of a Perpendicular aesthetic not yet visible in the aisles, is pre-1400 (Fig. 3.17); the choir and associated eastern transepts are dateable to 1394–1420.75 One repeated and distinctive motif is the use of two lights housed under an ogee. Its origins are, of course, in the Decorated period and seen to great effect in the Boston nave windows, but its use as a tiny motif within a Perpendicular window becomes a sort of leitmotiv in the eastern counties of England in the fifteenth century and remains a prominent and distinctive feature of the window design for the chapel of King’s college, Cambridge in the early-sixteenth century. Certainly by c.1400 the flowing Decorated forms of c.1330 Boston may have appeared somewhat dated.

74

Thompson, Boston, p. 175. S. Brown, ‘Our Magnificent Fabrick’ – York Minster: an architectural history c.1220–1500 (Swindon, 2003), pp. 160–63. 75

76

44

See note 27 above.

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments 20. Such an expansion may have contributed towards a desire to re-craft the chancel to reflect its increasing status and institutional size.

Fig. 3.18 St Botolph’s, detail chancel windows exterior. the tracery was redone in an effort to update the building. The motivation for such a partial upgrading is not clear, although one should not rule out the possibility of structural issues necessitating additional works, or indeed the desire for new glass design forms as a driving factor for remodelling the tracery. In addition, the layout and position of the late medieval stalls, which were designed specifically to fit out the choir, necessitated a chancel of the current length; hence, if the chancel had not been extended and was shorter than it is now, the choir stalls would have taken up too much of the space available. Sixty-two carved misericords form part of the chancel seating, which early commentators date to the 1390s;77 but Christa Grössinger recently re-appraised them as dating from c.1400, basing her chronology on an interpretation of fashionable headgear on figures within the narrative scenes represented in the carvings.78 There is good reason to suppose therefore that these misericords are significantly later than the proposed 1370 end date for the main building campaign, and are more likely to conform to an early-fifteenth century date (c.1400 to 1420), associated with the ‘modernising’ and seating of the chancel.79 One possibility is that the construction of the choir stalls and the upgrading of the east of the choir were actually done together as part of a campaign to provide an adequate setting for the church’s rapidly growing clerical population (Fig. 3.15). In 1377 (perhaps about when the building was initially completed), there were 37 clergy in Boston, although only one was beneficed,80 but by 1381 this figure had risen by another

Fig. 3.19 St Botolph’s, lower stage of tower. The famous tower would amply benefit from a paper of its own, although a few comments can be made about it here. First, if the basis of the re-attribution of the 1309 reference is taken to mean 1389, then it suggests that the works to the tower would follow on from the building of the main body of the church, which is certainly feasible. Adding large western towers to extant buildings was not uncommon and was particularly associated with some key merchant churches, not least the decision in the 1370s to add a significant tower to St Michael’s, Coventry (Warwickshire), in order to rival its neighbours.81 At St Botolph’s the stages all have distinct architectural characteristics reflecting both their date and their contribution to the overall design of the tower. The highly panelled lower stage uses a developed

77

F. Bond, Wood carvings in English churches - I - misericords (London, 1910), p. 226; subsequently adopted by G.L. Remnant, A catalogue of misericords in Great Britain (Oxford, 1969), p. 90; and see also a church guide, St Botolph’s parish church – the misericords (Much Wenlock, n.d.). 78 C. Grössinger, The world upside-down: English misericords (London, 1997), p. 158–59. 79 With thanks to Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham for a more detailed discussion of the dating of the features in the misericords, in particular the ‘chaperon’ which can be compared to early-fifteenthcentury MS. illustrations, and the torsed bacinet, through comparison with other media, such as heraldry, brasses, sculpted monuments and seals. 80 With thanks to Stephen Rigby for discussing this with me: A.K. McHardy (ed.), Clerical Poll Taxes of the Diocese of Lincoln, 1377–81, LRS 81 (1992), no. 134, refers to a 1377 listing of a rector, two parochial chaplains and thirty-four other chaplains; and by 1381 (no. 1399) a rector, two parochial chaplains and fifty-six others. This is also

referred to in part by Thompson, Boston, p. 57; and Dover, Early medieval history, p. 13. 81 L. Monckton, ‘St Michael’s, Coventry: the architectural history of a medieval urban parish church’, in L. Monckton and R. Morris (eds), Coventry: medieval art, architecture and archaeology in the city and its vicinity, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 33 (2011), pp. 135–63; this tower was added to an existing church and the decision to rebuild in a late medieval style and on a larger footprint was made afterwards.

45

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

Fig. 3.21 Tattershall (Lincolnshire) collegiate church. 3.6 Conclusions At the beginning of this paper three questions were raised relating to an analysis of the wider correlation between urban economics and church building programmes; thereafter, understanding the particular nature of the patronage of St Botolph’s; and lastly, examining the exceptionality of the church building itself in the late middle ages. The relationship between urban economic prosperity and church building programmes is an interesting concept, but one which is hard to elucidate with any great certainty. In some towns, like Coventry, a direct correlation is easy to find: a phenomenal amount of building took place during the late fourteenth century, which was not only a period of high prosperity but followed on directly from the town attaining selfgovernance. Political and economic success made a heady combination in late-fourteenth century Coventry.84 However, in Boston during the period 1330–50, while there are falling exports and a decline in trade with the onset of the Hundred Years War, as shown by Rigby in chapter 2, there still appears to have been a high degree of individual prosperity. This economic well-being coincides precisely with the plan to rebuild the church on such a massive scale, as well as with the onset and continuity of mercantile memorialisation using Tournai marble incised slabs, as described by Paul Cockerham in chapter 5. The concurrent development of the guilds must also have been influential in overall architectural planning; for example, although St Mary’s guild was not formally incorporated until 1392 it was already one of the wealthiest in the town, and, hence, it occupied the twobay Lady chapel at the east end of the south aisle in the new building, where three altars were housed. The development of the church at this time must have been strongly dependent upon guild as well as private patronage. This relationship is easier to identify in the latefourteenth century when the town’s fortunes enjoyed a resurgence; Rigby shows us how the probi homines were involved in the guilds through gifts of land and property

Fig. 3.20 St Botolph’s, tower from south. Perpendicular form, and is surmounted by a large stage with twin lights each defined by large ogees over the top (Fig. 3.20). In general form it seems reasonable to compare this to York Minster, where similar work on the tower took place in the early years of the fifteenth century (post-1407).82 The next stage has, by contrast, cuspless tracery, a highly unusual and distinctive form which was most obviously and innovatively made popular in the region by the work on the collegiate church at Tattershall (Lincolnshire), dating from the 1440s (Figs 3.20 and 3.21). The top stage, of the sixteenth century, looks to other models, possibly to the mendicants, who favoured octagonal towers, but more likely Boston turned for inspiration not by chance to another collegiate church, that of Fotheringhay (Northamptonshire). The decision to add this top stage at all was a reflection of the church’s enormous self-confidence. Until the early-sixteenth century the west tower of St Wulfram, Grantham (Lincolnshire) retained the privilege of the tallest tower in the region. A successful challenge was made by Boston but then all were superseded in 1515 by St James, Louth (Lincolnshire). Evidently by this date the competitive edge between the trade centres endured sufficiently to stimulate such rivalry despite the decline in trading activity.83 82

Brown, ‘Our Magnificent Fabrick’, pp. 162–63. For Grantham and this comparison with Boston and Louth see J. Maddison, ‘The church of St Wulfram 2: the tower and spire’, in D. Start and D. Stocker (eds), The making of Grantham: the medieval town (Sleaford, 2011), pp. 71–94, at p. 91. 83

84 See R.M. Goddard, ‘The built environment and the later medieval economy: Coventry 1200–1540’, in Monckton and Morris (eds), Coventry, pp. 33–47; and Monckton, ‘St Michael’s, Coventry’, passim.

46

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments as well as administration.85 However, the generally ascribed date of the second quarter of the fifteenth century for the construction of the tower raises the question as to why such an enormous project was embarked upon during a period of economic decline. Based on the analysis above, the probable date of the commencement of the tower in the late-fourteenth century, although not its subsequent chronology, can be related closely to the growing dominance of the guilds over the financial fortunes of the town, and the patronage of particularly wealthy individuals at a time of rising personal prosperity. A decline in the town’s overall trading fortunes becomes clear from the second quarter of the fifteenth century, yet by then the construction of the tower was underway and a commitment to continue probably existed. Its extended building time – with a likely finishing date in the sixteenth century – does suggest, however, a slow campaign, which sits in direct contrast to the construction of the main body of the church. The latter was ultimately more urgent, required as it was for the acting out of the liturgy, compared to the building of the tower. Towers are, of course, not just often associated with civic pride but also with religious zeal, and given our understanding of the operation of the St Mary’s guild in the late medieval period, the latter is clearly an important factor. While overseas trade at Boston collapsed in the course of the fifteenth and earlysixteenth centuries, the St Mary’s guild appears to be one of the wealthiest and most successful guilds in medieval England. This contrast highlights the difficulty in attributing success simply to urban economic factors, and confirms what has been implied earlier in this paper, which is the increasing complexity and scale of the religious foundations that served the parish church; it was, in effect, operating on a quasi-collegiate system of many priests involved with a complex liturgy.86 The strength of the guilds as religious organisations is shown to greatest effect in the St Mary’s guild gaining the Scala Coeli indulgence in the 1510s, which sealed its fate as ‘the national body with the most extensive privilege for its members’; this made its membership increasingly attractive, in turn increasing its income through fees and indulgence payments.87 Not only was that guild aiming for national status, but also for a conscious strategy of development and expansion which came to fruition in the later middle ages and extended into the sixteenth century. The sheer success of this strategy is shown in the St Mary’s guild’s collections for the 1520s which matched the total income of the sees of Exeter (£1,600) and Salisbury (£1,500), and thus would have continuously benefited the economy of the town at this time.88 Badham’s work in this volume has shown what a high proportion of testators included the guilds in their bequests, indicating the prominence both the incorporated and unincorporated guilds played in the lives of the townsfolk.89 Despite an overall decline in the economic

prosperity of the town, the factors of who was wealthy and what they funded, remain crucial to an understanding of the economic dichotomy at Boston, of a decline in trade yet a significant ongoing patronage of the church. As the St Mary’s guild collections show, what wealth did exist was concentrated in the hands of a few; the largesse of fewer, but wealthier, individuals and institutions may thus explain the continuation of works at St Botolph’s. The popular nature of the guilds and their vital role in intercession, as well as an individual loyalty to them manifest in the testamentary records of the townspeople, increasingly ensured that the more successful guilds acted as corporate donors towards building projects, so that the parochial finances relied less on family and more on institutions. The concentration of wealth produced by the structure in Boston of its guilds must, hence, explain much about the way St Botolph’s was financed throughout the middle ages. The presence of what is, in essence, a single large campaign in the fourteenth century, carried out in a relatively short period of time, is indicative of the level of funding that was available in the town. At St Patrick’s, Patrington (Yorkshire), John Maddison associates its lack of aesthetic coherence to the ‘slow progress of the building and the reluctance of the masons directing its construction to break free of the proportions dictated by earlier surviving work’.90 This synopsis sits in direct opposition to the situation at Boston; therefore while Patrington provides an example of how episodic rebuilding correlates commonly to episodic funding, Boston seemingly had both the financial means and the will to create a building on an unprecedented scale, and to exemplify the late medieval parish church as both a parochial building and a corporate guild institution. Is this building truly exceptional however? And to what degree can it be considered, paradoxically, both atypical and a model? As referred to above, the influence of the mendicant houses is probably highly relevant to the development of large parish churches in the postthirteenth century period, on the basis of appropriate architectural models and the need for burial space, and this influence resonates in the use of the frequented areas of the nave for mercantile burial, as Cockerham discusses in chapter 5. Going on from this, however, the space was also required for the increasingly complex organisational structure of the parish church, and the sheer number of priests (and clerks) that were required to service this, including the guilds and any chantry foundations that existed.91 When a re-ordering took place at Boston in the nineteenth century, as in numerous other parish churches around the country, the church was filled with pews, following a model of seating provision throughout the church that had its origins in the early-seventeenth century. It is now acknowledged that the re-seating of entire nave area with pews was such as to provide an

85

Rigby in this volume, pp. 19–20. Burgess, ‘An institution for all seasons’, pp. 3–27. 87 R.N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England. Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 243, 375–76 88 Ibid., pp. 436–37; 440–41. 89 Badham in this volume, pp. 56–59. 86

90

Maddison, ‘Patrington Church’, p. 147. Although no documentary evidence for the foundation of perpetual chantries or chantry chapels has been found, the possibility that some existed in a church servicing a large population, must remain high. 91

47

The parish church of St Botolph, Boston

excess capacity even for that time, which highlighted not just the vastness of the medieval space, but also the purpose of this space – which was not for sitting but to accommodate burials and constant liturgical activity, both of which were united through the actions of the priests as they said and sang prayers for the souls of the deceased as part of their duties. The potential clashing of concurrent individual masses and prayers ensured that by the later fourteenth century the larger institutions, such as cathedrals, had introduced timetables for saying mass as the number of chantries was so great. As Boldrick maintains, ‘the majority of chantry masses were to be performed in the morning, after matins and before lauds, with other chantry masses fitted in throughout the day between the canonical hours … At Exeter Cathedral in the late-thirteenth century these chantry foundations were located at different altars as far apart from each other in the cathedral, probably to alleviate competition among services and to provide each mass with the closest possible thing to silence’.92 One can imagine the need for such a system in an institution like St Botolph’s, of timetabling both intercessory masses as well as those of the daily liturgy, in addition to providing the space for these services to be performed without audible and physical conflict; and furthermore to enable masses to be said at times that could be useful to parishioners, or encourage attendance at certain times of day. Whether Boston was exceptional in operating in this way is in doubt, but it may have been exceptional in terms of its scale within a parochial context. At a general level it is certainly not inappropriate to suggest that Boston is a ‘merchants’ church’, a title commonly applied to any grand parochial structure in a prosperous town of the later middle ages. Part of Boston’s exceptionality, however, seems to be the focus of the merchants on a single parish church, via a handful of highly organised and successful guilds.93 Even if the construction of the tower dragged on over many decades, exposing the ebbs and flows of the community’s ability to fund enormous building campaigns, the fact that it was built at all shows how the townspeople of Boston wanted a tower worthy of their church and worthy of their status in the region. Its visibility across the Fens even now serves to prove how successful they were in creating an iconic image for their community. As to the architecture itself, Christopher Wilson, when describing later medieval churches, states that, by the early-fourteenth century, prototypes of the major late medieval parish church existed in limited numbers in eastern England. He recounts the presence of tall arcades with slender four shaft piers, relatively low clerestories forming continuous bands of windows and a roof of shallow pitch, and the creation of boxy spaces.94 It is impossible that Boston was not in his mind when drafting

this description, as he identifies that this format was easy to ‘perpendicularise’ through its details and thus idealise its standard setting. There is no reason to challenge this assumption, and the sheer importance of Boston institutionally, together with the range of visitors that would have witnessed its coincidence of liturgy and architecture, may have promoted its suitability to accommodate all these functions as a model. In turn, however, this is a reflection of the influence of the great thirteenth-century churches on the redevelopment of St Botolph’s itself. This church’s characteristics are crystallised by the nature of the funding, the scale of the operation and the consistency of the architectural form. Based on surviving models there may, therefore, be key buildings which assimilate the lessons of the past in a way that makes them serviceable to those in the future. The inherent adaptability of Perpendicular architecture per se lends itself to an identification of these models, and there must be little doubt that St Botolph’s stood, literally, like a beacon for the later-fifteenth century merchants in the east of England. Acknowledgments Particular thanks go to Stephen Rigby (for much information and invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter), David Stocker (for remaining a useful and generous information resource on Lincolnshire), Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham (for patience and understanding as well as editorial skills), as well as Clive Burgess, John McNeill, Barney Sloane and Robert Swanson.

92

Boldrick. ‘Chantry Space’, pp. 160–61; and see also N. Orme, Exeter cathedral: the first thousand years, 400–1550 (Exeter, 2009), pp. 145– 54. 93 See Badham p. 59 for details of how the merchant classes patronised the guilds through membership and in death. 94 C. Wilson, ‘“Excellent, new and uniforme”: Perpendicular architecture c.1400–1547’, in R. Marks and P. Williamson (eds), Gothic art for England 1400–1547 (London, 2003), pp. 98–119, at p. 104.

48

Chapter 4 ‘He loved the guild’: the religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston by Sally Badham in 264 of the 506 parishes).5 Religious guilds could be found in small villages, but proliferated in towns where there was greater economic activity, especially those which, like Boston, were ports and supported markets. Norwich had over 60 such organisations and Lynn’s two parishes supported over 100, but most East Anglian towns had between 10 and 30 guilds.6 Evidence indicates that there were smaller numbers of guilds in Yorkshire: York had 52, Doncaster 24, Hull 20, Beverley 13, Scarborough 13, but few other urban centres had five or more.7 The number of guilds able to flourish in Boston may have been limited by the density of guilds in neighbouring villages discussed below; Bainbridge has drawn attention to the exceptional concentration of guilds in the wealthy alluvial silt lands around the Wash, in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk as well as Lincolnshire.8 Entry to the guilds was to a significant degree selfselecting and self-perpetuating, with social respectability being as important a criterion for entry as the financial standing to afford the entry fee; guild ordinances relating to the conduct of members have been characterised as ‘a mixture of spiritual holiness and social probity’.9 Guild membership therefore conferred or re-affirmed a social standing valuable to an individual’s position in the town. A significant number of those who were brethren and benefactors of guilds would have aspired to burial and commemoration within the parish church, perhaps even in one of the guild chapels. This is not an aspect of guilds that has hitherto received specific attention, but there is ample evidence in the case of Boston, as discussed in chapter 6. Many of them would have chosen to be commemorated by a floor monument – probably an incised slab or a monumental brass. St Botolph’s is still largely paved with such medieval monuments, a number of the most important of which can be attributed to known guild members. These monuments would have formed only one part of the strategy for commemoration of such individuals. Monuments had their setting in the context of medieval Catholic theology, specifically the doctrine of Purgatory, which held that the soul had to be refined or purified before it could enter heaven. Medieval people believed that the refining process could be accelerated by

4.1 Medieval religious guilds Religious guilds or fraternities have been characterised as being ‘essentially communal chantries’, which were formed under the patronage of a particular saint or in devotion to a religious symbol, such as the Corpus Christi.1 They were probably first established in England in the Saxon period, but it was in the late Middle Ages that they reached their prime, playing an important part in the spiritual life of urban society, particularly in the richer parts of the country.2 They were mostly lay organisations and were distinct from the craft guilds which existed primarily to regulate the economic functions of various trades. Religious guilds were also distinct from the parish but not generally in competition or conflict with parochial organisations. Some lasted for several centuries, but others were only fleeting associations, badly run and rapidly losing adequate support.3 Smaller guilds had few resources, primarily restricted to maintaining lights and celebrating masses at an existing altar within the church, but the major guilds had their own guild chapels within the parish church, often richly decorated and furnished with gifts provided by pious members. The chaplains of these major guilds supplemented and enriched the religious life of the local community, providing extra opportunities for parishioners to attend mass, particularly at unsocial times of the day, such as dawn and dusk, to meet the needs of merchants, travellers, fishermen, and labourers. Crucially, they would also celebrate masses for brothers and sisters of the fraternity, both living and dead; the wealthier the guild, the more elaborate the range of practices they were able to provide. Although primarily concerned with spiritual activities, guilds also offered a social life and group support to their members, especially in times of hardship. No study has yet been published of the Lincolnshire guilds as a whole, but there were probably many hundreds of them.4 Farnhill’s study of East Anglian guilds suggests that there were at least 1229 guilds in Norfolk (with guilds recorded in 445 of the county’s 800 parishes) and nearly 500 in Suffolk (with guilds recorded

1

C. Barron, ‘The parish fraternities of medieval London’, in C. Barron and C. Harper-Bill (eds), The church in pre-Reformation society: essays in honour of F.R.H. Du Boulay (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 13–37; at pp. 22–23. 2 H.F. Westlake, The parish gilds of medieval England (London, 1919), pp. 35; V.R. Bainbridge, Gilds in the medieval countryside: social and religious change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350–1558, Studies in the History of Medieval Religion 10 (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 14–17. 3 See Barron, ‘Fraternities of medieval London’, p.35, for examples of London guilds that failed to flourish. 4 For a brief overview, see D.M. Owen, Church and society in medieval Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire 5 (Lincoln, 1981), pp. 127–131.

5 K. Farnhill, Guilds and the parish community in late medieval East Anglia c. 1470-1550, (York, 2001), pp. 30–31. 6 Farnhill, Guilds in East Anglia, p. 31. 7 J. Kermode, Medieval merchants. York, Beverley and Hull in the later Middle Ages, (Cambridge, 1998), p. 135; D.J.F. Crouch, Piety, fraternity and power: religious gilds in late medieval Yorkshire 1389– 1547, (York, 2000), pp. 252–64. 8 Bainbridge, Gilds in the medieval countryside, pp 26–27. 9 G. Rosser, ‘Communities of parish and guild in the late Middle Ages’, in S.J. Wright (ed.), Parish, church and people: local studies in lay religion 1350–1750, (London, 1988), pp. 29–55, at pp. 36–37.

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The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston the offer of prayers by the living faithful.10 The purpose of commissioning monuments was to enlist prayerful assistance from clergy, friends and onlookers. Yet the expenditure on such things could be dwarfed by the sums directed towards other forms of commemoration, including gifts to the guilds to ensure that the donor was the recipient of regular intercessory prayer. Much has been written about the similar benefits of burial and commemoration in monasteries and friaries or obtained through the establishment of chantries. In comparison, the handful of scholarly publications on guilds in recent years, which have all been regional studies, have not generally addressed related issues such as how guild membership was supplemented by other forms of commemoration of the pious brethren. By the latefourteenth century the Boston guilds attracted a substantial following, especially amongst the resident merchant community, eager for the communal spiritual self-help that membership brought them in terms of protection of their souls in the afterlife. The monuments of St Botolph’s church which form the main focus of this volume can thus be more fully understood when viewed against the background of the guild membership of those commemorated.

together with the rules for the ceremonies to be observed on such occasions and for the distribution of money to the poor.12 The detail of the obits includes mention of other guilds of which the principal benefactor was a member and whose brothers and sisters were to be included in the prayers, hence the register helps to throw light on other guilds operating concurrently in Boston. For example, the record of the obit for the Boston merchant William Thorland and his wife Margaret records that they were members of the guilds of Corpus Christi, St Mary, St Peter, the Trinity, St George, St Catherine, the Postill [Apostles] guild, the Holyrood guild, the Fellowship of Heaven and the Seven Martyrs.13 A detailed list also survives, dated 1489, of the Corpus Christi guild landholdings with their rents, giving a valuable insight into one of its sources of income; there is also a statement of expenditure, sadly undated.14 Most guilds are less well documented than the Corpus Christi guild, although annual statements of property and its income and expenditure for St Mary’s guild in the period from 1514 have been preserved.15 The two inventories of goods belonging to this guild dated 1530/1 and 1534 are the only such documents that survive for the town’s guilds.16 For the remaining guilds the primary sources of information comprise the 1389 guild certificates, the licences of incorporation in the public records and, for the incorporated guilds, the 1548 chantry certificates.17 The guild certificates are particularly useful as they furnish information about their origins, purposes and religious practices, but of the nineteen Boston guilds only nine were recorded in 1389. For the purposes of this study, it has been assumed that guilds not included in these returns were established after that date, although that cannot be known for certain. The 1389 certificates are generally accepted as being incomplete in their coverage, as well as possibly being a sanitised version of the guilds’ activities, many of them cautiously pleading a lack of assets or emphasising their charitable provision or emphasising their religious function rather than the social and networking benefits that members enjoyed.18

4.2 Documentary sources for the Boston guilds Medieval Boston had at least nineteen religious guilds. These are listed in Table 4.1, along with the dates when each is first and last recorded (although many may have had a longer life).11 These date spans give a valid indication of their dates of foundation and dissolution in only a small minority of cases. It is likely that some at least were in existence significantly before the first date for which we have a record and a few might have continued until the dissolution of the guilds brought about by the Chantries Act of 1548. Our knowledge of them is hampered by the fact that most guild records were lost at or following the dissolution. No guild ordinances survive for Boston and only for the Corpus Christi guild does the register survive; as well as admissions, it contains a calendar listing the obits to be observed by the guild, 10 C. Burgess, ‘“A fond thing vainly invented”; an essay on purgatory and pious motive in later Medieval England’, in Wright (ed.), Parish, church and people, pp. 56–84. 11 P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), pp. 113–55, lists a total of fifteen guilds, but in some cases his evidence is confused. Specifically, the documents which he cites for a putative guild of St Botolph actually concern other guilds. There was a tabernacle of St Botolph in the choir, which housed an image of the saint. Various locals left bequests for making the tabernacle: for example the wills of Adam Pennington, esq., (d. 1525), William Sutton (d. 1525) and Edmund Burte (d. 1531) and William Wightman (unknown occupation, d. 1532), the last being for 16d ‘to the gyltyng of St Botulphe of Boston’. Thomas Robertson of Algarkirk (d. 1531) stipulated that if the image of St Botolph in the high choir at Boston was not gilded before his death he would leave £20 for this purpose: TNA: PROB11/24, fols 68r–72v. The references for these and other Boston wills referred to in this chapter are given in Appendix 3. W.M. Ormrod (ed.), The guilds in Boston (Boston, 1993), identifies fourteen guilds, but will evidence examined by the current author names additional minor guilds. Finally, R.N. Swanson, Indulgences in late medieval England. Passports to paradise? (Cambridge, 2007), p. 243, erroneously refers to a guild of St Etheldreda at Boston, but the source (Cambridge University Library, Ely Diocesan Records, G/1/6, p. 155) states that it was at Lynn.

12

BL, MS. Harley 4795. Thompson, Boston, p. 126. 14 Thompson, Boston, pp. 127–32 and 133–34. 15 Thompson, Boston, pp. 138–39. 16 See inventories for 1530/1 (LAO: 4/A/2/1A) and 1533 (LAO: 4/A/2/1B). Thompson, Boston, pp. 141–46, lists partial transcripts. B. Brammer has provided unpublished full transcripts in modern English. The latter are the basis of an analysis of how the objects were used in the architectural spaces of the guild buildings in K. Giles, ‘“A table of alabaster with the story of Doom”: the religious objects and spaces of the guild of Our Blessed Virgin, Boston (Lincs)’, in T. Hamling and C. Richardson (eds), Medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (Farnham, 2010), pp. 265–87. 17 The 1389 certificates are TNA: C47/39/82–90. They are summarised in Westlake, Parish gilds, pp. 156–58. See also C.W. Foster and A.H. Thompson (eds), ‘The chantry certificates for Lincoln and Lincolnshire returned in 1548 under the act of parliament of 1 Edward VI – part 2’, AASRP 37 (1925), pp. 247–75, at pp. 255–72. 18 Barron, ‘Fraternities of medieval London’, pp. 20–21. 13

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Table 4.1 The Boston guilds Dedication

Established / first recorded

Last recorded

All Hallows Ascension Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Apostles Blessed Virgin Mary Corpus Christi Fellowship of Heaven Holy Rood Holy Trinity Seven Martyrs St Anne St Anthony St George St James the Apostle St John the Baptist St Katherine SS Peter and Paul SS Simon and Jude St Thomas

1478 pre-1389 1508 c.1450* 1260 1335 c.1446* c.1450* 1389 c.1450* 1509 1519 1354 1389 1389 1349 1396 1368 1486

1533 1537 1533 1535 1548 1548 c.1446* 1533 1548 1539 1509 1527 1548 1535 1533 1537 1548 1533 1533

*undated reference, with date based on when the named brother is known to have been alive.

Nationally, many guilds known to have been in existence in 1389 do not have surviving guild returns, and this may apply to Boston although it is not provable. Moving on to 1548, the chantry certificates are also extremely informative for the guilds examined, but coverage is restricted for two reasons. Firstly, their late date means that many fraternities, having already been wound up in several earlier stages of dissolution encouraged by increased influence from reformist theologians, would not have been recorded. Secondly, since the purpose of the survey was to itemise and facilitate the seizure of all guild assets, local evasion was inevitable. Hence, in the case of Boston, only the five incorporated guilds are covered. In past studies of the Boston guilds the evidence of wills has been regarded as of incidental interest only, even though they provide evidence of the considerable mass of informal benefaction which enabled the continued operation of the smaller guilds in particular. Few Boston wills dated before the mid-fifteenth century survive. Only about fifty wills of Boston residents, recorded in the diocese of Lincoln dating from the hundred years before the dissolution of the guilds, have been published in part or in full.19 Yet there are a further

sixty-four unpublished examples from the period 1445– 1545 proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and now in The National Archives, and others proved in the Lincoln Consistory Court and now preserved in the Lincolnshire Archive Office. In total 147 wills (listed in Appendix 3) record those who requested burial in various guild chapels or who bequeathed money or land to the guilds. Testators from outside Boston also made bequests to the town’s guilds, but to make a complete study of all wills referring to the guilds would be a major undertaking outside the scope of this paper. Inevitably they present a somewhat skewed picture since only the better-off townspeople would have made wills, and of course one can only speculate at the number and status of benefactors and the size and nature of their gifts for which no records survive. Out of this total of 147 wills only eighty-four testators (57%) recorded their status; unfortunately, eighteen women, mostly widows, failed to mention their husband’s occupation. Otherwise they comprised eight gentlemen, a yeoman, a husbandman, five priests, twenty-three merchants, a notary and four mariners or fishermen. The remaining twenty-three were tradesmen of varying sorts, ranging from the richer businesses of mercers, pewterers and a goldsmith to those more basic of fishmongers, a skinner, a butcher, and a patternmaker.

19 A.W. Gibbons, Early Lincoln wills, (Lincoln, 1888); A.R. Maddison (ed.), Lincolnshire wills. First series AD 1500–1600 (Lincoln, 1888); C.W. Foster (ed.), Lincoln wills registered in the district probate registry at Lincoln, LRS 5, 10 and 24 (Lincoln, 1914–30); D. Hickman (ed.), Lincoln wills 1532–34, LRS 89 (Woodbridge, 2001); E.F. Jacob (ed.), The register of Henry Chichele, Vol. 2. Wills proved before the Archbishop or his commissaries, Canterbury and York Society 42

(Oxford, 1938); L. Boatwright, M. Habberjam and P. Hammond (eds), The Logge Register of PCC wills 1479, 2 vols (Knaphill, 2008).

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The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston It must be borne in mind that wills provide only a snapshot of a testator’s pious bequests at one specific date, and give no indication of charitable giving in the person’s lifetime. For example, the will of John Cowell (d. 1504) made no bequests or reference to the guilds, but the 1533 inventory of the goods of the guild of St Mary included ‘a whole vestyment of blak velvett for preist deacon & sub-deacon with orfraies of tent werk with the scripture written on them with the names of John cowell & Johan his wife & of their gifte’.20 The 147 Boston wills for the period 1445–1545 nonetheless form a valuable corpus, sufficiently large to enable trends of giving to the guilds to be established, as well as providing other further insights into the location of guild altars, preferences for burial location and other guild-related matters. There is generally very little documentary evidence as regards unincorporated guilds, which could not own property, so our knowledge of their presence and activities is sketchy. Some guilds mentioned in the Corpus Christi Calendar, such as the Fellowship of Heaven, are undocumented outside this register, while others, such as the Holy Rood and Seven Martyrs guilds, are only otherwise mentioned in wills.

ceremonies for the commemoration of the dead. The 1534 inventory of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Marydescribes the ‘principall herse cloth of red tyssew with valance of blew velvett brotheryd with venys gold and ymages of the resurrexion frynged with silke & lyned with blew bukram’, a second of ‘cloth of bawdykn with ymages of the assumption of our lady with lile pottes with valance of blak woosted’ and a third of ‘blak woorsted with a crosse of white ffustian with this lře M crowned at the iiij corners’.22 A table, hearse, board and a pair of trestles also suggest that during the funeral, the corpse would occupy a visually prominent position within the chapel.23 When obits were celebrated the draped hearse would represent the presence of the deceased. On such occasions and on the patronal festival there were processions with lights and torches. It is likely that livery was worn to affirm their sense of belonging, although few details regarding livery survive for the Boston guilds. The five major (incorporated) guilds were those dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Corpus Christi, SS Peter and Paul, Holy Trinity and St George and were incorporated by royal licence.24 They were permitted to own property and had their own seals, impressions of which survive (Figs 4.1a-e).25 They had established guildhalls in the town, used inter alia for the annual meeting and banquet on the patronal day when the new aldermen and other officers were elected and also for providing hospitality for non-resident members when visiting the town. The nave of St Botolph’s church was not a single open space as it appears today, but was compartmentalised by parclose screens to accommodate many guild chapels. Examination of the fabric suggests that the whole of the north aisle, with the exception of the passage to the north door, was partitioned for five guild chapels and the locations of four other guild chapels is also known. The major guilds had their own chapels in St Botolph’s, where prominent members could expect to be buried and have obits celebrated. Unincorporated guilds had no landed property, although they possessed candles, vestments and plate for use during services. Most probably did not have a dedicated guild chapel, although St Katherine’s guild did and possibly also the guilds of the Ascension of Our Lord, the Seven Martyrs and St Anthony. Instead most minor guilds held services at altars associated with devotional imagery of their patron saint. Whether they could all support a dedicated chaplain is uncertain; some may have existed just to support the

4.3 The guilds and their activities As discussed by Stephen Rigby in chapter 2, Boston did not enjoy the rights of self-government in the middle ages. It was administered until 1550 directly by the earldom of Richmond (later the duchy of Lancaster) and other lords whose agents established and administered the important St Botolph’s fair in the town, at which imported luxury wares were traded. It has been suggested that this administration appears to have impeded the development of trade and craft guilds in the town.21 Certainly it is not until after the Reformation that we have evidence for the establishment of trade guilds or companies in Boston, the earliest reference being to the Company of Tailors in 1552, although the deeds of the company were not sealed until 1572. The religious guilds established in Boston from the late thirteenth century onwards therefore provided an important outlet for the political and social aspirations of wealthy townspeople, as well as forming an important part of their spiritual life. The leading men of the town served as the aldermen, chamberlains and other officers of the guilds, and this continual civic involvement helped to provide a strong sense of social cohesion in the rapidly changing world of the late fifteenth century, when Boston was declining in importance as a port. The guilds varied considerably in the range of their activities. As a minimum they had a light at an altar in St Botolph’s, revered a holy patron and held an annual meeting, although some had a dedicated chapel in the church. Members attended the funerals of brethren and

22

Peacock, English church furniture, p. 207. Peacock, English church furniture, p. 208. 24 Foster and Thompson (eds), ‘Chantry certificates’, p. 255–72. 25 As well as the seal shown in Figs 4.1a and 4.7, a second seal design is known for the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is a pointed oval seal showing the Virgin seated in a flowery garden. This was probably derived from an image of the Virgin in a rose bower in turn derived from an Italian image of the Virgin and Child in a meadow. Cherry has suggested that the Boston guild may have owned a painting of this subject, possibly used as an altarpiece: J. Cherry, ‘Some seals of English guilds and fraternities, 1400–1540: iconography and patronage’, in R. Marks (ed.), Late Gothic England: art and display (Donington, 2007), pp. 16–24, at p. 18. 23

20 E. Peacock, English church furniture, ornaments and decorations, at the period of the Reformation… (London, 1866), p. 201. 21 A. Markillie, ‘The economy and society in medieval Boston’, in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, pp. 15–18, at p. 16.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments provision of lights before the images. There may have been altar-sharing policies; there is certainly evidence for this elsewhere, for example in Bodmin (Cornwall) three guilds were located at the Berry chapel and two at the Bore chapel.26 Altars against rood screens decently screened at the sides were a common feature of many churches and it is possible that the Guild of the Holy Rood was so accommodated in St Botolph’s, but Boston is likely to have had a higher degree of compartmentalisation, perhaps paralleling Holy Trinity church, Coventry (Warwickshire).27 The guilds provided reciprocal support and charitable provision amongst guild members both by ensuring that prayers were said for the souls of the past and present members of the confraternity and by providing aid for members in time of need. The major guilds also carried out charitable work in the town, building almshouses, supporting the poor and providing education. St Mary’s guild had a yearly distribution of bread and herrings to the poor. The guilds also engaged in municipal activities such as maintaining the town’s sewers, river banks, sea dykes and the town bridge. The guilds were therefore of considerable benefit to the town community as a whole, particularly the deserving poor. This was not primarily motivated by what would now be termed disinterested philanthropy, but by the perceived obligation laid upon those with ‘surplus wealth’ to distribute the excess to the needy and the belief that charitable activity aided the soul along the path to salvation. As John Doget, a priest of King’s College, Cambridge, succinctly expressed it ‘sicut aqua extinguit ignem, ita elemosina peccate extinguit’ (just as water extinguishes fire, so alms extinguish sin).28 The guilds were financed by gifts, the sale of indulgences, entrance fees, annual subscriptions and the lease of lands and buildings bequeathed by benefactors, as well as by the sale of candles, badges and other talismans. The five major guilds in particular were very wealthy: when in 1545 the assets of the guilds were transferred to the Corporation of Boston together they held lands to the yearly value of £527 12s 2d; the individual amounts varied from £323 15s 0d for St Mary’s guild to £11 9s 10d for St George’s guild.29

Fig. 4.1a Seal of guild of Blessed Virgin Mary. Drawing after Pishey Thompson.

Fig. 4.1b Seal of guild of Corpus Christi. Drawing after Pishey Thompson.

26 J. Mattingly, ‘The medieval parish guilds of Cornwall’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, new series 10 (1989), pp. 290–329, at p. 299. 27 G.H. Cook, Medieval chantries and chantry chapels (London, 1947), p. 23 fig. 1; and discussed by Linda Monckton in chapter 3. 28 Bainbridge, Gilds in the medieval countryside, p. 101. 29 Foster and Thompson (eds), ‘Chantry certificates’, p. 255.

53

The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston

Fig. 4.1c Seal of guild of SS Peter and Paul. Drawing after Pishey Thompson.

Fig. 4.1e Seal of guild of St George. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. In addition, all the guilds owned goods, such as vestments, altar cloths and plate for use in the parish church, which would have been the gifts of brethren over the ages or bought with their monetary donations.30 For example, the inventory of 1533 of the contents of the guildhall of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the guild’s chapel in the church refers, amongst many items donated by benefactors, to ‘a crosse of sylver & gylt, with ij branchis and ymages thereupon standgynge; that is to sey the ymage of our blessid lady, & the ymage of seynt John gylt and enamelyd with a sufferayne [sovereign] of golde thereto nailed, and offered by John Reede weynge in the whole 184 ounces’, ‘a cace of the gospell booke of sylver & gylte, with certeyn ymages thereupon gravyn of the gyfte of Mr. John Bevell of London, weynge 41 oz’ and ‘a stondynge maser, with a couer & shell siylver gylt all of the samegyfte [of John Robynson], weynge 26½ oz’.31 At a sale of the guilds’ effects in 1545–46 on their dissolution, the white, parti gilt, gilt and gold plate alone fetched a total of £679 7s 5d.32 Surprisingly £428 16s 8d of this was accounted for by the plate owned by the unincorporated guilds; this gives an indication of the wealth and importance of even the minor guilds. Two of the élite guilds also owned religious relics, which would have enhanced their status in the eyes of the confraternity and the townspeople. The Corpus Christi guild possessed ‘one camisia [shirt] of St Patrick’.33 The 1533 inventory of the goods of St Mary’s guild listed relics kept in the vestry in the guildhall: ‘part of the

Fig. 4.1d Seal of guild of the Holy Trinity. Drawing after Pishey Thompson.

30 These goods were sold off in 1552. Although not apportioned to individual guilds the goods were listed: Peacock, English church furniture, pp. 218–23. 31 The original is on display in the Boston Museum, housed in St Mary’s guildhall. There is a full transcript of the inventory given by Peacock, English church furniture, pp. 185–212; for these entries see pp. 192–93. John Rede died before 1486, according to his wife’s will. 32 Thompson, Boston, pp. 156–57. 33 Thompson, Boston, p. 115.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments fynger of saynt An closid in a hande of Sylver & gilde the whiche hand of sylver with the foresaide parte of the fynger is set in a certeyn pece of pece of Sylver & gylte’, ‘the gift of Thomas awbre’, ‘a certeyn bone of saynt Christyne with certen other relikes with the same bone inclused ... the gift of Sir Robert Cokes priest’, ‘a yoynt of the fyng of saynt An with certen bones of the innocentes’, ‘a case of sylvuer & parcell gilte in the whiche is conteyned part of the stone of the mownt of calvery & parte of the stone from the whiche cryste ascended a nother parte of the stone of the sepulcre of cryste’ and ‘a nother case of syluer & gilte, with the image of our lady standynge above with her childe on her hand of sylver & gilte in the whyche is conteyned parte of the mylke of our lady’.34 How they obtained these relics is not recorded, but they could have been donated by guild members. Whether guild ownership of relics was very exceptional is unknown, but certainly no studies of guilds elsewhere in England refer to other guilds holding relics, apart from the bones of minor saints who had been buried at the host church. Although the guilds mainly operated independently they did on occasion come together, for example on Easter morning when every guild participated in a celebration of the Resurrection. All altars were adorned with lavishly embroidered cloths, and candles were lit on the altars and by the devotional images. The guild chaplains, wearing the vestments of their fraternity, processed into the chancel of St Botolph’s followed by the choristers and liveried bedesmen.35 Little is known about the livery of the Boston guilds, but the 1534 inventory of the goods of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary included ‘one chaplett of red velevett for the alderman with grete owche [buckle] in the fronte of the same, of pure golde & in the same be sett iij great perles with vj turkaces. Vppon the same chaplett viii great owches of pure golde with viii balesez [rubies] sett in the myddes of every of them & garnishid with ij chesses [borders] of pearle abowte every of them. X owches of syluer & gilte conteynynge in euery of them v stones. Xvj other owches but littill one of perles and stone. In the hyndermore parte of the seide chaplett one great owche of syluer & gilte garnyshid with perle inin the circute weynge in the whole 8 ounces’, ‘a chaplette for ij chambrlaynes of blew velvett pouderyd with sterres of gold with letters M & lilies of perle weynge in the while by troy weight 12 ounces’ and ‘one verge [wand] paynted & harnesid at bothe endes with siluer ordeynyd for the keper of verger of the gilde’.36 They must have been a magnificent sight. Another highlight of the ecclesiastical year was the Feast of Corpus Christi, held on the Thursday before Trinity Sunday, at which the Host was carried through the streets in a procession.37 Individual guild members also made their own contributions to ensure that the display was suitably lavish: in 1478 William Cawod, a merchant

of the Staple of Calais, bequeathed to his son Richard his ‘garment of the Aungell which is used to be occupid yerely att Corpus Christi guylde in Boston church aforesaid to kepe it to the worship of God and the said guylde at his coste’. Since Corpus Christi was a major church festival, this procession was not restricted to the Corpus Christi guild and its brethren. Other guilds joined in with lavish displays, lit by torches. Their expenditure could equal or exceed that of the Corpus Christi guild itself. There were also related festivities: in 1514–15 St Mary’s guild paid out £21 14s 5½d in expenses for the feast held in their guildhall to mark Corpus Christi.38 The undated account of expenditure for the Corpus Christi guild shows £3 17s 4d was incurred for the feast, while in 1526 St Mary’s guild spent an impressive £11 18s 2¼d.39 In 1518 this guild had paid for a representation of Noah’s Ark to be carried in the procession by eight men, while in other years there are references to payments for musicians.40 These were not the only events at which the musical prowess of Boston men was on show. The antiquary John Leland especially praised the quality of singing in St Botolph’s church.41 The choir of St Mary’s guild was probably the most lavishly provided of all English guilds supporting liturgical music, having a choral establishment of nine chaplains, nine clerks and at least eight boy choristers.42 The 1533 inventory of the possessions of the goods of St Mary’s guild records that in the guildhall was a table ‘covered with parchment noted with the Anthems of our Lady with three collects and covered with linen cloth’.43 It has been argued that the singers of Boston may have incorporated continental influences in their music, eschewing the insular conservatism often attributed to English musicians generally.44 Even the highest in the land coveted its members; in 1524 and 1525 the guild had to pay fines totalling £2 6s 8d to avoid its ablest men and boys from being conscripted to serve in the Chapel Royal.45 The following year, the famous composer, John Taverner (c.1490–1545), formerly master of music at the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity at Tattershall and then newly appointed master of the Chapel Royal, visited Boston recruiting singers for Cardinal Wolsey’s new foundation of Cardinal College, Oxford. He was one of the first English composers to assimilate the Renaissance style of imitative counterpoint.46 In 1530, he left Oxford following Woley’s fall from favour to serve as a lay clerk 38

Thompson, Boston, p. 138 Thompson, Boston, pp. 134 and 138. Unfortunately, no detail is given as to the form of the celebrations, but it probably mirrored practice in other parts of the country; see, for example, J. Mattingly, ‘Going-aRiding. Cornwall’s late-medieval guilds revisited’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall (2005), pp. 78–103. 40 Fenning, ‘Corpus Christi’, p. 44. 41 L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 5 vols (London, 1964), 5, pp. 33–34. 42 M. Williamson, ‘Liturgical music in the late-medieval parish: organs and voices, ways and means’, in. C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The parish in late medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 14 (Donington, 2006), pp. 177–242, at pp. 192–93. 43 Giles, ‘Religious objects and spaces’, p. 285. 44 Williamson, ‘Liturgical music’, pp. 193–94. 45 A. Carlton, ‘Boston: from guild to corporation’ in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, pp. 60–67, at p. 62. 46 Williamson, ‘Liturgical music’, p. 194. 39

34

Peacock, English church furniture, pp. 190–91. N. Camfield, ‘The guilds of St Botolph’s’, in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, pp. 25–34, at p. 34. 36 Peacock, English church furniture, pp. 198. 37 H. Fenning, ‘The guild of Corpus Christi’ in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, pp. 34–44, at pp. 43–44. 35

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The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston in St Boltolph’s choir, where he probably took up the position of master of the choristers, a position which attracted a higher salary than at Cardinal College.47 Taverner, undoubtedly England’s most important earlysixteenth century composer of church music, is likely to have been a member of the St Mary guild and in 1538–39 occupied a house reserved for musicians which belonged to the guild.48 It was possibly for this guild that Taverner wrote his masterpiece, the festal mass ‘Corona spinea’; this may have reflected the crown depicted on the livery badge of its almsmen.49 Taverner also served as a chamberlain in the influential guild of Corpus Christi, and became one of the twelve aldermen when Boston was made a borough in June 1545, four months before his death. He is buried with his wife Rose under the tower of St Botolph’s, although their grave is marked only by a replacement modern ledger stone.

William Reede (merchant of the Staple of Calais, d. 1509), asked ‘I will myn executors at my decesse make me broder in all the guyldes in Boston church that I am not broder in, that is to wite seynte Georgys guylde, Symon and Jude guyld, senyte Johns guylde, th’asension of our lorde guylde, seynte James guyld and seynte Thomas guyld and to pay for every broderhod 20d’. This emphasises that for some, perhaps most, guild members the spiritual benefits were probably of greater value than the social and trade benefits. Most testators mention just a handful of guilds, but Janette Lamkyn (widow, d. 1508) referred to fourteen guilds by name and Richard Hycks (mercer, d. 1533) to a remarkable fifteen. Testamentary provisions often did not, however, record all the guilds of which the deceased was a member. The Corpus Christi calendar of obits records in sixteen instances the guild membership of those to be commemorated.51 These range in date from Frederick Tilney, who died in 1377, to Adlard Hubbard and Joseph Benyson, both of whom died in 1527. For several individuals a will survives, but these do not always provide such full information as to the guild membership of the testator. For instance, the will of Adlard Hubbard (merchant of the Staple of Calais, d. 1526) is silent as to his guild membership, but the Corpus Christi calendar of obits records his and his wife’s membership of the guilds of Corpus Christi, St Mary, SS Peter and Paul, St George, the Trinity, St Katherine and that they were ‘brother & sister in all other guildis withyn the pareshe churche of Boston’.52 Again, John Aberay (pewterer, d. 1499) made no reference to guilds in his will, but he and his wife Margaret had an obit celebrated by the Corpus Christi guild and the calendar also records his membership of the guilds of the Blessed Virgin Mary, St Peter, St George, the Trinity, St Katherine and the Seven Martyrs.53 Thomas Totoft (esquire, d. 1493) was another who mentioned only the Corpus Christi guild in his will, but he is recorded in the calendar as belonging to all.54 The will of Elizabeth Rede (widow, d. 1486) leaves bequests to the guilds of Corpus Christi, SS Peter and Paul, St Katherine, the Apostles, Holy Rood, ‘St Thomas guild videlicet Martyrs guild’ and ‘Allhallows guild’, but the obit to her husband William, Merchant of Boston, and his three wives refers to the guilds of Corpus Christi, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St Peter, the Trinity, St George and St Katherine.55 Finally, it is clear from this that the probate evidence almost certainly understates, perhaps considerably, the extent of guild membership amongst better-off Bostonians. Nonetheless, the impression created is that guild membership was relatively commonplace among the Boston mercantile and trade élite and that many individuals belonged to many guilds.

4.4 The extent of guild membership A total of eighteen different guild names are mentioned in the will sample of 1445–1545 (detailed in Appendix 3), although, as explained below, some alternative names are recorded for the same guild. An analysis of their relative popularity is shown in the diagrams in Figs 4.2–4.4. Although sixty-seven (46%) of the total of 147 testators made no reference to any of the guilds, eighty (54%) of them did so, including some who chose not to be buried in St Botolph’s church or churchyard (Fig. 4.2). Of the Boston testators who referred to the guilds sixty-five (44%) mentioned between one and three guilds by name (Fig. 4.3). The major incorporated guilds were the most popular, although some minor unincorporated guilds attracted a significant following (Fig. 4.4). The proportions vary over time, 1450–1540 being the period of proportionately the highest testamentary giving to the Boston guilds; although bequests did not really tail off until c.1540, when religious changes introduced by the Henrician government made testators cautious about providing further gifts to the guilds. This continued positive attitude to the Boston guilds is mirrored in some other parts of the country, such as London and the West Country, while a decline in support from earlier in the sixteenth century is apparent in East Anglia, York and Salisbury.50 In Boston, William Cawod (a merchant, d. 1478), John Leeke (a mercer, d. 1527) and Thomas Murre (a roper, d. 1530) left bequests to ‘all the guilds’; while a further six testators remembered all the guilds of which they were members. One striking example demonstrates that people could enter the confraternity after death: 47

H. Benham, John Taverner: his life and music (Aldershot, 2003), p. 12; R. Bowers, ‘Taverner, John (c.1490–1545)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27004, accessed 22 Feb 2010]. 48 Benham, Taverner, p. 12. 49 R. Bowers, ‘Taverner, John (c.1490–1545)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27004, accessed 22 Feb 2010]. 50 Farnhill, Guilds in East Anglia, pp. 154–55; Barron, ‘Fraternities of medieval London’, pp. 13–37; Mattingly, ‘Medieval parish guilds’, passim.

51 BL, Harley MS. 4795, Calendar of obits, fols 65v–77r. None of the calendar entries gives a date of death, but for all but three the person is known from other documentary sources. I am grateful to Julian Luxford for transcribing the relevant entries on my behalf. 52 BL, Harley MS. 4795, fol. 86v. 53 BL, Harley MS. 4795, fol. 87r. 54 BL, Harley MS. 4795, fol. 87v. 55 BL, Harley MS. 4795, fols 84r–84v.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 4.2 Diagram showing proportion of wills mentioning guilds over time.

Fig. 4.3 Diagram showing numbers of guilds mentioned per will.

57

The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston

Fig. 4.4 Diagram showing popularity of individual Boston guilds (excludes one testator who left bequests to unspecified guild). establishment of chantries.56 It would surely have been open to the gentry to have established chantries in St Botolph’s, but if they did no record remains. Curiously, as far as is known, no chantry chapels were established at St Botolph’s, although various testators of lesser status requested perpetual or limited-term service chantries, usually to be administered by one or other of the major guilds.57 Generally such members of the gentry who were guild members chose to patronise prestigious guilds such

Some differences in the extent of guild involvement of different social groups and occupations is seen from the will evidence. The local gentry were not great supporters of the Boston guilds, although all but two of the eight testators in this category were members of at least one guild. The most popular guild with this group was the Corpus Christi, which was generally regarded by Boston historians as the rich man’s club (and two of them asked to be buried in the Corpus Christi chapel), although overall the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary was mentioned in more wills. Three of the four self-styled gentlemen in the will sample chose burial in St Botolph’s; one was John Robynsonne (d. 1500) who came from a wealthy merchant family in the town and the other, William Sutton (d.1525), styled himself ‘gentleman merchant’; so their cases may not be typical. Two testators of gentry status preferred instead burial in the Boston friaries. Perhaps they put more faith in the perceived permanence of organised intercessory prayer practiced in the mendicant houses and in the

56

A similar pattern of gentry burials in friaries is also to be found in Cornwall, but not to the exclusion of parish church chantries. An interesting comparison may be made between Boston and Bodmin, the latter having chantries co-existing with guild chapels. In 1494 a chantry was founded in the north-east chapel at Bodmin dedicated to St Andrew, St Martin and Henry VI. This was already the chapel of the guild of St Martin – the town millers and milwards – and was being built or newly completed in 1469–70. I am grateful to Joanna Mattingly for this information. 57 The chapel at the south-west of St Botolph’s known as the Cotton Chapel might conceivably have been a family chapel with a chantry, but there is no evidence that it was built for this purpose rather than as a guild chapel. Indeed, tradition suggests that it was the chapel of St George’s guild.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments as the guilds of the Holy Cross at Stratford-upon-Avon and of the Holy Trinity at Coventry (Warwickshire).58 They may have been motivated by the social cachet to be gained rather than the benefits to their soul. Membership of small local guilds would not have carried the same advantage and as the gentry would have been comparatively few in number they could never expect to dominate and exercise power and influence in such guilds. Those of middling status showed greater commitment to St Botolph’s church and its guilds. Of the four Boston mercers whose wills survive, only one did not mention the guilds in his will, but of the others, all of whom chose burial in St Botolph’s, one referred to six guilds, a second fifteen guilds, and the other claimed membership of all the guilds. Could there have been an element of self-interest here to satisfy the fairly constant need for cloth for draperies and vestments? Most other tradesmen asked to be buried in St Botolph’s but, with one exception, they belonged at best to two guilds. Their allegiances were with a wide range of the guilds, both the major incorporated guilds which could own property and the minor unincorporated guilds. The pattern of guild involvement of the merchants presents a different story. They also showed the greatest commitment to St Botolph’s church, only two of the twenty-four choosing burial elsewhere. Ten did not refer to the guilds in their wills, although one – Thomas Robertson (d. 1531) – is recorded elsewhere as a member of the Corpus Christi guild. The remaining fourteen (58%) left bequests to the guilds and all but five of them had multiple guild memberships. This compares favourably with the position in York where only 15% of merchants remembered the guilds in their wills; Hull and Beverley merchants were even less inclined to leave bequests to the guilds in their wills.59 The Boston merchants particularly favoured the major guilds which had most influence in the town. Nine were members of St Mary’s guild, while the other incorporated guilds each included two to seven members from this group. This is unsurprising as membership of these guilds would enable them to attend social gatherings, providing excellent opportunities for networking and trade. These groups contrasted with the almost identical gentry networks, established on families and landed descent or inheritance; so just as the gentry relied on lineage and land for prestige and authority, so the merchants relied on the lineages provided by the guilds. The methods were the same although the social structures different. Better-off people who lived outside Boston were known to have been members of at least some of the major guilds, but a different picture is presented when testamentary dispositions are considered. A sample of sixty-five wills from the National Archives of people living in southern Lincolnshire but outside Boston

revealed just a single case which refers to the Boston guilds. Instead they chose to remember their local guilds, which had been established in even the smallest of villages near Boston. Most had just one or two: Gosberton had a Lady guild and another dedicated to St John the Baptist;60 Surfleet had guilds of St Mary and St John;61 Sutterton had a Lady guild;62 Swineshead had guilds dedicated to St Mary and All Saints;63 Wigtoft had a guild dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary;64 Wrangle had guilds of our Lady and the Holy Rood;65 and Wyberton had guilds dedicated to St Katherine and Our Lady.66 Some villages near Boston had several religious guilds: Whaplode had guilds of St Katherine, the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist;67 while Spalding had guilds dedicated to St John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Trinity and St Thomas the Martyr.68 Even more impressive was the list of Pinchbeck guilds to which Richard Pynchebek esquire (d. 1491) of Pinchbeck left bequests, namely the guilds of St John, St Peter, the Trinity, All Hallows, SS James and Nicholas and the light of the High Rood.69 For a few villages in the area, such as Algarkirk, Frampton and Kirton, no records of guilds have been found, but this brief survey shows how deeply entrenched guild culture was in the Fens. Mention should be made of people who lived in other parts of the country who were members of the Boston guilds. As discussed below, membership of the guilds of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Corpus Christi carried a considerable social cachet, hence their brethren included royalty, the aristocracy and the higher clergy. Yet it was not only the great and the good who chose to be longdistance members of these guilds. Thomas Yogge, a citizen and vintner of London (d. 1509), left 40 shillings to ‘the Fraternity of Our Lady and St Botolph in Boston’.70 His testamentary bequests suggest that he originated from Plymouth, hence his connection with the 60 TNA: PROB11/12, fol. 9v; R.E.G. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by Gervase Holles A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (Lincoln, 1911), pp. 172–73 records that the south aisle window given by named brothers and sisters of the guild of St John the Baptist and that there was another window with a Latin inscription calling for prayers for guild members. He gives the Latin inscriptions thus: ‘S wdw of S aisle: Orate pro aia Johis Bolls, Arm. et Catharinae consortis suae, Thomae Edmund et Julianae consortis suae, Willi Flouter et Agnetis consortis suae, Willi de Chelle et Johannae consortis suae, ac pro fratribus et sororibus Gildae Sci Johis Baptistae qui istam fenestram fieri fecerunt ... Nave: Orate pro aiabus Fratrum et Sororum Gildae Sci Johis Baptistae, qui istam fenestram fieri fecerunt’. 61 TNA: PROB11/21, fols 46r–47r. 62 Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 178. 63 TNA: PROB11/12, fols 11v-12v; Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 178. F.A. Greenhill, Monumental incised slabs in the county of Lincoln (Newport Pagnell, 1986), p. 111, records an inscription ‘Here lyeth Roger Berdne’ and Ann his w(ife be)ne(fac)tours to the gylde of our lady / … deceased/ the yere of our (lorde) god a m ccccc xii on whose soules .. / .. dyng for the / …. fordays gyld.’ 64 Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 179. 65 TNA: PROB11/26, fols 41r–42v. 66 TNA: PROB11/18, fols 35r–35v. 67 Westlake, Parish gilds, pp. 178–79. 68 Westlake, Parish gilds, pp. 175–76; TNA: PROB11/11, fol. 38r; PROB11/21, fols 164v–165v. 69 TNA: PROB11/10, fols 219v–220r. 70 TNA: PROB11/16, fols 147v–148. I am grateful to Graham Javes for this reference.

58 For the Stratford guild, see M. MacDonald (ed.), The register of the guild of the Holy Cross, Stratford-upon-Avon, Dugdale Society 42 (2007). 59 Kermode, Medieval Merchants, p. 137.

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The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston Boston guild was motivated by other considerations. Another interesting case is Katherine Langley of London, who became a vowess after her husband Henry died (he was alive in 1485 but dead by 1501). She appears to have been a serial member of fraternities and collector of indulgences, including one issued by the g uild of St. Mary the Virgin, Boston.71 Finally in this section, the point should be made that Bostonians did not restrict themselves to membership of guilds in their home town. The register of the guild of the Holy Trinity at Luton (Bedfordshire), for example mentions a number of people from Boston. In 1529 William Rosetur of Boston was admitted pro anima ‘his dirge is said per vita sua’. In 1530 John Hutchynson ‘chamburleyn of Boston’ was admitted to the Luton gild so that masses could be said for his soul. In 1535 Lucie Annable of Boston, mother of Nicholas Robertson was admitted pro anima. In 1536 a dirge was said for Elizabeth Clay of Boston and in 1537 a dirge was said for William Kocet of Boston.72

testators in the period 1445–1545, forty-five (31%) left bequests to this guild. A fascinating insight into the devotion that the guild inspired in its members is provided by the inscription recorded by the antiquary, Gervase Holles, from the lost brass commemorating Richard Frere (merchant, d. 1424). It read: Hic jacet prostratus Ricus Frere tumulatus, Gildam dilexit quam munere saepe provexit. Anno milleno C obit quater et duodeno Bis Julii senoque die migravit amaeno. Uxor et Alicia sepelitur, juncta Johanna. Spreverunt vitia, gustant caeli modo manna. Audit quique pie Missam cum voce Mariae Alte cantatam per Gilde vota locatam. Papa dies donat centum veniaeque coronat Nonus ei vere Bonifacius hunc reverere. (Here lies prostrate Richard Frere, buried, he loved the guild, which he often promoted with a donation. He died in the year one thousand, four times a hundred, and twelve twice, and on the sixth of July he went to a better place. His wife Alice is also buried together with Johanna. They shunned vices; may they soon taste the manna of heaven. Whoever hears Mass devoutly, with the antiphon of Mary sung well, as was established by a vote of the guild, may the Pope give him one hundred days of pardon; and may Boniface IX crown him, in truth, that he may worship.)75

4.5 The major guilds The oldest and wealthiest guild in medieval Boston was the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was established in 1260 by Andrew de Gotere, Walter Tumby, Galfrid de la Gotere, Robert Leland and Hugh Spaynge, to maintain two priests in St Botolph’s. Nothing is known about any of these founders, although it is likely that they were wealthy Bostonians, perhaps merchants. Amongst the earliest monuments in the church are three cross slabs, one currently under a fine canopied recess in St Mary’s chapel and two in a recess further west. The fabric is of later date than two of them, hence they must have been saved from the earlier church on the site, perhaps because of the importance of the people they commemorated. It is tempting to speculate that they might have been monuments to some of the guild founders, but the dates make this unlikely. The 1389 guild certificate records that one priest was to say mass at dawn and the other at ‘9 o’clock’; fourteen torches and a varying number of candles were always to burn before the Lady altar between these times.73 Royal licences to enable the guild to acquire land in mortmain were granted in 1392, 1445, 1448 and 1482.74 Members paid an admission fine of 6s 8d and an annual fee of 1s. The guild seems to have attracted a particular following amongst the richer townspeople: of the 147 Boston

As explained by Linda Monckton in chapter 3, the St Mary’s guild played a prominent part in the building of the new church of St Botolph in the fourteenth century and took over a prime position in the south-east corner of the nave (Figs 4.5 and 4.6). Its chapel was spacious, occupying two bays with an area of 1204 square feet.76 It was divided from the rest of the church by parclose screens with a loft, which may have supported images and lights at the west end, of which the fifteenth-century entrance to the stair remains. The easternmost window in the south wall of the aisle is shortened to accommodate the sedilia beneath it. The popularity of St Mary’s guild was enhanced by the exceptional spiritual benefits it could bestow upon its members.77 In 1401 Pope Boniface IX gave 100 days’ remission from Purgatory to members of the guild who were present whenever mass was celebrated aloud, with music, in the chapel. Another indulgence granted by Nicholas V in 1451 allowed comprehensive, retrospective absolution to existing members and all new members joining over the next five years, a privilege successively renewed in 1464 and 1475. Reflecting its spiritual importance at this time, the guild maintained an enormous staff of seven priests, twelve ministers and thirteen bedesmen.78

71 TNA: C270/32/18: Indulgence by guild of St Mary the Virgin, Boston, to Katherine Langley: grant of confraternity [1500-1517]. Her will is in London Guildhall Library (now London Metropolitan Archives) MS. 9531/9, fols viii–x. I am grateful to Laura Wood for this information. 72 H. Gough, The register of the Fraternity or Guild of the Holy and Undivided Trinity and Blessed Virgin Mary in the Parish Church of Luton, in the county of Bedford, from A.D. 1475 to 1546, Together with the Annual accounts of the master & wardens of the said Fraternity from the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, 1526 to the same Feast, 1547, edited, from MSS. in the possession of the Most Honourable the third Marquess of Bute, by Henry Gough, ( London, 1906). I am grateful to Barbara Tearle for drawing these entries to my attention. 73 Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 157; Thompson, Boston, pp. 134–35. 74 CPR, 1391–96, p. 192; CPR, 1441–46, p. 333; CPR, 1446–52, p. 119; CPR, 1477–85, pp. 272 and 330.

75

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 154. B. Brammer, ‘The guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, pp. 45–56, at p. 45. 77 Thompson, Boston, pp. 135–37. 78 Sir Thomas Gybson (priest, d. 1533) left a bequest of 1s to ‘our Lady’s bedesmen’. 76

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 4.5 Plan showing the location of some former guild chapels in St Botolph’s.

61

The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston

Fig. 4.6 View of the south-east corner of the nave of St Botolph’s where the chapel of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary was formerly located. From 1476 altars of Scala Coeli attracting commensurate indulgences granted by the pope were established in England, initially in the royal chapels and then elsewhere, Boston being amongst the earliest. Petitioning Rome for such indulgences involved a major capital outlay. In the period 1516–20, the Boston guild’s campaign to increase its privileges cost around £2,100, yet this level of investment was repaid many times over. The guild was largely of local significance before 1500, but by 1520 it was the premier collecting institution nationally. The guild’s indulgence receipts rose from under £1000 in 1514–15 to more than £1400 in 1518–19 and peaked at £1550 in 1521–22; the number of individual contributions probably exceeded 8000.79 To collect such large sums required elaborate organisation, with the chamberlains and their clerks touring allotted sections of the country.80 Even though the costs of collection and basic administration were high –

There were evidently at least two subsidiary altars in the chapel in addition to the main altar of Our Lady. They were probably positioned against the south wall, in which a piscina, sedilia and aumbry are still preserved. The best documented was the altar named Scala Coeli (the Ladder of Heaven): in 1531 Hugh Schawe, skinner, requested two trentals of thirty masses ‘at Scala Celi to be sayd immediately aftyr my decesse in our Ladys qwere’ and Richard Shallok, husbandman, requested soul masses ‘in our Lady chapell at the altare of Scala Celi’ on Wednesday to Saturday. Various other testators requested masses of Scala Coeli at Boston for the benefit of their souls, the earliest being dated 1516; it had been established some time after 1512 and its rapid rise to popularity was due to the exceptional indulgence it offered. The original Scala Coeli pardon was attached to an altar at the abbey of Tre Fontane in Rome. To visit the chapel and have a mass celebrated on behalf of an individual after death would give great benefits to the soul, variously described as freeing the soul from the pains of Purgatory at once or swiftly. Its reputation was international, and from the end of the fourteenth century some Englishmen left bequests for pilgrims to visit the chapel on their behalf.

79 80

62

Swanson, Indulgences, pp. 375–76. Swanson, Indulgences, pp. 135–36.

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 4.7 Sealed admission certificate to the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary issued to Thomas Baragh on 23 July 1505.

Fig. 4.8 Front view of St Mary’s Guildhall in South Street, Boston. 63

The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston

Fig. 4.9 Side view of St Mary’s Guildhall in South Street, Boston, showing the depth of the building.

Fig. 4.10 View of the banqueting hall in St Mary’s Guildhall in South Street, Boston. 64

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments the expenses usually totalled around £400 – the income was nonetheless considerable.81 Swanson has calculated that, even allowing for collecting costs, the Boston indulgence generated funds matching the incomes of each of the sees of Exeter and Salisbury or the income received by the crown in clerical taxation from much of northern England.82 The guild’s contribution to the economy of Boston, in 1524–25 only twenty-second in the standard urban rankings for late medieval England, must have been considerable given that the number of visitors to the town would have been significantly enhanced by those visiting to take advantage of this indulgence. However, with Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1534 the gathering of membership funds based on papal indulgences became illegal and the Scala Coeli indulgence was outlawed altogether under the ‘Ten Articles’ of 1536; there would have been a consequential massively deleterious effect on the guild’s finances and also on the economy of the town. To advertise the indulgence the guild used preachers and publicity leaflets; a broadside of c.1516–18 advertising the privileges of the guild states: ‘Also it is graunted to all Cristen people, the which any fryday in the yere doth vysyt our Lady chapell in the sayd parysshe Churche of Bostone shall have the full lybertyes and power of Scala Celi in Rome’.83 Newly-enrolled members were issued with a sealed admission certificate which inter alia set out the indulgences to which they were entitled; the earliest such certificate surviving was issued to the merchant Thomas Baragh on 23 July 1505 (Fig. 4.7).84 The production of these and the publicity leaflets provided good trade for the Boston printer Richard Pynson. In 1524–25 he supplied the guild with 4000 ‘parchment letters’, 4000 ‘great briefs’ and 2000 ‘Jubilees’; although the distinctions between these documents are unclear, the totals give an impressive indication of levels of expected annual recruitment.85 In order to qualify for the Jubilee indulgence, which took place at a specified time of the year and for which banners and tables with scriptures adorned the church, guild members were required to complete three circuits of seven altars in St Botolph’s.86 The St Mary guild chapel also had an image or altar of the Pièta in the guild chapel: Hugh Schawe requested burial ‘in St Botolph by my wife afore our Lady of Pety’. We know nothing about the chapel’s decoration, but as evidenced by the 1533 inventory, it was lavishly

furnished. There was ‘a great Egle of latten [brass eagle lectern] standinge on thre lions of latten, in the myddes of the queyr’ and ‘a great lecterone of latten standynge where masse & Anempes be songe bought in the tyme of John Robynson beyng alderman’. The chapel was lavishly lit, there being ‘ij great candelstickes of latten’, ‘ij secondary candelstickes of latten’, ‘ ij candelstickes of latten standing at the altar endde’, ‘an other lesse candelstyke standing afore owe lady’, ‘ij littel candillstickes standynge on the highe altar of owr Ladye’, ‘a candelstik of letten with ij flores for the morrow masse’, ‘an other litill candelstik of latten with ij flowres for one of the side altars’, ‘ij other litill candelstickes of latten with ij pynnes’ and ‘ij laten candelstickes standinge vppon the altar bowght of Stephen wodows’. The guild had three vernicles (Veronicas or pictures of the face of Christ) as well as ‘an olde cloth of sacysnett with the ymage of owr lade thereaupin steyned’, ‘a steyed bannar cloth of lynyn cloth with the ymage of owr lady & certeyn ymages of men & women [presumably donors] knelyng before her’ and ‘dyverce other paynted clothes with stories & batailes hangyng about the queyre of owr lady’, which were probably hung on the walls on the chapel and perhaps also on the parclose screens. Another hanging was ‘vii tables with scriptures uppon them to hange on the altars in the tyme of the Jubyle’ and ‘xvi bannars to hange abowte the altars in the tyme of the Jubyle wherof xiiij of them be with the popes armes & ij with the kyngs’s armes’. The other goods mentioned in the inventory included twenty-five books, chalices and other plate, mostly of silver gilt, and many costly vestments and altar cloths. That the chapel had some seating is indicated by the will of Richard Hycks (mercer, d. 1533) who requested burial in St Botolph’s ‘agaynst the schort stolys [stalls] of our lady’. Thompson records that when the floor of St Botolph’s was lifted in the nineteenth century, among the items found were ‘part of a clasp of a cope of silver gilt, with the letter M on the square portion, and a double rose on the circular end’ and ‘two coins with the legend Ave Marie gracia plena’, undoubtedly linked with the guild of St Mary. Their current whereabouts are not known. The guild had three important buildings in the town. The first was the Chantry House, built in the fifteenth century, which provided accommodation for the guild chaplains and was located in South End. The guild’s bedehouse is generally believed to have been in nearby Beadsman’s Lane, although when it was demolished is unknown. This housed the ‘twelve poor persons of the said borough or towne called Our Ladies beadmanne’ described by the chantry certificates of 1547. However, the most important building was the guildhall, known as ‘St Mary’s House’. It was erected in the 1390s, apparently to replace an earlier construction on the same site, presumably in response to the incorporation of the guild in 1392. It still survives in South Street and now houses the town museum (Figs 4.8–4.10). Recent analysis of the fabric has revealed that the timbers are of Baltic origin, doubtless a product of the Hanseatic trade. It was built on a long, thin strip of land bounded to the west by South Street, to the north by Spain Lane and the Blackfriars, to the east by Spain Court and to the south by

81

Swanson, Indulgences, p. 437. Swanson, Indulgences, pp. 440–41. N. Morgan, ‘The Scala Coeli indulgence and the royal chapels’ in B. Thompson (ed.), The reign of Henry VII, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 5 (Stamford, 1995), pp. 82–103, quote at p. 103. I am grateful to Nicholas Rogers for bringing this reference to my attention. 84 Universis xp̃ifidelibus presentes litteras inspecturis. Nos Aldermãnus Camerarii gilde siue cõfraternitatis ĩ honorẽ btẽ marie virgĩs in ecclesia scti Botulphi de Bostoñ ... ĩstituti Salutẽ, etc. [Letters of admission into the confraternity, made out in favour of Thomas Baragh, merchant, including a recapitulation of the various indulgences attached to the Guild by various Papal grants. Dated July 23, 1505]; published Richard Pynson (London, 1504?); BL, catalogue reference: C.191.c.14. For other printed letters of admission see Morgan, ‘Scala Coeli indulgence’, pp. 101–03. 85 Swanson, Indulgences, p. 173. 86 Giles, ‘Religious objects and spaces’, p. 272. 82 83

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The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston Beadsman’s Lane. The guildhall is a long, two-storied, brick-built structure, with limestone detailing.87 The ground floor is subdivided into thirteen bays but on the first floor only twelve. The west front is dominated by a large Perpendicular tracery window, with a niche for a statue, presumably of St Mary, and fragments of stained glass featuring the Apostles. At the apex of the window are the remains of a figure, possibly an angel. The central pointed arched doorway is flanked by two segmental arched windows and there is a holy water stoup to the north of the door opening. The gable has moulded coping with a fleuron frieze and is topped by the eroded remains of what appears to be a bellcote. Giles and Clark argue that these features all suggest a deliberate evocation of an ecclesiastical façade. The two most important public rooms within the building were the hall, which Giles and Clark believe to have been located on the first floor in the three westernmost bays of what is now the banqueting hall and to have had a dais at one end on which the officers of the guild would have been seated, and the chapel, thought to have been located on the ground floor and accessed from South Street. The inventories suggest that the latter was modestly furnished. The most impressive item was a ‘table of alabaster with the story of the dome contaynynge in lenyth ij yards’, probably a reredos behind the altar, although ‘an ymage of our lady of wood standynge in a tabernacle’, ‘a littill ymage of our lady of alabaster’ and ‘a paynted cloth of beyond see werk’ were evidently also prized.88

prominent in the town, although few documents relating to it survive. The date of its foundation is not known, although it is recorded that it was established by a group of fourteenth-century Boston merchants.89 In 1396 licence was granted to John Belle, Walter Pescod, Henry Leverton, Richard Aileward, Robert Wrangle and William Thorneton of Boston for incorporation of the guild and for lands to be alienated in mortmain for its maintenance.90 The incorporated guild took over part of the nave of St Botolph’s to form a new chapel on the north side of the nave of St Botolph’s church, matching that of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the south side (Figs 4.5 and 4.11). The guild certificates record that two new painted wooden images of the saints were provided to stand either side of the altar there, at the east end of the aisle. Thirteen wax candles of 4lb weight each were set on ‘perches of curious work’ in front of them; these were lit every Sunday and feast days at mass.91 The chapel’s dedication was emphasised further in its decorative schemes: Holles recorded that one of the windows had a border of capital ‘P’s with the keys of St Peter and the sword of St Paul hanging from them (Fenestra cum limbo Clavium et Gladiorum a litera P pendentium).92 Two chaplains celebrated divine worship in the guild chapel for the souls of all the brethren, living and dead, who were currently, or had been, benefactors of the guild. Funerals of guild members were also important occasions. The entire body of brethren would gather at the home of the deceased and from there would process with the corpse to the church of St Botolph for the service, at which each of the brethren would offer an oblation of one farthing for the soul of the deceased.93 Benefits were not limited to the provision of prayers: in cases of need burial was provided for guild members at the guild’s expense, and members in poverty received 14d weekly.94 Initially the guild held no lands, but that changed over time. By the dissolution, its lands were worth £57 7s 0d.95 The guild undertook charitable work in the town and at the dissolution its property included a school in Wormgate. The guildhall and its bedehouses are believed to have been in St Peter’s Lane at the northern end of the street known as Wide Bargate.96 Foundations of a fifteenth-century medieval brick building were found

Fig. 4.11 View of the north-east corner of the nave of St Botolph’s where the chapel of the guild of SS Peter and Paul was formerly located. The third most popular guild amongst testators in the period 1445–1545 was that dedicated to SS Peter and Paul, who were seen as the joint founders of the Christian church, receiving bequests from twenty-one Boston testators. This guild was one of the oldest and most

89 The founders were Fulco de Sutton, Thomas Edwards, Simon Lambard, John Hewett, Robert Edmons, John Norys, Robert de Fosdyke, William Cokhede, Simon de Barres, Richard Bokenale, Thomas de Marynge, John de Thorpland and Luke Pywk: TNA: C47/39/88; Thompson, Boston, p. 147. 90 CPR, 1396–99, pp. 19–20. 91 Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 157. 92 Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155. In his will Richard Quykrell (notary, d. 1528) requested burial ‘nyghthe the sepulture place of John Quykrell, some tyme my father, by the cross called Powllhyrd’. Whether or not this was associated with the guild chapel of SS Peter and Paul is unknown; see Foster (ed.), Lincoln wills, LRS 10, pp. 114–15. 93 Thompson, Boston, p. 158. 94 Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 157. 95 Foster and Thompson (eds), ‘Chantry certificates’, p. 255. 96 Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’s’, p. 31.

87

For an exemplary systematic archaeological analysis of the building, see K. Giles and J. Clark, ‘St. Mary’s guildhall, Boston (Lincs): The archaeology of a medieval “public” building’, forthcoming. Information on the guildhall is largely taken from this source. 88 Peacock, English church furniture, pp. 208–209.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments during excavations under Poultry yard, next to the New England Hotel, which used to be known as the Cross Keys, a symbol associated with St Peter.97 By 1719 the bedehouses were in ruins and were ordered to be taken down; they were replaced by four cottages occupied by poor men.98 The names Peddar’s Cross and St Peter’s Bridge have also been recorded in the area, implying an association with the guild. The Corpus Christi guild received bequests from only nineteen testators in the period 1445–1545 but nonetheless commanded great wealth, its lands being worth £114 16s 7d per annum at the dissolution.99 The guild register contains 1362 names and is very informative regarding the social makeup of the membership, even though as a record it is incomplete as the early lists are probably defective.100 The guild was founded in 1335 by Gilbert Alilaunde and initially had thirty members, all but four of them based in Boston.101 The entry fee of £2 4s 4d ensured that membership was confined to the more affluent and it was to draw into its network of members a remarkable number of the higher clergy, nobility and even royalty of late medieval England. After its establishment, there appear to have been no new admissions until 1343, although from then until 1349, 135 new brothers and seventeen new sisters, including Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, are recorded. In 1349 a royal licence of incorporation was granted to the guild, which stipulated that it should maintain six chaplains who were to pray for the king and his family, as well as the brethren, both living and dead.102 New members admitted under the new ordinance included King Edward III, Queen Philippa and the Black Prince. Further endowments followed in 1398, 1402, 1414 and 1464.103 Although the great and good continued to be admitted to the guild, this was not to the exclusion of the local mercantile élite; many Boston merchants who acted as bailiffs of the duchy of Lancaster and as royal customs collectors were members and often officials of the guild.104

Fig. 4.12 View of south aisle of St Botolph’s church, showing the blocked entry to the former Corpus Christi chapel. The Corpus Christi guild had a chapel at St Botolph’s church. It was a separate building attached to the exterior of the parish church, to the east of the porch and adjoining the two western bays of the south aisle, which was linked to the church through a doorway, now blocked-up, with other points of access still clearly visible from inside the church (Figs 4.5 and 4.12). The chapel was reputedly destroyed in 1627 to provide stone for the repair of St Botolph’s church.105 Although no fabric remains to indicate the date of the chapel, the nave was evidently planned with it in mind, for the three windows to the east of the porch where the chapel abutted have higher sills than those further to the east (Fig. 4.13). There is also a canopied, elaborate niche on the buttress adjacent to the door leading from the south aisle into the chapel, but none on those buttresses further to the east. The chapel could well have had an exterior west door close by this niche. It was almost certainly built in the first half of the fourteenth century as the guild register implies that the chapel had been decorated by Gilbert Alilaunde before his death in 1354.106

97

Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’s’, p. 31. Thompson, Boston, p. 149. 99 Foster and Thompson (eds), ‘Chantry certificates’, p. 255. 100 BL, MS. Harley 4795; there is a valuable analysis of membership in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, table 1 p. 37. 101 TNA: C47/39/83. 102 CPR, 1348–50, p. 364; CPR, 1350–54, p. 101. This was confirmed by CPR, 1385–89, p. 9, with further resolution in CPR, 1391–96, p. 68. 103 CPR, 1396–99, p. 342; CPR, 1401–05, p. 173; CPR, 1423–16, p. 290; and CPR, 1461–67, p. 156. 104 S.H. Rigby (ed.), The overseas trade in the reign of Richard II, LRS 93 (Lincoln, 2005), pp. 223–57. 98

105 106

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Fenning, ‘Corpus Christi’, p. 43. Fenning, ‘Corpus Christi’, p. 43.

The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston Another incorporated guild established at some unknown date before 1389 was the Trinity guild, regarded as the bakers’ guild, originally merely a fraternity formed to augment and increase divine worship in St Botolph’s.108 It was of lesser importance than the three guilds already discussed, its landholdings at the dissolution being worth only £20 3s 7d.109 In 1389 it had no possessions or income apart from the annual subscriptions of 13s from each of the brethren.110 Incorporation followed, with significant bequests in 1409, 1411 and 1468.111 It appears to have enjoyed a degree of popularity, being mentioned in thirteen of the wills dated 1445–1545. Most of the will references refer only to a Trinity altar and when in 1468 William Baxter granted lands to the guild in return for soul masses, he specified that they should be celebrated at the altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary.112 That a chapel might perhaps have been provided later is suggested by the wording of the will of Simon Goodhale (d. 1530); he refers to ‘the Lady alter’, ‘the alter of the appostles Simon and Jude’ but to ‘the Trinitie gylde within the same church’, which may possibly, but not certainly, indicate a chapel. Tradition records that it may have been located in the north-west corner of the north aisle, where marks on the walls and pillars indicate former parclose screens, but there is no firm evidence to support this.113 As discussed in chapter 6, several lost brasses of men known to be brethren of the Trinity guild and indents with an image of the Trinity were in the south aisle between the guild chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the south porch; this may be evidence that the altar was located here. What is certain, however, is that the guild had a hall in the town called ‘the Trinity chamber’; it was situated on the property granted by William Baxter in 1468 in Gascoyne Row in Wormgate near the centre of Boston.114 ‘Trinity hall’ passed to the Corporation, but was sold in 1573; no trace is known to survive. St George’s was the least affluent of the major guilds. It was established before 1354115 and incorporated in 1399 by Richard Frere, William Halden, John Gibson, Stephen Baxster and John Skelton, with royal licence being granted to them in 1416 to acquire and alienate in mortmain lands to maintain a chaplain.116 This was a relatively early appearance of such a guild dedication, which became much more popular after Agincourt.117 In 1404 the guild was successful in disputing precedence in all public assemblies and processions over the older guild of SS Simon and Jude, suggesting that it had gained in relative size and importance.118 St George’s guild had a dedicated altar in St Botolph’s, as mentioned in the 1416

Fig. 4.13 View from the south of the exterior of St Botolph’s church, showing the area where the chapel of the guild of Corpus Christi was located.

Fig. 4.14 Shodfriars Hall, Boston, formerly the guildhall of the Corpus Christi guild. The Corpus Christi guild also had a hall, which has been identified as the building now known as Shodfriars Hall, a building which despite its unpromising Victorian exterior is an authentic timber-framed construction retaining much of its original fabric (Fig. 4.14).107 Dating from the third quarter of the fourteenth century, it occupies an ‘island’ site in the town in that roads run all round it and it was a structure of substantial scale and importance. In the rental of 1489, it was referred to as ‘Goldenhows’ and described as containing a hall, kitchen and two chambers. Unlike St Mary’s guildhall it does not appear to have housed a chapel. The rental also refers to a ‘Head mansion of the guilds called Corpus Christi Place’ which was probably a clergy house provided for the large ecclesiastical establishment attached to Corpus Christi guild.

108

TNA: C47/39/90; Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’s’, p. 27. Foster and Thompson (eds), ‘Chantry certificates’, p. 255. 110 Thompson, Boston, p. 150. 111 Thompson, Boston, p. 150 112 Thompson, Boston, p. 150. 113 Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’s’, p. 34; Giles, ‘Religious objects and spaces’, p. 70, note 17. 114 Thompson, Boston, p. 150. 115 Gilbert Alilaunde (d. 1354) was a member of this guild according to the Corpus Christi calendar: Thompson, Boston, p. 125. 116 CPR, 1399–1401, p. 249; CPR, 1416–22, p. 62. 117 Mattingly, ‘Parish guilds of Cornwall’, p. 305. 118 CPR, 1401–04, p. 388. 109

107 N. Kerr, ‘Timber framed buildings in Boston’, East Midlands Archaeology 2 (1986), pp. 70–78.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments incorporation document and John Haule’s will of 1514.119 The guild probably had probably appropriated space for its own chapel and it is thought that this might have been located in what is now known as the Cotton chapel to the south-west of the nave, which incorporates medieval masonry.120 It was nonetheless a fairly popular guild, being mentioned in nine of the wills in the period 1445– 1545. The guild also owned guild buildings as well as other property: St George’s Hall, presumably the guildhall, stood at the bottom of St George’s Lane, but was last recorded in 1726.121

William de Kyme and six other mariners of Boston.125 It maintained a priest to pray for the benefactors of the guild and all others who were in danger on the sea; that such a guild should operate in Boston is unsurprising given its importance as a port. Admission cost 6s 8d, with a further 2s 2d paid yearly. The guild had its own chapel in St Botolph’s, the location of which is not recorded, where ‘12 wax tapers of four lbs weight standing on a perch’ were lit on Sundays and all festivals during divine service. On the death of a brother or sister all the brethren assembled at the house of the deceased on the day of his funeral and carried his body to St Botolph’s church with twelve torches carried in the procession.126 Another of the ancient guilds was dedicated to St John the Baptist. Its founders are unknown, but in 1389 it was known as the cordwainers’ or shoemakers’ guild. The brethren paid 2s 2d annually, from which a chaplain was provided to pray for their souls.127 The guild owned two suits of common vestments, a missal, a chalice, a pair of pewter candle sticks and two altar cloths.128 The will of John Humfey (grocer, d. 1504) refers to ‘the light afore St John the Baptist at the chancel door in the church at Boston’; this is the only firm evidence as to the location of its altar. Twelve wax tapers on a stand were burnt before the altar on each festival day and sixteen tapers at funerals of the brethren and during the Corpus Christi festival and at Easter.129 Its altar, served by a chaplain, was housed in the guild chapel dedicated to SS Peter and Paul.130 Mention should also be made of a reference in the will of Stephen Woodhouse (d. 1531) to ‘one house in one strete callyd Bargate at Boston of the est syde of the water and in the Horsse market, towarde the est off st Peter guyld, towarde the west off John Roode, towarde the sowthe of Lady guyld, and towarde the northe of the comun way’. What exactly ‘John Roode’ was is unclear, although it may have been a guild chapel or possibly even a guildhall. Its location was evidently not within the current footprint of St Botolph’s church. Instead it seems to have been to the south of the chancel and was probably one of the buildings shown there in the vignette of St Botolph’s which decorates the bottom left-hand corner of Robert Hall’s plan of Boston surveyed in 1741 (Fig. 4.15). The more easterly building, referred to as the ‘Taylor’s hall’ was pulled down in 1725. This may have been owned by the Boston Taylors’ Company established in 1562, but is obviously of earlier date and may have been built by one of the guilds. The westernmost building was demolished in 1761; it was used as a vestry, although believed originally have been an oratory or private chapel.131 Another sketch of these building is preserved in

4.6 The pre-1389 minor guilds Considerably less is known about Boston’s unincorporated guilds, although such evidence as is available suggests that some of them attracted a considerable following. Five were of some antiquity, being established by the time that the 1389 guild certificates were drawn up. For only two of the guilds is there a known date of foundation. The guild of St Katherine was established in 1349, although the names of its founders are unknown. It was described as a small and simple fraternity with an annual subscription of 6d each; six candles were lit before her image at Matins and Mass on festival days and twelve torches burnt round the corpse of a brother, during the Corpus Christi festival and at Easter.122 The guild’s altar was in the north aisle of St Botolph’s church, as evidenced by the will of John Cowell (fisherman, d. 1504) in which he requested ‘to be buried in parish church of Boston on north side under the stone before St Katherine’s altar there’. In 1451 Katherine Pulvertoft, a wealthy widow, bequeathed to the guild ‘a great torch hanging chandelier’, which was presumably suspended in front of the altar.123 In the period 1445–1545, fifteen other testators referred to the guild, making it one of the better supported guilds. St Katherine was a popular dedication for guilds in the area, others being at Baston, Whaplode, Wigtoft and Stamford, the last of these having been referred to in the alliterative Katherine hymn probably written c.1400 by the Carmelite Father Richard Spalding of Stamford: I grete the most gracious to governe hem al That geder the to hir giyld hem for to gyde. (I greet you, [as being the one] most empowered by grace to direct all those Who gather you to their guild in order for you to guide them.)124 The second guild, dedicated to SS Simon and Jude, was established in 1368 by Stephen de Holmenlyne, 119

Foster (ed.), Lincoln wills, LRS 5, p. 59. Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’s’, p. 34; Giles, ‘Religious objects and spaces’, p. 70, note 17. 121 Thompson, Boston, pp. 152–53. 122 TNA: C47/39/86; Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 157. 123 Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’, p. 30; LAO: DIOC/REG/19, fols 18r–48v. 124 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodley Rolls 22, lines 267–68; R. Kennedy, ‘Spalding’s Alliterative Katherine Hymn: a guild connection from the south-east Midlands’, Viator 35 (2004), pp. 455–82. I am grateful to David Griffith for bringing this fascinating reference to my attention. 120

125 TNA: C47/39/89; Thompson, Boston, p. 155; Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 157. 126 Westlake, Parish gilds, p. 157. 127 TNA: C47/39/85. 128 Thompson, Boston, p. 155. 129 Thompson, Boston, p. 155. 130 Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’s’, p. 33. 131 Thompson, Boston, p. 175.

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The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston the Wilson Collection in the Society of Antiquaries of London (Fig. 4.16).132

Fig. 4.16 Sketch of the ‘tailors’ hall’, Boston, from the Wilson collection, Society of Antiquaries of London. 4.7 The minor guilds established after 1389 We move yet further into the mists of obscurity with the remaining minor guilds; indeed there has even been debate whether all of them actually existed. There may have been several reasons for this. The transition from light to guild was undoubtedly fluid. Groups maintaining lights before an image could become minor guilds for a time and then revert to just maintaining a light. Some were shortlived. Other small guilds may have amalgamated over time, as happened elsewhere, for example at Poughill (Cornwall) and St Botolph-withoutAldergate, London.137 In particular, it has been questioned whether the Apostles’ guild and the ‘Postill guild’ mentioned in the obits recorded in the Corpus Christi calendar are not in fact alternative titles for the guilds of SS Peter and Paul and SS Simon and Jude respectively.138 However, the evidence of the Boston wills shows that this is highly unlikely. In the period 1445–1545 fourteen Boston testators referred to the Apostles’ guild, including Richard Quykrell (notary, d. 1528) who left the guild ‘for amendyng of areymentes viid’. Significantly both Robert Osse (d. 1506) and William Hassyll (d. 1533) left bequests to both the guilds of SS Peter and Paul and SS Simon and Jude as well as to the Apostles’ guild, from which we can infer that they were three separate organisations. Three other individuals – Elizabeth Rede (d. 1486), Johannes Stoylt (merchant, d. 1501) and John Payne (mercer, d. 1504) – left bequests to the Apostles’ guild and also to the guilds dedicated to SS Peter and Paul, while Jannett (d. 1508), widow of Robert Lamkyn, also left a bequest to the guild of SS Simon and Jude in addition to a bequest to the Apostles’ guild. The name ‘Postill guild’ does not appear in any wills hence is probably just an alternative spelling for the Apostles’ guild; both versions appear in the calendar.139

Fig. 4.15 Vignette of St Botolph’s in the bottom left-hand corner of Robert Hall’s 1741 plan of Boston showing the ‘tailors’ hall’. Another ancient guild was dedicated to St James the Apostle, but few details are known of it. It was founded simply in order to increase and augment divine service and was supported by an annual subscription of 1s 1d.133 It evidently had a dedicated altar, in front of which twelve candles on a ‘perch’ were lit on festival days. It might also have had its own chapel: Richard Shallock of Boston (d. 1531) requested soul masses on Sundays ‘in the quyer of St Jamys’.134 At the funerals of the confraternity the guild observed obsequies similar to those of St John the Baptist’s guild. The last of the pre-1389 guilds was that of the Ascension, although nothing is known about when it was founded or by whom.135 Members paid an annual subscription of 1s 1d, which paid for a clerk and candles to burn at the funerals of the brethren and to carry at other festivals.136 Although it was long-lived, it was apparently less well supported than the other ancient confraternities: in the period 1445–1545 only seven testators referred to it by name and mostly left only small bequests. Of rather more interest is the bequest of William Anabull (patternmaker, d. 1535) who left the guild ‘a staffe of sylvyr and gylte I brought from Seynt James of Compostilla’.

132 Society of Antiquaries of London, Wilson Collection vol 3/3. I am grateful to Derrick Chivers for drawing this to my attention. 133 TNA: C47/39/84; Thompson, Boston, p. 155. 134 Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills, LRS 24, pp. 162–63. 135 TNA: C47/39/82. 136 Thompson, Boston, p. 154.

137

Mattingly, ‘Parish guilds in Cornwall’, pp. 294–95 and 316; Barron, ‘Fraternities of medieval London’, p. 19. 138 Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’, pp. 25–26. 139 BL, MS. Harley 4795, fols 81r (William Thorlande, alderman of Corpus Christi guild 1441, 1451 and 1452); 82r (Richard Bennington,

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments The guild of the Seven Martyrs is another about which there is some uncertainty, even though it is specifically referred to in the record of five obits in the Corpus Christi calendar and in thirty wills in the period 1486–1539, making it the second most popular guild referred to in probate records. The problem with this guild lies in its dedication. Most references to it are as the ‘Seven Martyrs’, presumably referring to the seven sons of St Felicity martyred in Rome, but the will of John Leeke (mercer, d. 1527) refers to the ‘7 sleepers’ (of Ephesus). This may simply be a mistake and it seems probable that the references to the Seven Martyrs and Seven Sleepers refer to a single guild. Yet there is an additional complication. Elizabeth Rede (d. 1486) referred to a guild called the guild ‘St Thomas guild videlicet Martyrs guild’. That there was indeed a separate guild to St Thomas à Becket, the martyr, is suggested by the inclusion of bequests to St Thomas’s guild in the wills of Janette Lamkyn (d. 1508) and William Reede (merchant of the Staple of Calais, d.1509), in the latter case alongside a reference to the Martyrs guild. Of those who remembered the Seven Martyrs guild in their wills, only nineteen (63%) gave their occupation; they comprised three merchants, eight tradesmen/professionals, four priests and four widows, hence it was apparently not patronised by the gentry. Far more people whose wills were proved in the Lincoln Consistory Court had an allegiance to this guild than those who owned property in more than one diocese and whose wills were therefore proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. This reinforces the likelihood that the Seven Martyrs guild membership was probably largely drawn from those socially below the rich leading members of Boston society. It is also interesting to note that, of the thirty Boston residents who referred to this guild in their wills, nine (30%) referred to only one or two other guilds and eleven (37%) did not mention any other guild at all. Hence, 33% of Seven Martyrs brethren belonged to more than three guilds; this compares with just 10% for members of all other guilds, suggesting that members of the Seven Martyrs guild were more dedicated to guild culture and multiple membership. Yet, for all its popularity, we know virtually nothing about the operation of the guild itself. It may have had its own chapel; a building called the ‘House of the Seven Stars’ formerly stood near the north-west corner of the church.140 Another putative guild may have been dedicated to St Anne and perhaps operated as a subsidiary to St Mary’s guild specifically to organise a cult of the relic of St Anne’s finger which it owned.141 No references to such a guild appear in the Corpus Christi calendar but it is mentioned in the will of the widow Jane Bawtree (d. 1509). It may also be significant that among the possessions of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary was ‘a long small chest standing by St Anne’s quire’.142 St

Anne’s cross once stood in St Anne’s Lane in the southwest of the town.143 For several minor guilds the evidence is compelling, even though nothing is known about them other than their names. The calendar of obits of the Corpus Christi guild records that William Thorlande (fl. 1441–54) and his wife Margaret were brother and sister of ‘Holyrood’.144 This guild is also named in wills of Jannett Lamkyn (d. 1508), John Haule (d. 1514) and Richard Hycks (mercer, d. 1533). The most obvious location for its altar would have been against the main rood screen separating the chancel of St Botolph’s church from the nave. However, a pilgrim’s token found at Brothertoft (Lincolnshire), the survival of which is uncertain, records a visit to ‘the Holy Rood in the wall at Boston’ (my italics) (Fig. 14.17).145 The guild dedicated to All Hallows is mentioned in the Corpus Christi calendar and in five wills ranging in date from 1478 to 1533. The final guild mentioned in the calendar is that dedicated to the Fellowship of Heaven, but no references to it have been found in the will sample. The calendar records that William Thorlande (fl. 1441– 46) and his wife were members of the guild of the ‘ffelychipe [sic] of heuen’.146 It is possible that it is an alternative name for the All Hallows guild, as the company of heaven would have included all souls, but it is perhaps more likely that it was a small and shortlived fraternity. Two further minor guilds are known only through will references, although one seems to have been of some significance. First, in the will of Andrew Trollope (d. 1519) is a bequest of 3s 4d to ‘St Antony guild’, while in 1527 John Leeke left ‘to saynt Anthony qwere to the payntyng and gyltyng therof 25s 7d’. It may have been a newly established guild in the early-sixteenth century. Rather surprisingly, these references strongly suggest that the guild had a dedicated chapel at St Botolph’s church. Finally, the guild of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is known only through references in four wills, those of Jannett Lamkyn (d. 1508), William Reede (d. 1509), William Wightman (d. 1533) and Richard Hycks (d. 1533).

143 Thompson, Boston, p. 155, considered that the name more likely reflects the former existence of a Benedictine nunnery or church of that name. No such religious house is recorded in D. Knowles and R.N. Hadcock, Medieval religious houses in England and Wales, (London, 1955, 2nd edn 1971). 144 BL, MS. Harley 4795, fol. 81r. 145 Thompson, Boston, p. 300. 146 BL, MS. Harley 4795, fol. 81r. Thorlande was alderman of the Corpus Christi guild in 1441 (Thompson, Boston, p. 119); he was mayor of the Staple in 1443-46 (TNA: C241/230/25; C241/229/35; and C241/231/3).

alderman Corpus Christi guild 1430, 1450, fl. 1452); and 85v (William Gawnte, fl. 1489). 140 Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’, p. 28. 141 Camfield, ‘Guilds of St Botolph’, p. 28. 142 Thompson, Boston, p. 146.

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The religious guilds associated with St Botolph’s church, Boston day. In all St Botolph’s church was a mighty powerhouse of prayer. Yet, by 1550 all relating to guilds and lights had been swept away. In 1539 the convents of the four Boston friaries were closed; at a stroke the number of viable churches had been reduced from six to two, although St John’s was not a major institution, and some forty friars probably left the town, although for the politically astute men of the town the possible destruction of the guilds must have seemed likely to have a far greater impact.149 In 1545 Boston finally received incorporation as a borough. Many of the new civic dignitaries were also eminent members of the guilds. They used this opportunity to safeguard as best they could the legacy and assets of the guilds;150 one of their first acts was to take over a substantial amount of the property of the major incorporated guilds, thus preserving for the town’s use much of the income that had previously gone to the guilds. The guilds were dissolved in 1548, but not all their former property remained with Boston Corporation, some being granted by Edward VI to Edward Fynes, lord Clinton and William Parr, marquis of Northampton, although subsequently the Corporation regained St Mary’s guildhall and, albeit at great cost, other properties known as the ‘erection lands’ subsequently used to establish a free grammar school at Boston.151 The actions of the new Corporation suggest that they realised that the days of the guilds were numbered, but, despite the prevailing religious climate of the time, there is little evidence to suggest that support for the Boston guilds was in decline before the 1540s. For only the five incorporated guilds is their dissolution documented. Probably a good many of the other guilds also survived until 1548, but some may have ceased to operate before then. Nonetheless all but perhaps the Guild of the Fellowship of Heaven, for which there is only one, undated, reference certainly remained in operation into the sixteenth century (see Fig. 4.4). The Subsidy Certificate for 1526 reveals that, as well as the vicar and his three curates, eighteen priests and eleven stipendaries ministered in St Botolph’s, virtually all established and financed by earlier lay initiatives.152 The number of admissions to the Corpus Christi guild varied: they were relatively low between 1490 and 1510, but then recovered in the next two decades.153 However, only six new members were admitted from 1540, the last being in 1543. The will sample also shows support for the guilds remaining strong until the mid 1530s. The last will with a reference to one of the guilds is dated 1539, when Jeffrey Wayse, a draper, asked to be buried in St Peter’s choir. Indeed the guilds continued to be regarded as being of such importance that, when John Robynson died in 1525, he left all his extensive portfolio of landed property to St Mary’s guild in return for soul masses, an

Fig. 4.17 Token of the Good Rood at the Wall in Boston found at Brothertoft. Drawing after Pishey Thompson. 4.8 The end of the guilds When Leland visited Boston on the eve of the Reformation, the interior of St Botolph’s looked and operated very differently from how it does today. He described the church as: so risen and adournid that it is the chifiest of the toune, and for a paroche chirche the beste and fayrest of al Lincolnshire, and servid so with singging, and that of cunning men, as no paroche is in al England. The society and bretherhodde [longging] to this chirch hath caussid this, [and now] much lande longgith to this society.147 The guilds were in many ways central to the religious life of St Botolph’s. The aisles were sub-divided by parclose screens to form guild chapels, with at least three more guild chapels built against the outside walls. Instead of just one main altar at the east of the nave as at present, there were at least eighteen altars or lights associated with the guilds, in addition to another to St Christopher and the high altar dedicated to St Botolph.148 All would have had dedicatory lights; on festival days in particular the precious metal crosses, candlesticks and other plate set on expensively embroidered altar cloths would have gleamed in the light from the profusion of candles. At all these altars mass would have been said at least once a

149 For the best account, see C. Cross, ‘Communal piety in sixteenth century Boston’, LHA 25 (1990), pp. 33–38. 150 A similar attempt at safeguarding assets is recorded in Cornwall at Lostwithiel and probably Helston; information from Joanna Mattingly. 151 Transcripts of the documents accounting for the corporation’s actions are in Peacock, English church furniture, pp. 213–23. 152 Cross, ‘Communal piety’, p. 33. 153 Fenning’ Corpus Christi guild’, table 1 p. 37.

147

Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, 5, pp. 33–34. William Rede (d. 1509) requested burial ‘in the parishe church of Boston before seynt Xpofer’.

148

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments exceptionally valuable donation confirmed by his widow Eleanor on her death in 1529. This bequest was of such significance that long after the property passed into the Corporation’s hands it was collectively known as ‘John Robinson’s lands’. Evidently Richard Frere was not alone in loving the guild. Acknowledgements I am grateful to my husband Tim Sutton for photography and help with construction and analysis of the databases. The staff of Lincolnshire Archives were of great help during my visits there. Judith White has been of much help in gathering information from wills in The National Archives. Paul Cockerham, Graham Javes, Kate Giles, David Griffith, Julian Luxford, Joanna Mattingly, Sophie Oosterwijk, Stephen Rigby, Nicholas Rogers, Christian Steer, Barbara Tearle and Laura Wood have provided valuable comments and advice.

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Chapter 5 Incised slab commissions in fourteenth century Boston by Paul Cockerham 5 and 7; Section 2, Indents 4 and 21). Were these also originally incised slabs made in Flanders, but which have either been worn out completely, or turned over; or were they slabs of English origin, being perhaps ‘Ashfordblack’ marble from Derbyshire, indistinguishable to the naked eye from foreign carboniferous limestones, again either worn smooth or reversed?7 In addition to those unrecorded, but identified Flemish slabs which were tragically ejected from the church in the 1980s (chapter 7), then the total of slabs brought over to Boston from Flanders might have been as many as thirty – more than a quarter of all known fourteenth-century foreign slab and brass commissions in the British Isles. Because of the generally poor condition of the Boston slabs however, there are considerable problems with their dating; in addition, nearly all are anonymous.8 Although frustrating in being denied the satisfaction of establishing a precise chrono-genealogy of the slabs, and thereby identifying a formula of socio-religious interplay between them, paradoxically these caveats lead to an understanding of the slabs as a large and distinct corpus of this particular monumental form in a single locus.9 In an attempt to address these issues this paper is divided into four sections. Firstly, in establishing a matrix of memorialisation, the materials and manufacture of the slabs are considered: where are they from and how were they made? Secondly, what was the motivation behind their commission: who chose these slabs, and why? Thirdly, how did the monuments function in terms of individual and collective memory, and why did they apparently peter out? And lastly, did their designs provide models influential in later monument design concepts in England?

5.1 Introduction An early guidebook to St Botolph’s, Boston, published in 1842, noted as an aperitif to a detailed record of the inscriptions on the monuments there, that ‘the floor and the nave aisles are filled with slabs on which were formerly figures and inscriptions. A few have some remnants of their ancient splendour still existing, but so mutilated that it is impossible to decipher to whose memory they referred. Many are of large size and appear to have been covered with ornamental and heraldic devices.’1 Boston’s own indefatigable historian, Pishey Thompson (1785–1862), was moved to comment only, however, that ‘The floor of the nave ... is almost entirely composed of ancient ledger stones, some of them of great interest.’2 In the war years R.H. Edleston published rubbings of a few of the better-preserved incised slabs among the fruits of his extensive, but eccentric, rubbing expeditions throughout Europe, and counted twenty-one ‘foreign-made’ slabs in St Botolph’s in total;3 but it was not until 1958 that F.A. Greenhill published a wellresearched list of the incised slabs there, his detailed notes posthumously published in 1986.4 He describes twenty-six slabs ranging from a thirteenth(?) century coped white stone with a cross botonnée, in the outer south aisle, to a slab with a fifteenth(?) century marginal inscription in Latin, under the tower;5 but relevant to the current survey he identifies twenty-three Tournai marble slabs of which three (Appendix 1, Section 3, Greenhill 15, 17 and 24) are not currently (2009) to be found.6 The situation is complicated by a number of large rectangular slabs of black homogenous stone in the central aisle and west end of the nave, but which are completely flat, bear no engraving or other signs of use, except for four which accommodated brasses (Appendix 1, Section 1, Brasses

7 S. Badham, ‘An interim study of the stones used for the slabs of English monumental brasses’, MBST 13 (1985), pp. 475–83, esp. p. 478; and F.G. Dimes, ‘Sedimentary rocks’, in J. Ashurst and F.G. Dimes (eds), Conservation of building & decorative stone (Oxford, 1998 edn), pp. 61–134, esp. pp. 90–95. There are now increasing doubts as to its use in medieval times however. 8 Of the 104 foreign examples currently identified by the author in the British Isles, only twenty are attributable, and not all of these can be securely dated. 9 No petrological analyses of these slabs have been attempted, so it is assumed initially that the slabs are of Tournai stone and engraved either there or in Bruges. Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 1, pp. 28–33, discusses the engraving of slabs in fourteenth-century Flanders, and dismisses Bruges in favour of Ghent as being a more important centre of the craft. H.K. Cameron’s papers ‘The 14th-century school of Flemish brasses’, MBST 11 (1976), pp. 50–81; ‘The 14th-century school of Flemish brasses: evidence for a Tournai workshop’, MBST 12 (1977), pp. 199–209; and ‘The incised memorial as part of the obsequies for the dead: French faith and Tournai wills’, MBST 13 (1984), pp. 410–23, together with M. Norris, Monumental brasses - the memorials, 2 vols (London, 1977), 1, pp. 25–34; and L. Dennison, ‘The artistic context of fourteenth-century Flemish brasses’, MBST 14 (1993), pp. 1–38; suggest that brass engravers produced incised slabs as well, and that although the geographical locations of the more prolific schools of slab / brass production were difficult to identify precisely, Tournai was undoubtedly the centre where many workshops responsible for brasses and slabs were located.

1

Anon., Descriptive & historical account of St Botolph’s church, Boston (Boston, 1842), p. 49. 2 P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), p. 187. 3 R.H. Edleston, ‘Incised monumental slabs 2’, Annual report of the Peterborough Natural History, Scientific and Archaeological Society [hereafter ARPAS], 62 (1934), pp. 2–3, pls. 1 and 5–6; ‘Incised monumental slabs 4’ ARPAS 64–65 (1936–37), pp. 5–6, pls. 2, 6, 7; ‘Incised monumental slabs 5’, (Barnard Castle, 1942), pp. 6–7, pls. 1–4. His rubbings are now in the University Library, Cambridge; see J. Bertram, ‘The peculiar publications of Robert Edleston’, MBSB 108 (May 2008), pp. 153–55. 4 F.A. Greenhill, The incised slabs of Leicestershire and Rutland (Leicester, 1958), pp. 3, 218–9; Idem, Incised effigial slabs – a study of engraved stone memorials in Latin Christendom, c.1100 to c.1700, 2 vols (London, 1976), 1, pp. 10, 13, 204–05 and 208; 2, pl.110b and pp. 14–15; Idem, Monumental incised slabs in the county of Lincoln (Newport Pagnell, 1986), pp. 21–28, pls. 3 and 22. His rubbings of the Boston slabs, made in the 1920s and 1940s, are now in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London. 5 This slab was lost when the tower was repaved sometime after 1983. Its lettering in fact suggests a late-fourteenth-century date; information from Sally Badham by email 11 February 2010. 6 Of these slabs unfortunately only no. 17 was recorded by Greenhill by a rubbing.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments in long, straight folds; it is depicted by boldly-incised lines implying a slight flexure of the right knee. His wife wears a long mantle over a surcoat and kirtle, has a veil and wimple on her head and the delineations of her facial features are almost identical to those of her husband (Fig. 5.3). The inscription notes Adam’s death as occurring in 1325 but the year of Sibile’s death is left blank, suggesting that the slab had been laid down shortly after Adam’s death and before hers.10

5.2 Material and manufacture: the mechanics of the slabs To establish some kind of chronological context, art historical stylistic comparisons using both British and Flemish monumental resources are helpful. Fortunately, two of the best preserved black marble slabs in Lincolnshire act as a sound basis as they are firmly dated. On the floor of the north aisle of St Leodegar’s church, Wyberton, just south of Boston, is a fine black marble slab incised with the effigies of Adam de Franton (d. 1325) and his wife Sibile, standing under a simple double canopy with a plain central shaft, and with four shields with merchants’ marks between the pinnacles (Fig. 5.1).

Fig. 5.2 Head of Adam de Franton (d. 1325); Wyberton (Lincolnshire).

Fig. 5.1 Tournai marble incised slab of Adam de Franton (d. 1325) and wife Sibile, Wyberton (Lincolnshire); positive rubbing from Greenhill collection in the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Fig. 5.3 Head of Sibile de Franton (1325); Wyberton (Lincolnshire). An equally well-preserved slab now in the floor of the east end of the north aisle of St Botolph’s, to Wessel

Adam has long hair curling around and below his ears, his eyes are rounded and staring, his nose is in profile and his lips are full (Fig. 5.2). He is dressed in the civilian fashion of the time in a long, ample gown with moderately pendulous sleeves, which reaches to his feet

10 R.E.G. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by Gervase Holles, A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (Lincoln, 1911), p. 152, records more of the inscription than is currently present; see also Greenhill, Lincoln, pp. 134–35, pl. 20.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston de Smalenburgh (d. 1340), is just as boldly engraved with an almost identical male civilian figure. The lines of his face, the hang of his gown and his posture are all very close, yet the canopy is more elaborate with embattlements above the principal arch, and there are large, thick side-shafts, each containing four separate compartments.11 In addition, the lettering of the marginal inscription is in relief, on a wide, edged fillet, rather than the simply incised band at Wyberton, and there are evangelistic symbols at the corners.

representation, as both Greenhill notes for slabs and Cameron and Norris identify for brasses.12 There is, for instance, hardly anything to choose between the figures of Franton, de Smalenburgh, and Adam de Walsokne (d. 1349) on his brass at King’s Lynn (Norfolk):13 the faces have identical drawing of the eyes, nose and mouth, the figure posture is the same, and the hang of the gown is identical even down to the quirky little diagonal drapery fold at the flexure of the knee (Fig. 5.4). This effigial conformity strongly suggests a Tournai workshop origin for these slabs as Cameron traced for the comparable brasses;14 but Bruges has been proven to be an increasingly important centre of fourteenth-century monument production, using marble from Tournai shipped down the river Scheldt via the ‘De Lieve’ canal.15 The artists followed the path of the stone to a centre where international trade and economic opportunities were vibrant.16 Minor details such as the tiling patterns of the roofs engraved on the tabernacles in the embattled canopies can distinguish between Tournai and Bruges work;17 by contrast the designs of the Ghent slabs are quite different and they seem neither to have developed the refinement of the Tournai-Bruges axis products, nor were they widely exported.18 12 Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 1, pp. 204–05; H.K. Cameron, ‘Four civilian brasses of the Flemish school’, MBST 14 (1987), pp. 101–14; Norris, Memorials, 1, pp. 28–31. 13 The brass is very worn but for an excellent reproduction see E.M. Beloe, jnr., A series of photo-lithographs of monumental brasses and matrices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries now or formerly existing in the county of Norfolk (King’s Lynn, 1890–91), pl. 13. See also H.K. Cameron, ‘The fourteenth century Flemish brasses at King’s Lynn’, ArchJ 136 (1979), pp. 151–72; the Walsokne brass is discussed in detail at pp. 153–58. 14 Cameron, ‘The 14th century school’, passim; Idem, ‘Incised memorial’, passim. 15 Based on Hans Eichler’s seminal paper Die gravierten grabplatten aus metal im 14. Jahrhundert und ihre vorstufen (Köln, 1933), pp. 43– 48, continental scholars have more recently started a debate between Bruges and Tournai as sources for these incised memorials: V. Vermeersch, Grafmonumenten te Brugge voor 1578, 3 vols (Bruges, 1976), 1, pp. 188–215; E. Van Caster and Dr R. op de Beek, De grafkunst in Belgisch Limburg (Assen, 1981), pp. 14–20; L. Nys, La pierre de Tournai – son usage et son exploitation aux XIIIe, XIVe et XVe siècles (Tournai, 1993), pp. 101–49; Idem, ‘La commande en art funèraire à la fin du Moyen Âge: le cas des lames gravées à Tournai et dans les régions limitrophes’, in F. Joubert (ed.), L’artiste et le commanditaire aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (XIIIe – XVIe siècles) (Paris, 2001), pp. 151–65; H. Kockerols, ‘Lames funéraires de laiton’, in J. Toussaint (ed.), Art du laiton – dinanderie (Namur, 2005), pp. 131– 57; R. Van Belle, Vlakke grafmonumenten en memorietaferelen met persoonsafbeeldingen in West-Vlaanderen (Brugge, 2006), pp. 64–81; R. Van Belle, Laudas Flamencas en España – ‘Flemish’ monumental brasses in Spain (Bilbao, 2011), pp. 176–81. 16 The export of marble from Tournai to Bruges, followed by the tombmakers, resonated in a natural spread of Romanesque architectural influence stemming from Tournai cathedral, for which see Baron Verhaegen, ‘L’architecture Scaldienne aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles – les relations entre Tournai et la Flandre’, in Fédération Archéologique et Historique de Belgique, Miscellanea Tornacensia – mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, congrès de Tournai 1949 (Brussels, 1951), pp. 515–25. 17 Van Belle, Grafmonumenten, pp. 64–81; see also Nys, ‘Commande en art’, p. 164. 18 Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 1, pp. 30–31; V. Despodt, ‘Gentse grafmonumenten en grafschriften tot het einde van de Calvinistische republiek (1584)’, 3 vols, (Universiteit Gent, afstudeerwerk tot het behalen van de academische graad van licentiaat in de geschiedenis, 2000-1), 1, pp. 111–17; and see also Dennison, ‘Artistic context’, pp. 24–29.

Fig. 5.4 Figure of Adam de Walsokne (d. 1349) from his brass at St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn (Norfolk); negative rubbing. Changes between 1325 and 1340 are manifest therefore more in architectural features than in effigial 11

Greenhill, Lincoln, pp. 25–26, pl. 3.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments While these Scaldienne workshops19 used Tournai marble the question must be asked as to whether one or more of the Boston slabs might be of Mosan origin, using marble quarried from around Namur. Hadrien Kockerols has recently produced an exhaustive and descriptive list of funeral monuments ‘en pays Mosan’ dating from 1000 to 1800.20 His encyclopaedic study makes it quite clear that, firstly, the details of the figures which can still be deciphered from the worn out designs on the Boston slabs are quite dissimilar to those effigies engraved on slabs worked along the river Meuse.21 Secondly, the late medieval incised slab industry was relatively fragmented along the Meuse. The stone came from numerous quarries sited along the upper reaches of the river, and with slabs

either worked in situ or only a short distance away,22 it is likely that the Mosan workshops were smaller and less organised compared to the highly proficient industry in west Flanders.23 This ruralised industrial structure must, therefore, have limited the export potential of these Mosan workshops. Lastly, although there was a thriving export trade in metalwork based on Namur and Dinant, these trade routes were hardly exploited to facilitate the marketing of sculpted figures and monumental slabs, contrasting strongly to a thriving commercialism along the river Scheldt.24 All this evidence, albeit circumstantial, makes it very unlikely that any of the Boston slabs originated from the Meuse, despite recent suggestions that some of the fragmentary remains of black marble slabs excavated at St Peter’s, Barton-onHumber (Lincolnshire) are of Mosan origin.25

19 ‘Scaldienne’ refers to an active trading route along the river Scheldt which linked Tournai and Ghent directly, encompassing Bruges via connecting waterways, such that artistic influences followed trade. 20 H. Kockerols, Monuments funéraires en pays mosan – arrondissment de Huy (Malonne, 1999); Idem, Monuments funéraires en pays mosan – arrondissment de Namur (Malonne, 2001); Idem, Monuments funéraires en pays mosan – arrondissment de Dinant (Malonne, 2003); Idem, Monuments funéraires en pays mosan – arrondissment de Liège (Malonne, 2004); Idem, Monuments funéraires en pays mosan – arrondissment de Philippeville (Namur, 2006); Idem, Monuments funéraires en pays mosan – la pointe de Givet (Namur, 2007); Idem, Monuments funéraires en pays mosan – arrondissment de Waremme (Namur, 2008); Idem, Les gisants du Brabant Wallon (Namur, 2010). 21 Sculpturally, Mosan work was most influenced by the rapidly developing styles of the Île-de-France, such that by the middle of the fourteenth century there was an elegance which progressed almost to a mannerism in the region’s figure statues; see Comte J. de Borchgrave d’Altena, ‘Le triomphe de l’orfèverie et l’évolution des arts au pays de Liège’, in Art Mosan et arts anciens du pays de Liège – exposition internationale (Liège, 1951), pp. 50–60; see also see M. Devigne, La sculpture Mosane du XIIe aux XVIe siècles (Paris and Brussels, 1932), pp. 50–77. While this elegance, poise and vivacity of figure modelling was not consistently found in the Mosan slab effigies, as a corollary there was an obvious lack of the type of rigid standardisation shown on the Bruges – Tournai monuments (Nys, La pierre de Tournai, pp. 116– 19). Mosan slab figure drawing was usually convincing, with an enhanced sense of realism, plasticity and an originality of composition; for instance, the diminutive figures of children were incorporated early on. As examples see the slab now at the Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire (Brussels) to Jacquemin d’Oxhen (d. 1344); and those at Anthisnes (Liège) to Gérard d’Anthisnes (d. 1316) and Ponchars d’Anthines (d. 1351) [now lost]: Kockerols, Monuments funéraires – Huy, pp. 57, 60–1; and H. Kockerols, ‘La collection de frottis de tombes plates de la société archéologique de Namur’, Annales de la Société Archéologique de Namur 74 (2000), pp. 23–41, at pp. 38–39. As Margaret Devigne summed up, ‘il n’y a pas de contact entre le style des tombes mosanes et celui des tombes tournaisiennes’; M. Devigne, ‘Les différences de présentation et de style entre les tombes mosanes et les tombes tournaisiennes’, Annales de la Fédération archéologique et historique de Belgique – congrès de Tournai de 1921 (Tournai, 1927), pp. 265–66. For significant sculptural differences between the two schools in the modelling of late medieval capitals see L. Cloquet, ‘Types de chapiteaux scaldisiens et mosans’, Revue de l’art Chrétien third series, 4 (1886), pp. 220–21. Complicating the issue however, M. Kockerols has recently suggested that incised slabs produced in the Mosan workshops of the second half of the thirteenth century were made by ‘tomb-sculptors … trained in Tournai, and even that Tournai exported its craftsmen’, although ‘the disappearance of the vast majority of works leaves us with few firm points for discussion.’ See H. Kockerols, ‘Two incised slabs from the abbey of Val-Saint-Lambert near Liège’, MBST 17 part 4 (2006), pp. 297–314, quotes from p. 314. Assuming M. Kockerols’ suggestion is correct, these craftsmen who had been relocated from or influenced by Tournai work at the end of the thirteenth century, later developed their own drawing style and iconography divergent from the Tournai-Bruges axis, and were instead influenced by the artists of northern France.

22 The discovery of a part-engraved slab to a priest in the quarry of ‘Cinq Rois’, Tournai, is convincing proof that such effigies were produced ‘en série’. As slabs were popular the workshops no doubt attempted to form stockpiles to satisfy this ready demand; see Nys, La pierre de Tournai, pp. 83–84; 116–19. Doubtless similar working practices occurred along the Meuse, but these quarries were more spread out, hindering a coherence of design development, compared to the industry along the Scheldt, which was focussed on Tournai. 23 H. Kockerols, ‘L’oeuvre des tombiers’, in J. Toussaint (ed.), Art en Namurois – la sculpture 1400–1550 (Namur, 2001), pp. 313–26; Idem, Monuments funéraires – Namur, pp. 31–38; Idem, Monuments funéraires – Dinant, pp. 49–57; Idem, Monuments funéraires – Liège, pp. 38–40. 24 R. Didier, ‘La sculpture Mosane du 14e siècle’, in Rhin-Meuse – art et civilisation 800–1400 (Cologne and Brussells, 1972), pp. 387–78; Idem, ‘A propos de l’art de la fin du moyen âge en Namurois: peinture, sculpture, orfèverie, ornament liturgique’, in Toussaint (ed.), Art en Namurois, pp. 38–81. He styles the area around Namur as ‘terra incognita’. 25 Based on the petrological analyses of Prof. John Prentice, Sally Badham has suggested that fragments of incised slabs excavated between 1978 and 1984 at St Peter’s, Barton-on-Humber, were of Namur / Mosan origin rather than the usually assumed Tournai marble, of which there were other examples in the church. One of the larger pieces of proposed Namur stone bears the remnants of a marginal inscription in Lombardic letters ‘(ANI)MA PROPICIETVR DEV(S)’ (English Heritage accession number 88213558) in which the floriated shape of the ‘R’ implied a stylistic similarity with the slab of Adam de Franton (d. 1325) at Wyberton (Lincolnshire); S. Badham, ‘Black marbles – problems of identity’, MBSB 96 (2004), pp. 730–31; Idem, ‘Sepulchral fragments of Tournai marble and Namur stone’, in W. Rodwell with C. Atkins, St Peter’s Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire – a parish church and its community, volume 1 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 657–62. She has also proposed that perhaps ‘some other slabs hitherto identified as being of Tournai marble, are more probably carved from Namur [marble]’, quote from ‘The use of sedimentary “marbles” for church monuments in pre-Reformation England’, Church Archaeology 11 (2007), pp. 1–18, at p. 3. However, Prof. Prentice’s expertise in performing these analyses has lately been questioned by Belgian geologists, and currently one of the few authoritative examinations is that performed by Dr Francis Tourneur, who bases his results on the identification of the microorganisms in the stone strata (pers. comms 14/08/2009 from H. Kockerols and R. Van Belle). Hence, there is a possibility that the Barton stone types have been confused, and those previously identified as from Namur are in fact from Tournai. In addition the characteristically cursive ‘R’ on the Barton and Wyberton slabs, postulated as a Mosan characteristic, is also found on early fourteenthcentury Tournai products, such as the brass to King Eric Menved (1319) at Ringsted (Denmark) [illustrated by W.F. Creeny, A book of facsimiles of monumental brasses on the continent of Europe, (London, 1884), p. 3], and on Bruges slabs, such as those in west Flanders at Damme (c.1270) and Sint-Kruis (c.1350+) [illustrated by Van Belle, Grafmonumenten, pp. 231–36 and 406–10]. The potential use of Namur marble for slabs exported to England in the fourteenth century, which was always going to be an exceptional occurrence based just on the

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston Accepting the Tournai provenance of the Boston slabs therefore, their condition is such that in most cases only faint outlines of the figures and their architectural context can be deciphered. The models described so far, of 1325 and 1340, act only as a basis for a chronology, although other features are just as helpful. Firstly, the width of the marginal fillet changes, whether engraved on the stone or inlaid in another material: generally, the wider the fillet the later the date. Secondly, the initial absence and then the presence of evangelistic symbols at the corners of the marginal fillet, which fashion evolves to incorporate them down the long sides of the fillets, also suggests a chronological development. Thirdly, the presence of (inlaid) small figures of saints above the primary effigies (Fig. 5.5) implies the original presence of an embattled architectural canopy superstructure, and infers a later rather than an earlier period in the fourteenth century.26 Fourthly, neither the use nor absence of white marble or brass inlays seems to be date related. Brass was used on a Tournai slab as early as 1296,27 so despite the fact that some slabs incorporate brass for marginal fillets, heads and hands rather than mastic, this seems to be individual monument design rather than part of a chronological workshop trend. Fifthly, some of the slabs retain details of the principal figures’ dress, one better preserved slab (No. 22) definitely dateable as c.1360 for instance.28 Lastly, size does not appear to be date related: some of what are considered to be the earliest slabs (No. 5) are of similar dimensions to later ones (Nos. 19, 20).29 The very simple conclusion is that most of the Boston slabs were laid down before c.1350 over a thirty to forty year span, but to construct a precise timeline is

Fig. 5.5 Tournai marble incised slab (FAG 11) with figures of saints inlaid in white composition (c.1325?); St Botolph’s, Boston.

geography and the trade patterns, seems remote therefore. Export of graveslabs was just one aspect of a buoyant Tournai trade in such things, traced by J.F. King, ‘The Tournai tomb-slabs at Trondheim and Tortefontaine’, JBAA 161 (2008), pp. 24–58, as crucially his stylistic analyses of the designs of these slabs and fonts reflected a distribution facilitated by the Scheldt and confirmed by geological analyses which indicated an almost exclusive Tournai origin of the stones. King’s earlier paper, ‘The Tournai marble baptismal font of Lincoln cathedral’, JBAA 155 (2002), pp. 1–21; and C.S. Drake’s paper ‘The distribution of Tournai fonts’, AJ 73 (1993), pp. 11–26, also explore the relative saturation of the market at this time by Tournai products. See also L. Cloquet, ‘Exportation des sculptures tournaisiennes’, Fédération Archéologique & Historique, Compte rendu des travaux du dixième congrès tenu à Tournai (Tournai, 1896), pp. 642–52; and P. Rolland, ‘L’expansion tournaisienne aux XIe et XIIe siècles: art et commerce de la pierre’, Annales de l’Académie Royale d’Archéologie de Belgique 72 (1924), pp. 175–219. There is an evident contrast between this kind of overseas trade compared to the Mosan schools of sculpture, which looked to the south and east for a mutuality between artistic influences and trade. It is far more likely that slabs previously identified in England as originating from the Meuse region are either identified in error, or are in fact ‘petit-granit’ from Écaussines and Soignies (Hainaut). This stone predominated in Bruges only post-1450 on the decline of the Tournai quarries and is unlikely to have been introduced into England before then. Although Tournai and Namur marbles are almost completely indistinguishable, ‘petit-granit’ is more easily recognised due to the larger number of ‘snail trails’ it displays; see E. Groessens, ‘L’origine et l’évolution de l’expression “petit granit”’, Bulletin de la société belgique de Géologie 101 (1994), pp. 271–76; and for examples see Kockerols, Monuments funéraires – Namur, p. 36. For an overview of Belgian marbles see C. Camerman and P. Rolland, ‘La pierre de Tournai. Son gisement, sa structure et ses proprieties, son employ actuel. Son employ dans le passé’, Mémoires de la Société Belge de Géologie, de Paléontologie et d’Hydrologie 1 (1944), pp. 5–86; in English, E. Groessens, ‘Ornamental and building stones from Belgium’, Stone Industries 19 (1984), pp. 24–35; and for an insight into the complexities of identification of the stones see J.-P. Van Welden, ‘Contribution à l’identification des “pierres de Tournai”’, Bulletin de l’Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique 8 (1965), pp. 149– 64. See also King, ‘Tournai tomb-slabs’, p.34 for details of geological analyses of Tournai and Mosan stones; and for an instructive case study of Mosan marble see J. Story et al, ‘Charlemagne’s black marble: the origin of the epitaph of Pope Hadrian I’, Papers of the British School at Rome 73 (2005), pp. 157–90.

26 As on the slab to a priest (c.1330) at Ashby Puerorum (Lincolnshire); see Greenhill, Lincoln, p. 4, pl. 21. The presence of a large plain gap between the heads of the primary figures and the top of the slab, suggests that this was filled with a complex rather than rudimentary canopy, but this does appear relevant to a chronology. The arches over the figures at Wyberton (1325) are plain and there is no superstructure, but slabs of this period and earlier can sometimes have enormously complex canopies: see the slabs of Jakemes Porez (c.1300) originally in Tournai cathedral, and of Gilles de Renes (c.1300) once in Bruges [illustrated by Van Belle, Grafmonumenten, pp. 128–29]. It is the presence of inlaid figures only which implies a later date, as on the slabs at Koksijde (West-Flanders) (c.1350) [illustrated by Van Belles, Grafmonumenten, pp. 314–15]. 27 Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 120–24, 330–31. For further descriptions of the techniques and use of inlays see Greenhill, Leicestershire, pp. 98– 99; Kockerols, Monuments funéraires – Huy, pp. 11–13; and for an account of a ‘brass head’ see J. Page-Phillips, ‘Three Flemish fragments’, MBST 14 (1989), pp. 324–28. 28 For comparisons see S.M. Newton, Fashion in the age of the Black Prince: a study of the years 1340–1365 (Woodbridge, 1980), passim; and M. Scott, Medieval dress and fashion (London, 2007), pp. 78–121. 29 Apart from the poor condition of the Boston slabs any art-stylistic analysis is hindered considerably by the relative dearth of incised slabs of this period in Tournai itself. Apart from the enormous losses which have occurred in the country (Vermeersch, Grafmonumenten, 1, p. 259, suggests 95% destruction rate, and Kockerols, Monuments funéraires Liege, p. 17, 93%) the current difficulty in gaining access to the slabs in the cathedral during the huge restoration project underway after the earthquake of 1999, together prevent a realistic assessment of comparative material. The searchable photoarchive database of the Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique has proved an invaluable resource: www.kikirpa.be (accessed 23/11/2009).

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Map 5.1 Hanseatic trade routes throughout northern Europe during the late medieval period. impossible.30 They commemorated a particular group of men dressed as civilians – the third estate – most with their wives, together with those slabs to priests who served these men and their community.31

The slab was originally laid down in the Franciscan friary in Boston, and around 1813 was excavated from the site, eventually being brought into the parish church.32 Here, therefore, we have a monument erected in a mendicant house in the town, commemorating a German merchant who was buried there rather than requesting his body to be returned to his native Munster.33 Clearly, this merchant was involved in the trading networks of the Hansa, which began as an association of north German merchants in the twelfth century. By the fourteenth century this had developed into a strong and wealthy community of cities, their aim being to protect their merchants’ trade from foreign competition, and to extend this influence as far as possible overseas. Always ‘an amorphous organisation, lacking legal status, having at its disposal neither finances of its own nor an army or a fleet’, nevertheless it hugely facilitated German trade from east to west and back again, and by the early thirteenth century its merchants had established close relations with Bruges and other towns on the Zwin estuary, as well as the English ports of King’s Lynn,

5.3 Motivation and methods of commissioning the slabs Who were these people therefore, and how and why did they order these slabs? The only one now identifiable is to Wessel de Smalenburgh, the complete inscription of which is vital in an understanding of the commemorative cult manifested by these monuments. It reads: HIC IACET WISSEL(M)VS D(I)CT(V)S / SMALENBVRGH CIVIS ET MERCATOR MONASTERIENSIS QVI OBIIT FERIA SEXTA / POST NATIVITATEM BEATE MARIE / VIRGINIS ANNO DOMINI M CCC XL ANIMA EIVS REQVIESCAT IN PACE AMEN (Here lies Wessel called Smalenburgh, citizen and merchant of Munster, who died the sixth day after the feast of the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary 1340. May his soul rest in peace. Amen.)

32

For the original site of the Franciscan friary see Thompson, Boston, pp. 112–13; and G. Harden, Medieval Boston and its archaeological implications (Sleaford and Stamford, 1978), p. 25. 33 Despite a discussion of Wessel de Smalenburgh’s potential activities in Boston, little is known about the man himself; see H. Ludat, ‘Ein Zeugnis westfälisch-englischer Beziehungen im Mittelalter – die grabplatte eines hansischen Kaufmanns aus Münster in England’, Westfalen - Hefte für Geschichte Kunst und Volkskunde 29 (1951), pp. 47–51; Dr and Mrs M. Tennenhaus, ‘Hanseatic merchants in England – 1. Boston’, MBST 11 (1976), pp. 189–97; and K. Kruger, ‘Church and church business in Hanseatic agencies’, in K. Friedland and P. Richards (eds), Essays in Hanseatic history – the King’s Lynn symposium (Dereham, 2005), pp. 80–93.

30 Greenhill dated most of them (and other equally worn out ‘foreign’ black-marble slabs) as c.1325. This was obviously a date with which he felt comfortable for the majority of the attributions. 31 For an account of the English historical context in which civilian monuments evolved see N. Saul, English church monuments in the middle ages – history and representation (Oxford, 2009), pp. 238–48.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston

Fig. 5.6 Tournai marble slab commemorating Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340), St Botolph’s, Boston.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Boston and Hull.34 This potentially one-sided trading relationship in fact flourished in the thirteenth and earlyfourteenth centuries, despite intermittent political uncertainties and trading embargoes, and a large number of Hanseatic merchants settled more or less permanently in England. As there would have been many more who resided only temporarily, supervising their businesses and ‘networking’, a durable mutuality between German and English merchants would have become deeply rooted in early-fourteenth-century Boston.35 An intense circulation of goods imported and exported in a triangular route between Boston, Bruges and north Germany, became commonplace (Plan 5.1). It is hardly surprising therefore that a German merchant dying in Boston might choose to be buried there, where he may well have made his home, and be commemorated by a slab made in Bruges. Probate documents relating to this period in Boston have not survived, and even if they had they would almost certainly have failed to provide any information about the ordering of a tomb from Flanders.36 However, in surmising the links between England and the continent which were forged during the life, and subsequent demise of, a merchant, the wills of Hanseatic traders proved in London provide an interesting corpus.37 For instance, Andreas Kylmere, a merchant from Dortmund, Germany, made his will in 1391 and directed that he was to be buried in the church of St Lawrence, Poultney, London:

buried] before the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where John de Humeo rests interred ... Item, I leave 8 marks to a certain chaplain appointed by my executors and supervisors, who will celebrate (mass) for my soul for one year in the church where my body lies buried).38 Nothing of this is exceptional, but both of his executors were from Dortmund. There was also an English supervisor of his will, who was no doubt instrumental in liaising with the German executors and the English authorities. Similarly, in 1395, Hans Rubius of Cologne made a nuncupative will requesting his burial in the church of the Austin Friars, London, bequeathing ‘fratribus eiusdem loci 20s. ad orandum pro anima sua ... quod habeat unam petram marmoream ibidem super corpus suum iacentem cum scriptura nominis sui’ (to the brothers of the same place [Austin Friars] 20s to pray for his soul, because he will have a marble stone in the same place, lying over his body, inscribed with his name).39 One of his executors was a London draper, the other a German merchant. In 1403 Godfrid van Kessell willed ‘Item volo, quod executors mei subscripti emant unum lapidem marmoreum sculptum cum armis meis ad iacendum supra corpus meum in dicta ecclesia’ (Item, I wish that my executors undersigned order a marble stone sculpted with my arms, to lie over my body in the said church [of All Hallows]).40 One of his executors was from London, the other was his German wife. These Hanseatic wills, although dating from half a century after the Boston slab commissions and only rarely specifying monuments, do reveal a consummate internationalism in their scope. Bequests are itemised in a variety of currencies to individuals in different countries;41 executors could be English, or foreign or both. There is also much to suggest that they planned their burial and subsequent commemoration in London and that the various schemes of memorialisation – whether physical in the form of graveslabs or verbal in the appointment of chantries – were carefully arranged and then put into practice by their executors.42 Returning to the Boston slabs, similar mechanisms of memorialisation might also have been selected by Boston merchants, their cosmopolitanism and ability to exploit trade routes between Flanders and East Anglia facilitating the importation of a slab from Tournai-Bruges to Boston.

coram ymagine beate Marie virginis, ubi Johannes de Humeo requiescat humatus … Item lego cuidam capellano celebraturo pro anima mea in ecclesia, ubi corpus meum requiescit humatum et eligendo per executors meos et supervisorem 8 marcas pro uno anno ([to be 34 P. Dollinger, The German Hansa (London and Basingstoke, 1972 edn), quote from p. xvii; N.G.J. Pounds, An economic history of medieval Europe (London, 1974), pp. 373–86; E. Carus-Wilson, ‘The medieval trade of the ports of the Wash’, Medieval Archaeology 6–7 (1964), pp. 182–201; and S. Bennett and N. Bennett (eds), An historical atlas of Lincolnshire (Chichester, 2001 edn), pp. 56–57; 140. 35 The ‘Steelyard’ in King’s Lynn is the only Hanseatic structure to survive in the British Isles, but was imitated in Boston and the other trading ports doing business with the Hanse, being an ‘inn-cum-storage’ facility; see V. Jansen, ‘Trading places: counting houses and the Hanseatic ‘Steelyard’ in King’s Lynn’, in J. McNeill (ed.), King’s Lynn and the Fens – medieval art, architecture and archaeology, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 31 (2008), pp. 66– 82. Prior to the provision of these communal facilities merchants would have hired accommodation and storage in the town, hence increasing their business and social contact with the indigenous population. Leland, for instance, noted that ‘The Eesterlinges kept a great house and course of marchaundice at Boston’; see L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535-1543, 5 vols (London, 1964 edn), 4, p. 181. 36 For example, the long series of early wills proved in the Court of Husting, London, reveal almost nothing about requests for monuments in the first half of the fourteenth century. It is not until at least the 1340s that even the burial place is commonly specified, and a will such as that of John de Holegh, hosier (1352) who wanted a marble stone with two brass figures on it surrounded by an inscription requesting prayers for their souls, is truly exceptional. See R.R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of wills proved and enrolled in the court of Husting, London, A.D. 1258 – A.D. 1688, 2 vols (London, 1889–90). 37 S. Jenks, ‘Hansische Vermächtnisse in London: ca. 1363–1483’, Hansische Geschichtsblätter 104 (1986), pp. 35–111; see also Kruger, ‘Church and church business’, pp. 90–91.

38

Jenks, ‘Hansische Vermächtnisse’, pp. 60–61. Ibid., p. 66. 40 Ibid., p. 73. In All Hallows there remains a Tournai marble slab incised with the outline of a priest in mass vestments standing under a canopy (c.1325); F.A. Greenhill MS collections, Incised effigial slabs in Britain, vol. 1 (currently in the author’s possession); Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 2, p. 3. The slab now bears the brass inscription to Thomas Vyrley, vicar (d. 1454) and is otherwise unrecorded. This slab was probably ordered for a priest who was connected with the merchants of the Hanse, who by then had established strong connections with that church. 41 For instance in 1401 one Wilhelmus de Colonia, styled as a goldsmith of London, left £10 of English money to his brother’s widow, who was a recluse in a Cologne convent; and in the same year Arnald Pallas esq. of Cologne, left forty shillings sterling to the Austin Friars in London, then bequests of eight and six gold florins apiece to individuals in London: Jenks, ‘Hansische Vermächtnisse’, pp. 70–72. 42 Jenks, ‘Hansische Vermächtnisse’, pp. 50–56. 39

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston This convention also occurred elsewhere, as in his analysis of the wills of merchants of the Hanse based in Lübeck, Cameron identified trends of particular merchant families to be commemorated by monuments specifically ordered from Flanders and laid down in the city’s churches. The will of Wedekin Warendorp (1350) requested ‘ein gutter in Flandern gefertigter Grabstein’ [a good gravestone prepared in Flanders]; and that of Burgomaster Hermann Gallin (1365) was recorded by an eighteenth-century antiquary as stating ‘super meum sepulchrum unum flamingicum auricalcium figurationibus bene factum lapidem funebralem’ [over my place of burial a memorial stone with Flemish brass figures, all well made].43 There were at least four, and possibly more, large fourteenth-century Flemish brasses on the floor of the Marienkirche and others elsewhere in the city; and from the presence of Flemish brasses and Tournai slabs with indents in Stralsund and Toruń, the trend was maintained in other Hanseatic trading ports.44 Additionally, Van Belle has identified an order placed in 1359 by a lord of Seville who paid trade visits to Flanders, for a slab to be made in Bruges and then delivered to Spain.45 This linked evidence suggests without doubt that merchants who traded along Hanseatic routes, and who died no matter whether in their native ports or overseas, were frequently commemorated by slabs and brasses manufactured in Flanders. A formal written notice ordering a Flemish slab might well have been previously discussed between the testator and his executors verbally, or they might have gone ahead and ordered the monument before their own death. Saul has noted that ‘patrons were instinctively unadventurous in their approach to commissioning ...[relying on]... personal recommendation when deciding which workshop to contact.’46 Consequently, bearing in

mind the closely knit society of English merchants at Boston, once one of them had opted for a Scaldienne slab, the same transaction could have been repeated many times over.47 Details of each monument would have been specified in a contract drawn up between the client – the commemorated or his representative, and the master of the workshop – several of which have been recorded. Greenhill, Cameron and Norris have trawled through various examples of contracts, published chiefly by de la Grange, Cloquet and Hocquet before the destruction in 1940 of the original documents in Tournai.48 More recently Nys has created an extensively cross-referenced biographical dictionary of ‘tailleurs de pierre’ and ‘graveurs de lames’ working in Tournai, producing an enormous documentary resource, much of which comprises albeit brief references to incised monuments rather than comprehensively detailed accounts.49 Norris translates in full the remarkably descriptive contract for a brass to be made in 1301 by Jacques Couvès of Tournai for the grave of Jean de Mur, archdeacon of Ghent, which imposes a firm control over the end product: ‘the detail of the specification, the items to be provided by the executors in the form of patterns and verses to be selected by them, and above all the direction to base the design and standard of the memorial on one existing in Tournai’ confirm Saul’s observation on the natural conservatism of such things.50 This derivativeness was commonly expressed in these documents and was something actively encouraged, such that the monument eventually created should resemble one the client already knew of and could be satisfied with.51 Just as frequently expressed was the desire that the slab of stone or brass plates should be ‘bien graver et souffisement’ (well and sufficiently engraved),52 such that, for instance, in using another monument as a model, Jacques de Baissi and Catherine de Tiel, his mother-in-law, were contracted to furnish ‘une lame à IJ images de laiton ossi boine et ossi souffisans que le signeur Watier Gargate’ (a slab with two images of brass, as good and as well made as that to

43 H.K. Cameron, ‘Flemish brasses of the fourteenth century in Northern Germany and their use by merchants of the Hanse’, ArchJ 143 (1986), pp. 331–51, at pp. 332 and 337; and K. Krüger, Corpus der mittelalterlichen grabdenkmäler in Lübeck, Schleswig, Holstein und Lauenburg (1100-1600), (Stuttgart, 1999), pp. 891–99. 44 J. Bertram, Monumental brasses and slabs in the cities of the German Hanseatic league (Oxford, 1994), pp. 41–42, lists one Flemish brass and four Tournai slabs with rectangular brass indents in the Nicolaikirche, Stralsund; and Cameron, ‘Flemish brasses of the fourteenth century’, p. 348, suggests that there were probably at least seven Flemish brasses in Toruń, only one of which remains. A Tournai slab with separate brass figure inlays there is illustrated by J. Jarzewicz et al., Gotyckie spiżowe płyty nagrobne w Polsce (Poznań, 1998), p. 178. 45 R. Van Belle, ‘Ferrand García de Santyllán († 1362) en zijn handel met Vlaanderen’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 145.2 (2008), pp. 193–218. This lord of Seville was in Bruges from 1358 until 1362 when he died. He sold over 50 tons of oil from his olive groves and with the income he bought cloth, tools for his hacienda, and luxury goods such as silverwork – but notably an incised slab for Samuel el Levi, the head treasurer of King Pedro ‘El Cruel’. The slab was shipped back to Seville in 1359 accompanied by his son Ruy. I am very grateful to M. Van Belle for this reference. 46 Saul, English church monuments, p. 104. The same author’s work in identifying the products of certain London brass workshops with patrons linked by family or society connections is also relevant here, emphasising the point that an individualism of monuments was not important, but that following fashion or peer pressure was. See N. Saul, ‘The fragments of the Golafre brass in Westminster abbey’, MBST 15 (1994), pp. 19–32; Idem, ‘The brass of Sir Thomas Le Strange at Wellesbourne, Warwickshire: its dating and its place in the “E” series’, MBST 15 (1994), pp. 236–48.; Idem, ‘The wool merchants and their brasses’, MBST 17 (2006), pp. 315–35.

47 Cameron’s account of the lives and activities of the burgesses commemorated by the Flemish brasses at King’s Lynn confirms that such people overlapped in time, attended ceremonies together and undoubtedly knew each other well. He concludes, ‘Braunche and Bittering who between them shared the Mayoralty for three out of the four years 1350–53 must have seen during those years the laying in St Margaret’s church of the brass to Adam de Walsokne and his wife. They must have been impressed to the point that they resolved to have similar memorials for themselves’; Cameron, ‘Flemish brasses at King’s Lynn’, pp. 164–69. The same kind of mercantile personal interaction must also have occurred at Boston. 48 A. de la Grange and L. Cloquet, ‘Études sur l’art à Tournai et sur les anciens artistes de cette ville’, Mémoires de la société historique et littéraire de Tournai 20 (1887); A. Hocquet, ‘Le rayonnement de l’art tournaisien aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles – nouvelles preuves’, Annales de la sociétè historique et archéologique de Tournai n.s.17 (1921), pp. 247– 82; Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 1, pp. 29–32; Norris, Memorials, 1, pp. 25–26; M. Norris, Monumental brasses – the craft (London, 1978), pp. 91–95; Cameron, ‘Incised memorial’, pp. 418–23; Saul, English church monuments, pp. 106–08. 49 Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 165–320. For a few examples of Tournai marblers working in northern France see M. Beaulieu, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs français du moyen age (Paris, 1992), pp. 9–36. 50 Norris, Craft, p. 91. 51 Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 111–12. 52 See examples given in Hocquet, ‘Rayonnement’, pp. 16, 17ff.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Watier Gargate).53 These instructions relating to the mechanical integrity of the finished product were a measure of what Saul identifies in the medieval period as one aspect of its aesthetic appeal.54 The safe, reassuring familiarity of a tombslab’s design, and the flawlessness of its engraving were, hence, simple aesthetic factors by which the Boston merchants might have judged these memorials. Each would have been content with their own as part of an ongoing series of similar monuments. Yet one of them started the trend; one of them placed the first commission in Flanders, begging the question of why this monumental type was chosen in the first place. What made these rich merchants opt for incised slabs of Tournai marble? The fact that they wanted a monument ‘bien graver et souffisement’ was a quality which they would have looked for in any material product, whether domestic – furniture, house fittings, wall hangings etc. – or as part of a trade deal: buying and selling quality goods was (and still is) one way to establish a good business reputation. And being merchants and therefore possessed of a honed cosmopolitan awareness of such artefacts, it is then in their psyche to explore anything innovative for its financial possibilities. While there was no way that a viable business model was sustainable just through the importation into England of Flanders tombslabs, it is natural that is should be a merchant who initiated the patronage in Boston.

imported. They must, however, have been among the earliest introductions of this monumental type. In England the merchants may already have come across earlier Tournai craftsmanship, such as the mannered but evocative imagery on the Romanesque tombslabs in Lincoln and Ely cathedrals55 (Fig. 5.7) and the characteristic marble fonts.56 They may also have seen the contemporary incised effigial slabs in the churches of Bruges, Ghent and Tournai, and one can only imagine the sumptuousness and rich appearance of these slabs, revealed now in the small print of tomb contracts. An agreement of 1325 drawn up between Jakemon de Frenne and Jehan Harboullet ‘marbriers’ of Douai, and Williaume Catel, their client, serves as a useful examplar.57 It specifies a full description of the size and design of the required slab, which was to incorporate latten effigies of William and his wife, their garments ornamented with diaperwork; there were to be two lions at William’s feet and two dogs by the feet of his wife. Above the figures, in stone, was to be a lavish architectural arrangement supported by three pillars, integrating censing angels and the twelve apostles; and the whole was to be surrounded by an inscription on a marginal fillet interrupted at intervals by shields of arms. The visual impact of this monument emerging fresh from the workshop in 1325, must have been stunning: in particular, the delicacy of the gilded diaperwork on the figures’ garments must have been exquisite, and utterly fulfilled the merchants’ expectations about the ‘quality’ of the product. The brightness of the freshly gilded figures would have been perceived as a glowing luminosity against the black Tournai stone together with other brass and white translucent inlays and heraldic tinctures; and these strong contrasts may have encouraged the use of ‘taille d’épargne’ techniques – the cut away surfaces perhaps holding colours.58 Tournai marble 55 J.-C. Ghislain, ‘La production funéraire en pierre de Tournai à l’époque Romane. Des dalles funéraires sans décor aux oeuvres magistrales du 12e siècle’, in J. Dumoulin and J. Pycke (eds), Les grands siècles de Tournai (12e–15e siècles), (Tournai, 1993), pp. 115– 208, esp. pp. 142–47, 186–95. See also E. Schwartzbaum, ‘Three Tournai tombstones in England’, Gesta 20 (1981), pp. 89–97. 56 King, ‘Tournai marble baptismal font’, passim. 57 Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 356–58. 58 This engraving technique was probably much more common than is suggested by the surviving slabs, but there is a notable example to Isabeau de Cambrai (1342) now in the nave floor of Saint-Jacques, Tournai, for which see de la Grange and Touquet, L’art à Tournai, p. 127; and Cameron, ‘Flemish brasses’, pp. 208–09. English examples can be found at Fleet (c.1320–40), Long Sutton (c.1350?) and possibly Halton Holegate (c.1350?), (Lincolnshire), and Newcastle Blackfriars (c.1320-30), (Northumberland); see S. Badham, ‘A fourteenth century Flemish composite slab from the Newcastle Blackfriars’, MBST 14 (1993), pp. 44–49. For an interesting account of the physical engraving processes involving slabs and the different methods of working, see J.C. Bessac, ‘Techniques de taille et d’ornementation des dalles funéraires’, in B. Imhaus (ed.), Lacrimae Cypriae – les larmes de Chypre, 2 vols (Nicosia, 2004), 2, pp. 65–80. The potential of incised slabs for the display of polychromy is discussed by S. Badham, ‘“A new feire peynted stone” – medieval English incised slabs?’, Church Monuments 19 (2004), pp. 20–52, esp. p. 35. The use of alabasters and white mastics might owe something to the techniques of ivory carving, which maintained a balance between polychromy and exposure of the original material; see M. Collareta, ‘From color to black and white, and back again: the middle ages and early modern times’, in R. Panzanelli (ed.), The color of life – polychromy in sculpture from antiquity to the present, (Los Angeles, 2008), pp. 62–77.

Fig. 5.7 Upper part of Tournai marble slab sculpted in low relief, ?bishop Remigius (d. 1092 but slab probably mid-twelfth century); Lincoln cathedral. For these slabs were a new commodity not just to Boston but to England. Clearly, with the impossibility of determining a precise chronological development of these Tournai slabs in Britain, it cannot be stated categorically that the slabs in Boston were the first of such things to be 53 54

Hocquet, ‘Rayonnement’, p. 19. Saul, English church monuments, p. 90.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston polishes to an extremely reflective finish, so the surfaces of these stones would have reacted with the coloured lights gently dispersed through stained glass windows. In addition to the aesthetic of craftsmanship exhibited by the slabs, the merchants, in choosing them, would have been sensible of their singularity – in effect, their beauty. Otherwise, why choose them? A richness of colours and brightness of gilding are two further medieval aesthetic qualities identified by Saul,59 but there must also have been an element of personal selection, even though one merchant appears to have slavishly followed another in the continual ordering process.

principal figures and these architectural formulae might have proved difficult to adhere to if slabs were simply widened accordingly, with the ratio becoming close to 1:1 (i.e. square) or even 1.8:1 which bases them somewhere between the formulae of √3:1 [1.73:1] and √4:1 [2:1].61 What is also clear is that as the width of the slab or plate increased to accommodate two and three effigies, so either the length increased, which added to the overall impressive scale of the monument, or the figures were compressed, side by side.62 For instance the ratios on the triple effigial slabs at St Mary’s, Barton-on-Humber (Greenhill 1) (Fig. 5.8) and Boston (Greenhill 13) are 1.65:1 and 1.9:1 respectively; the great brass to Robert Braunche (d. 1364) and his two wives at St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn (Norfolk), has a ratio of 1.75:1 which is almost identical to that earlier brass in the same church to Adam de Walsokne (d. 1349) and his wife of 1.74:1. Despite the inclusion of a third figure in the composition, the overall proportions of the brass were unaffected. This must have facilitated the use of stereotyped architectural and decorative details for the surrounds and was probably the reason for the retention of these proportions, letting the figures fit within the space rather than the figures dictate the space. Exceptionally, the brass with the single figure of Alan Fleming (d. 1361), Newark (Nottinghamshire), is larger than the Braunche brass at King’s Lynn but whereas on the latter monument there is no decoration behind the main figures, at Newark there is an enormously complex scheme of diaper infill; its proportions retain the ratio of 1.67:1, very close to double and triple effigial compositions. On the other hand the proportions of slabs which were engraved with only a single principal figure do tend to differ from the norm, as they were narrower but could be only slightly shorter because a minimum length was necessary to cover the coffin-filled grave.63

Fig. 5.8 Tournai marble incised slab with a male and two female effigies (c.1325?); St Mary’s, Barton-upon-Humber (Lincolnshire).

61

My analysis makes various assumptions, notably in presuming that the recorded dimensions were those of untrimmed, entire Flemish slabs; the frequent evidence of a marginal inscription helped confirm or not that this was so. 62 Stereotypical canopy patterns were used on slabs as well as brasses, fitting the effigial components underneath; see H. Kockerols, ‘Composition et modeles des dalles funéraires gravées’, Ardenne Wallonne 107 (2006), pp. 14–21. 63 Single figure slabs are as follows: Ashby Puerorum (Greenhill 1) 1.94:1, Boston (Greenhill 4, 8, 10, 16, 18, 21) together producing an average of 2.26:1; Thorganby (Greenhill 1) 2:1. However, the odd case at Boston and elsewhere produces an aberrant result – for instance one single figure slab (Boston Greenhill 4) has a ratio of 2.7:1, up to the extreme ratios of between √7:1 and √8:1, hence very long and thin and with no evidence of being trimmed. Could this have been a slab which was paired up side by side with another one, to his wife, for instance, to make up a double effigial / joint memorial, which ensemble would have been of more pleasing proportions? There were precedents, such as the enigmatic figures of members of the Northwood family, at Minster-inSheppey, Kent (1319 / 1335), for which see Norris, Memorials 1, pp. 2– 3; 2, figs. 5–6; and also those now in the Musée de Bijloke at Ghent (1323 / 1353), for which see Norris, Memorials 1, p. 32; and Despodt, ‘Gentse grafmonumenten’ 2, pls. 31–32; 3, 3.8.001/002. Peter Kidson has pointed out that an interesting case can be made from the incised slab to Huges Libergiers (1263), the architect of St

A final quality of aesthetic judgement might have been in the physical proportions of the slabs commissioned. Masons frequently based their architectural rectangular forms on the ratio of the long side : short side of √2:1 [1.4142:1] up to √5:1 [2.24:1].60 Slabs had to accommodate one, two and even three 59 Saul, English church monuments, p. 87. See also M. Nitz, Entstehung und bedeutung der Englischen messinggrabplatten (Munich, 1980), pp. 41–77, in which he speculates on the ‘lichtfigur’ motif of brasses, that light reflected from the gilded surface of brasses was a manifestation of the spirit of the deceased. Whether this was the accepted metaphysical case or not is not important (see H.K. Cameron’s review of the book, MBST 13 [1989], pp. 275–79) as it simply emphasises the desirable aesthetic quality of the brass to be gilded. 60 E. Fernie, ‘A beginner’s guide to the study of architectural proportions and systems of length’, in E. Fernie and P. Crossley (eds), Medieval architecture and its intellectual context - studies in honour of Peter Kidson (London, 1990), pp. 229–237.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Does this analysis indicate a preference for a particular harmony of proportions to suit accordingly a one, two or three person product? Slabs were certainly quarried and sold at different lengths: for instance in 1314 the Tournai ‘tombier’ Jean Aloul purchased several stones direct from a quarry ranging from 7 to 10 ft long.64 These stones were the raw material ready for engraving and as their widths would have been determined at the quarry to be proportional to their lengths, it was not the monumental workshops which dictated slab proportions (ignoring trimming down) but the quarrymen. However, as there must have been a pervasive influence of stonemasons in a quarry where blocks of stone for building were produced to specific dimensions, so it is understandable that the same practices also governed the quarrying and proportions of monumental slabs; but the stone supply for both purposes was fundamentally constrained by the geological strata.65 Once slabs were delivered to a workshop they could then have been incised with a stock architectural pattern and blank marginal inscription fillet until further work for a specific patron was commissioned.66 Apart from these aesthetic qualities influencing the choice of a monument, there were more practical considerations as well. An obvious advantage is that the slabs, however splendidly worked, were flat pieces of stone. They could be transported straightforwardly as the finished article, so there was no need to employ a mason at Boston to erect a three-dimensional tombchest of Tournai marble which had been brought over in its constituent parts, and run the risk that the structure fitted neatly into a potentially restricted location. Any competent mason could lay a slab over the burial site of the deceased in the floor as the dimensions were far from crucial.67

Cost was another factor relevant to choosing a monument, or whether to have a monument at all. The difficulty in estimating prices of incised slabs made in Flanders and delivered ‘ready made’ to Boston, is that the expenses specified in contracts and wills were usually in local currencies such as ‘livres parisis / tournais’. These were not actual coinage but monies of account. Rates of exchange between these trading currencies fluctuated, sometimes considerably, both with time and the region where the transaction took place, so that trying to determine for comparative purposes the equivalent costs of Flemish slabs in sterling is a process fraught with hazard.68 However, by converting the Flemish currencies to a relatively stable coinage base, such as Florentine florins, and then reconverting that estimate to sterling (taking exchange fluctuations into account), the approximate costs of these slabs can be gauged.69 (Table 5.1). For instance, taking the first entry, in 1291 Master Thierry de Calonne of Tournai was contracted by Jehan d’Avesnes, canon of the chapter of Notre-Dame, Cambrai, to make ‘une lame’ (no dimensions specified) for the sum of ten livres Tournois.70 At this date in Flanders, ten livres Tournois was equivalent to twenty Florentine florins, and as one Florentine florin was valued at 2s 9d sterling, so twenty florins equated to fifty-five shillings, or £2 15s 0d. Similarly, in 1296 Master Jehan li Poignières was contracted to make an incised slab with brass inserts, being ‘une lame de piére de XI piés de lonc et de largheche V piés et demi’, (a slab of stone eleven feet in length and five and a half feet in width), for Béatrice de Clermont, Châtelaine de Lille. The main design was to be incised in stone with ‘le cappe de dame vestie de laiton et semenchié d’escuçons des armes ... et une liste tout entour de laiton, et XII escous que là ke on vora et les coulombs et le tabernacle porsivant de laiton et II kiençons desous les piés le dame, de laiton’, [the sleeveless cloak(?) of the lady made in latten and emblazoned with shields of arms ... and an inscription around [the composition] in latten, and twelve shields which she bore, and the columns and tabernacle to be made of latten, and two little dogs under the feet of the lady, also in latten]; all this for twenty-three livres

Nicaise, Reims (Marne, France), now in the cathedral, illustrated by W.F. Creeny, Illustrations of incised slabs on the continent of Europe (London and Norwich, 1891), pl. 13. Huges’ figure is shown with the instruments of his trade, including a yardstick. From the yardstick one can get the scale and the dimensions of the frame, the innermost rectangle approximately 247 cms x 110 cms, i.e. 2.24545:1, which would have the sense of √5:1, almost the same as those ‘perfect’ ratios for single figure slabs listed at the start of this note. I am very grateful for a sight of correspondence between Prof. Kidson and Prof. Nigel Saul. 64 Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 352–54. 65 Although rectangular Flemish brasses were built up piecemeal using conjoined, small rectangular plates, the overall dimensions of the finished product still had to be inlaid into a Tournai slab with an even margin around the brass rectangle; again it was the quarry which dictated absolute monument proportions. See K. Holm, ‘The brass of king Eric Menved and queen Ingeborg: restoration and examination’, MBST 15 (1997), pp. 2–18. 66 This explains the occasional example of one figure only being depicted under a double canopy (as at Saint-Jacques, Tournai [1342]), or no figure at all under a canopy, as at Sury-près-Léré (Cher, France), to Marie de Prie, dame de Vivier (1347) [illustrated by J.-L. Flohic, Le patrimoine des communes de Cher, 2 vols (Paris, 2001), 1, p. 547. 67 There must be a caveat here in that we don’t know if any of the Boston slabs were originally set into the tops of raised tombs. Firstly however, as the vast majority of Flemish brasses and slabs both in England and abroad, judging from antiquarian evidence, appear to have been laid down in the floor, and secondly, that their manufacturers were termed ‘graveurs de lames’ [engravers of slabs] rather than ‘tombiers’ [tomb-makers], it seems likely that an entire monument comprised a flat slab laid flush with, or raised up only slightly from the floor. The material considerations of ordering a monument are discussed by B. and

M. Gittos, ‘Motivation and choice: the selection of medieval secular effigies’, in P. Coss and M. Keen (eds), Heraldry, pageantry and social display in medieval England (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 143–67. 68 Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 1, p. 17. 69 See P. Spufford, Handbook of medieval exchange (London, 1986), pp. xxx–xxxi for an account of the rise of bills of exchange resulting from the expansion of international trade in the thirteenth century; this book also acts as an indispensible chronological directory of medieval currency rates. 70 Hocquet, Rayonnement, p. 16; Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 193–94.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston Table 5.1 - Comparative costs of Tournai slabs. (The data are taken from de la Grange and Cloquet, ‘Études sur l’art’, passim; and Hocquet, ‘Rayonnement’, passim.) DATE

SOURCE

ACTUAL

COMPARATIVE

COST

COST

SIZE

DESCRIPTION

1291

Contract

10 livres Tournois

£2 15s 0d

A ‘lame’

1296

Contract

24 livres Parisis

£7 16s 8d

1301

Contract

150 livres Tournois

£26 12s 0d

1325

Contract

40 livres Parisis

£9 10s 3d

1325

Contract

30 sous Tournois

£0 5s 2d

1330

Contract

60 livres Parisis

£21 0s 0d

1334

Will

6 livres Tournois

£1 8s 6d

A tomb of marble for two persons

1335

Contract

26 livres Parisis

£8 13s 4d

Two person figure brass

1342

Will

4 florins d’or

£0 12s 8d

A ‘lame’

1343

Will

10 livres Tournois

£0 15s 0d

A ‘lame’ for two persons

1344

Contract

27 livres Parisis

£5 15s 6d

Slab with brass figure, canopy and accessories

1345

Contract

120 livres Tournois

£26 12s 0d

Slab with double effigy figure brasses

1350

Will

100 sous Tournois

£1 0s 8d

A ‘lame’ with two images

1359

Will

8 florins d’or

£1 2s 8d

A ‘lame’ with two images

11 x 5 ft

Slab with figure, canopy, arms and inscription in brass Slab with brass figure and canopy with alabaster inlays

12 x 6 ft

Slab with brass figures, canopy with smaller figures etc A ‘lame’

11 x 5 ft

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Slab covered entirely with a brass, 10 x 4 ft

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Table 5.2 - Wholesale prices of quarried stones in Tournai in 1314. (The data are taken from Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 352–54). QUANTITY OF SLABS

DIMENSIONS

ACTUAL PRICE PAID

4 slabs

10 ft long

21 gros tournois + 1 sterling

5s 3d

1s 4d

3 slabs

9 ft long

14 gros tournois + 2 sterlings

3s 6d

1s 2d

4 slabs

8 ft long

10 gros tournois + 2 sterlings

2s 8d

8d

4 pairs of slabs

7 / 7½ft long

11 gros tournois + 2 sterlings per pair

2s 10d per pair

1s 5d

parisis.71 In 1296 twenty-three livres parisis were equivalent to 460 sous, and as eight and a half sous made up a single Florentine florin so the contract was validated at fifty-four florins. At that time a florin was equivalent to 2s 10d sterling, so the cost of the contracted monument, delivered to Lille, was £7 16s 8d. Two deductions can immediately be made from these declared expenses despite the inherent uncertainty of exchange fluctuations. Firstly, the incorporation of brass increased the price of that monument markedly over one without any brass inlays. Secondly, as shown below, the wholesale costs of slabs from the Tournai quarries were cheap compared to the cost of stone in England. (Table 5.2). So how did these base prices impact upon the Boston merchants? For a start it seems that Flemish incised slabs were relatively cheap compared to what was similarly available in England. For example, in Exeter cathedral (Devon), a Purbeck marble slab attributed to Dean Andrew de Kilkenny (d. 1302) cost 13s 4d, with another 10s 0d paid as the expenses of a messenger despatched to purchase it.72 At just over nine feet long73 it is much more expensive than a 9ft long Tournai slab priced at 3s 6d, especially on this occasion when the Purbeck marble was probably cheaper than usual, being traded direct from Purbeck to Exeter without the London marbler mark-up (Fig. 5.9). Also in Exeter cathedral the (now lost) enormous slab of stone for the brass of bishop Thomas Bitton (d. 1307) cost £3.74 (Fig. 5.10) Although it was probably around twelve feet in length, again, its price hardly compares to the ten feet long Tournai slab sold for 5s 3d. Brass plates increased the costs considerably, but even then Flemish plates seemed to be cheaper than their English counterparts in the fourteenth century. The two

COMPARATIVE COSTS

COST PER SLAB

large rectangular brasses and their slabs at St Alban’s abbey (Hertfordshire) to abbot Thomas de la Mare and his predecessor (engr. c.1350) were only £14 each;75 compare these to the large but cut out brass figures to Sir John de St Quintin (1397), Brandesburton (Yorkshire), which were just slightly less at £13 6s 8d.76 Perhaps already established was the ability of the Flemish tombiers to mass produce flat funeral monuments – as brasses and incised slabs – which had brought about a reduction in the unit price of these things.77 Yet the base element of these Flemish monuments was Tournai stone, which was considerably cheaper than the English alternative of Purbeck and can only have helped as a marketing advantage. Carriage costs from Flanders to Boston also need to be accounted for, although shipping links were routine, day to day elements of trade to Boston merchants. Transport of a tombslab would have been straightforward to arrange therefore as just one more item amongst many to co-ordinate leaving Bruges for Boston, hence minimising the unit expense. Of course if the Boston merchant actually owned the vessel in which his slab was transported, the costs would have been minimal. There is little concrete financial evidence relating to the costs of shipping slabs along this route other than the references in the ‘Halyburton Ledger’ of 1498.78 Taking a single 75

H.K. Cameron, ‘14th century Flemish brasses to ecclesiastics in English churches’, MBST 13 (1980), pp. 3–13, esp. p. 11; N. Rogers, ‘The earliest known description of the de la Mare brass at St Alban’s abbey’, MBST 14 (1987), pp. 154–57. 76 R.H. d’Elboux, ‘Testamentary brasses’, AJ 29 (1949), pp. 183–91; Norris, Memorials, 2, p. 299; Idem, Craft, p. 52. Prices of tombs and brasses are also discussed by P. Lindley, ‘The tomb of bishop William de Luda’, in Gothic to Renaissance – essays on sculpture in England, (Stamford, 1993), pp. 85–96, at pp. 87–88; and Saul, English church monuments, pp. 108–11. 77 This was clearly the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when brasses were popularised and the variety of small, cheap brasses available multiplied considerably; see R. Greenwood, ‘Wills and brasses: some conclusions from a Norfolk study’, in J. Bertram (ed.), Monumental brasses as art and history (Stroud 1996), pp. 82–102, at pp. 86–92; and see also Saul, English church monuments, p. 111. 78 C. Innes (ed.), Ledger of Andrew Halyburton, conservator of the privileges of the Scotch nation in the Netherlands, 1493–1503 (Edinburgh 1867), pp. lxii, 161, 215, 250; see also F.A. Greenhill, ‘The ledger of Andrew Halyburton’, MBST 9 (1954), pp. 184–90; Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 148–49; Van Belle, Grafmonumenten, p. 72.

71 This contract gives the cost of the slab laid down in the church [“assise”, literally, seated] so this would include carriage and fixing costs, and again implies that the slab was laid down in the church floor rather than as the top of an altar tomb. See Hocquet, ‘Rayonnement’, pp. 16–17; and Nys, Pierre de Tournai, pp. 330–31. 72 D. Lepine and N. Orme (eds), Death and memory in medieval Exeter, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series 47 (Exeter, 2003), pp. 185–86. 73 W. Lack, H.M. Stuchfield and P.W. Whittemore, The monumental brasses of Devonshire (London, 2000), pp. 122 and 128. 74 J. Blair, ‘Four sets of accounts for making brasses’, MBSB 27 (June 1981), pp. 7–8.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston example, a tombslab purchased by one Robert Rynd for William Rynd cost £6 15s 0d in Bruges, with packing amounting to 3s 0d, a further 2s 0d for a toll in Bruges, 1s 6d for a stevedore and 4s 0d for a barge to Veere, adding a total of 10s 6d (or 7.7%) to the costs of the monument itself.79 These costs were just for exporting a slab out of Flanders and did not include its transport across the North Sea to Boston. However, the journey from Bruges to Boston can have been no more expensive (based on distance) than a comparable trip shipping a tombslab from London to Boston, so if the extra expense in commissioning a Flemish slab were likely to be less than 10% of the unit cost, this was still a relatively low figure.80

Bostonians chose Tournai slabs for their commemoration when there were other opportunities open to them. Fifty years earlier and the cross-slab workshop in Barnack (Northamptonshire) would have competed with the Ancaster stone workshops for the custom of the Boston merchants; indeed three Barnack cross-slabs (?late 13th century) were commissioned for élite graves in Boston

Fig. 5.10 Purbeck marble graveslab with indents for brasses, bishop Thomas Bitton (d. 1307), Exeter cathedral (Devon); scale drawing. (Greenhill 1 and two relief cross-slabs) before the demise of this source. Yet the merchants were apparently keen to move away from the increasingly routine cross-slab format and a perceived reduction in status symbolism, selecting effigial monuments as a means of selfpromotion and differentiation from their social inferiors.81 Firstly, they must have been aware, via metropolitan contacts and visits, of the slabs and brasses produced by the London marblers’ workshops, which dominated monument production in London and the south-east of the country.82 These were either large, ostentatious figural compositions, or more refined designs incorporating

Fig. 5.9 Purbeck marble graveslab, dean Andrew de Kilkenny (d. 1302), Exeter cathedral (Devon); scale drawing. This assessment of Flemish tombslabs from the aesthetic viewpoint of the medieval client as well as the pragmatic approach of a merchant, helps to suggest why these

81

L.A.S. Butler, ‘Minor medieval monumental sculpture in the east Midlands’, ArchJ 121 (1960), pp. 111–53, esp. pp. 139–41. 82 The standard work on the London marblers is S. Badham and M. Norris, Early incised slabs and brasses from the London marblers (London, 1999). See also Norris, Memorials 1, pp. 9–24; and J. Blair, ‘English monumental brasses before 1350: types, patterns and workshops’, in J. Coales (ed.), The earliest English brasses: patronage, styles and workshops 1270–1350 (London, 1987), pp. 133–74.

79

Greenhill, ‘Andrew Halyburton’, p. 186. The carriage charges of the other monuments specified in the ledger, bought and shipped from Bruges, are very similar. 80 Nigel Saul assessed the costs of transporting the brass of Sir John de Braose (1426) from London to Wiston (Sussex), a distance of around sixty miles, at between 10 – 12.5% of the costs of the monument itself; English church monuments, p. 39.

88

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments demi-figures and crosses. Their penetration into Lincolnshire was only slight, however, and although Purbeck cross-slabs were imported into the county they were later replaced by plain Purbeck slabs which were appropriated by a workshop probably based in Lincoln, who inserted their own Lincoln-manufactured brasses into them.83 The full length brass figure of bishop ?Sutton (1299) in Lincoln cathedral demonstrates the output potential of this atelier. It was also a centre of incised slab production using Ancaster stone, with some competent work still found at Buslingthorpe, Harpswell, Lincoln and Tetney (Lincolnshire).84 Equally accessible to Bostonians were the monumental brass workshop in York and several centres of monumental effigy production in Yorkshire, thought to be based at the stone quarries themselves.85 But none of these Yorkshire monument manufacturers seems to have marketed themselves competently, perhaps because of the topographical spread of the workshop-quarries. Although popular with the landowning élite local to those quarries, they made little impact even in north Lincolnshire, let alone the more remote south of the county. Notably, the merchants also passed over the output of a workshop probably at Ancaster, comprising a series of early- to mid-fourteenthcentury monuments which portrayed the deceased in a number of singular ways as a demi-effigy in low relief (Fig. 5.11). These were patronised particularly by the gentry and clergy in the Wolds, Nottinghamshire and in Yorkshire, but there are none in Barton-on-Humber, Boston or the other coastal ports.86 The townsmen and merchants seemed to have looked outwards in their connections rather than inland, wanting to difference themselves from the monuments commissioned by the gentry in their parochial heartland. So, having an insight into continental developments, and in a straight choice between London, Lincoln, Ancaster(?) or Flanders, they opted for Flanders.

Fig. 5.11 Ancaster stone slab with demi-effigy of civilian within a quatrefoil, first half of the fourteenth century; Heckington (Lincolnshire). 5.4 The incised slabs as memoria The choice by these merchants of a flat incised effigial slab for a monument, whatever the source, was a momentous one. The men who commissioned them were conscious of their lay status and their sub-knightly role in an urbanised society, yet they must also have been fundamental to the success of the St Botolph’s rebuilding project, very much because of their cash rich mercantile status. But in terms of their desire to commemorate themselves within this new church, they did not elect for large, free-standing tombs which might have quickly over-populated the space available and physically encroached upon people attending mass, or have blocked ceremonial processions.87 Gravestones on the other hand, did not intrude like this: they were a monument form altogether more attuned to a merchant’s social status, and being easily accommodated in the floor they also marked the grave with an undisputed material permanence. Once a Boston merchant had placed the initial order from Flanders and the slab had been laid down in the church, a steady stream of similar monuments arrived in the church over succeeding decades. These slabs en masse would have produced a striking visual presence in the new church floor. As this was presumably paved with pale creamy Ancaster or more yellow Barnack stone in the common areas of the nave and aisles at least, the colour contrast of the black slabs of polished Tournai

83

Blair, ‘English monumental brasses’, pp. 153–58. Greenhill, Lincoln, pp. 32, 54, 71, 81, 112; Badham and Norris, Early incised slabs and brasses, pp. 19–20; S. Badham, ‘Evidence for the minor funerary monument industry 1100–1500’, in K. Giles and C. Dyer (eds), Town and country in the middle ages – contrasts, contracts and interconnections, 1100–1500, Society for Medieval Archaeology monograph 22 (Leeds, 2007), pp. 165–95, esp. pp. 173–86. 85 B. and M. Gittos, ‘A survey of East Riding sepulchral monuments before 1500’, in C. Wilson (ed.), Medieval art and architecture in the East Riding of Yorkshire, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions for the year 1983 (1989), pp. 91–109, esp. pp. 96–102; and for the sculptured effigial workshops see S. Badham, ‘What constituted a “Workshop” and how did workshops operate? Some problems and questions’, in S. Badham and S. Oosterwijk (eds), Monumental Industry: the Production of tomb monuments in England and Wales in the Long Fourteenth Century (Donington, 2010), pp. 12– 36, at pp. 22–24. The restricted distribution of the Yorkshire quarryworkshops’ products mimics those of the Meuse; a spread of workshop locations seems to lead to an insular patronage of monuments. 86 Butler, ‘Minor medieval monumental sculpture’, pp. 141–45; B. Kemp, English church monuments (London, 1980), pp. 58–59; Saul, English church monuments, pp. 45–46. I am grateful to Sally Badham and Nigel Saul for discussing Lincolnshire sculpture with me. 84

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Saul, English church monuments, p. 239, warns about what appears to be the uncommon commemoration of civilians at this date: losses in urban churches have been high, yet these were just the churches in which civilians and merchants were memorialised. The relative dearth of such monuments in town churches should not be taken as evidence of a lack of commemorative zeal therefore, but the survival of the slabs at Boston was probably assisted by the fact that the monuments there were slabs and not more complex, three-dimensional tombs; see chapter 7 for a fuller account.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston marble, glistening with white marble and gilded brass inlays, must have been dramatic.

gone’. Although the descriptions are too vague to be of much use, one of these slabs is now identifiable as Greenhill 7, because Kerrich records it in the south aisle as ‘very large, a sword between them, Head, hands and sword have been inlaid’. This unique slab is now just south of the font at the west end of the nave. Possibly it was ejected from the Corpus Christi Guild chapel on its demolition and placed in the floor of the south aisle where Kerrich found it in the early 1800s, but it was then further relocated in the body of the nave. As Kerrich recorded only nine slabs more than a dozen went unaccounted for, perhaps because although he did see them they were too worn to make out, or perhaps they were covered by early pewing. Many of the Tournai slabs can now be visualised as laid down in what would have been heavily frequented walkways in the church, particularly those in a long line moving west-east towards the rood screen, following the natural route of a feast-day procession (Appendix 1, Plan 11.3). People might also have drifted along the length of the nave towards the rood during masses, as although the church was very wide, areas of the aisles would have been screened off in appropriations by the guilds into chapels, forcing individuals into the space of the nave rather than giving them the freedom to walk diagonally across this wide open space. The surface wear of some of these nave slabs is considerable (particularly Greenhill 11, 12, 13, and two other large Tournai slabs close by) such that even if they are not quite in their original locations they can only have suffered such complete surface erasure by being in areas of enormous footfall. The slabs’ original locations can obviously never be fully appreciated, but clearly each slab, individually, functioned to stimulate prayer for the dead. Laid down almost as the walls of the church were going up around them, as discussed by Linda Monckton in chapter 3, the high visibility of these quickly growing clusters of slabs would have become of increasing importance to the merchants as manifesting a communal entity of remembrance. They were becoming bound together in death as they were in life, but bound by a communion of trade rather than family: commerce rather than inheritance. While most, if not all of the Tournai slabs at Boston are likely to commemorate English merchants, one or two may have been to merchants of the Hanse who died in the town.90 Krüger has identified a custom prevalent in Bruges among the Hanseatic merchants, that on the death of one of their members the merchants were obliged to attend the funeral ceremony in the church, failing which they were fined.91 Additionally, if one of their number was lost at sea, then a solemn requiem mass was held with a catafalque erected, covered with the merchants’ pall, symbolising their corporate loss.92 Consequently, as all the merchants enjoyed the same lifestyle, privileges

Fig. 5.12 View of the central aisle of the nave, St Botolph’s, Boston. Hence, the location of the slabs is intriguing. The few post-1350 slabs were placed in, or later removed to the side aisles, perhaps associated with guild chapels or laid down there as the construction of the church progressed; but many of the nineteen slabs estimated as pre-1350 are clustered around the west end of the nave and extend up the central aisle (Fig. 5.12). Some would have been laid down before the earliest guilds were established, although four slabs (Greenhill 5, 7, 19 and 20) are now close to where slabs containing brasses originally laid down in the Corpus Christi guild chapel – the guild was established in 1335 – are currently located. The inference is that on the abandonment of the guild’s chapel by 1627 these Flemish slabs were re-sited just as those with brasses were.88 The early-nineteenth-century notes of Thomas Kerrich (1748– 1838) identify ‘Engravings on stone’ in both north and south aisles, but nothing in the nave or chancel.89 In the south aisle he noted four slabs to ‘Yeoman & wife, large as life, inscription running round’; in the north aisle there were four more of these and the slab of ‘a priest with a chalice, Head, hands & chalice inlaid, which are now

90 The will of the Hanseatic merchant Godfried van Kessel, proved in 1403, refers to his burial ‘coram stacione mercatorum Alemannie’ (before the station of the German merchants) in the church of All Hallows, London, testimony to the fact that they had colonised an area of this parochial church; see Jenks, ‘Hansische Vermächtnisse’, p. 73. 91 Krüger, ‘Church and church business’, p. 85. 92 Ibid., pp. 86–87.

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I am grateful to Sally Badham for suggesting this possibility. BL, Add. MS. 6732, fol. 20r. These would appear to be the earliest known references to incised slabs in Boston church. I am very grateful to Philip Whittemore for making available his transcript of these notes. 89

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments theory of the acquisition and training of a memory.96 Add to these two static visual parameters rituals centred around or invoking the memory generated by the slab and so the second cognitive sense, that of hearing, is also involved. The inscription on a slab acts, after all, as a powerful visual stimulus for the spoken word, as well as being a permanent one,97 so that all these sensations were specifically interlinked to perpetuate that experience of looking at a monument so as to create a memory, the ultimate purpose of which was to assist the living to remember the dead.98

and social standing in the town, whether they were Hanseatic traders or Englishmen involved in the same commercial trade routes, so the funeral panoplies of the Hanse might well have stimulated something similar in Boston, not least a communal sense of remembrance.93 As the slabs were continually laid down they would have started to form a focus for a continuum of commemoration. In addition to the funeral rituals, picture the parish priest or the personal chaplain of the deceased, recalling the inscription on a monumental slab at an anniversary mass, as just one small part of the elaborate commemorative celebration in the new parish church into which other merchants naturally would be drawn.94 As the numbers of slabs increased so would the frequency of these anniversaries, their repetition producing several potential sequelae. Firstly, each mass – or perhaps the more informal gatherings afterwards – would have also provided a forum, surely, for business transactions as well as pious recitations.95 These helped to cement relationships among the mourners and reinforce the cohesion of the group, as well as perpetuating a collective mercantile ethos between the living and the dead. Secondly, there would have been an increasing awareness of this type of funeral monument, popularising it among these people. Thirdly, the experience of a monument – its imagery and the mechanisms of how it portrayed what it did – was a vital mnemonic in medieval memory and the maintenance of remembrance. The use of various devices encapsulated in the physical structure of a monument resonated with its location in the church, these two criteria of material images and stable locations forming the crux of Bradwardine’s fourteenth-century

Fig. 5.13 Shield with merchant’s mark on incised slab of Adam de Franton (d. 1325); Wyberton (Lincolnshire). Another visual mnemonic was heraldry, but many merchants were of the non-armigerous classes and were unable to employ an heraldic device. Consequently, a system of personal marks was devised, which proclaimed not only the ownership or origin of the goods or belongings stamped with it, but also came to stand for the integrity of that merchant and the quality of his goods. Just as heraldry related to a knightly code of chivalry so the mark stood for a commercial honesty and soundness, crucially important to a man’s reputation and as near to

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Prior to the establishment of a popular guild structure at St Botolph’s, which probably absorbed much of the responsibility of arranging and overseeing the funeral rituals of its members, the family and executors of the deceased were responsible for such things. In a funeral procession through the town, the purpose of which was to draw the maximum public attention to the merchant’s death, his fellow merchants would have walked together as part of the cortège, identifiable by their richness of dress if nothing else. This group was a confluence of selfexpression and status-seeking identity, and being repeated at the month and anniversary masses, continued to emphasise the formation of a socially select body, one whose activities in remembrance were concentrated in the new church. For a case study see R. Dinn, ‘Death and rebirth in late medieval Bury St Edmunds’, in S. Bassett (ed.), Death in towns – urban responses to the dying and the dead, 100–1600 (London, 1995 edn), pp. 151–69; and for general overviews see C. Daniell, Death and burial in medieval England (1066-1550) (London, 1997), pp. 30–64; and R. Horrox, ‘Purgatory, prayer and plague – 1150– 1380’, in P.C. Jupp and C. Gittings (eds), Death in England – an illustrated history (Manchester, 1999), pp. 90–118, esp. pp. 101–08. 94 Kermode’s study of merchants in medieval Yorkshire suggested that merchants endowed anniversary masses for either one, three or seven years, leaving a lump sum of money from which the yearly salary of the priest was to be paid: J Kermode, Medieval merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the later middle ages (Cambridge, 1998), p. 131. The elaborate rituals associated with an anniversary mass are fully discussed by C. Burgess, ‘A service for the dead: the form and function of the anniversary in late medieval Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 105 (1987), pp. 183–211, esp. 183–86. 95 For example scribes drafting deeds for merchants sat in the Briefkapelle in the Marienkirche in Lübeck; see A. d’Haenens, Europe of the North Sea and the Baltic – the world of the Hanse (Antwerp, 1984), pp. 292–93.

96 Bradwardine drew on Thomas Aquinas’ earlier model; see M. Carruthers and J.M. Ziolkowalski (eds), The medieval craft of memory (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 205–214. 97 V. Debiais, Messages de Pierre – la lecture des inscriptions dans la communication médiévale (XIIIe–XIVe siècle) (Turnhout, 2009), pp. 299–325. 98 For a study of the development of these medieval senses and the relationship between image, location and speech – as the forerunner of religious drama – see T.K. Lerud, Memory, images, and the English Corpus Christi drama (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 41–50. See also E. Valdez del Alamo and C.S. Prendergast, ‘Introduction’, to Idem (eds), Memory and the medieval tomb (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 1–16, at p. 4; A.M. Morganstern, Gothic tombs of kinship in France, the Low Countries and England (Pennsylvania, 2000), passim. For an interesting case study of the various intellectual levels at which a late medieval funeral monument might be exemplified see K. Brush, ‘The tomb slab of archbishop Siegfried III von Eppstein in Mainz cathedral – a thirteenth-century image and its interpretative contexts’, in W. Maier et al (eds), Grabmäler – tendenzen der forschung an beispielen aus mittelalter und früher neuzeit (Berlin, 2000), pp. 33–50.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston an armigerous status as they could get.99 Two marks of Adam de Franton (1325) are blazoned on shields between the canopy pinnacles on his slab at Wyberton (Lincolnshire), probably the earliest example of a merchant’s mark on a monument in England (Fig. 5.13). Their mnemonic repetition as a kind of proto-heraldic symbolism was also no doubt found on the slabs at Boston.100 Looking at the collection of slabs an observer would note and perhaps recognise particular marks on various slabs. Going from slab to slab however, there was an expanding matrix of these symbols – like seeing goods stacked up on the Boston dockside, each lot stamped with a person’s mark – recalling the identity of the merchants en masse as a separate trading community in the parish. An earlier example of this idea of corporate memoria was established around the late eleventh / early twelfth centuries in the use of symbols, such as swords, shears, chalices and books, incorporated into cross-slabs. Aleksandra McClain has identified a large corpus of such cross-slabs in northern England concluding that in addition to the commonality of the cross, secondary emblems heavily outnumbered inscriptions on the slabs, such that ‘symbols proclaiming membership of group identities could be more important than discrete identifiers such as inscribed names’.101 And at another level, the faces of the merchants and their wives were frequently portrayed in a separate medium, beautifully incised in a crystalline white marble or in gilded brass.102 Each idealised face was one small but hugely important image in the overall experience of the gravestone,103 and in conjunction with the inscription

and mark could blend together into a personal recollection of the man in life. Multiply that experience by a factor of ten, at least, to reflect the slabs’ collective locus, and proceeding from slab to slab, as with the symbolism of the marks, the visual repetition of the merchants’ features is blurred into an idealised assemblage of the figures – each slab loses its particular identity but gains by merging into a corporate mercantile body. The association between the incised figures of the dead merchants and their real life counterparts was not established on facial likeness therefore. Rather it relied on a set of assumptions founded on the wholesale symbolism of their figures – the richness of their dress, the quality and elaboration of the slabs themselves (‘bien graver et souffisement’), the repetitive, formulaic inscriptions, and the funeral rituals focussed on the monuments themselves – that what represented one merchant was in fact symbolic of a much wider corporation.104 All this would not have been possible if the slabs were spread around diffusely, but at Boston their loci geographically established communal mortuary areas in the new church. Traditionally, the most favoured location for burial was the chancel, but this was reserved for the clergy, so the laity generally opted for burial in front of subsidiary altars in side chapels and transepts, and before pillars where the images of saints and their lights were mounted.105 While some of the slabs may well have been placed in the side aisles, in guild chapels and in front of images or side altars, others were undoubtedly laid down in areas where many people walked over them. These were not locations of high sanctity therefore, but, crucially, they were areas of elevated public awareness. Liturgical processions assembled and passed over the graves time and again, both at the west end of the nave and moving eastwards towards the rood, so there is an ambiguity to the connotations of burial here. These loci are relatively humble, expressive of a personal humility, with the gravestones frequently walked upon by the feet of the faithful. Yet the public awareness of the slabs could not have been greater, noting the names of the deceased and the richness of their monuments. The slabs were located as much for popular representation of the

99 See Saul, ‘Wool merchants’, p. 335. Aping heraldry, the marks were sometimes used on a shield on seals; see J. Alexander and P. Binski (eds), Age of chivalry – art in Plantagenet England 1200–1400 (London, 1987), pp. 276–77. 100 The Hanseatic league internationalised and accelerated the use of marks, making their presence at Boston almost a certainty. See F.A. Girling, English merchants’ marks – a field survey of marks made by merchants and tradesmen in England between 1400 and 1700 (Oxford, 1964), p. 9; and E. New, ‘Representation and identity in medieval London: the evidence of seals’, in M. Davies and A. Prescott (eds), London and the kingdom – essays in honour of Caroline M. Barron, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 16 (Donington, 2008), pp. 246–58, esp, pp. 255–57. As Dr New says, a merchant’s mark was ‘both a means of identifying an individual’s product and a means of expressing solidarity with one’s incorporated fellows’ (at p. 256). 101 A. McClain, ‘Cross slab monuments in the late middle ages: patronage, production, and locality in northern England’, in Badham and Oosterwijk (eds), Monumental industry, pp. 37–65, quote at p. 64. 102 Greenhill recorded eighteen of the effigial Tournai slabs at Boston as having inlaid heads / faces; Idem, Lincoln, pp. 21–28. 103 The depiction of the head held enormous medieval significance founded on a traditional belief that the soul resided in the head, and that it was therefore from the head that the soul departed at death. The better preserved figures on Tournai marble slabs and brasses are engraved with faces which still appear to be alive, the beauty and serenity of their features reflecting the peaceful passage of their soul and aspiring to a blessed eternity. The polychromic effects induced with various inlays were visually a measure of this medieval belief, encapsulated in the experience of the total monument itself. Were there also perhaps influences from the receptacles in which saints’ relics were housed, such as the elaborate polychromy of metalwork, specifically differentiating the face, employed on reliquary busts? See C.T. Little, ‘Introduction – facing the middle ages’, in Idem (ed.), Set in stone: the face in medieval sculpture (New Haven and London, 2006), pp. xiv– xvi; for reliquary busts see B.D. Boehm, ‘Reliquary busts: “A certain aristocratic eminence”’, in Little (ed.), Set in stone, pp. 168–90; and also S. Boldrick, ‘Introduction’, in S. Boldrick et al (eds), Wonder – painted

sculpture from medieval England (Leeds, 2002), pp. 13–29, esp. pp. 14– 19. For a discussion of the facial features of effigial tomb monuments and the possible origins of the way in which facial features were shown as ‘alive’, see E. Panofsky, Tomb sculpture: its changing aspects from ancient Egypt to Bernini (London, 1992 edn), pp. 53–58. 104 Stephen Perkinson has identified this model as typical of the system of representation of royal patrons in early-fourteenth-century France. The idea of regality could be portrayed by many semiotic systems which subfused the personal identity of the king himself into an impersonal one of authority; see S. Perkinson, The likeness of the king – a prehistory of portraiture in late medieval France (Chicago and London, 2009), pp. 85–134. See also Idem, ‘Sculpting identity’, in Little (ed.), Set in stone, pp. 120–23; and for an account of the significance of funerary portraiture in early-fourteenth-century Europe, see E. Mâle, Religious art in France – the late middle ages: a study of medieval iconography and its sources (Guildford, 1986 edn), pp. 382–85. 105 For a geography of late medieval burial see Daniell, Death and burial, pp. 87–115; N. Rogers, ‘Hic iacet: the location of monuments in late medieval parish churches’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The parish in late medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 14 (Donington, 2006), pp. 261–81; and Saul, English church monuments, pp. 114–19. For memorialisation in front of images see R. Marks, Image and devotion in late medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 172–185.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments class of people commemorated as for piety;106 a permanent mercantile ‘archive’ was, hence, in the process of being created. A mutually dependent and reciprocally beneficial alliance was continuously evolving between the individual and the collective: the latter crystallised the mnemonic prayerful needs of the former.107 One caveat is, of course, how the progress of the building work might have limited the choice of burial location for the merchants. If this mass of gravestones dominated the pavement of the incomplete church, could they equally have been taken as representing tombs to the founder(s)? A single slab is hardly noteworthy in itself, though a cluster of them is much more so; and there were no other status-conscious funeral monuments in the church to act as competition.108 Developing the thesis that these bodies of slabs acted as collective memoria, isolating and identifying the merchants as a select clan, so the memoria can be extended both backwards and forwards in time. Back in the tenth century certain trading élites have been identified as elements of Hiberno-Norse communities in Lincolnshire who, unlike groups of their predecessors, commissioned sculpted graveyard monuments in the newly founded proto-parish churches. These represented a politico-cultural shift which was most likely the reason for their commission in the first place. Specifically, they incorporated Hiberno-Norse art styles, this choice on a monument indicating either an incomer / trader with a Viking background, or a desire by an indigenous individual’s family to assimilate this pre-dominant Anglo-Scandinavian culture. The large numbers of slabs laid down at a small number of locations popular with traders contrasts with the general pattern across the county, where otherwise these monuments were used to mark the sporadic burials of an élite minority. In the churchyards where large numbers of tradesmen were buried they presumably requested graveslabs to identify themselves as part of a mercantile élite, demonstrating considerable socio-economic and political advantages over the rest of the town’s population.109 They were under pressure to consolidate new markets in the rapid

urban growth of the time, so gravestones were a novel and permanent means of manifesting their individual and corporate identity at this formative time. In the fourteenth century it was the physical body of the ecclesia, St Botolph’s church, which was at a formative point. So what better than to use gravestones – again with imported iconography – to unite the corporate richness of a powerful merchant body associated with the new church?110 And going on from this period, was this means of self-expression one precursor in the foundation in 1335 of the Corpus Christi guild in Boston? The guild celebrated the eucharist, the most powerful symbol of Christian culture, and this was reflected in the privileged élite who formed its core membership. It was not the earliest guild to be founded in the church, but in the fourteenth century it was highly prestigious with the inaugural list of thirty brethren including a large number of well-connected Boston merchants.111 The guild’s chapel was built onto the south aisle of St Botolph’s church by the porch, and, finished probably by 1354,112 it would have provided a tangible but still private focus for the Guild’s religious and commemorative activities.113 In addition, events such as feast days were occasions for the articulation and display of identity in rituals and processions through the town. The raison d’être of a Corpus Christi procession was the display of the eucharist, but these events also encouraged and made quite public the social stratification of those taking part. The centre of a procession was the most ornate, having at its heart the eucharist itself, so people of rank congregated in close proximity around it, fulfilled by their consequent spiritual enhancement. Merchants would have mixed here with other élite members of the guild to enjoy a mutual fellowship, but may still have been identifiable as rich civilians, lacking the lineage heraldry doubtless prominently displayed by gentry guildsmen.114 By this time had the Flemish gravestones served their purpose therefore? Were they slowly becoming superseded by social developments in the ways by which a confluence between individual and corporate memorialisation could be managed? Certainly the number of slabs laid down in Boston fell off very sharply post1350, but presumably this was due at first to the impact of the Black Death in the acutely affected urban areas of both Boston and Flanders.115 And as Stephen Rigby has

106

See T. Van Bueren, ‘Care for the Here and the Hereafter: a multitude of possibilities’, in Idem (ed.), Care for the here and the hereafter: memoria, art and ritual in the middle ages (Turnhout, 2005), pp. 13–34, esp. pp. 18–29. For earlier examples of high status graves located in church thoroughfares see C. Sapin, ‘Architecture and funerary space in the early middle ages’, in C.E. Karkov et al (eds), Spaces of the living and the dead: an archaeological dialogue – American early medieval studies 3 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 41–60. 107 See A.-M. Sankovitch, ‘Intercession, commemoration and display: the parish church as archive in late medieval Paris’, in A. Chastel and J. Guillaume (eds), Demeures d’éternité – églises et chapelles funéraires aux XVe et XVIe siècles (Paris, 2005), pp. 247–67. 108 A. Martindale, ‘Patrons and minders: the intrusion of the secular into sacred space in the late middle ages’, in D. Wood (ed.), The church and the arts (Oxford, 1992), pp. 143–78, esp. pp. 146–49. 109 D. Stocker, ‘Monuments and merchants: irregularities in the distribution of stone sculpture in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in the tenth century’, in D. Hadley and J. Richards (eds), Cultures in contact: Scandinavian settlement in England in the ninth and tenth centuries (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 179–212; see also D. Stocker and P. Everson, ‘Five towns funerals: recording diversity in Danelaw stone sculpture’, in J.A. Graham-Campbell et al (eds), Vikings and the Danelaw: select papers of the thirteenth Viking congress (Oxford, 2001), pp. 223–43. I am very grateful to Prof. Nigel Saul for alerting me to David Stocker’s work in this field.

110 Such a visible focus in the grand new building must have been useful in impressing merchants visiting from abroad, who were in Boston to attend one of the international fairs; see G. Platts, Land and people in medieval Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire 4 (Lincoln, 1985), pp. 135–51 111 See a full account of the Boston guilds by Sally Badham in chapter 4. The social and religious mechanisms behind Corpus Christi guilds are discussed by M. Rubin, Corpus Christi – the eucharist in late medieval culture (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 232–43. 112 H. Fenning, ‘The guild of Corpus Christi’, in W.M. Ormrod (ed.), The guilds in Boston (Boston, 1993), pp. 35–44, at pp. 42–43; N. Pevsner and J. Harris, The buildings of England – Lincolnshire (2nd edition revised by N. Antram, London, 1989), pp. 158–59. 113 Thompson, Boston, p. 116. The elaborate slab to a priest (c.1370?) (Greenhill 21) now in the south aisle, may be to one of the guild chaplains. Its fractured state perhaps reflects its translocation at the demolition of their chapel in the early seventeenth century. 114 Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 243–71. 115 The effects of the Black Death on London and Tournai are contrasted by Cohn using the yearly numbers of wills proved in each location. He

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston described in chapter 2 there was also a decline in the intensity of contact between Boston and Flanders as the wool export and cloth trades fell away, and a reduction in the importance and internationalism of St Botolph’s fair.116 The last few slabs probably date from around 1360–70. 117 What happened then? If there were an abrupt cessation in importing slabs, as seems to be the case, why was this? There was no subsequent rise in the number of monuments commissioned from English workshops in the late-fourteenth century which might have substituted for Flemish slabs, despite an increase in productivity of the York and London brass and slab workshops which by now were flourishing.118 Had the complete reliance previously of Boston merchants ordering slabs from Flanders eclipsed monumental connections with London and York, or blinkered their requirements as to what they wanted, so that when contact with Flanders fell away there was no satisfactory alternative source? After all, the York and London workshops were seemingly technically unable to satisfy the desire for the specific type of large effigial compositions which were previously de rigueur.119 Was there also a change in monumental

iconography? The characteristic black marble slabs recalled a period of healthy trade with Flanders. Once this was in decline, perhaps the idea of collective memory signified by the Flemish-made slabs and reconstructing the past, was no longer considered appropriate – but neither was a substitute format embraced.120 All these are potential pragmatic and aesthetic reasons for the apparent monumental lacuna in the last quarter of the fourteenth century at Boston. Yet a further factor also has to be considered, which is that the strategy of remembrance was evolving, integral to the rapid expansion of the guild structure in Boston at that time.121 Sally Badham’s analysis of bequests to the Boston guilds identified in wills (Fig. 4.4) suggests that eight of the ten guilds most popular with testators were established by 1389, so their infrastructure was well established both before and during the monumental lacuna. The guilds’ chief aim was the maintenance of prayer for the living and deceased guild members, supplementing the potential intercessory role of the mendicant friars for a relatively small financial outlay. Additionally, in the case of the guilds, the prayers emanated from fellow guild members – friends and colleagues – worshipping in their own personalised chapel or at a favoured altar, so they were, hence, retaining an intensely personal basis. The expectation was also that this commemoration would continue in perpetuity for as long as the life of the guild. Was the preference for verbal ritual commemoration within the privacy of an enclosed guild / chantry chapel also a result of the need to reinforce social boundaries – as in the guilds’ processions – consequent on their disruption following the Black Death?122 Why bother with a monument at all therefore when intercessory prayer could be guaranteed, and the purchase of an artefact for the guild chapel might act as a perpetual token of memorialisation in place of a gravestone?123

concludes that while London recovered fairly quickly post-1350, despite a second bout in 1361, Tournai was more consistently affected and the population did not rebound as speedily. Despite this, it did not appear to dent the productivity of the tomb workshops. See S.K. Cohn jr, The Black Death transformed – disease and culture in early renaissance Europe (London, 2003 edn), pp. 196–209. 116 S.H. Rigby, ‘“Sore decay” and “Fair dwellings”: Boston and urban decline in the later middle ages’, Midland History 10 (1985), pp. 47–61, esp. p. 49. 117 The situation is complicated by the fact that so many apparently Tournai slabs have either been turned over or planed down to obliterate any engraving, and been reused to accommodate brasses; for example Appendix 1, Brass 7 is c.1425 but is neatly set into a Tournai slab, perhaps less than 100 years after the slab was first laid down. 118 For the York workshops see S. Badham, ‘Monumental brasses: the development of the York workshops in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, in C. Wilson (ed.), Medieval art and architecture in the East Riding of Yorkshire, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions for the year 1983 (1989), pp. 165–85, passim; and for London see Badham and Norris, Early incised slabs and brasses from the London marblers, passim; and S. Badham, ‘Monumental brasses and the Black Death – a reappraisal’, AJ 80 (2000), pp. 207–47. This question is also discussed by N. Saul, ‘The medieval monuments of St Mary’s, Barton on Humber’, in Davis and Prescott (eds), London and the kingdom, pp. 265–71. He suggests (pp. 268–69) that the abrupt stop in Barton merchants ordering Tournai slabs was due to two reasons: firstly, the gradual fall in the production of such things at Tournai; and secondly that a rise in brass production from the London and York workshops compensated for the shortfall. However, Van Belle’s analysis of the output of the Bruges workshops demonstrates a rise in fifteenth-century productivity compared to the previous century (Van Belle, Grafmonumenten, p. 457); and Vermeersch traces a continuing steady output in late-fourteenth-century Bruges brasses and slabs (Vermeersch, Grafmonumenten, passim). In contrast to Barton, where a York-manufactured brass was commissioned c.1390, there is nothing comparable in Boston: the monumental lacuna is quite distinctive. It was, however, to the London and Boston brass workshops that Boston merchants turned in the fifteenth century, rather than Flanders, with the increasing dominance of London in the English trading economy, and ships from Boston trading as much with London and Calais as with Flanders. 119 Although the London workshops demonstrated a remarkable resilience in continuing to produce high quality brasses during the decades of the 1350s and 1360s, their overall size was generally restricted to demi-figures and inscriptions. If, therefore, large effigial monuments were desired by the commemorated, such as the Robert Braunche (1364) at King’s Lynn (Norfolk), then Flanders was the only place to go. Despite the lack of such commissions in Boston the

Flanders workshops maintained their supply of brasses to other locations in England. See Badham ‘Black Death’, pp. 234–45; and P. Lindley, ‘The Black Death and English art’, in M. Ormrod and P. Lindley (eds), The Black Death in England (Stamford, 1996), pp. 124– 46, esp. pp. 138–39; and this volume chapter 10 note 6. 120 For an example of this in stained glass see D. King, ‘Henry Scrope’s window at Heydour, Lincolnshire’, in C.M. Barron and C. Burgess (eds), Memory and commemoration in medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20 (Donington, 2010), pp. 75–86, esp. pp. 85–86. 121 N. Camfield, ‘The guilds of St Botolph’s’, in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, pp. 25–34, esp. p. 26; and D.M. Owen, Church and society in medieval Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire 5 (Lincoln, 1971), pp. 127–31. 122 P. Binski, Medieval death – ritual and representation (London, 1996), p. 121. 123 In both Flanders and London the burial preferences expressed in wills altered as a result of the Black Death. Prior to 1350 there were few precise instructions written down, the testator relying on verbal wishes and his immediate family to carry them out. Post-1350 the location of burial sites and other specifications were increasingly written down for posterity, so that anyone might carry out the will’s terms, the testator fearing both the ignominy of an anonymous burial and the absence of a family to assist. The numbers of funeral monuments increased concomitantly in both Flanders and London in the second half of the fourteenth century in response to this trend. See S.K. Cohn jr, ‘The place of the dead in Flanders and Tuscany: towards a comparative history of the Black Death’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds), The place of the dead – death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 17–43. Although very few Boston wills survive from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there is no reason to doubt that the testators also followed this tendency

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments There is ample evidence that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries guild members were commemorated by monuments as well as by routine ceremonies of remembrance co-ordinated by the guild, and via the donation of artefacts for the use of the guild and its chaplains.124 The strategy of commemoration was frequently expansive, and cumulatively so, such that obit rolls became longer (even though some obits may have been for only a limited period) and guild chapel fittings ever more numerous, with the inherent risk that an individualism of memorialisation might get absorbed into an increasingly impersonal set of mechanisms. A monument, hence, was an undisputed marker to distinguish an individual and personalise their commemoration. Contrast this impression to one when the guilds were young and comprised relatively few members, obit rolls were short and personalised fittings sparse, and so there may well have been less pressure for individual remembrance using a monument. In the late fourteenth century an individual would still have impinged weightily upon the mechanisms of guild memoria, not just because there were fewer of them but also because surviving guild members would still retain personal memories of that individual as a trade colleague, Boston resident and guild member. Would a monument have been as vital then as a century later, when an individuality was likely subsumed by a much larger organisation?

physically portrayed and orally commemorated? One notable feature is that the majority of slabs – fourteen examples – show a double effigial format which is uncommon in England at this time.125 There are several potential reasons for this disparity. Until the late twelfth – early thirteenth century the established church was reluctant to sanction double graves, from which developed the policy of erecting an individual monument to each member of a couple, each one acting as a marker for their graves. However, a relaxation of this tradition slowly permitted the introduction of double graves and, hence, double effigial monuments as the grave covers.126 Simultaneously the church also started to promote the image of a married couple to encourage the sanctity of marriage in an attempt to reduce the overwhelming dominance of lineage appreciation.127 Bauch cites a number of examples of double tombs in western Europe from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, much earlier than in England therefore, not just to married couples but also to father-son and uncle-nephew pairings, emphasising close family relationships as much as marriage.128 Artistic influences must also have helped in developing this new monumental format, which Saul identifies as ‘a process of experiment and invention’.129 Sculpted figures on portals,130 those ranged up in stained glass, as well as the regiments of ‘weepers’ and accessory figures incorporated into the sides and superstructure of large free-standing tombs, must all have served as potential artistic models.131 The sculptural differences

5.5 Models of memorialisation Returning to the slabs at the heyday of their use in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, one can sense a definite mutuality between this type of monument and the fairly closed community which used it: the one fed off the other. What may have started with one or two merchants looking to Flanders for a funeral monument in the early fourteenth century turned into a trend. But did monuments perpetuate the fashion? We have already seen how Boston merchants preferred this monumental type as an expression of superior status, mercantile connoisseurship, cosmopolitanism and opulence, and ultimately as a means of corporate commemoration by this affluent élite. So as the physical scale and appearance of the slabs sold themselves to the merchants, the slabs indeed initially created and then perpetuated the fashion. Beyond these qualities however, did they manifest any changes over the norm in response to client demand, expressing how these individuals wished to be both

125 See K. Bauch, Das mittelalterliche grabbild – figürliche grabmäler des 11. bis 15. Jahrhunderts in Europa (Berlin and New York, 1976), p. 115; H.A. Tummers, Early secular effigies in England – the thirteenth century (Leiden, 1980), pp. 22–23; Saul, English church monuments, pp. 145–47; and Kockerols, ‘Two incised slabs’, p. 312. Between them they identify only a handful of true double effigial monuments from the late thirteenth / early fourteenth centuries, as opposed to monuments comprising two single related figures placed side by side. 126 Bauch, Das mittelalterlichte grabbild, pp. 106, 325. 127 Kockerols, Monuments funéraires - Liege, p. 42. 128 Bauch, Das mittelalterlichte grabbild, chapter 9 ‘Doppelgrabsteine’, pp. 106–19; and see also H. Körner, Grabmonumente des mittelalters (Darmstadt, 1997), pp. 137–46. The appearance of children on funeral monuments, to create joint or family tombs in the late thirteenth century is discussed by S. Oosterwijk, ‘“A swethe feire graue”: the appearance of children on medieval tomb monuments’, in R. Eales and S. Tyas (eds), Family and dynasty in late medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 9 (Donington, 2003), pp. 172–92, esp. pp. 176–79. 129 Saul, English church monuments, p. 145. 130 The development of recumbent ‘gisants’ from the erect, free-standing figures on the entrance portals of churches entailed a conceptual shift from ‘sculpture monumentale’ to ‘sculpture funéraire’, but was essentially a straightforward artistic process. It would have needed little further adaptation to arrange two or more recumbent figures side by side as a joint tomb for a husband and wife. See A. Erlande-Brandenburg, Le roi est mort – étude sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des rois de France jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle (Geneva, 1975), pp. 109–17; P. Williamson, Gothic sculpture 1140–1300 (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 52–54; and J. Wirth, L’image à l’époque gothique (1140–1280) (Paris, 2008), pp. 311–16. 131 Close analogies between slabs and glass in Rouen (Seine-Maritime, France), for instance, have been identified by J. Bugslag, ‘Early fourteenth-century canopywork in Rouen stained glass’, in J. Stratford (ed.), Medieval art, architecture and archaeology at Rouen, British Archaeological Association conference transactions for the year 1986 (1993), pp. 73–80, at p.77; and see the ranges of figures under the canopy work in that glass illustrated by M. Callias Bey et al (eds), Les vitraux de Haute-Normandie – corpus vitrearum France, recensement 6 (Paris, 2001), pp. 371–72. The relationship of the figures with the architectural surrounds, as well as some of the details of the drawings

in providing detailed directions for their burial and subsequent commemoration. The peculiarity is that these wishes were not obviously transmuted into gravestones or free-standing tombs, but remembrance seemingly fulfilled by another means. For example, the will of William de Thym(b)leby was written in 1385 (Lincolnshire Archives, DIOC/REG/12 fol. 315r.), in which he desired to be buried in the chancel of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Boston (i.e. the chapel of the guild of the B.V.M. at the east end of the south aisle), and he gave 40s. to both this guild and the Corpus Christi guild – yet no funeral monument to him remains. Of course, a monument might have been lost; but equally, was the security of burial in the guild chapel and his bequests to two corporate bodies, sufficient memorialisation in itself, and there never was a true funeral monument? 124 S. Badham, ‘The Robertsons remembered: two generations of Calais staplers at Algarkirk, Lincolnshire’, in Barron and Burgess (eds), Memory and commemoration, pp. 202-17.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston inherent in linking two recumbent figures in full relief were far less of a problem in two dimensional incised slabs, the workshops of which quickly adapted their designs to incorporate two, three or even more figures.132 But there was another powerful stimulus in encouraging the commission of double figure slabs, which was the foundation of a chantry with which the gravestone was intimately associated. A chantry priest, directed by deeds drawn up by the founder, would have invoked intercessory prayer not just for the chantry founder but for anyone else specified, especially his wife, let alone his parents and grandparents who may anyway have been served by their own chantries. So, if both members of a couple were to be prayed for, as the raison d’être of the chantry’s foundation, it was only logical, once artistic difficulties had been resolved, that both individuals should be portrayed on the memorial slab associated with it. Even though the inscriptions on early double slabs are split into two parts, one part relating to the man and the other to his wife, both inscriptions would have been read on the same occasions, one after the other. 133 Picture a priest, then, and a group of mourners clustered at the east end of the nave in front of the rood, or at the altar within a guild-chapel, acting out a mortuary mass for a deceased individual, close by a tombslab engraved with the figures of, and commemorating this same individual and their spouse.134 Yet in all these

instances the surviving spouse is present in life during the proceedings as well as having his or her persona engraved on the slab. The imagery hence blurs a commemorative distinction between the living and the dead, especially as the ‘dead’ figures were shown ‘alive’ on the slab, which echoed in the chantry prayers recited near the stone. What better resonance of life and death could there be, acknowledging the passage of an individual from one state to another?135 It is clear that at the start of the fourteenth century these double commemorations were more commonly established in Flanders than in England; and it is equally clear that the double effigial slab was a monumental form brought over to Boston by its residents as pioneers. Those who commissioned them specifically wanted that type of double slab to work with this new intercessory practice, as they were presumably already familiar with both from their experiences abroad. But why should it have been a more prevalent institution in Flanders than in England? The answer to that is in two parts. First of all, the towns of Flanders early on were heavily colonised by the mendicant orders, which concentrated heavily on the evangelisation of the common people and frequently preached in the vernacular to enable better popular understanding.136 The mendicants were favourably placed therefore to act as intermediaries in the performance of intercessory prayer, and the orders also maintained an international outlook which specifically brokered contact with foreign, non-resident wealthy merchants.137 Their burial and commemoration in the mendicants’ churches contrasted ceremonially with such rites in a parish church, because monastic churches were plain structures resembling the arena of a preaching hall, and were generally accessible to the public, including women. The international merchants and their wives, together with the citizens of Bruges, all mingled together in these hallchurches giving rise to an intense cultural interaction. Visually both man and wife were exposed to the rich pictorial decoration which embellished these architecturally unremarkable structures, as well as spending time contemplating the gravestones of the dead,

themselves, are very close to those found on early-fourteenth-century incised slabs in northern France. As regards the potential design influence of ‘pleurants’ on tombs, see Morganstgern, Gothic tombs of kinship, passim; and for their sculptural context see P. Quarré, Les pleurants des tombeaux des ducs de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1971), pp. 13– 17; and X. Dectot, Pierres tombales médiévales – sculptures de l’audelà (Brouwer, 2006), pp. 76–80. For a development of this otherwise standardised format early on, suggesting the raising up and doubling up of effigies within a commemorative context, see, for instance, the tomb of Cardinal Hugues Aycelin (1297), in the Église des Jacobins (now the chapel of the monastère de la visitation), Clermont-Ferrand (Puy-deDôme, France), which was strongly influenced by early Italian designs: see J. Gardner, The tomb and the tiara – curial tomb sculpture in Rome and Avignon in the late middle ages (Oxford, 1992), pp. 90–91, fig. 75. 132 There are several late-thirteenth-century French examples recorded by Roger de Gaignières, for which see J. Adhémar and G. Dordor, ‘Les tombeaux de la collection Gaignières: dessins d’archéologie du XVIIe siècle’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6ème période 84 (1974), pp. 1–192; 88 (1976), pp. 1–88; 90 (1977), pp. 1–76, nos. 233, 274, 279, 280, 301, 370, 383, 389, 419, 459, 460, 495 and 496. One of these (no. 460, to Pierre de Condoire [1296] and his wife, once in the abbaye d’Ourscamp (Oise), is a typical Mosan product showing the double effigial format was as understood as much there as in the Tournai / Paris / Rouen schools of slab engraving, and tending to confirm Kockerols’ suggestion that the formative influences on early Mosan incised slab production were from Tournai: Kockerols, ‘Two incised slabs’, p. 314. See Kockerols, Monuments funéraires – Liege, p.115, for another Mosan example, and Van Belle, Grafmonumenten, pp. 307–11, for Bruges examples. Van Belle’s analysis of effigial slab typology in westFlanders (p. 457) records three out of eleven (27%) thirteenth-century slabs and eighteen out of fifty-three (34%) fourteenth-century slabs as double effigial compositions, making it the most popular design format of all in the fourteenth century. 133 As at Wyberton (Lincolnshire) to Adam de Franton (d. 1325) and his wife Sibile; Greenhill, Lincoln, pp. 134–35, pl. 20. This custom was no doubt a remnant of the tradition of single burial / single tomb commemoration, with each effigy surrounded by its own inscription. 134 It is generally accepted that such masses were performed by priests at altars rather than necessarily associated directly with the gravestone, although there must have been exceptions, for which see Châteauroux (Indre, France), Bibliothèque Municipale MS 2 fol. 395v: [www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht2/IRHT_054257-

p.jpg accessed 12 June 2010] which illumination of c.1414 shows a gowned and cowled religious figure with a book, squatting on top of a gravestone which bears a marginal inscription in Gothic minuscules. I am grateful to Sally Badham for discussing this topic with me. 135 Saul, English church monuments, p. 147. I am very grateful to Prof. Saul for further discussions on this topic. 136 D. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (Harlow, 1992), pp. 140–43. This rapid takeover was particularly the case in Flanders as its poor land was rapidly and heavily urbanised with consequent wealth accumulation. By 1340, for instance, Bruges had over 280 friars among 46000 inhabitants, the largest number in any Flemish town. They were split between four monasteries but enjoyed an independence completely outside the parochial system. See N. Geirnaert, ‘Bruges and European intellectual life in the middle ages’, in V. Vermeersch (ed.), Bruges and Europe (Antwerp, 1992), pp. 225–51, esp. pp. 228–29. 137 Most of the merchants who died in the city were buried in the Carmelite or Augustinian monasteries, where gravestones were no doubt laid down (though none survive) and chantries founded which provided useful financial employment for the surfeit of friars. Hanseatic merchants helped found the Carmelite monastery in Bruges in 1263–65, as although they also made charitable donations to the parish churches, they were never afforded citizens’ rights, and as such, affiliation to a parish church was never strong enough to favour burial and commemoration there. See W. Paravicini, ‘Bruges and Germany’, in Vermeersch (ed.), Bruges and Europe, pp. 98–127, esp. pp. 110–11.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments and witnessing at first hand the funeral and anniversary masses recited by friars sponsored in chantry foundations.138 This emancipation allowed women to participate in funeral masses just as much as men therefore, so it is only to be expected that ultimately they should want to be commemorated in effigy by their husbands. Secondly, in England, the early provision of chantries and accompanying physical artefacts such as tombs and chapels, was principally an activity accessible to only rich ecclesiastics, lords and the knightly classes.139 Their patronage of such means of commemoration was almost, perhaps, a by-product of a chivalric code. Those below the status of armigerous gentry, whether or not they were the wealthy bourgeois of a prosperous trading town, were frequently excluded from participating in chivalric activity: tournaments, for example, were exclusive events arranged purely for the entertainment of the Court.140 Yet in the towns of Flanders and northern France the rural nobility and the urban patriciate joined forces in an active promotion of the town’s fairs and tournaments. In Tournai, for example, the bourgeois inhabitants of the town considered themselves to be of a knightly status, and assumed the trappings of a noble life-style such as bearing arms.141 Their tendency to commission gravestones was twinned with that of establishing or augmenting chantries, following the custom of the rural noble families, so the mechanics of such things in Flanders, being far less selective than in England, happened more quickly and earlier. In considering the popularity of the double tombs, women also seem to have enjoyed a considerable amount of independence in urban Flemish society.142 A brief gender analysis of Tournai wills listed by de la Grange reveals that of the thirty-six wills proved between 1250– 1300, sixteen were by men, sixteen by women, and four were ‘conjoined’ wills.143 If nothing else it proved that urban women enjoyed greater freedom in making bequests and in the ordering of the disposition of their property than noble women (or at least married noble women), although of course they might have considered themselves of equal social status. The conjoined wills are particularly appropriate in considering a double commemoration. For instance in 1295 Ernous Catine and his wife Biertris de Granméz gave 300 livres Tournois ‘por estorer me capelerie u on cante cescun jor messe à tousjours en le glise S. Katerine à Tournay, à l’autel devant l’ymage S. Katerine’ (to ?restore / establish my chapel where a mass is sung each day in perpetuity in the

church of St Katherine in Tournai, at the altar in front of the image of St Katherine).144 This can only have referred to a joint mass, for both of their souls; and their tomb, if it bore effigies, must have depicted husband and wife. Additional testamentary evidence supports the early popularity of double figure tombslabs in Tournai. Of the twenty-five pre-1350 wills which request a ‘lame’, or simple tomb slab, twelve specify a slab to have more than one person on it.145 And one will in particular made by Lotars de le Verghe in 1346, was testament to his wish to be buried avoec men père, desous se lame, en l’attre S. Quentin de Tournay devant le cappielle S. Jehan. Et voel que Jehane, me femme, le face de nouviel regraver et pourtraire de ij ymagènes, l’une pour mi et l’autre pout li (with my father, under his gravestone, in front of the chapel of St John in the ? of St Quentin of Tournai. And I wish that Jehane, my wife, will re-engrave anew its face [of the tombstone] and portray two images, the one for me and the other for her).146 A need for this type of double commemoration was deeply rooted, with an enhancement of family feeling and the desire not to be alone in death.147 All these ideas, based firstly on the mendicants’ international facility in providing intercession, and secondly in the opening up of their churches to allow a rich mix of the local society to witness funeral and anniversary masses said to those commemorated by tombstones close by, fuelled the rise in double chantry provisions and double effigial monument format in late thirteenth-century Flanders. Introduced into Boston by traders familiar with these Flemish practices therefore, one consequence was that in addition to the slabs in their home town there is an increase in the incidence of double effigial monuments in many other port towns of the east coast of England. Those monuments depicting civilian merchants and their wives (being conversant with Flanders) appeared much more rapidly than monuments with effigies commissioned by the landed gentry which were steeped in traditional, knightly, lineage-based iconography, and generally erected in the rural parish churches at the heart of their manorial lands.148 144

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 28–74. Ibid., pp. 66–67. 147 Mâle, Religious art in France – the late middle ages, pp. 372–76. A poignant illumination c.1370 showing a single coffin containing a man and his wife is found in a Roman missal, now Avignon (Vaucluse, France) Bibliothèque Municipale MS 136 fol. 344: [www.culture.gouv.fr/Wave/savimage/enlumine/irht2/IRHT_055515p.jpg accessed 12 June 2010], suggesting that by this time not just double graves but double coffins were socially and religiously acceptable. 148 Email from Prof. Nigel Saul (15/04/2009). In Scotland, apart from the double effigial Flemish incised slabs and brasses which were imported directly, there is the early double tomb of Walter Stewart, earl of Monteith (1294) and his wife at Inchmahome priory (Perth). With sculptural influence from France, this unique composition seems to have been produced locally, following a concept imported direct from the continent; see V. Glenn, ‘Court patronage in Scotland 1240–1340’, in L. Keen (ed.), Medieval art and architecture in the diocese of Glasgow, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 23 (1998), 145 146

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W. Braunfels, Monasteries of western Europe – the architecture of the orders (London, 1972), pp. 129–30, 140–42; and J.P. Greene, Medieval monasteries (Leicester, 1992), pp. 170–71. 139 See Owen, Church and society in medieval Lincolnshire, pp. 92–101. 140 P. Coss, The knight in medieval England 1000–1400 (Stroud, 1993), pp. 72–99; and for a discussion of the urban patriciate see N. Coldstream, The Decorated style – architecture and ornament 1240– 1360 (London, 1994), pp. 158–61. 141 C. Barron, ‘Chivalry, pageantry and merchant culture in medieval London’, in Coss and Keen (eds), Heraldry, pageantry and social display, pp. 210–41, esp. pp. 219–21. 142 W. Simons, Cities of ladies: Beguine communities in the medieval Low Countries 1200–1565 (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 7–12. 143 de la Grange, ‘Choix de testaments Tournaisiens’, pp. 28–36.

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Incised slab commissions in fourteenth–century Boston Newcastle looked to continental models in producing slabs bearing ‘floating busts’: the head and neck of a man (and wife) was inlaid in brass but without any visible incised lines or other material indicating the rest of the figure.150 The colour contrast of these monuments was as enhanced as that of the Tournai slabs, as the base slab chosen by these northern engravers was usually of the dark or black marbles indigenous to the region, rather than the London standard of Purbeck marble.151 Of course these busts also reflected the established practice of representing demi-figures in the head of a cross or above its upper finial, whether in two or three dimensions, and a potential combination of brass and / or stone.152 But the lack of such features imparts an enhanced visual ‘presence’ to the bust(s), so that when arranged beside the two shields, as at Goldsborough (Yorkshire) (Fig. 5.14) the head takes on a quasi-heraldic symbolism – that the face of the deceased was as distinctive of their persona as their heraldry, and viceversa.153 Did the York workshop’s patrons see the Tournai slabs and want something similar, struck by the facial highlighting? Or did the York artists view the Tournai slabs independently and devise a design which would have provided a cheap and effective addition to the range they were already able to offer?154 5.6 Conclusion Paradoxically, in the space of under a century, we have travelled full circle in the mechanisms of commemoration. At the end of the thirteenth century commemoration of the Boston bourgeois would have been via corporate means as a traditionally based collective response, such as the guild of the Blessed

Fig. 5.14 North country dark limestone slab with indents for brasses, lady Eve de Goldesburgh, mid-fourteenth century; Goldsborough (Yorkshire); scale drawing. On a narrower scale however, there were other consequences of the importation of these Tournai slabs, notably in the influence of English brass and slab manufacture. For example, a consistent feature of Flemish slabs was their incorporation of white stone and / or brass inlays for specific features: faces, hands, chalices, vestment orphreys, saints’ figures and inscriptions could all be afforded an emphatic colour and material contrast designed to attract attention.149 It can be no coincidence that some products of provincial workshops also started to use this technique. Badham suggests that the engravers of brasses in York and

150 Badham, Brasses from the north-east, p.2. See also Blair, ‘English monumental brasses’, pp. 159–60; Badham, ‘Monumental brasses: the development of the York workshops’, pp. 167–71; Gittos and Gittos, ‘A survey of East Riding sepulchral monuments’, pp. 99–101. 151 S. Badham and G. Blacker, Northern Rock: the use of Egglestone marble for monuments in medieval England British Archaeological Reports, British Series 480 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 14–15. A Purbeck slab on the floor of the south choir aisle of Salisbury cathedral (Wiltshire) has inlays remaining, uniquely(?) outlining in a white mastic the head and two separate hands, supporting and blessing a chalice. Probably this commemorated one of the cathedral canons and dates from the latefourteenth / early-fifteenth century, but both the technique and the design suggest a continental influence on this otherwise presumed London product. This highly selective use of inlays contrasts to the ways in which polychromy was more frequently used to a much greater degree on medieval monuments; see Badham, ‘A new feire peynted stone’, pp. 20–52. I am grateful to Sally Badham, Jon Bayliss and Tim Sutton for information on the Salisbury slab. 152 See C. Boutell, Christian monuments in England and Wales (London, 1854), pp. 117ff. for many illustrations of these; Norris, Memorials, I, pp. 22–23. 153 For Goldsborough see P. Whittemore, ‘The slab to Dame Eve de Goldesburgh’, MBSB 107 (January 2008), p. 129; and S. Badham, ‘The slab to Dame Eve de Goldesburgh’, MBSB 108 (May 2008), pp. 172– 73. 154 To account for a further number of York – Flanders analogies later into the fourteenth century, see Badham, ‘Monumental brasses: the development of the York workshops’, pp. 172–73. In addition to the examples she discusses there is also a striking resemblance between the indent of the double effigial brass at Seamer (Yorkshire) [illustrated by Badham, ibid., p. 171 fig. 8] and the Flemish brasses with indents of double cut out effigial brasses, now at Ipswich and Dundrennan [illustrated by Van Belle, Grafmonumenten, p. 310].

pp. 111–21 at p. 117, and pl. 32. It is tempting to suggest that this enhanced social status of urban women carried through into the composition of the prestigious Corpus Christi guild: in the years between 1335 and 1400 there were almost as many women admitted as priests. See Fenning, ‘Corpus Christi’, pp. 35–44. 149 Visually of course this worked very well indeed with dark, homogenous marbles, but it was also practised by the Île-de-France, Châlons and Dijon engravers who frequently incorporated pieces of white marble(?) for faces inlaid into their characteristic slabs of creamywhite calcaire. For instance on the mid-fourteenth-century slab at Pontl’Évêque (Oise, France), of a lady under a large canopy and accessory architectural composition, her head and headdress are beautifully incised on a white inlay; further examples can be found in L.-T. Corde, Les pierres tombales du département de l’Eure (Évreux, 1868), passim; Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 2, pls. 58a, 59b, 61a, 62b; and C. Prost, Visages d’éternité – pierres gravées du moyen age (Bienne, 1980), pp. 66–67.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Virgin Mary, founded in 1260.155 The parish church of St John was a relatively small, low-status structure; the chapel of St Botolph’s by the town’s bridge was probably not that much more select; and the mendicant friars were relatively newly established in the town. In the earlyfourteenth century a combination of personal and urbanised wealth, and the social cosmopolitanism resulting from prosperous international trade, led to the grand rebuilding of the church of St Botolph on an enormous, lavishly funded scale. So how better now than to establish a mercantile identity quite early on in the building project that they were funding, and physically marking out areas in the church with groups of gravestones, whether or not in guild chapels, that acted as a corporate foci for intercessory prayer. These areas would have been purposefully conspicuous, and as, chronologically, some of the slabs were most likely laid down prior to the foundation of all but one of the religious guilds, let alone the construction and fitting out of the guild chapels, so their corporate identity was cemented into the church fabric early on independent of the guilds. Moreover, the intercessory prayer encouraged by these gravestones was not just for deceased merchants but for their wives as well, depicted for the first time on tombstones by the sides of their husbands. Going on, it is tempting to suggest that the intercessory beliefs and rituals of this social élite, represented initially by ‘ownership’ of particular spaces in the church, metamorphosed into the foundation of the prestigious and wealthy Corpus Christi guild – perhaps the first of several more? This and other guilds were to prove extremely successful in their social and economic roles – as much in life as in death – such that the very purpose of funeral monuments, the routes of ordering of which had probably been dimmed by the Black Death, was substituted in the third quarter of the fourteenth century by the efficient functioning and perceived perpetuity of the guild societies. Were the Tournai slabs also now perceived as dated – reminders of the past glories of an ancien régime which was no longer as vibrant as it was, and with nothing to commission as substitutes? The resulting monumental lacuna was broken in 1398 by the laying down of the brass to Walter Pescod and his wife. This complex, expensive brass was presumably a personal choice, the ‘London B’ workshop design of which was influenced, as Jessica Freeman suggests in chapter 8, perhaps by the lost brass of Thomas of Woodstock (1397) in Westminster abbey. On the other hand, there is a particular dominance of (originally) the two principal figures, a man and wife in civilian dress framed by the ranges of saints in the large and complicated architectural construction surrounding them. Yet this contrast of plain, simply delineated figures set within such an impressive composition – isn’t this also suggestive of a pseudo-Flemish design influence? Whatever the case, put down on the floor of the chapel of the guild of St Peter and St Paul, this brass beautifully harmonised the functions of a monument in a

location where it was intimate with the liturgical processions and ceremonies of the guild. Instead of one – the guild, or the other – the monument, there was now the first evidence in Boston of a true mutuality between the two. The Fens school of brass and slab engraving which flourished in Boston thereafter in the early fifteenth century was to take forward and develop this synthesis even more. Better still, merchants of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw fit to update their forbears’ corporate presence by intermingling their own monuments among the original Tournai slabs: the message of corporate memoria, as a dynamic archive, lived on. Acknowledgements I am indebted to many individuals with whom I have discussed stone identification and who have also suggested numerous references, particularly Sally Badham, Hadrien Kockerols and Ronald Van Belle; equally Professor Nigel Saul, Drs Clive Burgess, Rachel Canty and David Griffith, and Christian Steer, have all provided much food for thought about the concept of ‘memoria’; and I am grateful to Kevin Booth of English Heritage for his efforts in retrieving information on the Barton-upon-Humber slab fragments, now (2010) in storage in York.

155 B. Brammer, ‘The guild of the blessed Virgin Mary’, in Ormrod (ed.), Guilds in Boston, pp. 45–54.

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Chapter 6 ‘From remembrance almost out araced’: the brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston by Sally Badham 6.1 Introduction and methodology St Botolph’s church is exceptional for a town church in its retention of large numbers of medieval floor monuments dating from the early fourteenth century to the Reformation. In addition to the twenty-two Flemish incised slabs already discussed by Paul Cockerham in chapter 5, nearly one hundred complete or fragmentary slabs which formerly held brass inlay remain. Most of these were minor brasses comprising an inscription, a few being accompanied by quatrefoils or an heraldic achievement. There are also some slabs where only rivets betray that they formerly had brass inlay. It is impossible to say who is commemorated by these lost minor brasses – indeed, dating them is extremely difficult.Yet, even when we exclude these minor brasses from analysis, there remain thirty-three complete or fragmentary major brasses or indents with effigial representation.1 These are catalogued in Appendix 1, along with seven unusual noneffigial compositions. A further six lost brasses are known from antiquaries’ notes. Most, but not all, of these forty-six brasses are discussed below. Not a single medieval brass in the church retains its inscription. Hitherto, only two of those commemorated by the brasses have been identified, namely Walter Pescod, merchant of Boston (d. 1398), and John Strensall, Rector of Boston (d. 1408). Yet, as shown in this study, the identities of quite a few more individuals commemorated by the brasses or indents can be established from antiquarian church notes compiled in the second quarter of the seventeenth century by Gervase Holles (1607–1675). 2 His information appears to have been based on notes compiled by an as yet unidentified antiquary, formerly thought to be Francis Thynne (c.1545–1608), who visited the area between 1603 and 1605. 3 The Boston section of Holles’ MS. is one of several additions in a different hand, possibly, but not certainly Thynne’s. These antiquaries were primarily interested in inscriptions and heraldry, and thus did not describe the monuments other than by general phrases such as ‘tumulus marmoreus aerifixus’ (a marble monument fixed with brass) or ‘tumulus marmori in 1

Brief details are given in J. Wheeldon, The monumental brasses in Saint Botolph’s church, Boston, History of Boston Series 9 (Boston, 1973), although some slabs have since been destroyed. 2 BL, Harley MS. 6829, fols 203–06. Holles’ notes were published as R.E.G. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by Gervase Holles A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (Lincoln, 1911). For Holles, see P.R. Seddon, ‘Holles, Gervase (1607–1675)’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13552, accessed 9 April 2010]. For the disassociation of Thynne with this manuscript, see A.V.B. Norman, ‘The effigy of a knight at Halton Holgate, Lincolnshire’, Church Monuments Society Newsletter 4.2 (1989), pp. 18–19, and P. Hebgin-Barnes, The medieval stained glass of the county of Lincolnshire (Oxford, 1996), p. xxxiv. 3 BL, Add. MS. 36295. I am grateful to Julian Luxford for his observations on the authorship of the notes.

Terra’ (a monument of marble on the floor). Despite this limitation, the notes can nonetheless be used to link specific brasses and indents found in the church today with inscriptions recorded in these notes. The present distribution of floor monuments is, with some exceptions specifically noted below, broadly that recorded in the seventeenth century. As explained in chapter 7, when the church floor was lifted and relaid in the mid-nineteenth century, the advice of George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), that monuments should be retained in their original locations, was followed. Holles recorded seventeen pre-Reformation monuments while walking round the church in a systematic manner, beginning in the chancel and then progressing to the main body of the church, starting with the south aisle. In some cases the antiquaries specified the position of individual monuments, including post-Reformation brasses, which survive in situ. Several of the other medieval brasses and indents can be identified by their distinctive composition, for example the indent of a civilian and four wives, which can only commemorate John Robinson, merchant of the Staple of Calais (d. 1525), whose inscription names his four wives. By using these firmly attributed monuments as fixed points in the perambulation, more brasses and indents can be identified with specific monuments recorded by Holles: logically, the inscriptions given by the antiquaries before and after the securely attributed monuments are almost certain to have been those on adjoining floor monuments. A degree of caution must be exercised in the use of the antiquarian notes to identify who is commemorated by individual brasses and incised slabs, as not all the monuments that survive are in their original positions. Brasses known to have been originally located in the (later demolished) chapel of the Corpus Christi Guild were at some stage removed to the west end of the nave near the font, probably even before the visit of the unknown Antiquary. Moreover, the brasses commemorating Walter Pescod and John Strensall, which are the most complete of those remaining in the church, are known to have been moved in the nineteenth century to positions of honour on either side of the high altar, where they are also fortunately protected from wear. Others may have been moved without any record of the fact. The attributions suggested by the coincident topography of the brasses and indents, and their mention in the antiquarian notes, are in some cases supported by two further types of evidence. First, the outlines and hence workshop style of the indents can be used to date individual monuments, acting as a check on the identification. Secondly, the wills listed in Appendix 3 sometimes include requests for burial in a specified location. For example, William Rede, merchant of the Staple of Calais (d. 1509), requested burial ‘in the parishe 100

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 6.1 Diagram showing testamentary dispositions for burial and commemoration. church of Boston before seynt Xpofer’. Again, John Cowell (d. 1504), a fisherman of Boston, requested: My body to be buried if it please god within the parishe church of Boston on the North side of the church under the stone before Saint Kateryn’s awter ther my ij uncylls lyeth buried Sir Lawrence and Sir Thomas Cowell if it may be.4 Such will evidence can sometimes help to establish those commemorated by a monument. Sadly Cowell did not specify whether the ‘stone’ was an incised slab, a brass or possibly just a plain slab, and nothing attributable to him or William Rede survives today or is recorded. Nonetheless, four other testators have indents remaining in St Botolph’s church and in some cases their wills specify the part of the church in which they were buried. 6.2 Commemorative choices and scale of losses Derrick Chivers and Paul Cockerham have chronicled in chapter 7 the losses of brasses and indents potentially from the medieval period to the present day. Many floor monuments were undoubtedly discarded both before and after the unknown Antiquary recorded the examples surviving during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, as evidence from wills helps to demonstrate, but the most likely scenario is that the greatest loss of the brass inlays occurred as a result of neglect and gradual losses over a prolonged period. To compensate for this destruction it is possible that some floor monuments may remain undetected under the nineteenth-century wooden platform pewing in the nave. Even if a number of slabs 4 Nothing is known of Lawrence and Thomas Cowell, but they may have been guild chaplains.

are obscured there, however, it is unlikely that they would outnumber those lost. A sample of 147 Boston wills dated between 1445 and 1545 throws interesting light on intentions for burial and commemoration (see diagram in Fig. 6.1). Only nine testators make no disposition as to the place of their burial. In some cases, this may be because they had already made provision in their lifetime; for instance, Eleanor Robinson (d. 1528), the widow of John Robinson, did not specify where she was to be buried since she would undoubtedly have expected to lie with her husband in the chapel of the Corpus Christi guild under the brass commissioned for him, the indent of which survives. A further eight request, with ostentatious indifference, to be buried ‘where God pleases’ or some similar formulation. Eight more individuals wished to be buried outside Boston, including four in London and one in Calais. Seventeen (12% of the sample) opted for burial in one of the four friary churches in Boston and one for burial in St. John’s church. Of the testators who chose burial in the mendicant houses whose wills record their occupation or status, two were country esquires, while one spinster and three widows may also have come from gentry families. Although many Boston residents chose to support the friaries in life and also remembered them in their wills, there appears to have been something of a social distinction between those who were buried there and those who opted for the parish church and churchyard. The numbers involved in Boston are small, but if this is indeed a valid distinction it would appear to mirror the depth of involvement of different social classes with the Boston guilds. As noted in chapter 4, with some notable exceptions in the case of guilds of national importance, the gentry were not great supporters of the guilds. This reflects patterns found elsewhere. In Yorkshire noblemen and gentry whose wills were proved locally comprised only 3% of testators to guilds in the

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston

Fig. 6.2 Diagram showing specific preferences for intra-mural burial in St Botolph’s. county.5 Analysis by Rosenthal indicates that the gentry’s interest in guilds was not centred on their funerary practices or intercessory strategies; instead they founded chantries and commissioned obits from religious houses, especially the mendicant orders.6 Merchants and tradesmen showed a more consistent commitment to St Botolph’s and its guilds. This did not mean that they shunned the friaries; virtually all wills in the sample include bequests to all four orders of friars in Boston. A few merchants showed more than a token commitment to the mendicant houses. The will of William Cawod of Boston (d. 1478), merchant of the staple, wanted burial in the London Austin friars, his wife already buried in the Boston Austin friars. As well as making bequests to all the mendicant houses, he also remembered St Botolph’s church, all the guilds there, St John’s church in Boston and wanted two priests to sing masses in Cambridge and ‘St Petir’s quere of the parrish church of Boston’ for ten years. Moreover, the will of Elizabeth Rede (d. 1486), widow of a Boston merchant, requested burial in St Botolph’s by her husband and made many bequests to the guilds there; but nonetheless wanted all four orders of friars to come to the house that her body lay in and sing masses there; and thirty years direction for a dirige to be said for her soul by the friar preachers. Perhaps they wanted to spread their bets. As will be shown below, the status of those commemorated by brasses in St Botolph’s reflects this social divide, and highlights the fact that St Botolph’s was the religious establishment with which the better-off townspeople, who did not aspire to gentry status, mainly chose to be associated. The remaining 104 testators (71% of the total sample) who chose burial at St Botolph’s were almost exclusively

better-off townspeople who can be categorised as merchants, professionals and tradesmen. Thirty-eight of them chose churchyard burial, while sixty-six requested intra-mural burial. Most of this last group would probably have had some form of monument, whether as individuals or as part of a family gravemarker. Forty-one of those opting for intra-mural burial (61% of this category) gave further details as to where in St Botolph’s they should be buried (see diagram in Fig. 6.2). Burial in guild chapels or before guild altars was specified by 37%, those dedicated to Corpus Christi, the Blessed Virgin Mary or SS Peter and Paul being popular, but other locations were also mentioned. Most interesting of all for this study are the nineteen testators buried in the church who requested a specific burial location only by reference to the grave of a family member, in some cases under a pre-existing floor monument and providing additional details as to location. Following the custom of widows who had not remarried Elizabeth Rede (d. 1486), widow of John Rede, merchant of Boston, requested in her will that ‘my body to be buried in the parish kyrke of Boston under the same stone where my husband ligges’. Whether references to a ‘stone’ mean a brass or an incised slab is uncertain, especially as only a few can be linked with a monument still surviving. Most remaining (non-Flemish) floor monuments are brasses, but there are also three cross slab grave covers and some minor incised floor slabs. One of likely early-fifteenth-century date with an inscription in textualis (blackletter) lettering to Isberne de ?Ornsgale (perhaps a corruption of Horncastle) can still be seen in the north aisle, and Greenhill recorded another fragment of an inscription slab in the tower; it was last noted in 1983 by John Coales and is no longer extant.7

5

D.J.F. Crouch, Piety, fraternity and power. Religious gilds in late medieval Yorkshire 1389–1547 (York, 2000), p. 89. 6 J.T. Rosenthal, The purchase of paradise. The social function of aristocratic benevolence 1307–1485 (London, 1972), pp. 81–128.

7 F.A. Greenhill, Monumental incised slabs in the county of Lincoln (Newport Pagnell, 1986), p. 28.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 6.3 Diagram showing status of those commemorated by surviving or documented brasses in St Botolph’s church. Only one reference to the commissioning of a monument has been found in the will of a Boston testator and this is equally disappointing in the extent of the information provided. In 1538, the widow Elizabeth Paxford requested burial in the parish church of Boston ‘nyghe unto my husbonde Thomas Paxforde’ and willed that her executors ‘ley a newe stone on my grave wt a scripture’. As with Cowell’s floor stone, this could have been either a brass or an incised slab, but the inscription at least, if not the entire monument, had gone by the time the unknown Antiquary visited Boston a century later. The only medieval brasses or indents remaining in the choir are those to Walter Pescod and John Strensall, but others would certainly have been laid there. Holles’s notes suggests that monuments to three priests, William Bonde (d. 1485), William Smithe (d. 1505) and William Newton (d. 1545), may have been placed in the chancel, but whether these were moved elsewhere in the nineteenth-century restoration of this part of the church or were thrown out altogether is uncertain. In addition, a number of testators requested burial in the chancel of St Botolph’s, including Johannes Stoylt, merchant of the Staple of Calais (d. 1501), John Hoode, merchant of the Staple of Calais (d. 1519), and John Buttre alias Belynga (d. 1523). Nothing is known of monuments to any of them, but that in the early sixteenth century the chancel was open to burial of mere merchants probably indicates the pervasive influence of the wealthier merchants in the affairs of St Botolph’s church. This pattern of unrecorded losses applied to other parts of the church also. Some monuments seen by the antiquaries have undoubtedly been destroyed since their visits. Their notes record several inscriptions, mostly to people of a status likely to have been commemorated by a major brass, for which no matching monument can now be identified. Some parts of the church, such as the east end of the nave, have modern paving which has caused the removal or loss of monumental slabs. The area of the

former Guild Chapel of SS Peter and Paul is one such. No brasses remain there, apart from an indent to a priest, although it is recorded as being the former location of Walter Pescod’s. 8 In addition, there are a number of burials in the chapel indicated by wills including those of Barnard Symond (d. 1506) and Robert Carre (d. 1518) – both merchants of the Staple of Calais – and the draper Jeffrey Wayse (d. 1539). These men might not all have been commemorated by brasses, but it is unlikely that none of them were. Yet any monuments to them have disappeared without trace. The tower floor is also now largely devoid even of fragments of medieval monuments (apart from a few inscription indents close to the walls), although three significant indents were recorded there in the early 1970s by Jeremy Wheeldon, and in 1983 the author saw in addition five complete or fragmentary slabs which once bore minor brasses. 9 Yet those who chose to be buried here included, as well as the famous composer John Taverner and his wife Rose, a sadler named John Osbarn (d. 1447), and William Osse (d. 1513), a merchant of Lynn who lived in Boston and who asked ‘to be buried in the Churche of Boston in the belfry under the stone with my wyff and Matilda and Agnes Tymer lies under [sic]’. It is worth noting that the tower was not generally a position much requested for burials in England, although the location could have been described differently as porch or at the west door.10 Certainly monuments were not commonly placed in towers, although John Cobham (d. 1399) asked to be buried in the tower at Hever (Kent) 8

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155. Wheeldon, Brasses in St Botolph’s church, p. 6 and plan on pp. 8–9. 10 N. Rogers, ‘Hic iacet ...: the location of monuments in late medieval parish churches’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The Parish in late medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 14 (Donington, 2006), pp. 261–281. I am also grateful to Nigel Saul and Nicholas Rogers for their observations on this point. 9

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston and is commemorated by a brass there. 11 Perhaps the comparative popularity of the ‘Stump’ indicates that the tower with its lantern was a source of local pride. The people commemorated by brasses in St Botolph’s came from the same sectors of society as those who supported the religious guilds associated with the church, which have been discussed in Chapter 4. Indeed, some of those individuals who are recorded as being major supporters of individual guilds are known to have been buried in one of the chapels associated with these guilds and to have been commemorated by a brass. To illustrate these points, the discussion of individual brasses and indents below will be divided into three main sections reflecting the social groups represented: the gentry and professions; parochial and chantry priests; and merchants; for an analysis see Fig. 6.3. 6.3 Brasses to the gentry and professions One of the factors that reinforces the thesis set out above – viz. that there was a social divide amongst Boston residents as to whether they were buried in the parish church or one of the friary churches – is the almost complete absence of monuments in St Botolph’s to men shown wearing armour. The lost glazing of St Botolph’s as described by Holles records the arms of many great Lincolnshire families, including Ufford, Willoughby, Roos, Tattersall and Cromwell. 12 Members of these families may have funded painted glass in St Botolph’s because several high-status guilds were established there, but they were not generally buried in St Botolph’s. There were some exceptions. For instance in 1394 Mary, Lady Roos, left 100s for ‘a marble stone for my tomb’ (probably at that price an incised slab or a relatively small brass) at Rievaulx (Yorkshire) ‘like the one that lies over Lady Margaret de Orby, my grandmother in the church of St Botolph [Boston]’. 13 Sadly, Margaret Orby’s monument does not survive; it may even have been lost before the unknown Antiquary made his visit to the church. No other monuments to the nobility are known to have been set up in St Botolph’s church. Only one surviving indent commemorates a man whose executors considered depiction in armour appropriate to his social status. In the central aisle of the nave is a slab with two small figures turning towards each other: a man in armour, who is standing on a large grassy mound, and a lady (Fig. 6.4). A foot inscription, groups of sons and daughters, and two shields complete the composition, although a slice from the right-hand side of the slab has been lost. A Fens 2 product of c.1510, it is a surprisingly modest monument for a couple of armigerous status.14 There is only one surviving military brass from this workshop with which to make a

comparison – that at Stallingborough (Lincolnshire) to Sir William Ayscugh (d. 1509) and his wife (Fig. 6.5) – and there is another military indent of this style in Peterborough cathedral (Fig. 6.6). Unfortunately, none of the inscriptions from lost brasses in St Botolph’s church recorded by the unknown Antiquary are of an appropriate date and social class to provide a match for this indent.

Fig. 6.4 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to unknown armoured figure and lady c.1510, in nave of St Botolph’s.

11

N. Saul, Death, art and memory in medieval England. The Cobham family and their monuments 1300–1500 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 212–14. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155. 13 J. Ward (ed.), Women of the English nobility and gentry 1066–1500 (Manchester, 1995), p. 223. 14 The Fens 2 workshop appears to have operated in Boston from c.1490 to c.1525, producing small, ill-proportioned and badly drawn brasses; a total of eight extant brasses and twelve indents have so far been recorded; see S. Badham, Brasses from the north east (London, 1979), pp. 21–22. 12

Fig. 6.5 Fens 2 brass to Sir William Ayscugh (d. 1509) and his wife; Stallingborough (Lincolnshire).

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Although there are no more known military brasses and indents in St Botolph’s, one other effigial indent appears to commemorate a member of the professions who was of gentry status. The floor of the area where St Mary’s chapel was located retains a number of indents, dominated by a magnificent early Norwich 1 composition of the mid-fifteenth century featuring a civilian and wife under a double canopy (Fig. 6.7).15

the inscription (Fig. 6.9). 16 It is the only known illustration of the civilian figure and unquestionably links it with the inscription recorded by the earlier antiquaries. There is very little variation in the transcripts, although Stukeley oddly gives the name as Henry Flete, not Thomas. Thomas Flete’s inscription did not give his occupation, but it is likely that he came from Fleet, near Holbeach, in the Fens, where men of his name can be traced back to the early fourteenth century. From the mid 1430s Flete was very active in the affairs of Boston and the surrounding district.17 Flete can be shown to have had

Fig. 6.6 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to unknown armoured figure and lady c.1520-30, in porch of Peterborough cathedral. It might be assumed that this commemorates another merchant and that the shield may have featured a merchant’s mark but, as there is a crest above, armorial bearings are much more likely. It evidently commemorates a couple of wealth and status. No brass inlay which fits this indent appears to survive in the church, but a nineteenth-century rubbing in the collections of the Society of Antiquaries of London shows a lady’s figure which does so perfectly (Fig. 6.8). There can be no doubt that it came from this indent, but who does it commemorate? An analysis of the route taken by the unknown Antiquary when recording in St Botolph’s strongly suggested that this brass was to Thomas Flete (d. 1450) and his wife Alice. This was confirmed by a drawing made by William Stukeley, dated 1719, of the then surviving parts of the brass inlay, viz. the two figures and 15 R. Greenwood and M. Norris, The brasses of Norfolk churches (Norwich, 1976), pp. 14–36.

Fig. 6.7 Indent of lost Norwich 1 brass to Thomas Flete (d. 1450), in south aisle of St Botolph’s. A rubbing of the figure of his wife Alice is placed in the indent. 16 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Top. Gen. e 61, fol. 51v. I am grateful to Dr David Griffith for drawing this manuscript to my attention. 17 In 1435 and 1437 he was collector of the customs on wool, woolfells and hides, and subsidies in Boston and the surrounding district: CFR, 1430–37, pp. 247, 248 and 329. In 1436 he received a commission to investigate goods imported or exported without custom payments: CPR, 1436–41, p. 85. In 1437 and 1440 he was mayor of the Staple at Boston: TNA: C241/228/100; C241/230/44. In 1438 he was collector of customs and subsidies in Boston and district: CFR, 1437–45, pp. 12, 16 and 20. In the following year he was one of the two collectors of the subsidy on wool in Boston: CFR, 1437–45, pp. 12, 16 and 20. In 1441 he witnessed a quitclaim by John Moller of Burgh in the Marsh (Lincolnshire) and in 1442 he was witness to another deed: CPR, 1441–46, pp. 52 and 473. From 1442 to 1446 he was justice of the peace in Lincolnshire: CPR, 1441–46, p. 473. In 1446 he served as collector of customs and subsidies in Boston: CFR, 1445–52, pp. 51, 53 and 55.

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston

Fig. 6.8 Rubbing of the lost figure of Alice Flete. Rubbing: collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

connections with both the local gentry and the mercantile elite. In 1431 he was a beneficiary of the will of John Palmer, merchant of Boston.18 Two years later William Derby, esquire, lord of Bennington, named him as one of his feoffees in a settlement of the manor of Bennington and other lands nearby. 19 While these connections may suggest that Flete came from merchant stock, his involvement in county affairs, particularly as a J.P, suggests that he had successfully risen up the social scale. More specifically, his gift to the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary of ‘a booke of lawe, called Codex’ suggests that he may have been a lawyer, specifically an attorney.20 It is not inconsistent with this that he is not shown in legal dress; for example at Pulborough (Sussex), Edmund Mill (d. 1452), a lawyer and a J.P., is shown in civilian dress on his brass. 21 That Flete had attained minor gentry status would fit with his brass showing him as armigerous, although the civilian dress perhaps indicates that he was not sufficiently confident of his status to be shown in armour and chose instead attire which reflected his origins. In 1434 Flete had been admitted to the Corpus Christi guild,22 but it is clear that his main involvement was with the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1448 he and others had licence to grant to the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary messuages and lands in Boston and Skirbeck, which largesse doubtless explains how he secured burial in such a privileged position in the guild chapel.23 Finally, the unknown Antiquary recorded a monument to William Reade (d. 1400), ‘generosus’ (gentleman) of Boston. He appears to have come from a family of merchants but did not himself engage in trade.24 This is more likely to have been a brass than an incised slab, but nothing that survives appears to be of the appropriate date. 6.4 Brasses to parochial and chantry priests St Botolph’s has four surviving indents to priests, but the only monument which retains any inlay is the brass from the Fens 1 workshop commemorating John Strensall (d. 1408). Only the figure remains, although the slab shows that it originally had a canopy (Fig. 6.10). There is no record of the wording of the marginal inscription, but it has been traditionally associated with him. Moreover, stylistic analysis confirms a dating of the brass of c.1410 making Strensall the only likely candidate for it. It is currently in the chancel, where Kerrich saw it in the early nineteenth century, but was not found there by Holles or the unknown Antiquary of 1602–05, although they may 18

A.W. Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills (Lincoln 1888), p. 162. CClR, 1422–29, p. 294. P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), p. 144. 21 N. Saul, English church monuments in the middle ages - history and representation (Oxford, 2009), p.285. 22 Thompson, Boston, p. 118. 23 Thompson, Boston, p. 135. 24 S.H. Rigby (ed.), The overseas trade of Boston in the reign of Richard II, LRS 93 (Lincoln, 2005) has references to Reginald Reade importing cloth and fish (pp. 46, 57 and 59) and John importing fish (p. 58), but no reference to William. 19 20

Fig. 6.9 Drawing by William Stukeley of remains of brass to Thomas Flete (d. 1450), in south aisle of St Botolph’s, Boston. Copyright: Bodleian Library.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

have omitted it because the inscription was lost by their time.25 The antecedents of John Strensall (or variously Stransgill, Straneshale, Stansale, Stransall, Stranshall, Strensale or Strensallis) are unknown; he was illegitimate, but was presumably of gentle and influential descent given his excellent education and successful career.26 He was a magister by 136627 and was in 1377 granted licence to study at Oxford for three years.28 In April 1366 he was appointed to his first living as rector of Egremont (Cumberland), which he exchanged in June 1369, subsequently taking up a benefice in the gift of Lewes Priory (Sussex).29 In 1371 he received papal dispensation to hold three incompatible benefices and in the same year took up the living of rector of Mixbury (Oxfordshire).30 He was also granted a benefice in the gift of St Mary’s abbey, York, but relinquished it and instead was granted a canonry of Southwell (Nottinghamshire), with expectations of a prebend, subject to resigning Mixbury.31 In 1371 he was appointed rector of Boston, a living he held until his death in 1408.32 Strensall was assessed in the 1377 lay subsidy as a beneficed clerk, but he was clearly far superior in status to the average town priest. His appointments suggest that he was both an ecclesiastical civil servant and very prominent in Boston affairs, 33 as quite apart from his benefices, he held a number of important offices. In c.1364 he was appointed registrar of the papal collector in England, a position he still held in 1374.34 In 1386 and 1388 he was a controller of tonnage and poundage at Boston.35 This is rather unusual as most customs officials were merchants, although some royal clerks were also appointed. He may well have occupied a place in the local duchy of Lancaster administration and his appointment as a collector stemmed from this, but no records confirming this can be traced. Strensall was an associate of the élite group of merchants who were collectors of the great and petty custom at Boston, and he entered fully into the guild culture of Boston. He is shown on his brass in a cope, the orphreys of which have figures of eight saints: the Virgin and Child, John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, James, Andrew, Bartholomew and Jude, all of whom were saints to which Boston guilds were dedicated. 36 William Thymelby, sometime chamberlain of the guild of Corpus Christi and buried in the guild chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary, left

him a bequest in his will of 1385. 37 In 1392 he was amongst a group of men, including customs collectors Philip Gernon and John Belle, licensed to endow and further enrich the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary.38 In 1398 he and others held for the aldermen and the brethren and sisters of the guild 23s 4d for the rent of a messuage. 39 Strensall was a member of the guilds dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Corpus Christi and the Holy Trinity. The calendar of the Corpus Christi guild

25

BL, Add. MS. 6732, fol. 21r. In 1371, he was granted papal dispensation, on account of illegitimacy, to be promoted to all orders: CPapL,1362–1404, p. 163. 27 A.B. Emden, A biographical register of the university of Oxford to A.D. 1500, 3 vols (Oxford, 1957), 3, p. 1802. 28 LAO: DIOC/REG/11, fol. 147. 29 Emden, Biographical register, p. 1802. 30 Emden, Biographical register, p. 1802. 31 CPapL, 1362–1404, pp. 163 and 199. 32 LAO: DIOC/REG/11, fol. 147. 33 Thompson, Boston, p. 170. 34 CPapPet, 1342–1419, p. 536; CPapL, 1362–1404, pp. 163 and 199, CPR, 1370–74, p. 64. 35 Rigby, Overseas trade, p. 222. 36 These saints are also found on Pescod’s brass. 26

Fig. 6.10 Fens 1 brass to John Strensall (d. 1408), in sanctuary of St Botolph’s. records that the obit of John Strensall, formerly rector of Boston and brother of the fraternity, was celebrated and observed annually by the aldermen and brethren of the 37

Gibbons (ed.), Early Lincoln wills, p. 81. CPR, 1391–96, p. 192. 39 CIPM 3, p. 219 38

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston Trinity guild, viz. in the morning of 11 November in the choir of St Botolph’s church, or at the altar of the guild of the Holy Trinity there, with 20s of the goods of the said Holy Trinity, on that day every year, to be expended in the manner expressed in a tripartite indenture. In default of keeping the obit, a penalty of 40s was to be paid to the rector of the church.40

Barlings with his spiritual community. One indent remains by the north wall in the chapel area; it has a small and poorly proportioned composition featuring a figure under a canopy with a shield at its apex (Fig. 6.11). The shield could have borne a religious as opposed to an heraldic symbol. This is not an easy indent to date, but its inferior quality indicates that it could be a Fens 2 product dating from the end of the fifteenth century. Could this be Alan Lamkyn’s monument? It is certainly plausible, although far from certain.

Fig. 6.11 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass possibly to Alan Lamkyn (d. 1498), in north aisle of St Botolph’s. In addition to Strensall’s brass, there are three surviving indents to priests, although none can be identified with full confidence as corresponding to any of the clerical monuments described by Holles. In the guild chapel of SS Peter and Paul was recorded an inscription to Alan Lamkyn (d. 1498), canon of the Premonstratensian house at Barlings (Lincolnshire). 41 The Lamkyns were a local family: Alan’s father Robert was buried in St Botolph’s and his wife Jannett (d. 1509) chose to be buried with him, so bearing in mind the persistent desire of family members to be interred together, perhaps Alan Lamkyn chose burial at St Botolph’s to be with his parents, in preference to burial at 40

Thompson, Boston, p. 123 text and note 2, and p. 126. Perhaps the Trinity guild did not have a dedicated chapel at this date and maybe instead had an altar in the Corpus Christi chapel. 41 Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155.

Fig. 6.12 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to an unknown priest c.1500, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s. An indent at the west end of the central aisle of the nave comprises the figure of a priest with prayer scroll above his head and a foot inscription (Fig. 6.12). This is possibly Fens 2 work of c.1500. That it might commemorate William Smith (d. 1505), a canon of Lincoln and the first vicar of Boston after the appropriation of the rectory to the Knights of St John in 1480, whose monument was noted by the unknown Antiquary, is an attribution worth considering. Although the slab’s approximate date is coincident, the present location is not. Smith was vicar of Boston from 1492, but

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also an alderman of the Corpus Christi guild in 1503.42 Additionally, he was a member of the guilds of the Blessed Virgin Mary, SS Peter and Paul, St George, and the Holy Trinity.43 However, his prime allegiance was to the Corpus Christi guild. He left 13s 4d for an annual obit to be celebrated by the guild on 13 April, so it is logical to think he might have been interred there.44 The guild chapel was still extant when the unknown Antiquary made his notes, although he seemingly places Smith’s monument in the chancel rather than the chapel, making the attribution of this indent less certain – perhaps like Strensall he was ultimately buried in the chancel rather than the guild chapel, despite his obvious affiliations to the latter. This indent may have been moved from the chapel therefore, commemorating another, unknown ecclesiastic with firm guild affinities, because it is close by others known to have been laid down there originally and moved elsewhere later on. There is also an indent at the east end of the south aisle in the area of the chapel of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is York 2 work featuring a chalice and inscription of c.1475 (Fig. 6.13). It is possible, but perhaps unlikely, that this indent once commemorated William Bonde (d. 1485), who in 1477 was fellow of Queens’ college, Cambridge, and at his death rector of Stickney, just outside Boston. There are two problems with this attribution: first, the brass would have had to have been made in his lifetime, and secondly, the antiquaries seem to have seen his brass in the chancel. Finally, Holles noted a third monument also in the chancel to William Newton (d. 1545), rector of Leverton (Lincolnshire).45 It might have been moved elsewhere in the church, but no monumental evidence remains of this date.

Fig. 6.13 Indent of lost York 2 chalice brass possibly to William Bonde (d. 1485), in south aisle of St Botolph’s.

In summary, two existing clerical brasses can be attributed to named individuals with a fair degree of certainty (Strensall and Lamkyn), but two more are unidentified and another three are lost. Leaving aside Strensall’s brass, most of the remaining brasses to priests date to the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. At this time Boston had a large population of clerics, many of whom served the guilds. The Subsidy Certificate for 1526 for instance, reveals that as well as the vicar and his three curates, eighteen priests and eleven stipendiaries ministered in St Botolph’s, virtually all established and financed by earlier lay initiatives. 46 In these circumstances it is unsurprising that St Botolph’s had a significant number of clerical monuments. 6.5 Brasses to local merchants, tradesmen and other civilians The largest group of brasses and indents in St Botolph’s commemorate men shown in civilian dress who were members of the local merchant and trading community. There are seventeen complete slabs which fall into this category and five fragments. None of the latter can be linked with any named individual so they will be discussed only briefly here; however, a suggested identity can be provided for many of the complete compositions, even though most retain no inlay. The largest and most spectacular is the brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398), which is the subject of a dedicated study by Jessica Freeman in chapter 8. None of the other surviving brasses and indents could have matched this even when all the inlays were intact; nonetheless they are all of interest. Mounted murally in the blocked-up entrance to the former Corpus Christi guild chapel towards the west end of the south aisle is the remaining inlay of a bracket brass from the Fens 1 workshop, which operated c.1400–35 and produced incised slabs as well as brasses. It is a rectangular plate with the figures of a civilian and two wives under a small triple canopy which formed the head of the bracket (Figs. 4.12, 6.14). The indent for this brass lies in the floor a few feet away. It shows that the remainder of the composition comprised a foot inscription and two shields, which probably held merchant’s marks rather than arms, one on either side of the bracket stem. The inscription was recorded by the unknown Antiquary as commemorating Richard Frere (d. 1424) and his wives Alice and Johanna. The precise composition of this bracket brass is not paralleled on any other known Fens 1 brass, but in St Botolph there are two other slabs which evidently had figures engraved on rectangular plates which had outlines for the edges of a canopy like that on the Frere brass; one has the figure plate surviving, but it is worn completely smooth. Richard Frere appears to have been a merchant based in Boston and nearby Skirbeck, but very little else is known about him.47 This is not surprising, as references to men of his status rarely occur in the public records, as

42

Thompson, Boston, p. 170. Thompson, Boston, p. 125. 44 Thompson, Boston, p. 125. 45 Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 154. 43

46

C. Cross, ‘Communal piety in sixteenth century Boston’, LHA 25 (1990), pp. 33–38, at p. 33. 47 In 1396 he is recorded as trading in wool: CPR, 1391–96, p. 626.

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston will become apparent in the discussion of other Boston merchants commemorated by brasses, later in this section. Like many other merchants, Frere engaged fully in the local guild culture. He was co-founder of one of the minor guilds of Boston, the guild of St George. On 26 November 1399, he and William Halden, John Gibson, Stephen Baxter and John Skelton received licence to found the guild in St Botolph’s, Boston, to acquire lands and rents to the value of 20 marks yearly, and to grant them to the master or warden in mortmain.48 He also had a deep veneration for the Blessed Virgin Mary, as indicated by extracts of the transcribed inscription which read: Gildam dilexit quam munere saepe provexit [...] Audit quique pie Missam cum voce Mariae Alte cantatam per Gildae vota locatam. Papa dies donat centum veniaeque coronat Nonus ei vere Bonifacius, hunc reverere. (He loved the guild, which he often promoted with a donation […]Whoever hears Mass devoutly, with the antiphon of Mary sung well, as was established by a vote of the guild, may the Pope give him one hundred days of pardon; and may Boniface IX crown him, in truth, that he may worship.)49 It was exceptional to refer to a guild in a monumental inscription, although several cases are recorded of windows dedicated to the members of a particular guild, which presumably funded them.50 It is also unusual indeed for reference to an indulgence to appear on a brass of the mid-fifteenth century. Pardon inscriptions were common on brasses in the latethirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries, but not thereafter. One exception is incorporated into the cadaver brass at Ashby St Ledgers (Northamptonshire) to Sir William Catesby (d. 1479) and his two wives.51 Such inscriptions would have been particularly targeted by iconoclasts during the Reformation, although both the Boston and Ashby examples escaped removal or erasure. Frere’s indent lies too far west in the church to have been located in the guild chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was situated just to the east of the south porch. Perhaps he chose burial close to the altar of the guild of St George which he helped to found. However, Frere’s will does not survive, nor is there any documentary evidence yet discovered which records the 48

CPR, 1399–1401, p. 249. See Appendix 1.1 for a full transcript and translation. Examples in glass were to be found at Blyton, Coningsbury and Gosberton (Lincolnshire), Beeston-next-Mileham (Norfolk) and Tickhill (Yorkshire). An incised slab at Swineshead (Lincolnshire) reads: ‘Here lyeth Roger Berdne’ and Ann his w(ife be)ne(fac)tours to the gylde of our lady / … deceased / the yere of our (lorde) god a m ccccc xii on whose soules .. / .. dyng for the / …. forsaydgyld’. I am grateful to Dr David Griffith for these examples. 51 S. Badham and N. Saul, ‘The Catesbys’ taste in brasses’, in J. Bertram (ed.), The Catesby family and their brasses at Ashby St Ledgers (London, 2006), pp. 36–75, at p. 50. 49 50

location of this guild’s altar, so this suggestion can unfortunately not be corroborated.

Fig. 6.14 Indent of lost Fens 1 brass to Richard Frere (d. 1424) and his wives Alice and Johanna, in the south aisle of St Botolph’s. Four other brasses from the Fens 1 workshop are known to have been laid down in the church, two of them being of considerable interest. There is an indent at the west end adjoining – and partly covered by – the font, which still traps a small piece of latten (Fig. 6.15). The composition comprises a civilian and wife, their heads on cushions, under a heavy canopy with inhabited sideshafts. Some plates from the canopy survive, although not in situ; at the time of writing they were loose in the library above the church porch. The brass is Fens 1 work of c.1420, similar in composition to an indent at Louth (Lincolnshire) (Fig. 6.16). The unknown Antiquary recorded a brief extract of an inscription: ‘Thomas Gull obiit 7 die

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Decembris a(n)no D(omi)ni 1420’ before that of the brass to John Robinson and his four wives.52 The position of the indent under discussion very near to the Robinson indent, combined with the fact that Thomas Gull died at a time consistent with its stylistic dating, make it highly likely that this lost brass once commemorated him. Unfortunately, nothing about Gull has been discovered. The other Fens 1 indent, which formerly retained much of its brass inlay, was located at the east end of the nave until the early 1980s, when it was removed from the church and destroyed, as explained in chapter 7 (Fig. 6.17). It showed a civilian and wife under an elaborate and heavy canopy. There were weeper figures in the sideshafts, scrolls peppered the slab and there were shields on either side of the civilian figures. Some plates from the canopy remain loose in the church library; others were lost when the slab was removed, although rubbings of them are in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. The slab’s position suggests that it was to John Nutting (d. 1380), laid down on the death of his wife Agnes in 1420, and was duly recorded by the unknown Antiquary.53

As with the majority of merchants already discussed, very little can be traced about Nutting. On 3 February 1378, John Nutting the younger of Boston is one of two creditors owed a total of £80 by Thomas de Dinesby, knight, of Lincolnshire. 54 Nutting was admitted to the Corpus Christi guild in the late 1370s.55 He had an annual obit celebrated there on the first dominical day after the commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the month of September. 56 The ceremony was to be conducted without music and was set out in detail in the calendar listing the obits to be observed by the guild. The bellman was to announce the obit through the town on the previous Sunday. On the day of the obit itself the chaplains of the guild altogether, or two by two, repeated the offices for the dead in the principal chapel of the guild, with a Mass for Nutting on the dominical day following.

Fig. 6.16 Indent of lost Fens 1 brass to unknown civilian and lady, c.1420; Louth (Lincolnshire).

Fig. 6.15 Indent of lost brass to ?Thomas Gull (d. 1420) and wife, west end of nave of St Botolph’s.

It is unlikely that Nutting was actually buried in the Corpus Christi chapel, however. The original position of the indent was at the east end of the nave at the edge of the area formerly occupied by the chapel of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, suggesting that Nutting could have been a member of that guild too. As has been demonstrated in chapter 4, it was commonplace for merchants to hold multiple memberships of guilds and it is tempting to speculate that as Nutting’s obit was held on the first dominical day after the commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, he was a member of that guild.

52

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 154. W. Lack and P.J. Whittemore (eds), A series of monumental brasses, indents and incised slabs from the 13th to the 20th century, 2 part 4 (May 2008), pp. 29–30, pl. 31, in a note by S. Badham and D. Chivers.

53

54

TNA: C241/162/57. Thompson, Boston, p. 117. 56 Thompson, Boston, pp. 123 and 126. 55

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston recorded a monument to Robert Trygge (d. 1436), merchant of Boston, and his wife Alice, which cannot be accounted for.

Fig. 6.18 Indent of kneeling civilian and lady on either side of the stem on a cross, c.1430.

Fig. 6.17 Rubbing of lost Fens 1 brass to John Nutting (d. 1380) and wife Agnes (d. 1420), formerly at east end of nave of St Botolph’s. Rubbing: Jerome Bertram with rubbings of other plates from the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London overlaid. There are no other extant brasses to merchants predating the second half of the fifteenth century, although a fragment of a slab with kneeling figures of a civilian wife on either side of a cross is preserved in the north aisle (Fig. 6.18). It has been copiously smeared with cement so the indents are hard to decipher, but it is probably London work of c.1430. In addition, the unknown Antiquary

The next brass to be considered is that of a civilian and wife of c.1470 from the London D workshop, plates from which are stored in the library, together with a small portion of an embattled canopy base (Fig. 6.19); the history of their survival is recounted in chapter 7. Both figures are heavily effaced and there is no matching indent. No monument recorded by the antiquaries is of an appropriate date, so the identity of the couple must remain unknown. Two fragments of indents and one complete slab require brief mention. In the middle of the north aisle adjoining the north wall is part of the bottom of an indent showing a civilian and wife under a canopy with a group of eight children, part of an inscription, and a shield. The spacing suggests that another wife and group of offspring, along with at least one shield are missing. It was evidently a very large and elaborate brass. There is not enough left of the slab to indicate its workshop origin, but it is probably London work of c.1480. Also propped against the wall at the west end of the north aisle is the lower half of an indent retrieved from under pewing in 1984; as the surviving inlays of offspring show, it is London F work of c.1490, but the names of the commemorated are unknown. Finally, the internal threshold to the south door comprises an extremely worn indent to a civilian and his two wives probably dating to c.1430.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 6.19 London D brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1470, currently stored in the library of St Botolph’s. Rubbing: collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Fig. 6.20 Indent of lost London F brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501/2) and wives Agnes (d. 1505) and Elena, in south aisle of St Botolph’s.

The remaining brasses and indents showing merchants in civilian dress date from the first forty years of the sixteenth century. Next to the Flete indent in the chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary is an early-sixteenthcentury London F composition featuring a civilian and his two wives with nine sons and four daughters (Fig. 6.20). Above the main figures was a representation of the Trinity; four shields completed the composition. The group of sons belonging to this brass is kept in the church library (Fig. 6.21). The unknown Antiquary recorded in the nave an inscription reading: ‘Athelardus Kate [sic] Mercator Stapule Aldermannus Corporis Christi obiit in Vigilia S(an)c(t)i Matthie An(n)o D(omi)ni 1501 uxores ejus Anna ac D(omi)na Elena’.57 He appears to have had some difficulty reading the inscription, for it is virtually certain that he meant Athelard Bate, merchant of the Staple of Calais, whose will was made on 21 January 1501/2 and proved on 3 May 1502. Bate was survived by his widow Agnes (d. 1505), who willed ‘to be buried in church of St Botolph near unto the said Athelard Bate my last husband’.

Athelard was the younger son of John Bate (d. 1505) and his wife Alice, who were also buried in St Botolph’s church. Athelard was admitted to the Corpus Christi guild in 1502.58 This was probably a posthumous admittance as the inscription records that he had died on 24 February 1501/2. His will is not very informative as it does not say

57

58

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155.

Fig. 6.21 Brass inlay of group of sons from indent of brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501/2), currently in library of St Botolph’s.

Thompson, Boston, p. 121.

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston where in St Botolph’s he wished to be buried, although he left 20s for his burial. It may be significant that he left a bequest to the guild of the Holy Trinity, which would explain the presence of an image of the Trinity on his brass. This bequest was to be in return for an annual obit for Bate himself, his wife, his parents and all Christian souls; however, he specified that if the Trinity guild would not take the bequest it would devolve to the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Boston. That his brass was laid down in St Mary’s chapel may indicate that the latter option was the one which was acted upon. This is not the only monument in St Botolph’s on which the religious imagery does not reflect its location in the church. The most easily identified indent in St Botolph’s church is the London G composition featuring a civilian and four wives; the slab is located south of the font (Fig. 6.22). It is clear from the unknown Antiquary’s notes that it commemorates John Robinson, esquire, merchant of the Staple of Calais, who died aged 72 in 1525, and his wives Anne, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Eleanor.59

Robinson was armigerous, the shields in the indent having borne his arms azure a fesse dancetty between 3 falcons or. John Robinson’s fourth wife, Eleanor, died in 1528/9, her will having been made on 3 November 1528 and proved on 1 February following. She described herself as a gentlewoman and referred to her father, Athelard Bate, whose brass in St Botolph’s has just been discussed. Eleanor would thus have been shown both in the lost group of four daughters on his brass and as a main figure on her husband’s brass. The supervisor of her will was Thomas Robertson. 60 In 1486 John Robinson was one of the executors of Elizabeth, wife of John Rede of Boston. The witnesses to his own will included John Leeke, a Boston mercer whose brass will be discussed below. All these links show how tightly interconnected the Boston merchants were. John Robinson’s career is much better documented than most of his contemporaries’. He was the son of John Robinson I (d. 1500), who described himself in his will as ‘gentleman’. From 1463 until 1486 the elder Robinson acted as a customs official in Boston.61 He also held other positions of responsibility locally. On 14 November 1485 John Robinson, ‘king’s servant’, received, for his good service to King Henry VII’s father Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, a grant for life of the offices of bailiff of the town of Boston and porter of Hullgarth there, as well as feodary of the honour of Richmond in the counties of Lincoln and Nottingham. 62 The wording of the grant, however, is routine, so it need not be supposed that Robinson did anything special to gain this recognition. He held office as bailiff, and as part of this post he collected the rents and presided over the courts, receiving his retainer as his reward. Presumably he took the job as a way of rising to the top of Boston society, an objective in which he evidently succeeded. John Robinson I or his son John II was at one time mayor of the Staple at Boston. 63 John I and his wife Katherine were members of the elite Corpus Christi guild. 64 He was alderman in 1484 and one of two chamberlains in 1496.65 He was also a benefactor of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in 1482 being named amongst a group of men, including John Leeke, who granted land to maintain five chaplains in the guild chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Boston. 66 John I’s testamentary dispositions indicate significant wealth. His son John was to inherit all his lands, with the mercantile caveat of ‘if he be likely to do well’, which he undoubtedly did. John Robinson II (d. 1525), the man commemorated by the brass, followed in his father’s footsteps. In the first decade of the sixteenth century he received a series of appointments as a customs collector in Boston; 60

Fig. 6.22 Indent of lost London G brass to John Robinson (d. 1525) and wives Anne, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Eleanor, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s.

59

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155.

C.W. Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills 2, LRS 10 (1914), pp. 100–01. CFR, 1461–71, pp. 101 and 108; CFR, 1471–85, p. 143–44; CFR, 1471–85, pp. 254–45 and 263–64; CFR, 1485–1509, pp. 51–52; 62 CPR, 1485–94, p. 67. 63 TNA: C1/124/80; this action of debt against Robert Cope, of Ovir, pykmonger is dated either 1486–93, or 1504–15. 64 BL, Harley MS. 4795, fols 44r and 26v. 65 BL, Harley MS. 4795, fols 49r and 53r. 66 CPR, 1477–85, pp. 272–73 and 329–30. 61

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commissioner of wallis et fossatis (walls and ditches) for the port of Boston and in adjacent parts of Holland, Kesteven and Lindsey; and justice of the peace in Holland.67 In 1500 he was named as one of two men who contracted with Matthew Hake of Gravelines in Flanders for the latter to bring with him fourteen masons and four labourers to construct a sluice in Boston.68 In 1502 he and his son, John Robinson III, were named in a long list of merchants of the Staple of Calais who were granted a pardon for all offences against the customs prior to 1 October 1499. 69 John Robinson II was probably the wealthiest merchant in Boston in his day; his will reveals that he had extensive lands in rural Lincolnshire and also in Calais. Like his father before him and other leading members of Boston society, John II was deeply involved with the guilds. He was an especially devoted member of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, having been alderman in 1520–22.70 Gifts to the guild made by him or his father included an altar cloth of tawny damask decorated with eagles standing on books and the letter M ‘richly wrought’ with his arms in the midst of it, and a ‘standynge maser [bowl] with cover and shelle, sylver gilt, weynge 26½ oz’.71 His arms also adorned another altar cloth and frontal, of black damask, and he was the donor of a breviary used by the guild.72 Yet in his will he was more generous still. 73 He left a considerable amount of property to the guild, which was so important to it, and subsequently to the Boston Corporation, that it was known long after as ‘John Robinson’s lands’. His will and that of his widow, Eleanor (d. 1530), reveal that an obit was to be said in St Mary’s chapel for the pair of them, as well as John’s offspring, for ninety years following John’s death. The way in which the obit was to be ordered is specified in some detail and the sum of money to be expended on each occasion was significantly in excess of any other obit celebrated by the guild. He evidently did not want this provision to be overlooked, for the lost inscription on his brass recorded that he funded two chaplains for the chapel of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary.74 This was not the only guild of which John II was a brother. He left all the silks and velvets that comprised his garments to the guild of the Blessed Apostles. He was also admitted member of the Corpus Christi guild in 1495, and the following year he became one of two ‘chamberlains of the chapel’ (capellam camerariorum) as ‘Johannis Robinson Junior’. 75 He did not include the 67

CFR, 1485–1509, pp. 351–52, CFR, 1485–1507, p. 384; CPR, 1494– 1509, pp. 358, 359, 457, 547 and 647. 68 Thompson, Boston, p. 357, from records in the archive of the Corporation of Boston. 69 CPR, 1494–1509, pp. 309–10. 70 Thompson, Boston, p. 139. 71 Thompson, Boston, pp. 143–45. 72 K. Giles, ‘“A table of alabaster with the story of Doom” The religious objects and spaces of the guild of Our Blessed Virgin, Boston (Lincs)’ in T. Hamling and C. Richardson (eds), Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings, forthcoming. 73 TNA: PROB11/23, fols 39v–41v. 74 Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155. 75 BL, Harley MS. 4795, fol. 53r.

guild in his testamentary dispositions, but willed to be buried in their chapel, despite his evident devotion to the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The reason for this was undoubtedly the upholding of a family tradition, for his parents and wives had been buried there. That his wishes were followed is clear from the fact that his indent lies amongst others known to have been originally situated in the chapel of the Corpus Christi guild.

Fig. 6.23 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531), and wives Elizabeth and Mary, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s.

Fig. 6.24 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to unknown civilians and ladies c.1520; Tattershall (Lincolnshire). Adjacent to John Robinson’s indent is a small Fens 2 indent showing a civilian with two wives (Fig. 6.23). The women are engraved on a single plate, an unusual feature but one paralleled on a Fens 2 indent at Tattershall (Lincolnshire) (Fig. 6.24). According to the unknown Antiquary the lost inscription read: ‘Thomas Robertson Mercator Villae Calisiae obiit […] die Mensis […] et Elizabetha uxor ejus quae obiit 25 die Aprilis A(n)no D(omi)ni 1495, et Maria uxor altera quae obiit 2 die Julii A(n)no D(omi)ni 1520’.76 It appears that his date of death 76

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 155.

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston was not filled in so the brass was probably made c.1520 after the death of Mary Robinson, née Saxby, who must have had a specific desire to be buried in St Botolph, perhaps because her Saxby ancestors were buried there. This was not the only brass to Thomas Robertson. In the nave of nearby Algarkirk church, the village where the Robertsons lived, are a Fens 2 brass and a very similar indent (Figs 6.25 and 6.26). The indent commemorates Thomas Robertson (d. 1531), and the brass his father Nicholas (d. 1498) and his wives, Isabelle and Alice; both of these monuments were probably produced at the same time. They were modest brasses, unlikely to have cost more than £2 each, yet curiously Thomas and Nicholas were men of considerable means. Thomas himself was buried in Algarkirk rather than Boston therefore, but this only reflects the burial choices made by other men of means – even merchants – who lived in the surrounding area of southern Lindsey and Holland known historically as Boston Townlands. A sample of sixty-five southern Lincolnshire wills from The National Archives dating from 1388 to 1547 revealed that none of the testators chose burial in St Botolph’s church, preferring to be interred and commemorated in their parish churches or local religious houses.77

the status and codes of the two men. Both were extremely wealthy, owning properties in Boston and the Townlands. Nicholas bequeathed to his family his lands in Algarkirk, Wigtoft, Fosdyke, Donington, Quadring, Bicker, Skirbeck and Swineshead.78 Thomas built on his father’s wealth, leaving houses in Boston and Fosdyke and properties in Algarkirk, Fosdyke, Sutterton, Donington, Bicker, Boston, Leake, Butterwick, Frieston and Lenton, amongst other (unspecified) places in Lincolnshire, as well as elsewhere in England and in Calais. 79 He evidently had particularly strong links with Calais as in his will he left to the Staple chapel there £5 for an ornament or a jewel. He also made bequests to various churches in the town: the fabric of the church of our Blessed Lady in Calais benefitted by 40s, as did St Nicholas’s church and the Chapel of the Blessed Resurrection, while he gave 20s to ‘our Blessed Lady of St Peter’s there’, presumably a Marian image in St Peter’s church.

Fig. 6.25 Fens 2 brass to Nicholas Robertson (d. 1498), and his wives Isabelle and Alice; Algarkirk (Lincolnshire). Most of what we know about the Robertson family has to be gleaned from their wills. In the cases of Nicholas and Thomas these documents are unusually informative, and invaluable for the light they throw on

Fig. 6.26 Indent of lost Fens 2 brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531), and wives Elizabeth and Mary; Algarkirk (Lincolnshire). 78

77

Unpublished research by the author.

79

TNA: PROB11/11, fols 153r–154r. TNA: PROB11/27, fols 40r–40v.

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Like John Robinson, Thomas Robertson had a high profile in local affairs. In 1505 and 1507 he was appointed a commissioner of wallis et fossatis (walls and ditches) for the port of Boston and in adjacent parts of Holland, Kesteven and Lindsey, and he was appointed a commissioner of the peace for the period 1501–07.80 He also associated with others of the Boston élite. In 1504 he and John Robinson received a grant of land in Leeke and elsewhere in Lincolnshire. 81 Three years later he was amongst a group of men who received licence from the king to alienate to them the manors of Heyburgh and Kymyton in the county of Lincoln for the sum of £6 12s 0¾d.82 Both father and son were brethren of St Mary’s guild. In 1481 Nicholas Robertson, together with eleven others, including Robert Leek – presumably a kinsman of Nicholas’s wife Alice Leek – had granted the guild various lands in and around Boston to maintain five chaplains in Boston church.83 The Robertsons were also members of the élite Corpus Christi guild and it is likely that they may have been members of other guilds: Nicholas left the guild of St James 20s while Thomas bequeathed 6s 8d to each of the Boston guilds. The latter also directed that the priests of St Peter’s guild were to sing ‘a Dirge Mass of Requiem and one trental for my soul after the manner as Corpus priests do for a brother’.84 In his lifetime he provided for the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary vestments of green velvet and white damask with an orphrey of red velvet, another of white satin of Bruges powdered with flowers and an orphrey of black velvet and green Bruges satin.85 Nicholas had been munificent during his lifetime in providing a splendid new clerestory in Algarkirk church, and in his will he made additional bequests for the fabric of that church, as well as for other churches nearby. Nicholas Robertson’s generosity was, however, put into the shade by the largesse of his son Thomas’s will, although many bequests were intended to benefit their souls as well as the recipients’ wellbeing.86 Thomas, who showed an intense conventional piety, made extensive provisions for the health of his soul, including instructions for 1000 masses to be said ‘immediately after my death and as conveniently as it may be done’.87 He also left 3s 4d to each of the priests in St Botolph’s church, Boston, that is to say ‘the St George priest, the Trinity priest and the rood priest’ to pay for a trental. He also evidently planned a lavish funeral, with the priest, deacon and subdeacon receiving red damask vestments and a cope worth £10 ready for the day of his burial. Twelve poor men were each to receive black 80

CPR, 1494–1509, pp. 457, 547 and 647. CClR,1500–1509, p. 111. 82 CPR,1494–1507, p. 565. 83 TNA: C143/455/13. 84 TNA: PROB11/27, fols 40r–40v. 85 Giles, ‘“A table of alabaster with the story of Doom”’, pp. 272–73. 86 For further details, see S. Badham, ‘The Robertsons remembered: two generations of Calais staplers at Algarkirk, Lincolnshire’, in C. Barron and C. Burgess (eds), Memory and commemoration in medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20 (Donington, 2010), pp. 202–17. 87 TNA: PROB11/24, fols 68r–72v. 81

garments and a payment of 4d to bear torches at his burial day, seven-day and thirty-day and his first year-day masses, following which the torches that remained were to be distributed to the churches of Algarkirk, Fosdyke and Sutterton, to be used at Sunday masses. Sums of money would be doled out to various clerics attending his funeral, according to their degree: 8d for parsons and vicars, 6d for parish priests and chantry priests, 4d for deacons and 2d for clerks. Priests of the Corpus Christi guild at Boston were treated particularly generously: those going to Algarkirk for his burial would receive 3s 4d and those staying at home would have 2s. In addition, every priest attending his burial day, seven-day and thirty-day masses would receive a further 4d. Charitable deeds would also mark Thomas’s passing. On his burial day and thirty day every man, woman and child in Algarkirk and Fosdyke would receive 2d. He also left £11 to be distributed on his burial day, seven-day and thirtyday soul masses to the poor and bedridden of Sutterton, Wigtoft, Swineshead, Bicker, Donington, Gosberton, Surfleet, Kirton, Frampton, Wyberton and Quadring. Finally, it is worth drawing attention to the many bequests in Thomas’s will concerning Marian images. Thomas left red damask vestments for the priest, deacon and subdeacon, and one cope ‘in the honour of Our Blessed Lady’, presumably in connection with a subsidiary altar in Algarkirk church. A vestment of white damask worth 40s and a ‘vesture of a coat of white silk’ worth 20s were bequeathed to ‘the Lady of Sutterton’, undoubtedly a religious image in the church of St Mary at Sutterton. He similarly left an adornment worth 20s to our Blessed Lady in the White Friars of Boston; a jewel of silver and gilt to the value of 40s to the Blessed Lady of Walsingham; and a jewel worth 20s to the Blessed Lady of Lincoln. These bequests show that Thomas had retained a marked devotion to the Virgin, whom he asked in his will to intercede with God for the benefit of his soul. In the light of this evidence of his particular Marian devotion, it seems surprising that a devotional image of the Trinity was formerly shown on his brass at Algarkirk, whereas it was his father’s brass that featured an image of the Virgin and Child. Thomas Robertson’s is the last brass or indent in St Botolph’s showing the commemorated in civilian dress that can be firmly connected with a named individual. There remain five more complete or fragmentary floor slabs, some with associated brass plates, which date from the first half of the sixteenth century and which probably also commemorate Boston merchants. Little can be said about these apart from what is recorded in Appendix 1. It is also worth drawing attention at this stage to two small fragments missed by Wheeldon, which are incorporated into the fabric of the western wall of the nave. These unrelated pieces, dating from c.1525 and c.1535, are cut with indents of kneeling figures with prayer scrolls above (Figs 6.27 and 6.28). The compositions strongly suggest that the fragments came from the back walls of mural monuments, a type no longer represented in St Botolph’s. It is impossible to tell where they might have been located, especially as when the aisles of the church were compartmentalised by the parclose screens of the guild 117

The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston chapels there would have been scope for many more wall tombs than is apparent now.

6.6 Shroud brasses There are two important indents in St Botolph’s which merit separate discussion as the status of those commemorated is not immediately apparent from the composition. Both are indents of cadaver brasses. To the south of St Mary’s chapel is an indent of a pair of figures in shrouds; above their heads is a winding sheet, with the heads of the couple protruding, which is being carried to heaven by a pair of winged angels (Fig. 6.29). This is a rare example of a cadaver brass showing the salvation of the individual soul. A foot inscription and two shields complete the composition. It is probably early Fens 2 work and it may commemorate John Dale (d. 1482) and his wife, whose lost inscription records that he was a merchant of the Staple of Calais and also repaired the windows in St Botolph’s church. The unknown Antiquary noted that his brass had shields with his arms a fess and a crescent in chief.88 No further evidence can be traced of John Dale other than is recorded in the inscription, but the fact that he was armigerous suggests that, like John Robinson and the Robertsons, he was a man on the rise.

Fig. 6.27 Fragment of indent of lost brass to unknown civilian and lady, c.1525, on west wall of nave of St Botolph’s.

Fig. 6.29 Indent of lost Fens 2 shroud brass to John Dale (d. 1482) and wife, in south aisle of St Botolph’s. Fig. 6.28 Fragment of indent of lost brass to unknown civilian and lady, c.1535, on west wall of nave of St Botolph’s.

Towards the west end of the nave is another shroud indent, this one to a man and two wives, with prayer scrolls leading to an image of the Trinity (Fig. 6.30). It is 88

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 154.

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probably not London work, so it may be a Fens 2 product of the 1520s. From the inscriptions recorded by the unknown Antiquary the most likely candidate is John Leeke (d. 1527) and wives Alice and Joan. Their lost inscription read: ‘Johes Leeke Mercator de Boston / obiit ultimo die Februarii Ano Dni 1527. Alicia et Johanna uxores ejus […]’.89 Leeke’s was a long-established family from the nearby village of Old Leake, and which had considerable influence in Boston. He was only moderately wealthy, in

second decade of the sixteenth century and his second wife Joan in the 1520s.92 However, in his will made 19 August 1527, Leeke requested burial ‘within the qwere of our lady within the parish church off saynt Botulphe in Boston’.93 So unless the slab has been moved or he was buried elsewhere, this casts doubt on whether Leeke could have been the man commemorated by this slab, so the attribution remains uncertain. 6.7 Two lost brasses to Londoners In the south aisle close to the Frere brass is a fine London F indent of c.1490 to a civilian and wife with a Trinity and prayer scrolls (Fig. 6.31). It almost certainly commemorates Roger Shavelock and his wife Joan, although only Joan will have been buried here, as the lost verse inscription tragically records: To the mortall coarse, that lyeth here under stone, Was of Roger Shavelocke the wife clepyd Ione Of London he was Citizen, on Pilgrimage he went To our Lady of Walsingham, with full good intent, And so header [hither] to their countrey, disporting in their life. But cruell death, that spareth none, he took away the wife. In ye yeare of our Lord 1488, the day of Ascention, All good Christian pepull pray for hir of your devotion.94

Fig. 6.30 Indent of lost Fens 2 shroud brass, possibly to John Leeke (d. 1527) and wives Alice and Joan, at west end of nave of St Botolph’s. 1523–24 being one of eighteen people taxed: he paid 2s, the lowest sum recorded from the town, Thomas Robertson, for example, paying £33 6s 8d. 90 Several references in documents have been made to him above, but more can be added. In 1482 John Leeke or his father was named amongst a group of men, including John Robinson, who granted land to maintain five chaplains in the guild chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Boston.91 John was admitted to the Corpus Christi guild in the 89

Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 154; the Antiquary of 1602– 05 has the ladies’ names transposed. 90 Thompson, Boston, p. 61. 91 TNA: C143/455/13.

Why then did Roger set up their brass in Boston? They certainly had local connections. In view of the Trinity on the brass they were perhaps members of the Trinity Guild and buried near the guild’s altar or in its chapel, although it is known for certain that the couple were members of the Corpus Christi guild, to which they were admitted in the 1480s.95 The location of the chapel of the Trinity guild is unknown, although brasses featuring a Trinity are to be found mostly towards the west end of the pewed part of the nave where this indent is also now situated. The likelihood is that Roger was a member of the long-established Shavelock or Shallock family of Fishtoft, near Boston, who went to London to make his fortune. And make his fortune he did. Roger was apprenticed to Thomas Gresill in 1444–46, and within ten years he had completed his training and established a drapery business of his own. After becoming a freeman of London sometime before 1465, he took on at least five apprentices of his own.96 In 1469/70 he was admitted as a liveryman. There are a few other references to him, but nothing of great import until we come to the circumstances of his death.97 92

Thompson, Boston, p. 120. Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills 2, pp. 40–44. 94 Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 154. 95 Thompson, Boston, p. 120. 96 M. Davies (ed.), The Merchant Taylors’ Company: court minutes 1486–93 (Stamford, 2000), passim. 97 In 1483 he was one of the executors of Richard Snowe of London [CCR, 1476–85, p. 302]. In 1486 John Robinson, citizen and cutler of 93

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston awne throte’.99 So, most unusually, we can get behind the bare biographical facts of the people commemorated by a brass to reveal a piteous story of a double personal tragedy. The brass was evidently made following Joan’s death, but the grieving Roger did not wish to live much longer. Curiously, this was not the only lost brass at Boston to a Londoner with a history of death following a pilgrimage to Walsingham. An inscription in Boston church, recorded on 3 August 1601 possibly by Francis Thynne, runs as follows: Here lyeth the bodye of Raype Burkes of London sometime cytyzen with Joane his wyfe who went [?twyse] one pilgrimage to or lady of Walsingham and came into ther country for [yeur] disportinge but deathe tooke him away & here gaue buryal 1459’.100 This inscription was not mentioned by Holles in either version of his manuscript notes in BL, Add. MS. 36295, so it was lost between the Antiquary of 1602–05’s and Holles’s visits. The wording bears an uncanny resemblance to that on Roger Shavelock’s brass, but also has significant differences. It is highly unlikely that there is any mistake in the transcription, for Burkes, like Shavelock, can be found in the records as Roger Burkes, Birkes or Byrkes. An under-sheriff of London, active in the 1450s, he died on14 January 1459/60.101 He left a will, but sadly it makes no mention of where he wished to be buried or of any monument.102 Maybe Roger Shavelock saw this brass when he buried his wife Joan and, perhaps struck by the coincidence of Christian names and pilgrimages to Walsingham, he specified an inscription for his wife’s brass based on the wording he read on Burkes’s brass.

Fig. 6.31 Indent of lost London F brass to Roger Shavelocke and wife Joan (d. 1488), in south aisle of St Botolph’s. On 14 December 1489 William Bryan, late apprentice of Roger Shavelock, petitioned that he should be entered into the books of the fraternity, as Roger had died intestate and because he was not presented before his master’s death.98 Shavelock’s shop in Ludgate had cloth and other goods said to be worth nearly 1000 marks. The circumstances of Roger’s death were notorious: an entry in The Great Chronicle of London records that ‘a Taylour named Roger Shavelock Dwellyng w’yn ludgate and holding there a Shopp well storid with drapery, kut his London, gifted to Roger Shavelock, tailor, and John Johnys, fletcher, all his lands and chattels and all his debts [CCR, 1476–85, p. 50]. On 23 April 1491 John Morys, late of London, received a pardon of outlawry in the hustings of London for not appearing before the justices of the bench to answer various claims for debt including Roger Shavelock, citizen and tailor of London (52s.) [CPR, 1484–94, p. 335]. 98 Davies (ed.), The Merchant Taylors’ Company, p. 147.

6.8 Conclusions There are a number of interesting trends to be discerned amongst the monuments known to be laid down in St Botolph’s church. The strong concentration of brasses and indents commemorating merchants who were guild members and the priests who served them has already been highlighted. Yet, with a few exceptions mentioned above, the imagery and inscriptions on the brasses do not appear greatly to reflect involvement in the guild culture, nor is there much correspondence between the religious imagery on these monuments and guild affiliation. The two large brasses to Walter Pescod and John Strensall include among the figures of saints those to whom Boston guilds were dedicated; this specificity 99

A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley (eds), The Great Chronicle of London (Guildhall MS 331), (London, 1938), pp. 243–44. 100 BL, Sloane MS. 3836, fol. 30v. I am grateful to Christian Steer for drawing my attention to this manuscript and to Julian Luxford for checking the text. 101 C.M. Barron, London in the later Middle Ages: government and people 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 357–58; P. Tucker, Law courts and lawyers in the city of London (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 288 and 303. I am grateful to Christian Steer for these references. 102 TNA: PROB 11/14, fol. 138r.

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Fig. 6.32 Diagram showing popularity of workshops patronised by those commemorated by brasses in St Botolph’s church. undoubtedly indicates a definite degree of personal involvement in the design, despite the London origin of the brasses and, particularly in Strensall’s case, may indicate that they were commissioned in the lifetime of those commemorated. The largely lost brasses to John Nutting and Thomas Gull evidently had inhabited sideshafts, but which saints were shown is not recorded. Several indents with devotional imagery featured the Trinity, but none are known to have had figures of the Blessed Virgin Mary or other saints with which the Boston guilds were associated. Another unusual feature of this collection of brasses and indents is their disparity of design. Choices for monumental commemoration were often subject, amongst other factors, to influence from the commemorative preferences of others in the circles in which the deceased moved. It is not unusual for monuments to individuals linked by blood or friendship to show commonality of design or to have been made by the same workshop. It is even sometimes the case that when patrons came to choose monuments for themselves or others for whom they were acting, they wanted something similar to a monument they had seen or admired. We have already met with the case of Mary, Lady Roos, who wanted a monument like that in St Botolph to her grandmother, Lady Margaret de Orby, and in chapter 5 Paul Cockerham has drawn attention to the way in which the fourteenth-century merchants in particular commissioned broadly similar Flemish incised slabs, perhaps as a deliberate statement of communal identity. Yet there is no evidence from the surviving brasses and indents of a similar pattern of patronage

amongst their successors. Surprisingly not even Pescod’s magnificent brass seems to have provoked emulation in the form of a series of fine London series B brasses in the church. The indents to Nutting and Gull have a rough generic similarity, but the Fens 1 workshop whence they came produced other brasses with grand canopies. The overwhelming dominance of Latin inscriptions over those in the vernacular is also unusual, especially those dating from after 1500. 103 The continued use of Latin for clerical brasses is not surprising, but that the merchant community also opted for inscriptions in this language, is. Could this potentially be a use of Latin as a means of learned exclusivity of comprehension of the inscriptions and enhancing a cliquey mercantile appreciation, particularly as the merchants would have been on hand to supervise designs very closely? Those monuments produced in the Boston workshop would have been likely to have been subject to a large degree of client input; it is logical to expect that these would have shown what the client wanted them to show, rather than having to make do with a stock product from London. St Botolph’s retains evidence of a once large number of brasses paving its floors, but their chronological distribution is not typical of national patterns of commemoration in that the earliest surviving example – the brass to Walter Pescod – dates only from 1398. The 103

See for comparison J. Bertram, ‘Inscriptions on late medieval brasses and monuments’, in J. Higgitt, K. Forsyth and D. Parsons (eds), Roman, Runes and Ogham: medieval inscriptions in the insular world and on the continent (Donington, 2001), pp. 190–97, at p. 191.

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The brasses and indents of St Botolph’s church, Boston explanation must surely be the well-established taste for Flemish products. Although incised and inlaid Flemish slabs were popular with those buried there in the period up to c.1370, the only evidence for any Flemish or other foreign brasses comprises one small rectangular plate in the south aisle, and the indent of another noted by Wheeldon in the tower, but since lost, both of which anyway are most likely Fens 1 examples of c.1425. It is probably significant that, as Stephen Rigby points out in chapter 2, the change in patterns of patronage from Flemish slabs to English brasses coincides with the period when Boston’s foreign import trade was largely with Bergen and the Baltic rather than the Low Countries. A handful of brasses date from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, but most span the period 1450–1540. This comparative lack of brasses and indents dating from the second quarter of the fifteenth century is more difficult to explain. Perhaps some were laid down, but subsequently disposed of, to make room for new burials. Those commemorated by brasses patronised a variety of workshops (Fig. 6.32). A number of these patrons were merchants of the Staple of Calais and had international connections. Most would also have maintained strong links with London, hence seventeen merchants and other patrons ordered monuments from the large and prestigious London-based workshops whose products were dominant throughout much of England. In contrast, sixteen Boston patrons chose brasses from regional workshops. Fifteen brasses were commissioned from two workshops operating almost certainly in Boston itself. The commissioning of seven brasses from the Fens 1 workshop, which operated c.1400–35 and produced incised slabs as well as brasses, is unsurprising. It produced high-quality monuments which were chosen by élite clients, including the Stapletons of Ingham (Norfolk) and the Willoughby d’Eresbys of Spilsby (Lincolnshire). That eight Boston merchants and other patrons chose brasses from the Fens 2 workshop which produced a number of modest brasses dating from c.1490–1525 is less explicable. None of the surviving products of this workshop are large or elaborate and most are of mediocre quality. Perhaps aesthetic qualities were low on the list of considerations of these Boston merchants when choosing their monument, unlike their predecessors of 150 years earlier, even though the subsidiary imagery was just as closely supervised. In the period when there was no brass engraving workshop operating locally, one patron ordered a brass from a workshop based in Norwich. There were a few large and magnificent brasses and indents in St Botolph’s, but it may appear surprising that so many apparently well-off patrons chose comparatively small brasses from regional workshops. As evidenced by the information set out above on the men and women commemorated by these brasses, some at least of the testators channelled large sums of money into supporting the religious guilds and the local friaries and other religious houses. Perhaps some thought that the soul masses that would be said for them would endure in perpetuity significantly longer than their memorials. They could well have had grounds for such a judgement. There is ample evidence that old memorials were routinely removed from church floors to make room for new

burials. 104 New burials attracted fees and the churchwardens could have sold the stone and brass from discarded monuments for profit. The Boston merchants of the period 1450–1540 in particular could have witnessed this phenomenon, especially in such a popular church for burials as St Botolph’s. Admittedly there is no surviving evidence of this for Boston; large numbers of fourteenth and fifteenth century slabs were left alone, even though some Flemish slabs have been reused for later monuments and others, such as that to Lady Margaret de Orby, have gone. Medieval man undoubtedly thought that the Catholic faith and the associated guilds, religious houses and soul masses would last for ever. Yet they judged unwisely, as by the mid-sixteenth century a religious revolution had materialised. In consequence, the fruits of all their expenditure on charitable gift-giving and soul masses are long gone: all that remains to keep their memory alive are the previously anonymous remnants of their brasses. Like the names of the senators of Rome described in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1431–38), these Bostonians’ brasses have: The golden lettres dirkid and diffacid, And from remembrance almost out araced.105 Acknowledgements I am grateful to my husband Tim Sutton for photography and help with the construction and analysis of the data base. I would also like to thank Jerome Bertram, Derrick Chivers, Paul Cockerham, Julian Luxford, Sophie Oosterwijk, Ernie Napier, Nigel Saul and Christian Steer for other valuable help and advice.

104

S. Badham, ‘Medieval greens: recycling brasses and their slabs’, MBSB 93 (May 2003), pp. 673–74; P. Lindley, Tomb destruction and scholarship. Medieval monuments in early modern England (Donington, 2007), pp. 6–8. 105 H. Bergen (ed.), Lydgate's Fall of Princes, 4 vols, Early English Text Society, extra series 123 (London, 1924), vol. 3, Book VIII, (second stanza of a subsection entitled ‘The wordes of Bochas a-geyne Rome’), lines 2535–41.

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Chapter 7 The lost brasses and indents of Boston by Derrick Chivers and Paul Cockerham church (Appendix 1).5 Why only this slab appears to have survived is impossible to say because the friars’ churches were favoured as a burial location by the local gentry as well as foreign traders and Hanseatic merchants, so it is likely that there were many more laid down.6 In chapter 6 Sally Badham accounts for eleven individuals tending towards gentle status in her sample of ‘Boston’ wills, who elected for burial in the friars’ churches there. It is inconceivable to think that funeral monuments did not proliferate in these churches when the will directions of these testators are considered. For instance, one Herman Isbrande, a Netherlander, willed in 1533 that his body ‘to be humate and buryd within the churche of the Blake Frerys [Boston, and] … that the iiij orders of Frerys bring me to my sepulture, and they to syng dirige for me’. Later that same year Thomas Gybson, priest, wanted his body buryed in a specific spot ‘within the rode’s quere [Rood’s choir] in the Blake Frerys’ in Boston. What would be the point of being interred right there if there were not some monument to remember him by and solicit prayers for his soul?7 John Leland, for example, while proceeding cautiously around Boston in the late-1530s on account of the plague, noted ‘In the Blake Freres lay one of the noble Huntingfeldes and was a late taken up hole, and a leaden bulle of Innocentius Bisshop of Rome about his neck.’8 This was the tomb of Sir William de Huntingfield (styled Lord Huntingfield) who is mentioned in numerous commissions in the wapentake of Skirbeck in 1353–55 and others in Lincolnshire between 1362 and 1374, as befitted someone of his style. He married Elizabeth, daughter of John, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby of Spilsby, not far from Boston, and died without issue in 1376.9 Curiously the burial of this knightly lord was occasioned by a stand-off between the friars and the bishop of Lincoln, who wished to be present for the interment. The

7.1 Sixteenth-century destruction – the demise of the friaries Writing in Lincolnshire on the first day of Lent 1539, Bishop Ingworth of Dover, a one-time Benedictine monk ‘whose religious views were “flexible”, not to say doubtful’1 duly reported to the Vicar-General Thomas Cromwell. ‘According to my duty at your commandment I have received to the king’s highness use the 4 houses of friars in Boston, very poor houses and poor persons, and according to your letter I have delivered the same houses to master Taverner and master Johns, servants to the king’s grace, with all the poor implements for his money.... These houses be meetly leaded ... in Boston I think in the four houses about four score fodder or more.’2 Ingworth may have got there just in time, as earlier in the year ‘master Taverner’ informed Cromwell that the Austin, Black and White friars had ‘piteously lamented to me their poverty, not knowing how to live till their houses be surrendered … The devotion of the people is clean gone,3 their plate and implements sold; so they have nothing left but the lead, which (if I had not forbid it) they would have plucked down and sold too’.4 Although these churches were pillaged primarily for the valuable raw metal that could be sold off at market value, as well as any precious fixtures and fittings which remained, this verbatim report of the ultimate demise of the Boston friaries must also have heralded the complete destruction of whatever tomb monuments their churches contained. Out of this devastation the sole survival of the Tournai marble incised slab to Wisselmus de Smalenburgh (1340) is simply fortuitous, being found during nineteenth century excavations on the site of the Franciscan friary and thereafter housed in St Botolph’s

1 M. Zell, ‘Thornden, Richard (c.1490–1558)’, ODNB (Oxford 2004, online edn 2008) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68339, accessed 14 March 2011]. 2 G.H. Cook, Letters to Cromwell and others on the suppression of the monasteries (London, 1965), p. 231. A fodder (or fother) of lead weighed 19½ cwt, so Ingworth reckoned that the yield of lead from the mendicants’ houses in Boston would be close to 78 tons. The price of lead was, obviously, variable, but it was a highly sought after building material, and, assessed at, say £4 the fother, then the value of the lead from the Boston friaries would have been well over £300. See L.F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540 – a documentary history (Oxford, 1992 edn), pp. 262–65. 3 C. Cross, ‘Communal piety in sixteenth century Boston’, LHA 25 (1990), pp. 33–38, however, cites numerous wills of the 1530s which request mendicant input to funerary and anniversary masses, with consequent remuneration; all these instructions would have been additional to the ongoing payments for masses which had already been commissioned in the same friaries. Hence, if the devotion of the people had truly ‘clean gone’, it was either, firstly, a true but recent change initiated by the dissolution of the minor houses a few years earlier, secondly a purposefully hyperbolic communication of changes abroad in the population of Boston, or thirdly and most likely, a combination of the two. For comment on how friars anticipated Ingworth’s visitation see D. Knowles, The religious orders in England, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1959), 3, pp. 360–66. 4 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, 14 part 1, p.40.

5 Only limited archaeological investigation of central Boston has taken place, such that even the sites of most of the friaries are uncertain let alone the extent and style of their buildings. Those of the Dominican friary are best known and survive in part, but no funeral monuments have been discovered on the site; see G. Harden, Medieval Boston and its archaeological implications (Sleaford 1978), pp. 16–26. The most recent assessment is the Boston Town Historic Environment Baseline Study: [http://www.boston.gov.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view &id=1279&Itemid=3602] accessed 26 January 2011. 6 For an idea of the overall importance of the friars’ houses to the population of Boston and its hinterlands, see Cross, ‘Communal piety’, p. 33. 7 D. Hickman (ed.), Lincoln Wills 1532–1534, LRS 89 (2001), pp. 193, 211. For an analysis of the funeral monuments in the mendicant houses of London, suggesting their use by the gentry and aristocracy as places of interment and fruitful commemoration – which pattern appears to repeat at Boston – see C. Steer, ‘Royal and Noble commemoration in the mendicant houses of medieval London, c. 1240–1540’, in C.M. Barron and C. Burgess (eds), Memory and commemoration in medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20 (Donington, 2010), pp. 117– 42. 8 L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 5 vols (London, 1964), 4, p. 114. 9 G.E. Cockayne et al. (eds), The Complete Peerage, 13 vols (London, 1910–59), 6, pp. 668–70.

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The lost brasses and indents of Boston friars ‘closed off the chancel of the choir and defended it against him [the bishop] with swords and arrows, and refused to let him or any other bishop come to services in their church without leave of the friars themselves’.10 What was the reason for this? Was it a manifestation of the mendicants jealously guarding their right to burial – and much future income from funerary masses – of such an important man? The presence of his monument as a permanent reminder of this great man’s patronage of the friars would have been very important locally and in the wider community. It would have enhanced the social standing of the Black friars leading to further burials of the wealthy and sponsored intercessory masses, and ultimately a more comfortable living. Whatever its strategic value to the house however, it failed to be preserved when the buildings were demolished. Leland went on to find that ‘Ther lay also in the Gray Freres of the Mountevilles gentilmen, and a vi. or vii. of the Withams gentilmen also’.11 This is evidence of a second tomb monument to a member of the aristocracy in a Boston mendicant house, as well as the creation of a gentry family mausoleum, presumably marked with individual raised monuments or floor slabs. Again, nothing has survived. Floor slabs were generally sold off as building stones and pavement slabs – many are known to have been recycled in Belgium in building work,12 or serving as the bottoms of canals and ditches13 – so bearing in mind the same kind of watery topography around Boston a similar fate most likely befell the large, rectangular and thick tombslabs unearthed from the friaries, to be used in keeping up the seawalls.14 As Thomas Paynell, Henry VIII’s chaplain wrote to Cromwell, questioning the means of maintaining the sea defences, ‘By staying the said timber, iron and stone, you would deserve immortal memory of the town’.15 Although most likely relating to building stones, in 1561 the borough of Boston received £11 from Mr Wesname ‘for certain stones sold to him out of the White Friars’, and in 1573 the corporation negotiated ‘fre Egresse and Regresse with cart & carriages ... unto the sayde Inner part of the [White] freeres to fetch or carrye away the stones within the said

freeres which be now standing in pillers or walles above the soyle or grownd’.16 7.2 Sixteenth century destruction – the demise of the chantries The extinction of these monastic houses and the appropriation of their land and property in Boston and roundabout, was just the first symptom of wider, but more specifically focussed destruction however, as the church of Rome metamorphosed into the church of England, and theological changes moved slowly towards a reformed, Protestant church.17 As Sally Badham has discussed in Chapter 4, at the start of the sixteenth century the guilds were venerable, financially wellendowed organisations. Even if their status was faltering by the 1540s, the 1547 act for the dissolution of the chantries, including guilds, meant that they all became the property of the crown.18 Obviously, the potential loss of the chantries and guilds, which for centuries were intimately involved in the day to day religious and civic life of the town, and heavily patronised by Boston’s mercantile élite, would have been far more heavily felt than the more restricted loss of the friaries, which were essentially privatised religious organisations. The guilds were symbiotic with the church: they were not just central to intercessory prayer, but equally a core factor in the maintenance of a buoyant and self-sustaining merchant class. They were intensely visual in their impact, both in the church – with a luxuriance of fixtures and fittings in their chapels – as well as on display in the town during feast day and funeral processions. All of this panoply was continuously demonstrative of mercantile power and wealth in the face of the gradual population decline of the late medieval town: it was saving face at the very least.19 By the 1540s however the symptoms of the guilds’ ultimate condemnation were all too clear, hastening negotiations which secured the town’s incorporation in 1545. The mayor and aldermen propitiously secured much guild property for the town, including the church, rectory and vicarage.20 The church fabric and appointment of incumbents were now totally governed by the Corporation – the mercantile élite therefore. Hence, instead of merchants beholden to make continual financial contributions to the church, providing for the well-being of their souls, by now the revised theological slant in Boston, together with the reorganisation and maintenance of the church’s fabric, were all beholden to the merchants.21

10 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Lincoln, volume 2 (London, 1906), pp. 213–17 at p. 214. 11 Toulmin Smith (ed.), Leland, 4, pp. 114–15. He also noted (p. 182) that ‘The Lord Monteville had a goodly great and auncient manor place at Fischetoft a mile from Boston. It is now al yn ruine’; the lands descended to the Lords Willoughby d’Eresby. Thompson wrote that the Witham family ‘was very numerous in Boston in the fifteenth and early part of the sixteenth century’, with one Hugh Witham elected into the Corpus Christi guild in 1401 and alderman in 1404; in 1430 Hugh Witham was alderman of the guild, and in the same year one William Wytham was one of the founders of St Mary’s guild; P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), pp. 117–18, 241. 12 See R. Van Belle, Op de drempel van de eeuwigheid – nuieke wrijfprenten van magistrale grafmonumenten 1218>1802 (Brussels, 2008), p. 20. 13 W.J. Blair, ‘An early monastic indent at Hardwick, Oxfordshire’, MBST 11 (1976), pp. 308–11; J. Bertram, ‘Some loose stones’, MBSB 54 (1990), pp. 447–48. 14 Page (ed.), History of Lincoln, volume 2, p. 213, quoting BL, Stowe MS. 141, fol. 37. 15 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, 14 part 1, p. 133.

16 P. and J. Clark (eds), The Boston Assembly Minutes 1545–1575, LRS 77 (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 35, 95. 17 P. Lindley, Tomb destruction and scholarship – medieval monuments in early modern England (Donington, 2007), pp. 8–18. 18 Lindley, Tomb destruction, pp. 21–22; and see also E. Duffy, The stripping of the altars – traditional religion in England 1440–1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp.448–77. 19 D.M. Owen, Church and society in medieval Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire 5 (Lincoln, 1971), p. 130; and see also C. Davidson, Technology, guilds & early English drama (Kalamazoo, 1996), pp. 33– 55. 20 G.A.J. Hodgett, Tudor Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire 6 (Lincoln, 1975), pp. 134–35. 21 Cross, ‘Communal piety’, p. 36.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments atmosphere.28 By 1552 the wardens of St Botolph’s undertook a final reckoning up of the cash raised against what had been spent, under pressure from government officials to account for such things centrally. Sales such as ‘a sute of Redde veluett Imbrotheride w(i)th gold & flowers of grene veluett preest decon and subdecon & iiijor copes to the same tooe of theime of Red Tysshewe and thither tooe of blake Tysshewe xvjli ... a Sepulchre w(i)th the appurt(enances) xxvis viijd ... ix corporaxe Cases w(i)th the Clothes tooe holly water stockes of Latten ij Chaires and Certen books w(hi)ch was after burned by commandment of the ordinare xxs’; were balanced by expenses ‘in and aboute the Reparacion of the north side of the church with leade’ and more, which cost £24 9s 3d. Similarly, £13 0s 8d was spent on the ‘mendyng of the South side of the churche and leade for the same’; £10 on ‘cov(er)yng and new laying the steple with leade’; and in 1549 ‘expencis in and aboute the repayring and amending of the grownde worke of ye churche and of certen wy(n)dowes of the Same and ye walles’ were another £14.29 All this work, the sale of many church vestments and fittings, possibly the whitening of the church interior but undoubtedly the considerable and ongoing expenditure on the church fabric, suggests a radical cleansing of Catholic liturgical hardware, with a making good of the damage so caused.30

As the Boston assembly minutes recorded in 1550, ‘Mr Mayor, Mr Robartson, Mr Felde, Mr Wendon, Mr Kyd and other Aldermen [met] to consider what should be done about the whitening of the church, the high quire and St Peter’s’, 22 suggesting that the church interior was to be whitewashed, obscuring painted decoration and mural imagery,23 and pointedly noting that the guild chapel of St Peter and St Paul should be included in the process. Nothing more is known about the proposed ‘whitening’ so whether it was actually carried out or whether the mere discussion was a minuted corporate gesture towards compliance with government policy is debateable. Because the delicious irony is that here at Boston, as elsewhere, when the artefactual possessions of the church and guilds were liquidated, theoretically in order to stop them falling into the hands of government agents,24 many such things were purchased at decent prices by the mayor and aldermen who had simultaneously sanctioned the ‘whitening’ of the church. Robert Dobe, the mayor, purchased ‘one sute of barred silke w(i)t(h) pellycanes in it prest, decon & subdecon xs ... one Egle for a lettern, xls ... one alter clothe of damaske silke w(i)t(h) redde barres, iiis iiijd, ... ij pelles to lay before the alter xiijs iiijd’. Thomas Browne, one of the King’s commissioners enquiring into the sale of goods from the church, bought ‘a sute of redde Bawdekyn decon & sub decon w(i)t(h) one old redde cope w(i)t(h) garters, xiiis iiijd’ and ‘ij copes of redde reluett embro(i)dered w(i)t(h) Egles, xxxs’; and Thomas Sorsby, mayor in 1550, treated himself to ‘one vestment decon & subdecon of blacke worsted w(i)t(h) thre Copes of the same colo(u)r to ye same xxs’.25 What did these theoretical iconoclasts want with their purchases – the eagle lectern for instance, and the vestments? Were they prized simply for the value of the gold and silver thread and other metals that they contained,26 or that they might be converted to secular uses; or were these individuals, as part of the church and borough establishment, acting purely as safekeepers, or out of sentiment?27 The funds raised by these sales were in theory channelled towards the upkeep of the church, now that the corporation was entirely responsible for it. That there were Bostonians who queried the wisdom of this expenditure ‘about such vain devices and expenses as was thought good by the … mayor and burgesses’ provides an early clue as to the prevailing religious

7.3 Sixteenth century destruction – mechanisms of monument preservation (i) Lineage protectionism How did these changes in social, religious and civic orthodoxy translate into funeral monument destruction? Following on from the physical dismantling of the friars’ churches and their contents, there was now a social realisation that people had suddenly been empowered to capitalise from structures which only a few years previously had been universally revered, for as long as anyone could remember. What started off as a doctrinal dismissal of Purgatory soon turned into an accelerating attack on all religious imagery, including tombs, the prime meaning of which of course was to solicit the forbidden previous orthodoxy of intercessory prayer. By 1550 legislation was issued specifically excluding tombs from this general rout, although of course by then much damage had already been inflicted.31 Many effigial brasses were easily prized up from their slabs and sold off for the value of the metal.32 If the fixtures and fittings of

22

Clark (eds), Boston assembly minutes, p.5. R. Whiting, The reformation of the English parish church (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 128–29. 24 R. Hutton, The rise & fall of merry England – the ritual year 1400– 1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 92–93. 25 E. Peacock, English church furniture, ornaments and decorations, at the period of the Reformation (London, 1866), pp. 222–23. 26 Whiting, Reformation of the English parish church, pp. 79–82; and see S. Tarlow, ‘Reformation and transformation: what happened to Catholic things in a Protestant world?’, in D. Gaimster and R. Gilchrist (eds), The archaeology of reformation 1480–1580 (Leeds, 2003), pp. 108–21. 27 Eamon Duffy has traced the safeguarding of the vestments of Morebath (Devon) which were kept out of sight of the Edwardian commissioners by the local population. Many of the vestments were then re-presented to the church during the Marian reinstitution; see E. Duffy, The voices of Morebath – reformation and rebellion in an English village (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 126–27, 162. 23

28 E.H. Shagan, Popular politics and the English reformation (Cambridge, 2003), p. 291. 29 Peacock, English church furniture, pp. 217–19. 30 The considerable total of £61 17s 3d was spent between 1546 and 1550, far more than was normally expended in churches on routine maintenance of the fabric, which was usually only a few pounds or so annually; see J.C. Cox, Churchwardens’ accounts from the fourteenth century to the close of the seventeenth century (London, 1913), pp. 74– 90. Although in a different area of the country, the fact that in 1593–95 an entirely new aisle was built onto Northiam church (Devon) for £75, contextualises the degree of expenditure at Boston a few decades previously; see H. Colvin, Essays in English architectural history (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 41, 50. 31 Lindley, Tomb destruction, pp. 18–23. 32 J. Bertram, Lost Brasses (Newton Abbot and London, 1976), pp. 15– 19; R. Hutchinson, ‘Tombs of brass are spent: Reformation reuse of

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The lost brasses and indents of Boston the guild chapels were purchased by members of the corporation – the very same artefacts which they or their ancestors may well have bequeathed to the guilds in the first place – could the same process of preservation have been extended to the effigial brasses in the guild chapels? Hence, were brasses removed for safe keeping rather than for sale? Would that policy explain the presence of some of the indents in St Botolph’s? Or was it felt that the preservation of a displaced, and thereafter apparently random collection of brass plates, the significance of which was lost as soon as they were taken up from their slabs, better left unattempted? After all, the only saving grace was that the brass effigies of Bostonians were kept by their descendants rather than sold for their monetary value. It is more likely that the brasses were conserved in their slabs intact. For instance, it is hardly coincidental that a brass laid down c.1520, one of great contemporary importance with the splendid figures of Thomas Robertson (d. 1531) and his two wives, survived to be recorded by antiquaries in the early seventeenth century, as Nicholas Robertson, his son, was inaugural mayor of Boston in 1545 and thereafter a dominant influence in the town’s government.33 Was he himself going to rip up his father’s funeral monument, or allow its destruction by somebody else? Similarly, the large and impressive brass depicting John Robynson (d. 1525), his four wives and all their children, survived until the seventeenth century; one Richard Robinson, presumably one of the children figured, was an aldermen of Boston in the 1560s. Other connections can be established between brasses which survived any mid-sixteenth century inconoclasm, and close descendants of those commemorated who were involved in local government in the second half of the sixteenth century. John Robynson’s fourth and surviving wife, Eleanor, was the daughter of Athelard Bate (d. 1501) whose brass was also preserved post-Reformation; and John himself was one of the executors of Elizabeth, the wife of John Rede of Boston – and a brass to one William Rede (d. 1400) also remained in the church to be recorded in the seventeenth century. John Leeke was a witness to John Robynson’s will, and a brass to him and his two wives styling him as ‘mercator de Boston’ (1527) was also recorded then. Brasses to three priests, William Bond (d. 1485), William Smyth (d. 1505) and William Newton (d. 1545) were also noted in the seventeenth century, probably in the chancel. Perhaps these three men had been active within living memory of the aldermen? There builds up a distinct impression that many brasses survived in the church which commemorated the ancestors and guild brethren of the borough’s aldermen in office after 1545. This is despite the fact that some of the

inscriptions recorded by the seventeenth century antiquaries contained sentences which would have been inflammatory to Protestants – ‘cujus animae propicietur deus’ was a phrase frequently targeted for obliteration. It is tempting to suggest that mid-century at least, family loyalties were far stronger than reformist theology, and the removal of pre-Reformation religious artefacts does not appear in Boston to have been symptomatic of mindless, wanton destruction. In contrast, it looks to have been very carefully managed by the civic authorities who took charge of the church before the fashion for image breaking took hold. In addition the 1550 Act for the destruction of religious imagery in churches, and its proviso excluding tomb monuments from destruction,34 reinforced what comes across as a lineage protectionism of the brasses, albeit a lineage established not in the fashion of a gentle family, by ongoing direct descent, but in a network established both laterally and vertically between commercially driven merchants. (ii) Iconographic toleration of brasses by Protestants Tomb sculpture was now also regarded with a changed mindset assisted by the fact that the types of effigial brasses laid down at Boston clearly differ in many ways from religious imagery involved in the liturgy or paraliturgy. Firstly, brasses were on the floor, set in a position of humility, and with the practical function of marking a grave – sometimes a dynastic grave. Floor monuments could never be comfortably involved in forms of liturgy or ritual: intercessory masses were recited in front of guild or nearby altars; devotional prayers were directed upwards towards religious images set on high, on pillars or above altars, and not down towards the floor. The two dimensions of brasses denied them the plasticity of sculptured religious figures, the appearance of which would mystically change in different lights and viewed from different angles. Brasses, after all, were flat pictures of people cut out in a dull metal and frequently walked upon. Secondly, the over-riding imagery of the brasses comprised effigies of the civil laity, depicted in practical, day to day attire; men were with their wives and children representing generations of families just as lived in the town. Thirdly, marks of civil status such as heraldry and merchants’ marks were prominently displayed. Lastly, there were few religious symbols on such monuments, and any that were present were small, unimportant parts of the composition. Brasses such as that to John Robynson (d. 1525) and his four wives, could now be construed as having a completely different role compared to their preReformation function. Laid down probably on John’s death in 1525 the original purpose of this brass was to establish a relationship between the living and the remembrance of the dead, the inscription recording his foundation of a chantry in one of the guild chapels. Reflecting the new orthodoxy however, this relationship changed to one between the living and remembering the dead in their lives, understanding their role in life as examplars. Hence, here now was John Robynson the successful trader, businessman and merchant of the staple

monumental brasses’, in Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds), Archaeology of reformation, pp. 450–68. 33 As well as Sally Badham’s account of the Robertson brass at Boston in chapter 6, see also Idem, ‘The Robertsons remembered: two generations of Calais staplers at Algarkirk, Lincolnshire’, in Barron and Burgess (eds), Memory and commemoration, pp. 202–17. The brasses and glass commemorating the Robertsons at Algarkirk also survived until the seventeenth century – evidence of more hands-on protectionism?

34

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Lindley, Tomb destruction and scholarship, p. 21.

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments of Calais, with all his wives, each depicted with their eyes open, and all grouped together in fashionable dress, standing on grassy mounds, and with their children congregated below in little jostling groups;35 it was a visible mnemonic of how the family would have been at prayer together in church. John’s civic mark, either heraldic or mercantile, was placed centrally, importantly, above his head. This was a prolific family, a prosperous man, a man of considerable civic status, and hence a man whose – understood – good works performed during life marked him out as an example to the Protestant onlooker to follow.

changes to the fabric, and building on its foundation in the large collection of Tournai marble incised slabs which formed a large part of the church floor. 7.4 Sixteenth century recycling of earlier monuments? All this said, some brasses perished, either leaving the empty, anonymous slabs which it has proved impossible to attribute, or brasses and slabs disappearing in their entirety. However, in analysing the brasses which were recorded by the seventeenth-century antiquaries, several anomalies emerge. For a start, no fifteenth century brasses were recorded in the chancel (the logical site for ecclesiastical commemoration) other than that late in the century of William Bond (d. 1485).37 Did other fifteenth century priests have their monuments looted; were their inscriptions removed (perhaps saving the monuments from total destruction) but rendering them anonymous; or did they never have monuments at Boston anyway, although the empty slab (c.1400) of the brass of a priest under a canopy (Appendix 1), suggests that they did. Sally Badham has already identified a relative absence of brasses in St Botolph’s earlier than the mid-fifteenth century,38 this despite the fact that a brass and slab engraving workshop (Fens 1 series) was most likely established in the town at the start of that century.39 There are only four brasses and indents produced by this workshop remaining at Boston however, a mere 11% of the total known output. There must have been more of this workshop’s products laid down in St Botolph’s of which we now have no knowledge at all except for references in wills, many of which are discussed by Sally Badham in chapter 6. And other monuments were commissioned which have disappeared completely. Where, for instance, is the marble stone ‘that lies over Lady Margaret de Orby, my grandmother in the church of St Botolph’s’ which Mary, Lady Roos, in her will of 1394, desired to be copied for her own monument?40 There is no physical or other documentary record of its existence. Did these more ancient artefacts lack a contemporary identity and meaning to the churchwardens and aldermen of the mid-sixteenth century, who possibly had no great interest in their preservation? To take another example, the c.1500 slab with the indent of a brass to a priest, possibly Alan Lamkin, is now found close to the original

(iii) Preservation by location Lastly, did the physical location of brasses also assist in their preservation? It seems likely that some brasses laid down within the precincts of guild chapels survived the iconoclasm of the mid-sixteenth century. Those to the Pescod, Flete, Leeke, Robertson and Robynson families, for instance, were all preserved until at least the seventeenth century and all were likely to have been located within the reserved privacy of guild chapels, away from mainstream attention.36 Hence, many brasses may have survived reformation iconoclasm due to a combination of careful civic control over changes to the church and guild chapels’ fabric; and there may also have existed a familial and mercantile protectionism, which was underpinned by a revised appreciation of the meaning of brasses in upholding aspects of Protestant ideology. There was, ultimately, no dichotomy of uncertainty as to how these brass figures might be interpreted. They could not be religious idols: they were the pictures of ordinary citizens of Boston, represented in life, those very same lives being vividly and personally recalled by the same and next generations of Bostonians. Both the sense and the physical artefacts of a corporate mercantile archive based on tomb monuments persisted therefore, despite other 35

This was then a standardised format of effigial representation; see M.W. Norris, Monumental Brasses – the memorials, 2 vols (London, 1977), 1, pp. 161–66. 36 The scale of this sort of protectionism, that of obscuring or hiding a tomb on purpose, is difficult to assess, as we need the information that post-Reformation a monument was apparently not visible, but later on was on display again. That this occurred in the church of St Margaret, New Fish Street, London, is without doubt however. The tomb of John de Coggeshall (d. 1384) was not recorded by John Stow in the first edition of his Survey of London (1598), yet in subsequent editions, for the same church, ‘Monuments it hath none; onely one of note, and well worth the observation, being unknowne, and not found till very lately; whereof Master Wood (the reverend Parson of the Church), made mee acquainted by his Clerke, to have me come see it, which I did very thankfully. Finding it to bee the figure of a man of good respect, lying upon his Tombe … in the said Church wall, under the Marble Stone in the Window, next to S. Peter’s Altar on the North side of the Church’ (John Stow, The survey of London, [London, 1633 edn], pp. 230–31). It is clear that this figure ‘in the Church wall’ was covered over during the late sixteenth century, but later on – during a period of Laudianism perhaps? – it was deemed appropriate that this tomb might be ‘found’ again. It is quite conceivable that the same principle of preservation operated at Boston, that brasses on gravestones on the floor might easily have been covered over or otherwise obscured during periods of scrutiny from potentially unfavourable authorities. We are very grateful to Justin Colson and Christian Steer for discussing the Coggeshall monument with me, and highlighting the potential importance of this means of tomb preservation.

37 The likelihood was that John Strensall’s brass (d. 1408) was also in the chancel, but being without its inscription it was not recorded in the early seventeenth century by any of the touring antiquaries. This still leaves a gap of over seventy-five years without a single attribution however. 38 Badham, ‘The Robertsons remembered’, p. 217. 39 S.F. Badham, ‘The Fens 1 series: an early fifteenth-century group of monumental brasses and incised slabs’, JBAA 142 (1989), pp. 46–62. 40 J. Ward (ed.), Women of the English nobility and gentry 1066–1500 (Manchester, 1995), p. 223, quoted by Badham, ‘The Robertsons remembered’, p. 217. The will reads ‘corpus meum ad sepelendium in Monasterio B. Mariae Rivallensis, in choro ejusdem Monasterii, prope corpus Domini Johannis de Roos Domini de Hamelac, conjugis mei. Item lego melius averium meum ad offerendum die sepulturae meae pro principali meo. Item lego as facturam petrae marmoreae pro tumulo meo, sicut jacet super Dominam Margaretam de Orrby aveam meam, in ecclesia Sancti Botulphi, cs.’; J. Raine (ed.), Testamenta Eboracensia; or wills registered at York … part 1, Surtees Society 4 (London, 1836), pp. 201–02.

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The lost brasses and indents of Boston chapel of SS Peter and Paul in the north aisle. Was it moved here? Or was it in fact, as a Fens 2 brass and therefore commissioned in Boston itself possibly by a guild chaplain (whom nobody recalled and who by then had no relatives in the town), from which the brass was taken when the chapel was sanitised, although at least the slab was left alone as a utilitarian part of the flooring? Supplementing this contemporary lack of regard for older monuments, spatial pressure on favourable burial sites would undoubtedly have built up during the latter half of the fifteenth century when growing numbers of individuals requested, and were permitted, intra-mural burial.41 Not all of them would have wished to be commemorated by individual grave markers, but a considerable number unquestionably would have desired this type of memorialisation. If early-sixteenth century brasses were prolific in comparison to those dating from the previous two hundred years, could there have been an occupational rolling turnover of these flat monuments in the floor? Hence, by the start of the sixteenth century if there were no living relatives of a person or persons commemorated by a brass laid down, say, fifty to a hundred or more years earlier, by which time as well any anniversary masses, rituals and other verbal means of remembrance would also almost certainly have ceased, it is possible that their brass was coolly taken up and reused,42 or melted down.43 The slab might then have been planed down, or turned over and reinscribed, or simply refitted in situ with new brasses to the individual who had appropriated the slab for his own use, perhaps as well ejecting from the grave into an ossuary the bones of the previous occupants.44 Crucially, the location of these slabs would have been preserved, newly memorialised, and the persons newly commemorated would have benefited from their monuments being located in a particular, favoured place – either for sentimental reasons, close to a saint’s image; or for pragmatic concerns, such as in areas of high visibility or holiness, to solicit intercessory prayer. This re-use may in part explain the frequent finding at Boston of London-made brasses inserted into locally quarried oolite stones. These perhaps housed earlyfifteenth century Fens 1 series brasses,45 but the original

plates were removed and substituted by the new owner with his own, fashionable London-made plates.46 Such a process would have proved economically and socially astute: not only would they save on the costs of buying and transporting a stone slab, but the entire process could have been engineered in their lifetime, ensuring their interment at the location they selected when alive marked with the enduring imagery they wanted, and therefore removing that responsibility – and potential liability – away from their executors.47 On the other hand, living descendants of those commemorated by the floor monuments, or those still remembered in life by fellow guildsmen and merchant traders – part of the merchants’ ‘club’ – would naturally have been reluctant to remove these recently commissioned monuments and substitute their own, unless the former were already decayed.48 Generally they would have needed to find alternative loci for burial, or appropriated gravestones which had lost their personal contemporaneous affiliations.49 Does this chronological turnover explain the relative lack of mid-fifteenth century monuments at Boston as a peculiarity; or, because it is also found elsewhere in an urban situation,50 was this part of a wider but still urbanised trend? If the hypothetical reuse of slabs with brasses was statistically significant, clearly it came to an abrupt halt at the Reformation. There was an understandable nervousness about erecting new monuments post-Reformation; but in places like Boston situation was probably a mix of the two possibilities. We are grateful to Sally Badham for discussing this point with us. 46 There was a solid awareness of different markets for different trades with London the centre for luxury goods. J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales 4, 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 501, identifies a gentry farmer in Lincolnshire who sold his sheep at Stamford, his cattle at Newark, purchased steers at Spilsby, his fish at Boston, wine in Bourne and his luxuries in London. 47 Nicholas Rogers discusses the possibilities of tombs erected by individuals in their lifetime in the crowded burial environment of the urban church of St Mary’s, Bury St Edmund’s (Suffolk); see Idem, ‘Hic Iacet...: the location of monuments in late medieval parish churches’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The parish in late medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 15 (Donington, 2006), pp. 261–81, esp. 275–76. 48 For instance, the 1472 will of William Constantine, gentleman, of Grey’s Inn, London, recorded that he wished ‘to be buried … under a new stone where now is an old broken stone laid by my ancestors as proved by their testaments, with my arms and a superscription so that the souls of me and they might be remembered by prayers’, TNA: PROB11/6, fol. 38v. We are grateful to Christian Steer for this reference. 49 In the 1570s George Clynt, churchwarden of St George, Botolph Lane, London, made careful notes of the persons buried there ‘which you may fynde written in the olde tyme upon their tombe and Gravestones in letters of brasse’. This suggests not just a complete tolerance of these ‘old tyme’ monuments but a recognition of their permanent value as grave markers, by which Clynt pragmatically identified areas in the church which could be used for more burials; see S. Freeth, ‘Brasses at St George Botolph Hill, London, in 1574’, MBST 14 (1993), pp. 69–71. We are once again very grateful to Christian Steer for this reference. 50 J. Finch, Church monuments in Norfolk before 1850 – an archaeology of commemoration, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 317 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 37–78. Certainly brasses and slabs were ejected from churches in an attempt to make room for more burials and those thereby commemorated installing their own monuments; see S. Badham, ‘Medieval greens: recycling brasses and their slabs’, MBSB 93 (2003), pp. 673–74.

41 C. Daniell, Death and burial in medieval England 1066–1550 (London, 1997), pp. 96–97; V. Harding, The dead and the living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 121–32. 42 Norris, Memorials, 1, pp. 268–73; J. Page-Phillips, Palimpsests – the backs of monumental brasses, 2 vols (London, 1980), 1, pp. 17–18. 43 H.B. Walters, London churches at the Reformation with an account of their contents (London, 1939), p. 118, records from one particular church that the ‘weight of mettell which was taken vpon the graue stones … as iijd the lb’, with no possible interpretation other than that this was the scrap value of the brass. See also Hutchinson, ‘Tombs of brass are spent’, pp. 458–60; and P. Cockerham, ‘Review of Robert Hutchinson, “Tombs of brass are spent”’, MBSB 95 (January 2004), pp. 719–22, and MBSB 96 (May 2004), pp. 735–39. 44 At the Episcopal visitation of 1636 the churchwardens ‘Present and certify that … a little out place of the church, wherein dead men’s [bones] were used to be laid altogether were blown down or much defaced’, quoted by M. Spurrell, The Puritan book of Boston, History of Boston Series 5 (Boston, 1972), pp. 25–26. 45 This phenomenon is fairly widespread in Lincolnshire however, and it may well be that new slabs of oolite stone obtained locally were also set with London-made brasses, rather than each oolite stone necessarily once having been set with Fens-made brasses. In all likelihood the

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments where pre-Reformation monuments were largely untouched and valued (but in a new Protestant light) by descendants of those anciently memorialised, then these monuments would have endured further to be pragmatically employed for social reasons by succeeding generations of the same family. They demonstrated a lineage and status continuity, upholding the social identity of the family within the parish as well as artefactually retaining their space inside the church itself, the one resonating in the other.51 The enduring identity of the family and its position inside the collectively acknowledged social pyramid was perpetually upheld by this means.52 However, despite the apparent statistical logic in hypothesising that monument recycling occurred at Boston and elsewhere – that early monuments were simply substituted by later ones – can we be sure that this is the only factor responsible for the chronological peaks and troughs of the monument numbers that we find? The decades c.1430 to c.1470 were a period of general urban decline in England, with a considerable hunger in the 1430s followed by a trade depression until c.1460 as London absorbed much provincial business.53 In this context it was easier to commission a brass in the first and last quarters of the fifteenth century than in the middle of it. Hence, the Fens 1 series petered out by the 1430s, and the provincial series at Norwich was only just starting up by the middle of the century when the prolific London B workshop faltered shortly afterwards. York products reappeared in the 1460s after a lacuna of several decades, workshops at Bury St Edmunds and Coventry emerged only by the end of the century, and the business in Cambridge started later still.54 Not only might there have been a decreased demand for monuments in the provinces, but there may also have been difficulties in supply. Lastly, moving outside England to north-west mainland Europe, a detailed analysis of monuments erected in medieval Paris traces a steady rise during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, peaking in the period 1390–1439.55 There was a slight depression during 1440– 89 countered by the period 1490–1540 which was the most prolific of all,56 although the second half of the

sixteenth century reverted to the numbers found in the early fifteenth century.57 In a country which suffered from neither a total monastic ablation nor a series of theological reformations in the middle of the sixteenth century, then the Parisian data are remarkably similar to those in Boston, with a fall in the middle of the fifteenth century balanced by a rise thereafter. The sixteenth century peak in Paris occurred therefore not because of monument recycling but because of a genuine increase in sixteenth century commissions. Similarly, the midfifteenth century depression was just that, extending throughout urban England and Paris. Of course in both countries the dynamism of the commemorative landscape within a church continued, maintained by family responses to intra-mural burial, with tombs removed, renewed or replaced.58 But despite the temptation of thinking that the chronological and familial patterns visible in what survives of the brasses in St Botolph’s were ultimately conditioned by the commemorative pragmatism of succeeding generations, these monumental patterns were real, not just statistically apparent. The data reflect commissions not losses. 7.5 Seventeenth century destruction – Puritan zeal Moving on from the uncertainties of the mid-sixteenth century, Thompson records repairs to the fabric of St Botolph in 1577, with the roof re-leaded in 1602 and the chancel repaired in 1604, 1606 and 1608.59 Decay and repair were in balance, or at least the upkeep of the church was attempted in accordance with the Homily for repairing and keeping clean, and comely adorning of Churches.60 Ultimately though it can only have been to the detriment of the brasses and other monuments. During this period much of the county, and Boston in particular, had favourably absorbed a Protestantism which refused to be deflected by the reforming Arminianism favoured by James I.61 Several factors influenced this ideological Notre-Dame and the Benedictine abbeys, to the detriment of the mendicants’ houses; Bernard, La sculpture funéraire, 1, pp. 314–16. 57 Author’s (P.C.) own data. 58 C. Steer, ‘“better in remembrance” – medieval commemoration at the Crutched Friars, London’, Church Monuments 25 (2010), pp. 36–57, draws attention the most remarkable will of William Narborough (1491), in which he ordered ‘the exhumation of his parents, their reinterment in a new grave with a more elaborate monument, and the reuse of their grave for his own burial’ (p. 47). 59 Thompson, Boston, p. 164. 60 Certain Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of the late Queen Elizabeth of famous memory (Oxford, 1822 edn), pp. 252–57; and see also K. Fincham and N. Tyacke, Altars Restored – the changing face of English religious worship 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 87–103. 61 Hodgett, Tudor Lincolnshire, pp. 168–88; and F. Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), pp. 223–24, and she notes (p. 247) that ‘the small group of wills available for the town of Boston … shows 51 per cent with solifidian preambles under [King] Edward’. The polemic Protestantism of one Elizabethan preacher in particular, Melchior Smith, was well received in the town, as he insisted later on ‘that with enemies like the people of Boston he had no need of friends: “Their love was such towards him that willingly they would hear none preach but him.”’; P. Collinson, The birthpangs of Protestant England – religious and cultural changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 57. See also C. Cross, ‘Protestant evangelism in Boston on the accession of Elizabeth: the ministry of Melchior Smith’, in D.M. Loades (ed.), John Foxe at home and abroad (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 23–30.

51 S. Roffey, ‘Deconstructing a symbolic world: the Reformation and the English medieval parish chantry’, in Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds), Archaeology of reformation, pp. 341–55; S. Roffey, The medieval chantry chapel – an archaeology (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 130–39. 52 V. Harding, ‘Choices and changes: death, burial and the English Reformation’, in Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds), Archaeology of reformation, pp. 386–98. esp. p. 388. 53 R.B. Dobson, ‘Urban decline in medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series 27 (1977), pp. 1–22. We are grateful to Prof. Nigel Saul for alerting us to this paper. 54 Norris, Memorials, 1, 177–95; S. Badham, ‘Evidence for the minor funerary monument industry 1100–1500’, in K. Giles and C. Dyer (eds), Town and country in the middle ages – contrasts, contacts and interconnections, 1100–1500, Society for Medieval Archaeology monograph 22 (Leeds, 2007), pp. 165–95, esp. 169–73. 55 R.-P. Bernard, La sculpture funéraire mediévale à Paris (1140–1540), 2 vols (Unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris IV [2000]), 1, p. 449. 56 The 1440–1489 depression was explained as incumbent upon the slow recovery of France and its capital from the Hundred Years’ War, a reduction in the population of Paris, and the frequent absence of the kings from the city. Thereafter, the early-sixteenth-century boom period was fuelled by a rise in clergy commemorations, using ‘plates-tomb’ (i.e. brasses and incised slabs) laid down particularly in the cathedral of

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The lost brasses and indents of Boston shift. Firstly, there was a growing empathy with Protestantism even before the Reformation, ‘one Boston friar demonstrated his reforming sympathies by denouncing idolatry as the great rood from St Botolph’s was being burnt in the Market Place on Cromwell’s orders on 7 September 1538, “which [sermon]”… the vice-regent was informed, “hath done much good and hath turned many men’s hearts”’.62 Secondly, three redoubtable university-educated Protestants all had close and sometimes directly influential links with the town: Thomas Garrard schoolmaster,63 John Taverner choirmaster,64 and John Foxe martyrologist.65 Lastly, and most significantly, the transfer of control over all church matters to the corporation meant that the town’s élite both strengthened and gained strength from this religious transformation. The town’s religion was once primarily visual, in imagery, drama and rituals, but it changed to one which was much more easy to control, as a religion which was spread by preaching.66 Effectively this led to a secularisation of the church at Boston both physically and theologically: cleanse the church to abolish visual distractions during the services, appoint the right preacher, and there was as much civic control over the church as there was over the town itself. Just to increase the influence of preaching even further in the town, a mayor’s chaplain was appointed, who, together with the corporation-sponsored vicar, provided Boston with a comfortable ideological buffer against contemporary Episcopal disapproval. At the Episcopal visitation of the county in 1604 it was recorded that not only did sixty-one ministers fail to wear a surplice, or properly to perform the ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, but that Thomas Wooll, the fiercely Protestant vicar of Boston, ‘when offered a surplice “he in scorne thereof, as it seemeth, maketh it his cushion to sitt on”’, neither did he sign with the sign of the cross in baptism.67 The subsequent appointment of the Puritan minister John Cotton to Boston in 1612 was probably much more controversial in the county than it was in the town therefore.68 He experimented with the Order of Service and enjoyed a relatively unfettered

Puritan autonomy, so that ultimately ‘it hence came to pass, that our Lord Jesus Christ was now worshipped in Boston, without the use of the liturgy, or of those vestments ... the sign of the cross was laid aside, not only in baptism, but also in the mayor’s mace ... because it had been so much abused into idolatry’.69 This last comment related to an incident which was deemed sufficiently serious, at this period of acute sensitivity to regal disloyalty, to be officially reported to the Privy Council. On 7 April 1621 it was revealed that ‘The town maces of Boston being left in a window, the tops, containing the crosses &c., were cut off by some person unknown, and the mischief not being found out till the Mayor was going to Church on the Sunday, they were obliged to be thus carried before him. He was not privy to the offence and ordered the goldsmith of Boston to mend the maces.’70 Those subsequently examined under oath denied being or knowing the perpetrator, but one Atherton Hough, churchwarden, confessed that although he ‘did not cut the crosses from the maces …[he]… did break off the hand and arm from an image of a Pope in the steeple of the church, thinking it contrary to the statute of 1. Eliz. against images in churches.’71 By the following month the matter had fizzled out altogether, but this and wider issues of iconoclasm at Boston were railed against by Robert Sanderson, bishop of Lincoln, in a sermon delivered in St Botolph’s at his visitation there in 1621: The question is, Whether the zealous intervention of a good end may not warrant it good, or at least excuse it from being evil and a sin. I need not frame a case for the illustration of this instance: the inconsiderate forwardness of some hath made it to my hand. You may read it in the disfigured windows and walls of this Church. Pictures, and statues, and images, and, for their sakes, the windows and walls where they stood, have been heretofore and of late pulled down, and broken in pieces and defaced, without the command, or so much as leave, of those who have power to reform things amiss in that kind.72

62

Cross, ‘Communal Piety’, p. 36. S. Wabuda, ‘Garrard, Thomas (1498–1540)’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004; online edn, 2008) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10560], accessed 14 March 2011. 64 R. Bowers, ‘Taverner, John (c.1490–1545)’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004; online edn, 2010) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27004], accessed 14 March 2011. 65 T.S. Freeman, ‘Foxe, John (1516/17–1587)’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004; online edn, 2008) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10050], accessed 14 March 2011; and for a particular account of Foxe relating to Boston see Thompson, Boston, pp. 404–11. 66 This sensory dichotomy is discussed by C. Davidson, ‘The anti-visual prejudice’, in C. Davidson and A.E. Nichols (eds), Iconoclasm vs. art and drama (Kalamazoo, 1988), pp. 33–46. 67 C. Holmes, Seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire 7 (Lincoln, 1980), pp. 92–93. 68 J. Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 37, 93. Initially bishop Barlow contemplated blocking the appointment on the grounds that Cotton was too young to be given the responsibility of ministering over such a ‘large and fractious’ congregation, but in the end he gave way and confirmed his appointment; Cross, ‘Communal Piety’, p. 38. For Cotton see F.J. Bremer, ‘Cotton, John (1585–1652)’, ODNB (Oxford, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6416], accessed 14 March 2011. 63

What conclusions can we draw from this episode? Firstly, that there were still statues and pictures in the church which were regarded as ‘saintly’, and which had survived iconoclastic attacks until then. Secondly, that there was an active spirit of iconoclasm in the congregation, imbued by a sense of religious purpose which doubtless gained strength from the radically Puritan vicar John Cotton and his followers. Lastly, that although such things had previously gone un-noticed in the town, this particular incident, as it involved 69

T. Robbins (ed.), Magnali Christi Americana, or the ecclesiastical history of New-England by Cotton Mather, 2 vols (Hartford, 1855), 1, p. 261. 70 CSP, 1619–1623, p. 244; and for a comprehensive account see G.B. Blenkin, ‘Notices of Boston in 1621’, AASRP 10 (1870), pp. 223–31. 71 CSP, 1619–1623, p. 245. 72 W. Jacobson (ed.), The works of Robert Sanderson D.D. sometime bishop of Lincoln, 6 vols (Oxford, 1854), 2, pp. 64–65.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments desecration of civic regalia, was regarded as not only an act of religious iconoclasm (and hence tolerable?) but more seriously as an attack against civil order.73 Puritans found comfort in orderly, plain, hall-like churches, with strict visual contrasts of black and white, devoid of anything to catch the eye, so that the mind could focus totally on receiving and understanding the word of God.74 Hence, if fervent but independent iconoclastic factions were at work in Boston in the early 1620s it is difficult to think that effigial brasses and their accoutrements were spared. Could the timing of this possible monument destruction coincide with the fact that notes of extant brasses were made at the start of the century by the unknown antiquary, as Sally Badham has analysed in chapter 6 and Appendix 1, and which recorded inscriptions were later adopted by Holles as his own, finding fewer monuments left in situ than his predecessor? On the other hand, the fact that brasses were still being laid down at this time to persons influential in the town and hinterland, is highly significant. Richard Briggs, mayor and alderman (d. 1584) most likely had a brass; Robert Towneley, comptroller of the port and alderman (d. 1588) was commemorated with an inscription and heraldic achievement in brass, as was a local gentleman, Richard Bolle of Haugh esq. (d. 1591);75 brasses to these last two individuals survive. Significantly, the unknown antiquary noted all three of these monuments ‘In Choro majori’, the main choir.76 This location was the most prominent in the church so brasses placed here to members of the town corporation were markers of the town’s civic authority dominating the physical heart of the church, as well as suggesting that despite the reformed orthodoxy there was still very much an element of sanctity to being buried there, close to the Corporation’s stalls.77 These brasses were also adjacent to those commemorating early-sixteenth century ecclesiastics, on two of whose monuments the unknown antiquary recorded the intercessory phraseology ‘Cuius animae &c’. In the choir there evolved this curious paradox of post-Reformation monuments, which celebrated the lives of the deceased as a part of the godly community in the town, laid next to pre-Reformation

monuments originally positioned within the much wider context of visual and ritual commemoration of the deceased, encouraging remembrance of the soul by intercessory prayer. They were inescapably visual, potentially inflammatory reminders of the ‘old’ religion, tolerated at the Reformation perhaps because of personal memories, but anathema to Puritans seventy years later.78 Ultimately the priests’ monuments perished but those of Towneley and Bolle endured. Their survival may have been due to being located within the privileged security of the chancel, but more likely it was due to a continued civic and familial remembrance and respect for the individual, itself stressed by the monuments’ lexical properties which focussed on the social memory and identity of that person. Additionally the brasses were noneffigial and might have been judged to be securely anodyne in any interpretation of ‘images’.79 7.6 Seventeenth century destruction – structural changes to Boston’s churches Moving away from St Botolph’s, in 1626 John Williams, Sanderson’s successor as bishop of Lincoln, granted a licence to the churchwardens to take down ‘the ruins of the church and chapel of St John, and to employ or convert the same towards repairing the parish church of St Botolph’ – at which point the (unknown) numbers of monuments in St John’s would have been discarded and / or sold off, if they had not already disappeared, as ‘the late church or chapel of St John had not been employed to any divine use for the space of 200 year or thereabouts’.80 The three-dimensional tombs from the mid-fifteenth century of a man in armour and a lady, discussed by Mark Downing in chapter 9, were most likely recovered from St John’s church at this time, finding sanctuary in St Botolph’s. It might be asked why these effigies were saved; why were they re-housed when probably other 78 This is a challenging topic yet to be fully addressed, but see P. Lindley, ‘Innovation, tradition and disruption in tomb-sculpture’, in D. Gainster and P. Stamper (eds), The age of transition – the archaeology of English culture 1400–1600 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 77–92; J. Finch, ‘A reformation of meaning: commemoration and remembering the dead in the parish church, 1450–1640’, in Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds), Archaeology of reformation, pp. 437–49; and M. Aston, ‘Art and idolatry: reformed funeral monuments?’, in T. Hamling and R.L. Williams (eds), Art re-formed – re-assessing the impact of the reformation on the visual arts (Newcastle, 2007), pp. 243–61. 79 The fact that the brass to William and Mary Dinley (1626), comprising an inscription with a shield and symbols of mortality, was not recorded by the unknown seventeenth century antiquary, may provide a terminus ante quem for this primary source. William died in 1604, and his will (TNA: PROB11/105, will dated 10 November 1604) incorporates a vehemently Protestant passage leaving no doubt as to his religion. Commissioning a brass to such a Protestant ideologue must have been seen as conveying an advantage to his descendants when it was laid down in 1626. For the inscription see Thompson, Boston, p. 197. 80 Thompson, Boston, p. 164; although this entry in the corporation’s records conflicts with their aim in 1574, when it was agreed that ‘the churche of Saint Johannis ... shalbe repayred & amended ... & that ther shalbe wekelye Service ther done by ... the Maiors Chapleyne’; see Clark (eds), Boston Assembly Minutes, p. 102. Alternatively, did this 1574 restoration amount to anything; was it ever carried out? Or was it all just part of a corporation ploy aiming to underpin the appointment of the Mayor’s chaplain by nominally providing him with a building to preach in which was unconnected with St Botolph’s, and thereby reducing potential Episcopal scepticism over both the need for such a preacher, and the corporation’s right to appoint one?

73 For an account of iconoclasm specifically targeting crosses see M. Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England: official and clandestine’, in Davidson and Nichols (eds), Iconoclasm, pp. 47–91 at pp. 75–80. 74 M.S. Briggs, Puritan architecture and its future (London and Redhill, 1946); T. Mowl and B Earnshaw, Architecture without Kings – the rise of puritan classicism under Cromwell (Manchester, 1995), pp. 7–22. 75 Thompson, Boston, pp. 192, 197–98. Curiously the unknown antiquary who visited Boston in the early seventeenth century noted this brass with an inscription in Latin, whereas the brass plate today has an inscription in English, although it is convincingly of late-sixteenth / early-seventeenth century date. Were the plates switched at some point to clarify the meaning of the inscription in English as an attempt to prevent damage due to literary ignorance and hence an iconoclastic suspicion? Was the Latin inscription removed and later renewed; or did the unknown antiquary simply translate into Latin what was in front of him in English? See R.E.G. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire Church Notes made by Gervase Holles A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (1911), pp. 154–55. 76 Ibid. 77 For a case study of this paradox see W. Coster, ‘A microcosm of community: burial, space and society in Chester, 1598 to 1633, in W. Coster and A. Spicer (eds), Sacred space in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 124–43.

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The lost brasses and indents of Boston made for magistrates to hear the preacher in church.86 Hence, although in 1601 ‘seats were ordered to be made in the church for the Mayor, &c. at the cost of the Corporation’,87 it was probably not until later that the greater area of the nave and aisles was pewed, leaving many of the floorslabs and brasses exposed to potential iconoclasm in the interim. The Vicar General’s order of 1634 requiring the removal of seats already there suggests an unsatisfactory arrangement until then. The Vicar General continued,

monuments and / or floor slabs in St John’s were destroyed? Was it because these tombs now had an antiquarian interest?81 Or was it also because there was little about these effigies to inflame Puritan sensitivities, and they were just as symbolic of a righteous, muscular Protestantism as those grandiose funeral monuments newly sculpted in the Elizabethan period?82 The solemn, rigid grandeur of the medieval Boston figures, depicted very much alive and with eyes wide open, was emphatically instructive to the beholder as representing the valiant lives of the commemorated, and the fact that they were originally sculpted as intending to represent the dead beseeching intercessory prayer, was easy enough to overlook and misinterpret. A year later, in 1627, and the chapel of the Corpus Christi guild, attached to the south side of the south aisle of St Botolph’s, was reputedly demolished in order to furnish stone for ongoing work, the corporation having directed £6 13s 4d annually to be spent on repairs to the chancel.83 John Cotton may have been instrumental in the removal of these last physical remnants of preReformation guild theology – and he certainly would have welcomed them – before his departure from the town in 1631. Following these structural changes and after a metropolitan visitation in 1634, the Vicar General issued a series of orders,

2. Item – it is ordered That all the pavements of the said Churche and Chancell shalbe levelled & laid even & all the gravestones laid likewise even, in a comely and decent manner ... That the whole fabricke of the Churche & Chancell & especially the roofe and glasse windows of the same shalbe well & sufficiently repaired & amended & new whited all ov(er) & adorned w(i)th devoute & holy sentences of scripture written on the walls thereof ... it is further noted that the Ten commandments and the Kings Ma(j)esties Armes shalbe verie fairly painted & placed in the east end of the said Churche.88 Yet in 1636 the churchwardens still lamented that ‘the church is much in decay especially in three windows and much glass of other windows, and the Kings arms hang up in a large frame or table’.89 The inference is that while the regal symbolism ordered by the Vicar General was put into place as a sop to authority, not much else was done except perhaps the paving, as relating directly to the needs of the congregation. As there were no increases in the amount of funds diverted to church repairs at this time however, it suggests that the church interior was maintained much as previously. Unsurprisingly, Boston and its hinterland were consolidated as a Parliamentary garrison throughout the civil wars of the 1640s. No direct military action

touching the repaire & more orderly keeping & decency in & about the Churche Chancell and Churchyard of Boston ... as followeth, 1. Imprimis – it is ordered That all the seats in the bodie of the said Churche shalbe taken downe and rebuilded in an uniforme manner as they ought to be, leaving a faire spatious alley in the middle of the said Churche.84 It is difficult to identify when the original pewing of the nave, as identified here, was installed. From 1558 the Mayor and aldermen sat in the retained medieval stalls in the chancel on ‘pryncipall feastes’ only, otherwise making do with seats in ‘Our Lady’s quere’ – that is, the guild chapel of St Mary – distinguished from the common council who met in ‘St Peter’s Quire’ – the guild chapel of SS Peter and Paul.85 Yet with the growing corporation commitment to ‘godly religion’ and the inherent importance of a preacher delivering a sermon, it is likely that the first church seating dated from around the end of the sixteenth / start of the seventeenth century, when, in particular, special seating arrangements were

81

See Lindley, Tomb destruction and scholarship, pp. 96-109. N. Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 97–102; and for a Lincolnshire example see the monument at Snarford to Sir Thomas St Paule (d. 1582) illustrated by N. Pevsner and J. Harris, The Buildings of England – Lincolnshire (2nd edn, London, 1989), pl. 76. 83 See chapter 6; and also H. Fenning, ‘The guild of Corpus Christi’, in W. Ormrod (ed.), The Guilds in Boston (Boston, 1993), pp. 35–44. 84 LAO: DIOC/ADD REG/3, Bishops Act Book, 1611–1693 (‘The Red Book’), fol. 192r. 85 Clark (eds), Boston assembly minutes, pp. 26, 37. 82

86

Clark (eds), Boston assembly minutes, p. xvii; and for the motivation for installing pews see G.W.O. Addleshaw and F. Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London, 1948), pp. 86–98. 87 Thompson, Boston, p. 185. 88 LAO: DIOC/ADD REG/3, fol. 192r; see also Spurrell, Puritan book of Boston, pp. 24–25; and Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, pp. 202-03. 89 Spurrell, Puritan book of Boston, pp. 24–25.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 7.1 Early eighteenth century print of exterior of St Botolph’s church with floor plan from Dr William Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum.

133

The lost brasses and indents of Boston

Fig. 7.2 Floor plan of St. Botolph’s church c.1725, by Stukeley. The continual pattern of church repairs post-conflict in 1648, 1651, 1666 and 167494 suggests just a rolling maintenance programme of the sort traceable in many sets of churchwardens’ accounts,95 hinting at a structure which was ticking over, and not one which the corporation was charged with the kind of restoration necessary after radical, unfocussed vandalism. As Hipkin concluded in her study of social and economic conditions in the district of Holland during the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘So far from disorder and confusion being predominant in the town during these years, references to any departure from the ordinary course of events are comparatively few and far between’; ‘the municipal records give us a picture of its inhabitants pursuing their everyday business exactly as before 1640.’96 By 1657 the spatial pressure of burials at St Botolph’s had become intense, so as it was forbidden to continue to use the churchyard, ‘a piece of Ground ... belonging to the friars’ recommenced its original purpose ironically as a cemetery, no doubt with further destruction of any remaining structures including floor slabs.97 Intramural burials were still permitted but only for the massive

seriously threatened the town, and for good or for bad the zealous Presbyterian Edward King, Lord Manchester’s deputy, was appointed governor for much of that period, investing the town with his own brand of religious orthodoxy.90 But in contrast to the nearby cathedrals of Lincoln and Peterborough, which were comprehensively sacked by roving Parliamentary forces en route to battle,91 it is tempting to think that at Boston, even though the townspeople were staggering under the continuous burden of billeting the forces, that these same militia were less viciously destructive. Besides, despite the Ordinances of 1641, 1643 and 1644 regarding ‘the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry’92 was there anything much left to destroy or deface after the vicissitudes during Cotton’s incumbency two decades previously?93 And were many of the brasses and slabs now covered by pews anyway? 90

Holmes, Seventeenth century Lincolnshire, pp. 188–93, 198–99. J. Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 206–10. 92 Ibid., pp. 257–61; and see also Lindley, Tomb destruction, pp. 113– 24. 93 Anon., Descriptive & historical account of St Botolph’s church, Boston (Boston, 1842), p. 44, comments in relation to Cromwell and the Puritans, that ‘Tradition asserts that he used the aisles as stables for his horses’. This is repeated by G. Jebb, A guide to the church of S. Botolph with notes on the history and antiquities of Boston and Skirbeck (Boston, 1903), p. 23, such that ‘In the spring of 1643 a considerable Parliamentary army was assembled at Boston under Cromwell, and this force bivouacked in the Church and did much wanton mischief there’; and Jebb enlarged on this account in E.M. Sympson (ed.), Memorials of old Lincolnshire (London, 1911), p.122, such that ‘the horses were tethered to iron rings fixed in the pillars’. However, few other typical signs of 1640s iconoclasm are present, not just in Boston but in the 91

wider county, for which see T. Cooper, ‘Iconoclasm in other counties of the Eastern association’, in Idem (ed.), The journal of William Dowsing – iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English civil war (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 123–37, at 129–30. 94 Thompson, Boston, pp. 164–65. 95 Cox, Churchwardens’ accounts, pp. 74–90. 96 G.M. Hipkin, ‘Social and economic conditions in the Holland division of Lincolnshire, from 1640 to 1660’, AASRP 40 (1931), pp. 137–256, quotes from pp. 190 and 242. 97 Thompson, Boston, p. 165.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments sum of 40s ‘to be previously paid to the churchwardens’.98 Acting as a powerful deterrent, yet also a useful source of church funds, this measure would have restricted such interments to all but the most prestigious individuals.99 Perhaps after this date therefore, it might be hazarded that there was little disturbance to the church floor?

several structures (now gone) which were associated with the guild chapels: the vestry of SS Peter and Paul’s guild chapel, and that of St Mary’s guild chapel are seen attached to the east end of the north and south aisles respectively. Ranges of box pews are also delineated in the nave and aisles and being on platforms these would have covered and protected a large number of incised slabs and indents now – and then? – positioned between the pillars of the arcades. Other notable features include an enormous organ loft straddling the entrance to the chancel effectively forming a choir screen, with another, western screen in the nave. The pews of the mayor and aldermen were strategically arranged to face the pulpit across the central aisle of the nave; the other Bostonians, conventionally, faced east and so had to turn about to face the preacher in his pulpit.101 Such an arrangement continued to highlight the Protestant desideratum focussing on the Word of God – from the pulpit – rather than on the communion table / communion service which required use of the chancel,102 although a visitor in 1741 noted especially ‘a neat alter piece in the Corinthian taste’103 perhaps indicating an interest in the Baroque. The internal appearance is captured in a contemporary print (Fig. 7.3) although it fails to highlight the improvements which took place in 1715 when a total of £100 was donated ‘towards whitening and cleaning the parish church and pillars’.104 It can therefore only be surmised that, underneath the pews, and despite the work going on elsewhere in the church to satisfy post-Laudian liturgical requirements, the floor brasses, slabs with indents, and incised slabs, remained relatively undisturbed. On the other hand, William Stukeley’s drawing of the remains of the brass to Thomas Flete (d. 1450) and his wife Alice, is dated 1719 and shows two main figures and an inscription, as discussed by Sally Badham in chapter 6 (Fig. 6.9).105 A further, laconic comment of 1742 noted ‘half of it gone’, telling not of wanton destruction but just progressive decay. Countering this, there is the interesting comment by John Byng, fifth viscount Torrington, an eighteenth century collector of antiquities, who occasionally ‘wrenched up’ loose brasses to add to his collection. He visited Boston in 1790 but unfortunately for him, when testing the security of the brasses he found them ‘too firmly fixed’!106

Fig. 7.3 Early eighteenth century print of the nave interior of St Botolph’s church from the west. 7.7 Eighteenth century changes Piecemeal repairs continued throughout the eighteenth century and the church as depicted c.1724 in a print for Dr William Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum appears majestic, well proportioned, and very neat and orderly (Fig. 7.1).100 The ichnography of the church depicted in a small, dedicatory cartouche on the plate, (Fig. 7.2) shows 98

Idem. Comparative costs in the 1650s and 1660s in Cornwall are 13s 4d in the chancel of Liskeard (urban church) and 6s 8d for the ‘middle chancel’ of St Neot (rural church) which seem fairly standard; see P. Cockerham, Continuity and change: the Cornish funeral monument industry 1497–1660, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 412 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 192, 197. 100 W. Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum: or an account of the antiquities and remarkable curiosities in nature and art, observed in travels through Great Britain (London, 1724), pl. 19. It is difficult to judge the verisimilitude of this print of St Botolph’s, as representing little short of a ‘perfect’ structure, with the extant eighteenth century church. The depiction is maybe tinged by Stukeley’s abhorrence of the ‘fanatical destroyers’ and ‘stonekillers’ who had laid waste much of the country’s built heritage that he was so intent on recording, so his ideal of Boston church, dedicated to Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby de Eresby, may have been just that; see A. Walsham, ‘“Like fragments of a shipwreck”: printed images and religious antiquarianism in early modern England’, in M. Hunter (ed.), Printed images in early modern Britain – essays in interpretation (Farnham, 2010), pp. 87–112, esp. pp. 103–04. For a broader appreciation of such antiquarianism see M. Myrone, ‘The Society of Antiquaries and the graphic arts: George Vertue and his legacy’, in S. Pearce (ed.), Visions of Antiquity – the Society of Antiquaries of London 1707-2007, Archaeologia 111 (London, 2007), pp. 99–122, esp. pp. 102–04. 99

7.8 Nineteenth century restoration Subject to continual making good throughout the eighteenth century, and then badly damaged in 1803, it is 101 Anon., St Botolph’s church, Boston, p. 37. The box pews were installed in 1717, see M. Spurrell, Boston parish church (Boston, 3rd edn, 1987), p. 4. 102 Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, pp. 242–49. 103 R.G. Wilson, ‘Journal of a tour through Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in the summer of 1741’, in C. Harper-Bill et al (eds), East Anglia’s History – studies in honour of Norman Scarfe (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 259–88, at p. 278. The ‘Journal’ is an anonymous work, now BL, Add. MS. 38488, fols 17v–49. 104 Thompson, Boston, p. 166. 105 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Top. Gen. e 61, fol. 61v; we are grateful to Sally Badham for discussing this monument with us. 106 P. Whittemore, ‘John Byng: brass collector’, MBSB 115 (September 2010), pp. 292–93.

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The lost brasses and indents of Boston not surprising that ‘in 1843, a subscription was commenced for the repairs of the church, which had for several years past suffered much from decay and neglect.’107 George Gilbert Scott was retained by the Corporation that year to survey and report on the church, and as part of a litany of problems he reported that:

If all the work were carried out to Scott’s wishes then we should now entertain little doubt that the incised slabs, brasses and indents remain in the same locations, or close to where they were in the seventeenth century, or earlier still. Because the Civil Wars and Commonwealth seem unlikely to have been an era of great monumental destruction, as well as the church floor being progressively covered over by pews, both the greatest impetus as well as the greatest opportunity for the specific targeting of brass effigies would have been the first few decades of the seventeenth century. Scott’s works in removing the church floor in 1851–53 and excavating below it revealed ‘Several stone coffins ... beneath the pillars of the present church, to which they had been used as foundations’, so the scale of his archaeology should not be underestimated.113 There is, however, no clear evidence that any slabs, brasses or indents were substantially repositioned.

The stone floor is in parts very much broken, and is throughout very damp. I should think it desirable to relay it on a good bed of concrete or shingle. I would, however, strongly recommend that the ancient monumental slabs should be retained, and that wherever they are found to be over the graves, they should be re-laid in their proper places. They add much to the interest of an old church, even when worn and defaced, and should not be removed merely to gratify a love of neatness and novelty.’108

7.9 Monumental brasses: their removal, retrieval and restoration? Despite Scott’s resolve, at some point the brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398) and his wife was removed from its location on the floor at the east end of the north aisle, to the chancel, where it was set to the north of the high altar, paired by the brass to the south of the altar to John Strensall (d. 1408), which had always probably been in the chancel.

Addressing the subscribers directly, he stated that: The importance of acting upon correct principles, is in the present instance greatly increased by the magnitude and splendid character of the building, which exceeds almost every other Parish church in the kingdom. Its value therefore as a specimen of architecture, and as the great ornament of your town, gives it a double claim on your care and attention, while it adds greatly to the interest which must be felt for its proper Restoration.109 Major structural repairs were carried out between 1843 and 1851.110 It may have been then that the church floor was re-laid, but more likely it was after 1851 when a further subscription was raised to carry out yet more work: ‘The plan now entered upon embraced the fitting up the entire nave with convenient seats’, so the seating plan identified in Stukeley’s ichnography (Fig. 7.2) was abandoned, and ‘the floor lowered and re-laid with concrete.’111 The pattern of seating now involved four separate ranges, running along the two sides of the nave and centrally in both aisles, from west to east.112 These were arranged to leave passageways by the aisle walls, centrally down the nave – as before – but now the areas under the north and south arcades were left open. This is where a large number of incised slabs and indents are now found; they would formerly have been covered up by the eighteenth century seating until then. 107

Thompson, Boston, p. 167. G.G. Scott, A report addressed to the committee of the subscribers, for repairing and restoring Boston church (Boston, 1843), p. 14. The gist of the report is provided by Thompson, Boston, pp. 167–68. 109 Scott, A report, p. 6. 110 Papers relating to Scott’s specifications, estimates and reports are in LAO: Boston St Botolph PAR/9/8, 9/9, 9/10 and 9/11. 111 Thompson, Boston, p. 168. 112 LAO: Boston St Botolph PAR9/19/2: ‘Analysis and suggested report on plans for re-pewing and restoration ... 1851’. 108

Fig. 7.4 Brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398) with the right hand canopy side shaft brass being obscured by the base of the reredos. 113

136

Thompson, Boston, p. 190.

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 7.6 Indent with lost brass inlay to Alice Flete, c.1450. Other brasses have suffered far greater misfortunes. The full-length figure of a lady (c.1450) identified by Sally Badham in chapter 6 as commemorating Alice Flete, was recorded in its entirety by an (undated) rubbing in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London (hereafter SAL) (Fig. 7.76), which shows the brass in its slab, the latter now identifiable at the east end of the south aisle, in an area the greater part of which may have been obscured by the eighteenth century pews until the 1848–53 restoration.116 Probably the brass and slab were removed at that time, the figure taken up from the slab shortly afterwards, and the slab relaid in its original position. Haines noted the figure as ‘loose’ in 1861 and that its head and feet were gone, presumably the result not only of wrenching the brass from its slab, but also as it was a palimpsest, with part of the figure of a widow (c.1390) engraved on the back (Fig. 7.7). The brass plate would have been weakened by the engraving on both sides, accounting for the fracture along the arm (on the obverse of the plate), with the head and feet depicted on separate, small – and easily losable – plates.117

Fig. 7.5 Saints from Walter Pescod’s brass now covered by the reredos. In 1856 Thompson noted the Pescod brass in its original site, as did Haines, who published his seminal list of brasses in 1861.114 But by 1870 the brass was definitely in its new site in the chancel115 although the motive for its translocation is unclear; perhaps it was a combination of sensing the ultimate conservation of the best preserved brass in the church, and also spatially to balance Strensall’s brass by locating one either side of the altar.

114

Thompson, Boston, p. 187; H. Haines, A manual of monumental brasses, 2 parts (Oxford and London, 1861), 2, p. 116. It is not clear if Haines visited Boston or whether his information on the location of the Pescod brass was taken from a rubbing made prior to the removal of the brass – but probably the latter; and Thompson may well not have updated his account from an earlier edition of his book, published as Collections for a topographical and historical account of Boston ... (London, 1820), in which he recorded Pescod’s brass simply by quoting the notes of the unknown antiquary and Holles. 115 E. Trollope, ‘Boston and other churches’, AASRP 10 (1870), pp. 175–218, at p. 183.

116

As already noted, the fact that this brass was sketched by Stukeley in the early eighteenth century (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Top. Gen. e 61, fol. 61v) suggests that it was not covered over at that time, making predictions as to the extent of the pewing, despite the ichnography, hazardous. 117 Haines, Manual of monumental brasses, 2, p. 117; J. Page-Phillips, Palimpsests – the backs of monumental brasses, 2 vols (London, 1980), 1, p. 78, 2, pl. 140.

137

The lost brasses and indents of Boston Successively, in 1870, 1895, 1903 and 1926 this brass was described as either ‘loose’ or located ‘in the library over the porch’, but it is now no longer to be found anywhere.118

symbols, originally from different monuments but all c.1500 are known from a rubbing of 30 August 1889 and subsequently listed until 1926, but on removal to the parish library where they were last recorded they have subsequently disappeared (Fig. 7.10).

Fig. 7.7 Palimpsest reverse of part of lost brass to Alice Flete, c.1450.

Fig. 7.9 Lost inlay from a Flemish slab (Greenhill no. 11).

Fig. 7.8 Portion of a marginal inscription from a brass to a member of the Walsoken family, c.1400. Small fragments of brasses are also recorded by some of these same authorities, terminating with Mill Stephenson’s record in 1926. A portion of a fillet marginal inscription with the word ‘Walsokne’ engraved in relief (c.1400?) is known from a rubbing dated March 1907 in the SAL, but the brass is now lost (Fig. 7.8);119 and a plate of a pair of hands at prayer, effaced, was rubbed in situ as originally incorporated as inlay into a Tournai incised effigial slab (Greenhill 11, Wheeldon 35), and shown in another nineteenth-century rubbing in the SAL (Fig. 7.9).120 Three brass plates with evangelistic

Fig. 7.10 Lost evangelistic symbols.

118 Trollope, ‘Boston and other churches’, p. 183; G.E. Jeans, A list of the existing sepulchral brasses in Lincolnshire (Horncastle, 1895), p. 9; M. Stephenson, ‘A list of palimpsest brasses’, MBST 4 (1905), pp. 189– 92; Idem, A list of monumental brasses in the British Isles (London, 1926), p. 281. 119 One Bartholomeus Walsoken is on record as trading at Boston in large quantities of cloth and other costly merchandise between 1381 and 1390, so perhaps this fragment was a part of a brass to him or a family member erected towards the end of the fourteenth century; see Rigby (ed.), Overseas trade of Boston, passim. 120 Haines, Manual of monumental brasses, 1, p. 23, notes this brass as ‘two hands from a slab, c.1300’ in the nave, which accords with the location of the known slab; but Jeans, Sepulchral brasses in Lincolnshire, p. 10, maintains that ‘nothing is now known of them’; and

Other brasses, which still survive in part as loose plates, have equally troubled histories. The almost effaced figures of a civilian and wife (c.1470) together with the base of a double canopy and evangelistic symbols making up the entire composition, are recorded by an (undated but probably nineteenth century) rubbing (Fig. 7.11). The figures still survive as loose plates in the library having been mural in the Cotton chapel in 1895, in 1926 Stephenson, List of monumental brasses, p. 281, noted them in the library, whence they disappeared with the other pieces.

138

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments but the architectural work and the symbols are now gone. The slab once housing this brass is no longer to be found either, so it may be that the figures and the slab were under the eighteenth century pews, duly exposed on their removal and the brasses taken up from the slab – which was subsequently recovered by the new range of pews.

Fig. 7.12 Plates from the brass to Thomas Gull (d. 1420). The confusion had grown because this Fens 1 series brass, identified from its location as belonging to Thomas Gull and his wife (d. 1420) (Appendix 1), is remarkably similar to another large Fens 1 series brass to John and Agnes Nutting (d. 1420), the Purbeck slab housing these brasses having been originally on the floor of the nave just in front of the entrance to the chancel. This too had two principal figures under a large, heavy canopy supported by inhabited side-shafts, of which three architectural figures remained in 1973; although parts of the brass base and the canopy are still in the library (2009), these minor figures from the side shafts have disappeared.122 In 1981 a temporary nave altar was erected over the Purbeck slab, still with the original three side-shaft figures extant, but one of these plates fixed only with a single rivet at the corner, horribly permitting the brass to be swivelled around to support the altar platform. The further vicissitudes of the brasses and slab have since been extensively discussed, but essentially the entire slab was lifted in 1983–84 to install underfloor heating and a permanent nave altar.123 On its removal from the nave floor the Nutting slab was stacked under the north arcade at the west end of the nave where it remained for a few years. The altar platform was large enough also to obscure the Tournai marble incised slab, with inlays, of a priest in mass vestments (Greenhill 8, Wheeldon 45), known from Greenhill’s rubbing in the SAL made in 1929 (Fig. 7.13). This Tournai slab was also removed during the excavations for the underfloor heating, and joined the other slabs in the stack to be disposed of, and which were all subsequently conveyed to a skip. Around 1986 the floor of the tower was repaved prior to the installation of a new bookshop. In the centre of this area were three conjoining slabs of black Tournai marble which together bore the indent of a large rectangular brass of Flemish origin, akin to those at King’s Lynn

Fig. 7.11 Lost brass of civilian and wife, c.1470. The indent for what must have been originally one of the most notable brasses in the church is now found by the font at the west end of the nave. It comprises a very large slab of homogenous black marble – possibly a Tournai incised slab which has been turned over? – the composition comprising the figures of a civilian and wife, with their heads resting on cushions, beneath a large embattled canopy supported by thick side-shafts containing figures. One small brass piece of the side shafts is still in situ trapped beneath the steps of the font placed there in 1853, but is worn completely smooth, and a large plate for the canopy over the female figure and a side panel located below the surviving one are known from rubbings in the SAL (fig. 7.12). Again, there emerges a confused picture of what plates were still fixed to the slab after Scott’s restoration, and when the loose plates were taken away for storage (as usual to the library), although already a note in 1926 suggested that the plates forming the canopy were not to be found there.121

122

Rubbings of the side-shaft figures and what remained of the canopy were made by Rev. J.F.A. Bertram in 1969, and are now in the SAL. 123 W. Lack and P.J. Whittemore (eds), A series of monumental brasses, indents and incised slabs from the 13th to the 20th century, 2 part 4 (May 2008), pp. 29–30, pl. XXXI, in a note by S. Badham and D. Chivers.

121 P.J. Heseltine and J. Christian-Carter, Lost brasses from the Cambridge Antiquarian Society collection of brass rubbings (privately printed, 2007), p. 72.

139

The lost brasses and indents of Boston (Norfolk) (1349, 1364).124 Also on the tower floor was a broken slab with an indent of a late fourteenth century / early fifteenth century floriated brass cross,125 and a third stone bearing the indent of a brass to a civilian with four shields (c.1450?).126 To our knowledge we have no other record of these three slabs.

unrewarding; but later in 1986 the intervention of the parish librarian, Mr John Orange, eventually bore fruit. He confirmed that underfloor heating had been installed at the east end of the nave and in the tower, which involved excavating the floor levels. In addition, the monumental slabs removed were not replaced in the floor, unlike during Scott’s restoration, but instead were stacked at the west end of the nave – with the Nutting slab – for a period, before they were taken away in a skip and disposed of. Mr Orange found two small pieces of the Nutting brass in the library, so it was initially assumed that either the remainder of the pieces were taken up from the slab and passed into private hands on disposal of the slab, or the entire slab with brasses attached was dumped.

Fig. 7.13 Lost Flemish slab to an unknown priest, c.1330–40. An enquiry to the church authorities at that time by the Hon. Secretary of the Monumental Brass Society was 124 Slab dimensions: 290 x 178 cms; the indent of the brass plate 274 x 160 cms, leaving a stone margin of sixteen to eighteen cms around the brass. This is not at great variance with those margins measurable on other rectangular Flemish brasses and slabs, for instance two examples (1375) at St Alban’s cathedral (Hertfordshire), for which see W. Lack, H.M. Stuchfield, and P. Whittemore, The monumental brasses of Hertfordshire (London, 2010), pp. 452, 490. Presuming that these three pieces of Tournai stone at Boston were in their original locations relative to each other, and not the result of fracturing an entire slab, it would have been interesting to discover how they were joined together by the Tournai craftsmen in order to provide a solid and level support for the brass plate. Perhaps dowels of some kind were employed, either in the thickness of the slab or inserted into the surface. For comparative sizes of Flemish brasses and slabs see H.K. Cameron, ‘The 14th-century school of Flemish brasses’, MBST 11 (1976), pp. 50–81. 125 Dimensions: 114 x 99 cms. 126 Dimensions: 201 x 74 cms.

Fig. 7.14 Lost brass to John Nutting and his wife Alice, c.1420. However, in July 1989, by chance, Mr Orange came across seventeen pieces of brass when a wardrobe in the 140

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments been found stowed in the library in 1973130 then end up in the attic of a totally different building, while the section of the base plate associated with the figures was stored in a vestry cupboard. With this type of confusion – worryingly typified by the fact that when Sally Badham approached the church in 2007 to view the ‘loose’ pieces, they could not initially be found – it is hopeful that other plates may eventually come to light. At the moment (2010) they are in the custody of the current parish librarian, Mr Ernest Napier, and rubbings of all the plates have been deposited with the SAL.

east vestry was removed: ‘Safe but out of sight, the brasses had been put into the bottom of the cupboard for protection and to act as a stabiliser to keep it rigid; this sort of safe-keeping will be avoided in the future.’127 The plates included ten which formed much of the canopy and base of the Nutting brass, but not the side shafts which incorporated the subsidiary figures. A composite rubbing made up from one of the entire indent with the inhabited side shaft, and piecemeal rubbings of the canopy plates, demonstrating the magnificent complexity and originality of the canopy work with its early attempts at perspective, is shown in Fig. 7.14. The other plates recovered at that time included a portion of the decorated base belonging to the effaced brass figures of the civilian and wife (c.1470) (Fig. 7.11); and two pieces from the canopy of the Gull brass including one with the characteristic sawtooth upper edge of the embattled cornice (Fig. 7.12). One of these (the plate with the canopy over the female figure) has, apparently, been mislaid again. Also discovered was the plate of nine boys, facing to the right, which Sally Badham has traced to the slab (otherwise completely devoid of brasses) of Athelard Bate (d. 1501), originally in the chapel of the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the floor at the east end of the south aisle (Fig. 7.15). This plate had been fixed to the base of a nearby pillar128 but was subsequently removed to storage.

Fig. 7.16 Remains of brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1490. Wishing to end on a positive note however, during the installation of the nave altar in 1983–85 the front pews on the south side were removed, revealing the lower part of a broken slab of spine-bearing oolitic limestone bearing two brass plates of children, one group of seven daughters and one of two sons (c.1490). These brasses were known to have existed from rubbings in the SAL131 but the pews inserted in 1853 may well have covered them over afterwards. The top half of the slab with the indents to the two principal figures, is now lost, perhaps being ejected from the church with the others during the installation of the nave altar. The lower half is now (2010) propped up against the west wall of the north aisle within the church shop (fig. 7.16). While happily preserved for the current, the story of the brasses at Boston is tinged with tragedy, and one can only hope that even though this is but a minor, unprepossessing stone, its permanent conservation will soon be assured.

Fig. 7.15 Group of children from the brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501). Mr Orange wrote again in July 1991, ‘I have this week located four more pieces which are, in fact, the plates which the masons referred to as being in their hut and which they later transferred to the attic above the Parish Office in Wormgate [Boston]. This action was never reported to me and because of bad communication it was done at a time when those concerned took it for granted that I was in full possession of the facts, so nothing was done to make doubly sure of my being aware of the discovery.’129 These brasses were the effaced figures of a civilian and wife (c.1470), which, having

127 Letter of 3 July 1989 from John Orange to Derrick Chivers, in possession of the recipient. 128 J. Wheeldon, The monumental brasses in Saint Botolph’s church, Boston, History of Boston Series 9 (Boston, 1973), p. 11. 129 Letter of 8 July 1991 from John Orange to Derrick Chivers, in possession of the recipient.

130

Wheeldon, Monumental brasses in Saint Botolph’s church, pp. 17– 18. 131 They were listed by Stephenson, List of monumental brasses, p. 281, as in the south aisle, but in the SAL and Cambridge collections of rubbings they were ‘lost’ by 1926.

141

Chapter 8 Two Lincolnshire merchants: Walter Pescod of Boston and Simon Seman of Barton-onHumber by Jessica Freeman Two attractive memorial brasses in the Lincolnshire towns of Boston and Barton-upon-Humber cast an interesting light on the lives – comparable, yet different – of two late medieval merchants, Walter Pescod, a mercer, and Simon Seman, a vintner or dealer in wines. To place them in their geographical context, Barton lies to the north of the county, and Boston to the south east. Both men (probably) were born in or close by the port and town in which they were buried and commemorated, both embarked upon a mercantile career and both involved themselves in the administration of their working habitat. On the other hand, one remained in his home town while the other chose to base himself in England’s capital city. Yet each, at the end of their lives, wished to be commemorated by a high-quality and status-conscious brass, on which was inscribed their major achievements: Walter in Boston as a merchant and generous benefactor to his town’s important guild of SS Peter and Paul; Simon as a London vintner and alderman (Figs 8.1 and 8.2). Also, because the surviving sources involve a variety of records, different aspects of their lives are brought to the forefront. This is useful in painting a wider picture of both men’s careers, particularly in the details of their trading activities and office holding, although much less remains of a personal nature.

land in Toft and Boston to several men, including a chaplain, who were probably feoffees.2 In 1333, according to the subsidy (tax) rolls, a Richard Peascod lived at Leverton, a few miles north of Boston, and it may well have been a member of this family who in due course migrated to Boston. Here they resided at Pescod Hall in the north-east part of the town, which would have also been the centre of their business. The building currently known as Pescod Hall is a c.1450 replacement of an earlier house, which was restored in 1972 and moved in 2003 to Pescod Square in the town’s new shopping centre (Fig. 8.3). There is an 1856 engraving of the remains of this later hall, which probably incorporated part of the earlier structure (Fig. 8.4).3 In 1384 Henry Paysgode of Lincoln was assaulted in that city, but this is the only other contemporary reference to the name in the county that has so far come to light, although further research could turn up more information.4 Because Simon Seman was buried at Barton-onHumber, it is almost certain that he had a close connection with this town, although no evidence has been found of a family of this name in the immediate vicinity. Barton had suffered, like Boston, from a decline in trade, its heyday being in the reign of Edward III (1327–77). The town had ceased to be on the great north road, the river had encroached on the harbour and the ferry lost its importance.5 Maybe that was why Simon, or his family, saw greater opportunity for a young man in London. For in December 1412, Simon, described as citizen and vintner (so that if he had completed an apprenticeship, he was of age) was appointed not only executor to the London vintner John Bishop, but guardian of his infant grandson, a position of some trust. Bishop also requested masses for the souls of his wife, Agnes, and of John and Alice Chalton, at Ightham, Kent. It is intriguing that Simon’s wife was also called Agnes, although only one daughter, Margaret, is mentioned by Bishop. Simon’s second appearance in the capital’s records, possibly as a man approaching his thirties, occurs in February 1416 when he sat as a juror for the Thames-side ward of Bridge. By 1419, he and the grocer Thomas Selowe had rented from the trustees of the Bridge House, at 12d a year, a tenement with two shops in the parish of St Botolph Billingsgate, where the wharf lay below London Bridge. This was apparently the area in which Simon conducted his trading activities as a wine importer and where he stored his wine before selling it, firstly to wholesalers, and then to retailers.

8.1 Origins Turning first to their origins and dates of birth, in the case of neither man has this information survived. Walter Pescod’s first appearance in Lincolnshire records occurs in November 1372, when he was possibly in his midtwenties. He was one of twelve jurors, sitting at Skirbeck, who swore that a thief stole ‘singula cerchiues de cerico’ perhaps silk kerchiefs, and other goods valued at £20 from himself (an interesting sidelight on the difference between medieval and modern justice), Ralph Prote, and William Wyse, all of Boston.1 Then in Easter 1375 Walter Pesecode, mercer, together with his wife Matilda, and John de Hulle and his wife Johanna, appear in a final concord, or feet of fine, where they are together defendants (or vendors in a collusive legal action) of eight messuages, lands and rents in Skirbeck, Leek and Boston. Since the heirs of Matilda and Joanna are specifically included in the quitclaim, it is possible that Matilda and Johanna were sisters, and that the land was their inheritance. Next, in early 1389, Walter was the tenth of eleven witnesses to a quitclaim by Sir Henry Hasty of Lincoln – hence, he was important enough to be included in a gentry charter even if he himself was not of the highest social status. Five years later, in 1394, Walter and Matilda conveyed a messuage and twenty-one acres of

2

TNA: CP25/1/142/138/22; CClR, 1385–89, p. 637; TNA: CP25/1/144/149/29. 3 P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), pp. 205–06, 222 and 551 note 8. 4 E.G. Kimball (ed.), Some sessions of the peace in Lincolnshire 1381– 1396, LRS 56 (1962), p. 196, no. 560. 5 R. Brown, Notes on the earlier history of Barton-on-Humber, 2 vols (London, 1906–08), 2, pp. 144–46, 162–63 and 189.

1 TNA: JUST1/529, m. 12 (printed in R. Sillem (ed.), Some sessions of the peace in Lincolnshire 1360–1375, LRS 30 (1937), p. 232, no. 71); TNA: CP25/1/142/138/22. Ralph Prote was probably the Ralph Sprote who was a feoffee of lands conveyed by Walter in 1375.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 8.1 Rubbing of brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398), St Botolph’s, Boston.

143

Two Lincolnshire merchants: Walter Pescod of Boston and Simon Seman of Barton-on-Humber

Fig. 8.2 Rubbing of brass to Simon Seman (d. 1433), Barton-upon-Humber (Lincolnshire).

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments shops below London bridge, in August 1420, he was able to afford the lease of a tenement and garden a little to the north-east, in the nearby parish of St Botolph Bishopsgate. This tenement was held at forty shillings a year, from the priory of St Mary Spital without Bishopsgate, and was very likely where Simon lived. If it was the same property sold by his widow Agnes in 1457, it was a substantial estate, consisting of a tenement with two houses upon it and a garden with a gate and chamber above called ‘Le Gatehous’, together with meadowland and a pond or well.7 8.2 Wealth In an attempt to appraise the wealth of the two men, in the 1381 poll tax for Lincolnshire Walter Pesecod and his wife Alice (not Matilda) paid the sum of 3s 4d, and their two servants, John and Matilda, 4d each.8 Walter was one of the town’s top taxpayers for, out of a total of nearly 1600 names, only fourteen paid more than Pescod, in assessments ranging from eight shillings to 3s 6d, while five paid the same as him. The surviving London tax records - those of 1411 and 1436 - are unhelpful for references to Simon, but in 1425 he was listed among the indigenous merchants who paid tonnage (a tax on wine) and poundage (a tax on other goods) in the port of London.9 It is a measure of Simon’s prosperity that in late 1418 he was rich enough to be listed among the London merchants to agree to a loan to the king, and in 1428 he was appointed to the commission to collect the subsidy on knights’ fees for London.10 His success so soon after his first appearance in London’s records may indicate that he had acquired experience and capital in another part of the country before moving to the city, although despite a search of the surviving customs’ accounts for the ports of eastern England, no record now remains that he shipped wine elsewhere. There is evidence, however, that he sold wine to at least one provincial vintner, for in 1453 William Noble, a vintner from Evesham (Worcestershire) was pardoned his non-appearance to answer Simon’s executors over a debt of £8 13s 4d.11 Another possibility is that Simon took over an existing London concern, perhaps as a favoured apprentice or relative, or by marrying his master’s widow or daughter; he may even have changed his name.

Fig. 8.3 Pescod Hall, now in the centre of Boston’s Pescod Square shopping development.

Fig. 8.4 Remains of Pescod Hall in the 1850s. Engraving from P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston. Simon was a member of the Vintners’ Company, one of London’s major trade guilds, whose first charter in 1363 was a grant of monopoly for trade with Gascony. By the early fifteenth century, however, the company was losing its pre-eminence due in part to the gradual loss of lands under English rule in France.6 Hence, it was a sign of Simon’s success that a year after his acquisition of the

8.3 Office holding and trading activities Pescod himself also held at least one royal appointment, when in 1390 he was made constable of the Boston staple, Boston being one of the towns to which English

6 Guildhall Library, London (hereafter GLL), MS. 9051/1, ff. 291-1v (I owe this reference to Graham Javes, 2011); R.R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of letter book I of the city of London, 1400–1422 (London, 1909), p. 148; TNA: C146/1295; Corporation of London Record Office (hereafter CLRO), Husting Rolls 146/46, 150/31 and 157/27 (personal communication from Justin Colson, 13 March 2008); V. Harding and D. Keene (eds), London Bridge: selected accounts and rentals, 1381–1538, London Record Society 31, (1995), no. 146; the tenement was ‘lately’ held by Selowe in 1461/2: ibid., no. 307; A.H. Thomas, (ed.), Calendar of plea and memoranda rolls of the city of London, 1413–1437 (London, 1943), pp. 106, 207 and 263. For details of the medieval wine trade, see A. Crawford, A history of the Vintners’ company (London, 1977), especially chapter 1.

7

CLRO, Husting Rolls 148/38, 148/43 and 186/7. TNA: E179/135/83d, m. l, column 1, and /83, m. 6, column 1, transcribed as a composite document in C.C. Fenwick (ed.), The poll taxes of 1377, 1379 and 1381, 3 parts (Records of Social and Economic History, new series, 27, 29 and 37, Oxford, 1998, 2001 and 2005), 2, p.2, and p. 23, column 5. The tax was collected between December 1380 and February 1381. 9 TNA: E207/173/3 and E159/202, rot. 2 (information from Professor Stuart Jenks, 2003). 10 CLRO, Journal of Common Council 1, fol. 52; CFR, 1422–30, p. 216. 11 These customs accounts can be found in TNA: E122; CPR, 1452–61, p. 127. 8

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Two Lincolnshire merchants: Walter Pescod of Boston and Simon Seman of Barton-on-Humber trade in wool was then confined.12 However, in common with most medieval merchants, both Walter and Simon imported, in the ships of others, a variety of items. Those for Walter are listed in Boston’s surviving customs’ accounts, which also provide insights into the town’s trade with Scandinavia, the Baltic and the Low Countries. He imported alum (a mordant for fixing dyes) worth over £20 in 1387, madder or red dye, and herring worth £42 in 1393, and iron, oil and other goods valued at £100 in 1394.13 His trade in wool is also recorded through the pardon that he and others obtained in 1395 for woolfraud, namely purchasing contrary to statute, or excessive weighings.14 Boston’s trading peak had been during the thirteenth century, but had thereafter drastically declined as wool exports fell. One of the richest towns in 1344, and ninth largest in 1377, by the 1520s it had shrunk to twenty-second and thirty-second respectively.15 Trade partially recovered in the late fourteenth century with the rise of a new woollen industry in Coventry (Warwickshire), whose merchants exported cloth through, among others, the ports of Boston and Lynn. In return fish and other Baltic wares were imported, plus luxury goods.16 For Simon, a variety of records paint a picture of his trading activities, with the first mention of his connection with the wine trade in March 1417. In that year he and six other men petitioned for restitution after le Petyr of Dartmouth, a ship carrying their wine from Bordeaux, sank in a storm at the entrance to the river Thames, and the cargo was ‘acquired’ by others in Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire.17 By the fifteenth century the wine fleets, 75% of them English ships, sailed from western France twice a year, in the late autumn with vintage wines and then after Candlemas (2 February) with more mature wines. Simon’s trading activities emerge more clearly from 1421 with information from a good run of London customs’ accounts. In 1421 he imported cloth, in 1431, wine and quernstones, the latter valued at just under £7, in 1432 twelve barrels of soap, priced at £6 0s 8d, over two days in April 1433 nearly thirty tuns of wine, on which the subsidy, or tax, was £4 13s 9d and, in 1434, a further shipment of wine. 18 Light is thrown on his personal finances in 1427, when a commission of London merchants met to enquire into the value of German wines from ‘La Ryne’ (the Rhineland or Lorraine), which Simon said had been seized by men of

three towns in ‘Vanfourne’ (Vorne or Holland) whilst being shipped on his behalf in La Marie of Dordrecht in January that year. The Commissioners swore that the value of the wine at the time of capture was £197 13s 2d and that Simon had in addition suffered damages amounting to £36 16s 8d.19 8.4 Simon and the London Vintners’ Company As described on his memorial, Simon was a member of the Vintners’ Company, and can be counted as one of its leaders. From 1420 he was frequently a feoffee or trustee both for other vintners (two of whom, Thomas Crofton and John Wakele, had close connections with the parish of St Botolph Billingsgate), and on behalf of the company itself, as well as for several London citizens. It is very possible that he was elected master of the company sometime that decade (although their names are generally only recorded from 1427 onwards.20 He recruited at least two apprentices, those on record named as William Bentley and Stephen Haradyn, young men who would have been relied upon to act in their master’s absence abroad. They were made free in 1439 and 1443 respectively, although there is no indication as to whom they were turned over at Simon’s death in 1433; probably they continued to serve his widow.21 8.5 Walter’s role in Boston Walter Pescod’s career followed a different pattern, for in common with other provincial merchants he put his trust in membership of religious guilds. He and his wife Matilda were members of the prestigious Holy Trinity guild of Coventry, a town in which he would have had interests, since Boston was one of its trading ports. Unfortunately the register entry can be dated no more precisely than to the late fourteenth century. This guild drew members from all over England, from Cumberland to Wiltshire, individuals who were anxious to cultivate friendly relations in a leading town, and included noblemen as well as merchants.22 Yet Coventry would not have been the only market to which Walter travelled, and it is possible that he also went overseas to further his trading interests. More importantly Walter was a major benefactor of the Boston guild of SS Peter and Paul, one of the oldest and most prominent of the known medieval guilds in the

12

19

TNA: C67/23. TNA: E122/7/19, mm. 7, 8d; 7/30, m. 1d; and 7/30A, m. 1d; S.H. Rigby (ed.), The overseas trade of Boston in the reign of Richard II, LRS 93 (2005), pp. 63, 72, 197 and 203. 14 CPR, 1391–1396, p. 627. 15 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Lincolnshire, volume 2 (London, 1906), pp. 303–04; A. Dyer, Decline and growth in English towns, 1400–1640 (London, 1991), pp. 21, 70 and 64. 16 Rigby, Overseas trade, p. xxxvi; E. Carus-Wilson, ‘The medieval trade of the ports of the Wash’, Medieval Archaeology 7 (1962–63), pp. 182–201. 17 CPR, 1416–22, p. 87 (the other men were Walter Chertesey, John Femell, Robert Hierne, Ralph Valentyn, John Melbourne and John Treweman, of London, merchants). 18 GLL, MS. 33963/1, pp 12-13 and 218; TNA: E122/77/1 mm. 12–12d; 73/6, fols 3v, 5, 14, 16, 31v and 32v; 72/17, m. 2d; 77/1, m. 9d; and 73/5, fol. 4. (These references were also kindly supplied by Professor Jenks.) A tun was 252 gallons.

CPR, 1422–29, p. 464. CLRO, Husting Rolls 151/5, 152/26, and 154/69; GLL, MS. 15461, no. 673; H.M. Chew (ed.), London possessory assizes, a calendar, London Record Society 1 (1965), nos 227 and 229; CLRO, Husting Rolls 149/25, 165/45 and 150/31; R.R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of wills proved and enrolled in the court of Husting A.D.1258– A.D.1688, 2 vols (London, 1889–90), 2, p. 371; GLL, MS. 33963, pp. 12–13; Crawford, Vintners’ company, p. 280. 21 GLL, MS. 15211/1, fols 5, 7 (Bentley died intestate in 1468: GLL, MS. 9171/6, fol. 21; Calendar of plea and memoranda rolls 1437–1457, p. 176. Haradyn may have come from Staplehurst, Kent, TNA: C1/38/274 and 227/40). The freedom records of the Vintners’ company only survive from 1428, and Simon himself would either have served an apprenticeship or bought his way in by redemption, perhaps as a successful provincial trader. 22 M.D. Harris (ed.), The register (records) of the guild of the Holy Trinity, St Mary, St John the Baptist and St Katherine of Coventry, Dugdale Society 13 (1935), p. 93.

13

20

146

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 8.5 Patent for the guild of SS Peter and Paul, Boston (TNA: C66/344, m. 23). Reproduced by permission of The National Archives. Belle were collectors of the customs for Boston. Belle was a man of considerable local importance: constable of Boston c.1386, mayor of the Boston staple in 1393, a brother of St Mary’s guild in 1392, alderman of Corpus Christi guild from 1397–98, and a frequent appointee to royal commissions.26 Belle had received an excellent education, which perhaps his fellow merchants also enjoyed, for around 1400 he composed – or caused to be composed – a long satirical poem in Latin attacking the corruption of Treasury clerks, based on his experiences as an official harassed at the Exchequer. No doubt this type of frustrating encounter was something with which Walter was equally familiar.27 Perhaps the most interesting of Walter’s fellow townsmen, however, was William Harecourt, mayor of the Boston staple in 1374, who in 1381 had paid a similar amount in tax to Pescod. When Harecourt was charged with fraud in 1383, an inventory was taken of his household goods. These included not just what might be expected for a man of his (or Walter’s) standing - such as eight mazers or bowls bound with silver-gilt, three lidded silver cups, six silver plates, numerous beds and their trappings, brass, pewter and furniture – but also two hawks and a ‘gentle’

town. Fig. 8.5 shows the patent for the guild of SS Peter and Paul, although few other records of it have survived. This and the other Boston guilds are discussed more comprehensively in chapter 3. When in 1396 this guild was formally incorporated, it was to Pescod and five others that the royal licence was granted, evidence of his leading position in the guild.23 He would have taken part in processions before the Sacrament and on Easter day, at the funerals of brethren and, no doubt, on their patrons’ feast day, 29 June. His quarterly or annual dues would have contributed to the burial expenses and the weekly pensions of 14d paid to members in need and poverty.24 All these scattered references to Walter Pescod help place him among his contemporaries, for unfortunately Boston’s pre-1545 borough records have not survived. John de Hulle, a fellow witness in 1389 and co-grantor with Walter in 1375, was described in 1392 as an alderman and brother of the guild of St Mary, Boston. His trading activities included pursuing debts from a Huntingdon taverner in 1367 and a Lincoln shipman in 1381.25 Among those who petitioned with Walter for a chantry licence in 1396, both Richard Aileward and John

23 TNA: C66/344, m. 23 (printed in CPR, 1396–1399, pp. 19–20); the other men were John Belle, Henry Leverton, Richard Aileward, Robert Wrangle, and William Thorneton of Boston; G. Jebb, A guide to the church of S. Botolph with notes on the history and antiquities of Boston and Skirbeck (3rd edn Boston, 1921), p. 130. 24 TNA: C47/39/88 (partly transcribed in H.F. Westlake, The parish gilds of medieval England [London, 1919], pp. 36–37 and 157) where the founder members - all merchants of St Botolph - are listed. 25 CPR, 1391–96, p. 192; TNA: C241/150/168 and /168/27.

26

Rigby, Overseas trade, pp. xxv and xxix, and 244–46 and 254–55 (for Belle and Ailward); TNA: C241/175/61A, 181/83 and C143/428/7; CPR, 1391–96, p. 192. 27 C.H. Haskins and D.M. George, ‘Verses on the Exchequer’, in English Historical Review 36 (1921), pp. 58–67 (quoting Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Bodley 496, fols 232v–234; and BL, Lansdowne MS. 168, fol. 336); I. Gladwin, The sheriff: the man and his office (London, 1974), pp. 256–58.

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Two Lincolnshire merchants: Walter Pescod of Boston and Simon Seman of Barton-on-Humber falcon, highly prized at £10.28 It appears extremely likely that Walter also went hawking on the Lincolnshire fens with his friends.

benefactors of their company, yet there is no reference to a similar bequest or arrangements for an obit for Simon among its records, although on the other hand such details generally only survive from about 1437. And just once, as noted above, has Seman himself been found in a fellow vintners’ will, that of John Bishop in 1412. He did leave a will although this has not been located either in London or Lincolnshire, for in Easter 1436 his executors, who were his wife Agnes and one John Conyngburgh, brought a plea of debt against John Clerk of Colchester, Essex, gentleman, in the sum of £10. In 1432 Clerk had agreed, at the parish of St Leonard (Eastcheap) ‘in the ward of Bridge Street’, London, where Seman’s trading base was located, to pay this sum over two years. Agnes and John were also still pursuing the unpaid debt of a Worcestershire vintner in 1453.33 Simon’s co-executor John Conyngburgh or Canyngburgh was probably the poulterer John Conyngsburgh, although little is otherwise known of him. He was, however, most likely another immigrant to London, probably from Conisborough (West Riding of Yorkshire), about fifty miles from Barton. A personal, rather than simply a business connection, may therefore have led to his appointment as an executor.34

8.6 Simon’s office-holding in London For Simon, parallel with his rise within the Vintners’ Company was his rise into the governing élite of the city of London. Unlike Pescod, membership of a religious guild was not a matter of major importance for Simon, although no doubt he belonged to the Vintners’ Company’s own guild dedicated to St Martin of Tours, and probably to one or more parish guilds. In 1422 he became alderman for Bishopsgate ward, which office he held until his death, and then in September 1424 he and John Bithewater (or atte Water) were elected joint sheriffs of London and Middlesex. It was slightly unusual that Seman did not serve as sheriff before rising to the rank of alderman.29 The journals of London’s Common Council show that Simon was in general a conscientious attendee at the court of aldermen. In particular they indicate when he was absent, in spring 1424, 1428 and 1429, and the autumn of 1426,30 when he was probably away on business, for most vintners travelled to Bordeaux or the Rhineland once or twice a year to buy wine, often leaving behind a factor to complete the transactions. He also shouldered his share of civic responsibilities, for example serving on courts of enquiry and juries and, as mentioned, was one collector of the London subsidy in 1428.31

8.8 The brass of Walter Pescod Walter Pescod died on 28 July 1398 (or the fifth Kalends of July, as his monument’s inscription has it), and he, or his executors or family acting on his instructions, chose a very prestigious brass from the pre-eminent London B workshop (Fig 8.1). There were few local brass engraving workshops outside London at this time, although it has been suggested that there was one in Boston.35 Walter’s brass is now to the north of the high altar, although it was originally at the east end of the north aisle of the nave in the guild chapel of SS Peter and Paul. Enough remains to show that it was an exceptionally fine monument, especially given that it commemorated a merchant, whose brasses are generally of a lesser quality than those of the gentry. It is of some individuality and must have been a special commission, for Pescod is shown in a tunic and gown powdered with a pea-pod or peascod device, arranged to form the letter W, as punning references to his name. Over the tunic is a mantle, with a hood around the neck, and Walter stands full face, hair cut short and wearing a small forked beard. He lies with his wife, whose effigy is now missing, beneath a doubly-triple canopy, with a super-canopy divided into two squaretopped compartments with cusped round arches, and

8.7 Wife, family and testamentary provision For both Walter and Simon, little information has come to light regarding wife and children and it is doubtful if either left any living descendants. The will of neither man has survived. Walter’s spouse is named in 1375 and 1394 as Matilda (in French, Maud), but in 1381 as Alice, so it is possible that he was married three times, unless the poll tax record is in error. On their Boston brass it was probably Matilda’s effigy which once stood next to that of Walter. Simon’s widow, Agnes, was still alive in 1458 when she was then the wife of William Allard, citizen and skinner of London. Like her previous husband, Allard was a leading man in his company, perhaps master in 1448.32 It is worth noting that those vintners who were associated with Simon in his lifetime became major 28

TNA: C241/156/27; CIMisc, 1377–88, p. 128. A.B. Beaven, The aldermen of the city of London, 2 vols (London, 1908–13), 2, p. 6. 30 CLRO, Journal of Common Council, vol. 2, fols 2–9v (1422–3); fols 26, 27–28v, 29v, 31–31v, 32v, 33v–38v, 39v–40, 41–44, 45–45v, 47– 51v, 52v–53, 54–54v, 55v (1424–25); fols 104v, 105, 106, 107v, 110v– 111v, 112v, 114–115, 116v–117, 118v, 119, 122, 123–123v (1427–28); fols 120v, 124, 125v–126, 127v–128, 129v–132, 133–139 (1428–29). I owe these references to Professor Caroline Barron. 31 Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, 1413–37, pp. 191, 223; TNA: KB9/1070, m. 61; E326/1997 and E326/2018; R.R. Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of London letter book K, temp. Henry VI (London, 1911); Sharpe (ed.), Calendar of letter book I, pp. 281–83; Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, 1413–37, p. 263, where the dispute was between Richard Banastre and the vintner Edmund Sheffield. 32 CLRO, Husting Roll 186/7; Calendar of records of the Skinners’ company (Typescript, Skinners’ company, London, 1965), no. 215. 29

33 GLL: MS. 9051/1, fols 291-1v; TNA: CP40/701, rot. 121d. (information from Dr Hannes Kleineke, 2003). A chancery case dating to c.1456–60, TNA: C1/26/63, refers to the two daughters and heirs of John Clerke of Colchester, Agnes, and Jane, then wife of William Grenside. Agnes had died without issue and Jane was claiming against her father’s feoffees, John Huntyngdon and John Wright of Colchester, for a good estate; CPR, 1452–61, p. 127. 34 CClR, 1429–35, p. 38. An earlier John Conyngesburgh died in 1406, leaving a widow Saikina; CLRO, Husting Rolls 126/143, 126/145, 129/58, 129/71 and 134/67; Calendar of records of the Skinners’ company, no. 215. 35 S.F. Badham, ‘The Fens 1 series: an early fifteenth-century group of monumental brasses and incised slabs’, JBAA 142 (1989), pp. 46–62, esp. pp. 58–59.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments flanked by four pairs of saints in panelled niches. Erected upon and forming a continuation of the entire superstructure there is an arcade of seven niches, from all but two of which the figures are lost (one is of St John the Evangelist and the other St Peter) each under a cinquefoiled arch with an ogee pediment, and the whole finished with an embattled cornice. The top central figures probably once included St Paul, and also the Holy Trinity or, less likely, Our Lord between two angels. Each section of the side-shaft has the effigy of a saint or apostle standing beneath a single canopy. From the top left down can be identified St James the Great, St Matthew and St Philip. Two of the figures on the right are St Thomas and St Bartholomew. Missing now are SS Simon (on the left), James the Less, and Jude (on the right).36 SS Peter and Paul were the saints to whom the guild chapel was dedicated, and SS James, Simon and Jude were those saints, together with the Trinity, to whom other Boston guilds were dedicated. This may indicate that Pescod was also a member of these guilds, multiple guild membership being quite common. These saints would therefore have been chosen because they had a devotional significance for Pescod. The marginal inscription is now lost, but was recorded as reading:37

architectural character of the memorials of one of the most distinguished figures in the land.’39

Ut referunt Metra Mercator olim vocitatus, Pescod sub petra Walterus hic est tumulatus. Qui quinto Iulii discessit ab orbe Kalendas M C ter octo cui nonageno mage prendas. Multa Petri Gildæ bona contulit ex pietate. Vestis et versus Pisis interstinctæ.38 (As these verses record, the merchant formerly called Walter Pescod lies buried here under this stone, Who departed from this earth the fifth day of the kalends of July 1000, 300, [and] 8 to which 90 more should be added. Out of piety he contributed many goods to the Guild of [St] Peter. ?And with peas his clothing is sprinkled). The design of this remarkable memorial finds a close parallel in the lost brass of Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester (d. 1397), once in Westminster abbey and known from a seventeenth century engraving by Francis Sandford (Fig. 8.6). On the duke’s memorial, as on Pescod’s, the central figure is flanked by inhabited side buttresses supporting an arcade of niches. Pescod’s brass was thus ‘making a conscious effort to emulate the

Fig. 8.6 Engraving of lost brass to Thomas of Woodstock (d. 1397), Westminster Abbey. Engraving by Francis Sandford, Genealogical History of the kings and queens of England, and monarchs of Great Britain. 8.9 The brass of Simon Seman Simon Seman died on 11 August 1433, and was buried in the chancel of the church of St Mary, Barton-uponHumber. Dressed in a merchant’s gown, over which is a mantle, a sign of civic dignity, he is depicted on his near life-size floor monument as standing with his feet resting on two wine casks, the symbols of his trade. His merchant’s marks (two now missing) were placed in the four corners (Fig. 8.2). It is unknown whether it was he or

36

H. Haines, A manual of monumental brasses, 2 parts (Oxford and London, 1861), 2, p. 116; G.E. Jeans, A list of the remaining sepulchral brasses in Lincolnshire (supplement to Lincolnshire Notes & Queries 3, 1893), pp. 7–8; H.W. Macklin, The brasses of England (3rd edn, London, 1913), p. 71 and illustration between pp. 70 and 71. 37 R.E.G. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by Gervase Holles, A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (1911), p. 155, from BL, Harley MS. 6829, p. 205; see Sally Badham’s account of this volume and its authorship in chapter 6. 38 The meaning of this sentence is unclear.

39 N. Saul, English church monuments in the Middle Ages - history and representation (Oxford, 2009), pp. 249–50.

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Two Lincolnshire merchants: Walter Pescod of Boston and Simon Seman of Barton-on-Humber his executors who commissioned such a fine brass – unsurprising since Simon was a well-to-do London merchant – and which like Pescod’s brass was a London style B product. Both might have patronised this preeminent and productive London workshop in preference to the Fens 1 brass engraving workshop based in Boston because of their connections with the capital and their desire to be commemorated by the best English brasses money could buy.40

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Caroline Barron and Stephen Rigby for generously sharing with me their respective earlier research into the careers of Simon Seman and Walter Pescod, and to Sally Badham for information on the latter’s brass.

A scroll issues from Simon’s mouth, reading: Credo q(uo)d rede(m)ptor meus vivit et in novissimo die de t(er)ra surrectur(us) su(m). Et in carne mea videbo deu(m) salvatorem meum (For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I will see my God; Job 19, verses 25-26). and a marginal inscription encloses the whole, celebrating his London status and achievements, reading, In gracia et misericordia dei / Hic jacet Simon Seman quonda(m) Civis Vinitari(us) ac Alderman(nus) London(iensis), Qui obiit xio die mens(is) Augusti / Anno domini Mill(esi)mo oCCCCo / Tricesimo Tercio Cuius anime et omnium fidelium defunctorum deus propicietur amen. AMEN.41 (In the grace and mercy of God, Here lies Simon Seman, onetime Citizen, Vintner and Alderman of London, who died the 11th day of the month of August in the year of our Lord 1433, on whose soul and those of all the faithful deceased may God have mercy amen. Amen.) 8.10 Conclusion The surviving records have thrown some light on the careers of these two prosperous late fourteenth and early fifteenth century merchants. One was a leading townsman in a prominent guild in Boston, trading mainly in wool, and the other a London citizen, a vintner whose success as an importer of wine from Gascony and the Rhineland was matched by corresponding success in the civic hierarchy of England’s capital city as alderman and sheriff. It seems highly likely that each arranged for their achievements to be reflected in a fine and high status memorial brass in their home towns in Lincolnshire, at Boston and Barton-upon-Humber.

40

N. Saul, ‘The medieval monuments of St Mary’s, Barton on Humber’, in M. Davies and A. Prescott (eds), London and the Kingdom: essays in honour of Caroline M. Barron, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 16, (Donington, 2008), pp. 265–71, at p. 269; and J. Freeman, ‘Simon Seman, citizen and vintner of London’ in Davies and Prescott (eds), London and the Kingdom, pp. 259–64. 41 Also recorded, with errors, in Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes, p. 78; BL, Harley MS. 6829, p. 81.

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Chapter 9 Two alabaster effigies in St Botolph’s church by Mark Downing 9.1 Original location and condition of the effigies Lying on high tomb-chests underneath adjacent pointed arched recesses in the south wall of the south aisle of St Botolph’s church, are two alabaster effigies of a man in armour and a lady. They date to the mid-fifteenth century and probably commemorate a married couple of noble or gentry status. The effigies do not belong to these tomb recesses. They were apparently moved from the east end of the north aisle to their present positions about 1760,1 but were not originally located in this church. They were removed to St Botolph’s from the church of St John’s hospital in the town, an older foundation, when the latter was demolished in 1626.2 The Order of St John’s hospital was established in 1230 near Skirbeck, a suburb to the south-east of Boston, with the Order obtaining the advowson of St Botolph’s Boston in 1480.3 The effigies are not among the types of monument commonly associated with St Botolph’s. Sally Badham has argued in Chapters 4 and 6 that from the evidence of the guilds and brasses, St Botolph’s church was never much patronised by the local gentry, who mainly chose burial elsewhere, notably in the churches of the four Boston friaries. St Botolph’s was the church of the better-off townsfolk, especially the merchants. While at first sight both effigies appear to be well preserved, a closer inspection reveals that they have been totally restored and their surfaces re-cut. Indeed, in 1850 both monuments were restored by Abraham Kent of Boston4 as part of the major church restoration of 184553, following a report by Sir George Gilbert Scott referred to in Chapter 7 by Derrick Chivers. An engraving in a publication dated 1856 shows the monuments in their present condition. That Kent made considerable changes to the effigies to smarten them up is demonstrated by an earlier illustration of the effigies and tomb-chests, lying under arches, published in 1842 (Fig. 9.1); this shows the effigies in a much damaged state with their arms missing. The tomb-chests were basically in the same condition as they are at present, although the lithograph of the female effigy shows the tomb-chest with the centre panel, which is lozenge-shaped set within a quatrefoil, as plain without any heraldry.5 Today it is painted with the arms of Tilney; a chevron between three griffins heads.

head rests on a great helm. A broad orle encircles the great bacinet, carved in high relief with a spiral binding of ribbon, and running scrolls of foliage. The bevor of the bacinet consists of two plates and around the neck a chain, with a pendant; a cross patée. The pauldrons consist of five lames with small rivets on the upper lame, also a riveted border on the inside, continuing around the arm which appears to form part of the lowest lame.

9.2 Description of the effigies The military effigy is represented straight-legged with the hands raised in prayer and the feet supported by a lion looking away from the effigy’s right (Figs. 9.2, 9.3). The

The outsides of the upper and lower cannons have a border decorated with a square floral motif and couters with lobed side-wings. The gauntlets have long longitudinally boxed cuffs, which consist of five narrow lames over the back of the hand with the fingers covered by small convex plates. Upper and lower breastplates protect the torso, with the lower tapering upwards to a point high on the chest. The skirt consists of five upward pointing hoops and secured to the fifth lowest lame are four rectangular tassets, each has two straps with hexagonal buckles and with triangular chapes; the attachment of the strap to the skirt is not shown.

Fig. 9.1 Lithographs of both Boston effigies and tomb-chests, published in 1842.

1

P. Thompson, The history and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856), p. 184, note 1. 2 Ibid. 3 G. Jebb, A guide to the church of S. Botolph with notes on the history and antiquities of Boston and Skirbeck (Boston, 1921), p. 119. 4 Thompson, Boston, p. 184, note 1. 5 Anon., Descriptive & historical account of St Botolph’s church Boston (Boston, 1842), pl. facing p. 38.

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Two alabaster effigies in St Botolph’s church

Fig. 9.2 Military effigy at Boston, c.1450/60. of square floral flowers. The sabatons consist of four lames. The arms of the spurs are slightly curved. All this is in contrast to the 1842 lithograph of the knight, which does not give any detailed indication of what the effigy looked like originally, only that it wears a bacinet and possibly an orle. The new arms have been attached half-way down the upper arm, so whether any of the applied borders on the arms and legs are original is questionable; however, the possibility that it is an accurate reflection of the original design must be considered, as it seems as though it may be the only original decoration that remained on the effigy prerestoration. The borders on the arms are decorated with a square floral pattern and on the legs by running scrolls. This design is routinely encountered on alabaster effigies sculpted between c.1400-1456 but it seems highly unlikely that Abraham Kent would have known about this common feature. Alabaster effigies in Lincolnshire are comparatively rare and it is improbable that Kent travelled any distance to see what others looked like.6 The most likely scenario is that Kent reproduced a decorative feature that he observed on the Boston effigy before he restored it. Hence, it is reasonable to consider that although it has been re-cut, there remained enough of the original features for Kent to replicate. It may also be the case that he tried to be faithful to much of the other original detail when he carried out his restoration.

Fig. 9.3 Detail of Boston military effigy, c.1450/60. The sculptor has only shown half of the rear tassets. A triangle of mail hangs from underneath the lowest lame of the skirt, presumably representing the hem of the mail haubergeon (mail realistically represented). The hip-belt is made of square plaques; each consists of four leaves in saltire with studs between the arms, its large central clasp has a raised plaque decorated with a flower-head and small stones in the outer corners. The sword on the left is a complete replacement, and is attached to the effigy by a screw. On the outside of the cuisses and greaves are borders decorated with running scrolls of foliage, and across the lower edge of the greave is a square floral motif. The poleyns are globular with a central keel and lobed side-wings, which are articulated to the greave by a pointed lame. The poleyn itself is decorated with a border

6 M. Downing, Medieval military monuments in Lincolnshire, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 515 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 101 and 103.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 9.4 Effigy at Abergavenny (Monmouth), c.1450.

Fig. 9.6 Effigy at Cheadle (Cheshire), attributed to Sir Richard Bulkeley (d. 1451).

Fig. 9.5 Effigy at Burley-on-the-Hill (Rutland), c.1461. Fig. 9.7 Effigy at Tong (Shropshire), attributed to Sir Richard Vernon (d. 1456).

Apart from, perhaps, the decoration to the applied borders, one can question how much of the original carved armour remained prior to restoration. If we presume that the lower breastplate did taper to a point high on the chest and that the skirt had upward pointing hoops, then the closest comparable alabaster effigies to portray these features are of Sir William Ap Thomas (d.1446)7 at Abergavenny (Monmouth) (Fig. 9.4); Sir Henry Sapcote (d.1452)8 at Burley-on-the-Hill (Rutland) (Fig. 9.5); Sir Richard Bulkeley (d.1451)9 Cheadle (Cheshire) (Fig. 9.6) and the figure attributed to Sir Richard Vernon (d. 1456)10 Tong (Shropshire) (Fig. 9.7). This group of effigies suggests that the upward pointing breastplate and cusped hoops of the skirt are dateable to the 1450s. Some additional characteristics of these effigies are a great bacinet with highly decorative wide orle, raised mount, gorget plates, small tassets and a broad pointed lower lame of the poleyn, in common with the Boston figure. However, the Boston effigy wears a plain chain collar, whereas those others noted above wear

a Lancastrian SS collar, although it is possible that an SS collar was sculpted on the Boston effigy originally, before its severe restoration. This would have been chronologically appropriate, as after all the SS collar was portrayed sculpturally on effigies between c.1371-1461 with the Yorkist Suns and Roses depicted thereafter, until 1485. On the other hand, while all these effigies are stylistically similar and probably related, all have slight variations of the armour decoration/design, and the different depiction of the collar on the Boston monument could have been one of these inconsistencies. The effigies noted above were almost certainly made in an alabaster workshop which in 1419 was headed by Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, carvers of Chellaston, who contracted to make the tomb and effigies of Ralph and Katharine Greene at Lowick (Northamptonshire).11 The typical alabaster Prentys/Sutton tomb-chest consists of standing angels holding frontal shields which lie on a different design tomb-chests, for example at Staindrop (Durham), effigy attributed to Sir Ralph

7

O. Morgan, Some account of the monuments in the priory church, Abergavenny (Newport, 1872), pp. 41–55. 8 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Rutland, volume 2 (London, 1935), p. 119, note 31. 9 A.J. Bostock, ‘The pre-reformation effigies in Cheadle parish church’, Church guide (n.d). 10 M. Downing, The medieval military effigies remaining in Shropshire (Shrewsbury, 1999), pp. 27–31, fig. 20.

11 W. St John Hope, ‘On the early working of alabaster in England’, ArchJ 61 (1904), pp. 220–40, at pp. 230–31; S. Badham and S. Oosterwijk, ‘“Cest endenture fait parentre”: English tomb contracts of the long fourteenth century’, in S. Badham and S. Oosterwijk (eds), Monumental industry: the production of tomb monuments in England and Wales in the long fourteenth century (Donington, 2010), pp. 187– 236, at pp. 217–24.

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Two alabaster effigies in St Botolph’s church

Fig. 9.8 Female effigy at Boston, c.1450/60. Neville (d.1425)12 and Swine (4) (Yorkshire East Riding), effigy attributed to a Hinton c.141013. It is evident in some cases that workshops only supplied the effigy, whereas a different workshop provided the tomb-chest. There are no documentary references to Prentys after 1421, but Robert Sutton was still working in 1443.14 Although, therefore, at least one of the key personnel had changed and the designs had evolved, the workshop is referred to in this article as the ‘Prentys and Sutton workshop’. On the second tomb at Boston is the alabaster figure of a lady, who holds her hands in prayer and rests her head on a cushion which is held by two seated angels (Figs. 9.8 and 9.9). She wears a surcote ouverte over a tight-sleeved underdress. Over this is a cloak, held together below the neck by two broached-ties. This was not a fashionable costume in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, when an entirely different style of highwaisted gown with long full sleeves (the houpelande) was commonly shown on monuments.15 However, the horned headdress with veil draped over, totally hiding the hair, is appropriate for such a date, confirming that this effigy is most likely part of a pair with the military figure. The

depiction of the outdated costume is not an anomaly, however, as the surcote ouverte was used as ceremonial dress by ladies of gentry and higher status throughout the fifteenth century.

Fig. 9.9 Detail of female effigy at Boston, c.1450/60. The 1842 lithograph does not show any angels holding the cushion under the lady’s head and she appears to have long hair, but this is very likely an artistic misinterpretation of the veil. Whether the omission of the angels was a mistake on the part of the 1842 artist or an indication that Kent introduced a completely new element in his reconstruction of the female effigy is uncertain. Supporting angels are a common feature of female effigies from the Prentys and Sutton workshop; for

12

C.H.H. Blair, ‘Medieval effigies in the county of Durham’, Archaeologia Aeliana, fourth series 6 (1929), pp. 1–51, pl. 11 to face p. 51. 13 P. Routh, Medieval effigial alabaster tombs in Yorkshire (Ipswich, 1976), pl. 68. 14 Badham and Oosterwijk, ‘“Cest endenture fait parentre”’, p. 221. 15 M. Scott, A visual history of costume. The fourteenth & fifteenth centuries (London, 1986), passim.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments example the effigy to Katherine Greene at Lowick also has angels supporting her pillow, but they are smaller, less obtrusive and more elegantly carved than those at Boston, albeit perhaps because of the constricted space below the gablette at Lowick. Another likely Prentys and Sutton effigy is thought to represent Margaret Freville,16 2nd wife of Sir Hugh Willoughby (d.1448)17 at Willoughby-on-the-Wolds (Nottinghamshire) (Fig. 9.10); it displays supporting angels similar in size to those at Boston and both figures have much in common. The conclusion is that, like the military figure, this effigy of a lady was also a Prentys and Sutton product of c.1450/60. The tomb-chest is totally different to that of the military effigy and is not the original. In most instances both male and female would have been placed on the tomb-chest together and very likely these two effigies were separated when they were moved from St John’s to St Botolph’s, with the female placed on a redundant tomb-chest or it may even be a fabrication, and post restoration occupying a tomb-recess more suitable for a single figure.

with Richard Stephenson, a merchant of Boston, are credited as each giving £5 towards the building of the new church of St Botolph. Margery Tilney, according to Leland, laid the first building stone of St Botolph’s tower at Boston and was buried underneath it, but as Linda Monkton demonstrates in chapter 3, the tower dates from the fifteenth century.20 It is therefore clear that Margery can be discounted as a candidate for the female effigy. Other prominent people worth considering include Philip Tilney, who was sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1437, and from Boston.21 In 1430 Robert Petwardyn, who died in 1431, held the manor of Boston.22 His heir was Roger, the son of his brother Walter who died in 1430.23 Roger was a sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1441,24 and was last recorded in 1449.25 All these are possible candidates for attribution of the military effigy, satisfying the requirements of both social status and wealth implicit in such a tomb monument commission. The cross patée on the chain around the neck of the knight has led some authors to suggest that the effigy represents a member of the Order of St John of Jerusalem,26 but considering that it has been restored, such a feature might have been added by the whim of Abraham Kent. Alternatively, as the effigies came from St John’s church it is possible that the military figure does indeed represent a member of the Order of St John. In 1476 John Weston was appointed the head of the order in England; he originated from Boston and was last recorded in 1486, possibly dying in this year. William Weston senior, probably John’s brother and also from Boston, was another prominent Hospitaller, who apparently died between 1483-6.27 John or William Weston’s dates of death are too late to be considered for an attribution here, but a member of an earlier generation of this family would be a possibility. Although the identity of the couple commemorated by the alabaster effigies in St Botolph’s church cannot ultimately be determined therefore, these tomb monuments are an interesting element of the entire corpus of monuments in this fine church.

Fig. 9.10 Effigy at Willoughby-on-the-Wolds (Nottinghamshire), c.1450. 9.3 Attribution of the effigies It is not known whom these effigies commemorate. Tradition ascribes them to Sir John Truesdale and Dame Margery Tilney, and the tomb-chest supporting the lady’s effigy has been re-painted with heraldry appropriate to such an attribution.18 These attributions are, however, evidence of a widespread romantic tendency to attribute the most prestigious monuments in a church to its alleged founders. Both Truesdale and Dame Margery lived in the early fourteenth century, a good hundred years and more before these alabaster tomb effigies were commissioned. Sir John Truesdale was the rector of Boston from c. 1300 to the second decade of the fourteenth century.19 If commemorated by a monument he would naturally have been shown in clerical dress, not armour. He, together

Acknowledgements I owe particular gratitude to Sally Badham, who read through this article and made a number of helpful comments and suggestions.

20

L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 5 vols (London, 1964 edn), 4, p. 182. 21 CFR, 1437–1445, p. 3. 22 CIPM, 1427–1432, pp. 282–83, 330. 23 CIPM, 1427–1432, p. 231. 24 CFR, 1437–1445, p. 205. 25 CPR, 1446–1452, p. 275. 26 Jebb, S. Botolph, p. 63; see also M.R. Lambert and R. Walker, Old Boston (England) (Boston, Massachusetts, 1930), p. 95. 27 G. O’Malley, The knights hospitaller of the English langue 1460– 1565 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 38, 339 and 358.

16

H. Lawrence, ‘The heraldry of Willoughby’ Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society 48 (1926), pp. 22–36, at p.32. 17 A. Gardner, Alabaster tombs of the pre-reformation period in England (Cambridge, 1940), p. 97. 18 Thompson, Boston, p. 184, note 1. 19 Jebb, S. Botolph, pp. 104–05.

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Chapter 10 Conclusion by Paul Cockerham and Idolatry’?2 Or, if there are differences in the motivation behind and extent of urban iconoclastic activity, why should this be so? Boston’s civic and ecclesiastical histories have been expertly discussed by Stephen Rigby and Linda Monckton, who jointly account for the swift rise, and comparatively gentle fall, in Boston’s importance as a trading port, together with the initial re-development of St Botolph’s church reflecting this. The town was a trading tour-de-force in the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries, integral to a consumerism directly related to the cosmopolitanism of Hanseatic trade, so this secular prosperity rapidly translated into religious fulfilment, in the construction of a new church close to the market place – the site of the important St Botolph’s fair. Planned from the start as a very large three-aisled structure, it was to dominate completely the site of the original late-eleventh-century church of St Botolph. It was to be the sort of building to rank alongside the very churches in other eastern ports, like St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn (Norfolk) and the contemporaneous structure of St Mary’s, Hull (Yorkshire), whose architectural prestige, luxurious fittings, and religious status mirrored those in Flanders and the Hanseatic ports. The construction of St Botolph’s would also have been a talking point in itself. The building stood on one side of the market square, so its progress would have been constantly monitored and commented upon both by local townspeople as well as by foreign visitors. As Linda Monckton has discussed it was uniformly designed in the most fashionable architectural style, and during the long period of construction its position on the water’s edge would have visibly represented a physical link between the church and trade – the patronage of merchants whose wealth came from overseas trade coming to fruition in a church worthy of their town. Two hundred years later, Leland leaves us in no doubt that St Botolph’s was a mighty structure, as recalled in the title page of this book, compared to the poor, decaying church of St John, which was remote from the market and located outside the myopia of central Boston (Fig. 10.1). And despite, too, the four friaries which were founded towards the end of the thirteenth century, as their buildings (in keeping with their vows of servitude) appear to have been relatively modest structures; judging from what little archaeology has been afforded they were semi-domesticated and almost vernacular in ideal.3 Paradoxically though, the

10.1 Introduction ‘Boston … is a good pretty market corporation town with some good houses in it. The church is a very good one … the inns are tolerable, wine good, water in the springs almost salt. There is very little traffick through this town, being situated upon a by-road. All the people from the highest to the lowest are very complasant to strangers as they see them so seldom.’1 Something of the isolation of the town, and its goodness, are made quite clear in this unknown traveller’s account of his journey through East Anglia in 1741, and it is a situation which still clearly prevails today. The fact that until now there has been no detailed study of the important medieval monumental tomb inheritance of St Botolph’s church probably reflects this geographical remoteness. So, in writing the conclusion to this multi-authored book, although it would have been easier for one of the co-editors simply to summarise the various contributions, it is a more difficult task, albeit one which is much more worthwhile, to both justify and contextualise the book’s arguments, and in the course of which to attempt to synthesise something new. Self-evidently therefore, from a micro-historic viewpoint, the earlier chapters support the thesis that the presence and imagery of the late medieval funeral monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston, closely reflect the history of the town. The beautifully manufactured Tournai incised slabs of the early fourteenth century were both enormously popular, and represented the apogee of gravestone iconography and representation at a time when the town was, if not still on the up, at least commercially flourishing. By the sixteenth century monuments comprised smaller, plainer, piecemeal brasses, signalling an increasing introspection of memorialisation. They mirrored a significant reduction in the town’s overseas trade and its substitution by coastal shipping with links to London, as well as an inland market economy. A second, macro-historic assessment of this book’s contents is desirable therefore, in particular looking at how the patterns of memorialisation at St Botolph’s exemplified in particular by funeral monuments and the activities of religious guilds, compare more widely to those in other urban locations. It is also rewarding to examine these urban monuments within the context of Reformation iconoclasm. Was a common framework of destruction adopted, as we find in the seventeenth century when William Dowsing was specifically commissioned to implement a Parliamentary Ordinance of 1643 which focussed on the abolition of ‘Monuments of Superstition

2 J. Morrill, ‘William Dowsing and the administration of iconoclasm in the Puritan revolution’, in T. Cooper (ed.), The journal of William Dowsing – iconoclasm in East Anglia in the English civil war (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 1–28; and see J. Spraggon, Puritan iconoclasm during the English civil war (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 61–98. 3 G. Harden, Medieval Boston and its archaeological implications (Sleaford, 1978), pp. 22–28; and see also P. Cope-Faulkener et al. (eds), Boston town historic environment baseline study (Heckington, n.d.), pp. 9–10, available online at www.Boston%20urban%20baseline%20final.pdf accessed 18 May 2011.

1

R.G. Wilson, ‘Journal of a tour through Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in the summer of 1741’, in C. Harper-Bill et al (eds), East Anglia’s History – studies in honour of Norman Scarfe (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 259–88, at pp. 278–79. The ‘Journal’ is an anonymous work, now BL, Add. MS. 38488, fols 17v–49.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 10.1 Moule’s map of Boston, 1839.

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Conclusion

Fig. 10.2 Antiquarian print of St Botolph’s church and the grand sluice bridge on the River Witham, demonstrating how the church tower dominates the town and the surrounding countryside. and their unique, luxuriant commemorative appeal. Such things combined physical beauty – ‘bien graver et souffisement’ – with the desired permanency of a grave marker. Simultaneously, double effigial incised slabs signalled the advent of a duality of intercessory masses for a husband and wife together; documents such as conjoined wills requesting a mass for the testators together can mean only that. Equally, these changes reflected the fashions resulting from rapid Flemish urbanisation, and with them, the demise of the commemorative hold of ancestors over their descendants. An individualism consequently emerged, nurtured by the chivalric conventions of the late-thirteenth and earlyfourteenth centuries, which encouraged a focus on one’s own death, rather than on lengthy established family connections.4 In the rich urban meritocratic trading society that was Boston in the early fourteenth century, it

open aspect of St Botolph’s internal design may have been influenced by the characteristically hall-like churches of the mendicants and their dual purpose for preaching and burial. 10.2 Memorialisation in the new church The ultimate prestige of St Botolph’s therefore, as the most eye-catching building for a considerable area of flat Lincolnshire fenland, was as relevant then as it is today, and should not be underestimated (Fig. 10.2). Little wonder that those of the town’s élite who died during its periods of construction, wanted to be buried inside it rather than in its churchyard, as well as being commemorated by a permanent monument or gravemarker. At this formative period of building there would have been ample room to accommodate their burials, perhaps by specific design: these people also had both the money and, by virtue of their patronage, sufficient social influence to requisition intra-mural burial and memorialisation. Crucially, too, as I discussed in chapter 5, some of the merchants who travelled to Flanders would have had first-hand experience of commemorative fashions overseas; they could not have failed to encounter the elaborate effigial Tournai marble incised graveslabs,

4

S.K. Cohn jr, ‘The place of the dead in Flanders and Tuscany: towards a comparative history of the Black Death’, in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds), The place of the dead – death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 17–43, esp. pp. 17–22.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments which was particularly acute in heavily urbanised and populated Flanders;5 perhaps too because Hanseatic trade was shifting from Flanders to the Baltic ports; and also possibly because the mechanism of instituting a dynastic commemorative strategy broke down, as generations of families pre-deceased their parents leaving nobody to commission monuments following the natural deaths of the survivors. Any or all of these reasons may have contributed to the abrupt demise of the continual import of Tournai incised slabs.6 Crucially though, if the mercantile corporate of Boston was suddenly reduced in numbers, influence, wealth and cosmopolitanism, who was there left who was going to pray for them?

is hardly surprising that Bostonians looked to repeat these things in their own, new, church. The fact that the twenty-three or so Tournai marble slabs in St Botolph’s account for approximately a quarter of all such pre-fifteenth century surviving examples in the British Isles is itself suggestive of how important Hanseatic trade was to Boston at this period. And taking the incidence of Tournai slabs as a crude indicator of such trade success, it also demonstrates what a large share of such trade the Boston merchants managed to retain. Equally, these Tournai slabs date from c.1325 to c.1360, spanning the first decades of the building construction period. There was no delay in adopting this form of memorialisation in the church therefore, as the dates of the earliest slabs are coincident with the first building phase, and it is tempting to think that the slabs were directly incorporated into the floor almost as part of the construction programme. Were they also employed in the other churches of Boston prior to the building of St Botolph’s? Were there also slabs laid down at St John’s for merchants uncertain of the early-fourteenth-century building vagaries of the new church, but of which we have no record now? The survival of Wessel de Smalenburgh’s slab from the ruins of the Franciscan friary is tangible evidence that there were more of these monuments in Boston than those now extant in St Botolph’s, but how many, of course, is impossible to say. However, as the mendicants’ churches were usually the burial location of foreign traders, and as such trade was flourishing when the Flemish brass / incised slab industry was at its most prolific, so one can assume that Wessel’s slab was not an isolated commission and that more were laid down in the other mendicant churches as well. The rapid accumulation of slabs to merchants and their wives in St Botolph’s, however, opened up new ideas in memorialisation. Firstly, there was a colonisation of various parts of the new structure by contemporaneous monuments to the mercantile élite. This established a corporate archive of mercantile remembrance both in the recall of memory of the sheer mass of slabs together in the church, and in the creation of a permanent locus of burial and commemoration. Secondly, the use of double – man and wife – monuments, crystallised new extended formulae of remembrance, the duality of commemorating two individuals merging into that for a married couple, the two inseparable in death as they had been in life. These impressive Flemish floorslabs quickly superseded the earlier monumental form of cross slabs that we know of at St Botolph’s, with their impersonal, uniform iconography, and by then outdated appeal for élite patrons in Boston. It is possible that the few examples in the church, accounted for by Sally Badham and Lawrence Butler in Appendix 1.4, like the fifteenthcentury three-dimensional effigies described by Mark Downing in chapter 9, originally came from elsewhere. Equally swift, however, was the fall from favour of these Flemish slabs in Boston. Perhaps this was forced by the decimated population and lack of craftsmen resulting from the Black Death on both sides of the North Sea, but

10.3 Boston guilds and corporate remembrance Does this explain the moving away from funeral monuments in the late fourteenth century and an expansion of memorialisation by non-physical means via the evolving religious guild organisations? Distinct from trade guilds, those in St Botolph’s dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Corpus Christi, were 5

D. Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (Harlow, 1992), pp. 265–66. S. Badham, ‘Monumental brasses and the Black Death - a reappraisal’, AJ 80 (2000), pp. 207–47, stresses the possibility of the brass engravers in Tournai making the most of the opportunity to penetrate the English market for large effigial brasses at a time when the native industry was apparently unable to produce such large commissions, implying a continuity of production on the continent which ought therefore to be replicated in the continued availability of slabs to Boston clients. Examined more closely however, the chronology of this stunning series of brasses (which was assembled by H.K. Cameron in ‘The 14th –century school of Flemish brasses’, MBST 11 [1976], pp. 50– 71) suggests a hazy period of activity immediately post-1350 contrasting sharply to the large number of brasses laid down all over Europe, not just in England, from 1355 onwards. If the Tournai engravers can be charged with penetrating the English market, then they succeeded equally well elsewhere, but this was perhaps due more to a connoisseurship of the brasses themselves rather than incumbent on the failure of native brass production. The piecemeal distribution of these brasses along the Baltic coast of Germany is precisely in locations where other types of funeral monument, such as incised slabs, were also readily available at this time, emphasising the very special commission of these brasses. The seeming continuity of this school’s products, from 1319 to the early fifteenth century, suggests that while there may have been a glitch in production in the 1350s, no doubt due to the plague, there was a sufficient number of craftsmen suitably trained to manufacture these enormous brasses who survived to maintain the impeccable standards of production. The same may not have been true of incised slab workshop(s) in the city. Secondly, it is likely that many slabs of Tournai marble laid down in Boston were incised in Bruges, and while the productivity of the brass engraving workshop of Tournai appeared to endure the worst of the plague, the position as to the continuity of, or disruption to, slab production in Bruges resulting from the bouts of plague in the middle of the fourteenth century, is far from clear. The situation in Flanders has to be open to question therefore, but the very particular commissions of Flemish brasses by Englishmen after the 1350s were just that – orders for exceptionally fine funeral monuments – and should not be taken as a measure of the continuing availability of incised slabs, whether engraved in Tournai or Bruges. See F.A. Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs, 2 vols (London, 1976), 2, passim; E. Lau and K. Krüger (eds), Ich Bin ein Gast auf Erden, Grabplatten in Mechlenburgischen Kirchen [exhibition catalogue, Schwerin / Rostock] (1995); K. Krüger, Corpus der mittelalterlichen Grabdenkmäler in Lübeck, Schleswig, Holstein und Lauenburg (11001600) (Stuttgart, 1999), passim; C Kratzke, ‘Mittelalterliche sepulkraldenkmäler in den Klöstern der Zisterzienser und Zisterzienserinnen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Typenspektrum, mikroarchitektur und memorialfunktion’, in J. Hall and C. Kratzke (eds), Sepulturae Cistercienses – burial, memorial and patronage in medieval Cistercian monasteries (Cîteaux, 2005), pp. 259–322. 6

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Conclusion initially like rich men’s clubs: they were fellowships of the town’s élite, together with socially important contacts and aristocrats both from the county and further afield. Obviously they were in sharp contrast to the minor guilds also based in the church, which were patronised by the less well off and likely had specific, local, small-scale aims, although like the greater guilds (which also provided a business forum), these organisations principally were vehicles to ensure perpetual remembrance of the souls of the deceased members of the guild. This paradigm shift in the methodology of remembrance further aligns with Cohn’s ‘northern European’ attitude to death and remembrance in the middle of the fourteenth century. The rise of the guilds parallels testators in the cities of Tournai and Douai commemorating themselves by organising prayers and masses as a kind of Renaissance ‘individualism’ and in celebration of their earthly love and achievements. ‘The lifespan of the testator was their frame of remembrance’: hence, wider celebration of the individual Boston merchant who would previously have followed continental fashion and chosen to be memorialised by a Tournai incised slab, was now relinquished to a guild as a perpetual confraternity. He continued to forego the recall of his family’s descent and the ongoing worship of his ancestors, but now by enveloping himself within a corporate structure of remembrance rather than employing an individual, ostentatious monument.7 And following on from this, it is with the numbers and wealth of the guilds that the sheer scale of urban commemoration comes into its own. Guilds physically took over liturgically important areas of the interior of St Botolph’s with the structural conditions necessary for this privatised accommodation duly planned for as the church took shape. Parclose screens were erected to create and maintain the exclusivity of space required for a guild chapel, within which one or more priests would sing masses for the dead guild members, read obit rolls, and probably act as confessors to the guild members. These chaplains would also work in tandem with the guilds’ governors to capitalise on financial and physical legacies, upholding the very reason for their existence in the first place. Each of the two guilds of SS Peter and Paul, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, occupied a prestigious site at the east end of the north and south aisles respectively, and the magnificent religious paraphernalia retained for use within the exclusivity of these partitions must have imparted to the chapels something to equal – or more – the mystery of the chancel. The guilds, then, provided a security of perpetual memorialisation. No matter if one died without issue, or one’s offspring failed to trade as well as their fathers had, or were perhaps already deceased, the guilds’ systems were there to act in loco parentis to one’s soul. Money or a property-based endowment would sponsor an enduring remembrance, and often an artefact or religiously inspired decoration was commissioned and donated with the same motivation. As Sally Badham has identified in chapter 4,

the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary possessed a ‘banner cloth of lynyn cloth with the ymage of oure lady & certeyn ymages of men & women knelyng before her’, those men and women presumably representations of the donors, keeping them ever in mind.8 Burial within these relatively restricted spaces was the privilege of the few, and physical memorialisation with a tomb monument even more so. Yet as Sally Badham has painstakingly traced in chapter 6 and Appendices 1.1 and 1.2, several brasses were laid down within these chapels’ precincts, the choice of brass doubtless being as much pragmatic as anything else. Grandiose three-dimensional effigial tombs in wood, freestone or alabaster were fashionably adopted to commemorate family dynasties in parish churches with an enduring manorial descent, a notable example being near Boston at Spilsby (Lincolnshire) and the fourteenthcentury tombs to the Willoughby family there. Yet after the monumental lull of the late fourteenth century, having neither the luxury of space nor an opportunity to exemplify inherited social prestige – which might be recognised instead within the changing governance of a guild, the civic élite at Boston continually favoured flat gravestones, although with brasses rather than maintaining the fashion for the simpler, earlier monumental form of an incised slab. After all, the imagery of both types was the same – civilian figures in stylish dress, pictured within architectural surrounds and identified by inscriptions, heraldry and merchants’ marks. In chapter 8 Jessica Freeman adds biographical colour to two such monuments, one at Boston to Walter Pescod (d. 1398), and the other at Barton-upon-Humber to Simon Seman (d. 1433). The rich diversity of their business interests in Lincolnshire and London are brought to life and their considerable financial and property resources discussed, yet underneath these temporal assets both men desired the security of burial and physical memorialisation in the towns to which they felt they owed most. Walter Pescod and his wife were interred in front of the altar of the guild chapel of SS Peter and Paul, of which he was of course a member, under a large slab bearing a fabulous brass, the design of which resonated in a contemporaneous royal monument in Westminster, no less. Simon Seman was buried under a slab in the middle of the chancel of St Mary’s, Barton, the most prestigious position possible, for which privilege he was not just socially qualified but presumably prepared to pay handsomely. His monument bears just his single, dignified figure, yet he is portrayed standing on the wine tuns which were the foundation of his prosperity. The archive of mercantile commemoration inside St Botolph’s founded by the Flemish-made slabs continued to expand in the fifteenth century in parallel with the growth and influence of the guilds, which maintained their pre-eminence in facilitating intercessory rituals. The 8 For a full account of the lavish wealth and artefacts belonging to this guild see K. Giles, ‘“A table of alabaster with the story of Doom”- The religious objects and spaces of the guild of Our Blessed Virgin, Boston (Lincs)’, in T. Hamling and C. Richardson (eds), Everyday objects medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (Farnham, 2010), pp. 267–88.

7 S.K. Cohn jr, The Black Death transformed – disease and culture in early Renaissance Europe (London, 2002), pp. 245–46, quote from p. 245.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments costly.12 Conversely, a society under financial and cultural stress adopted funeral customs which were ostentatious and expensive. Could there be something of mid- to late-fifteenth-century Boston here, that although a port town in financial and population decline, prestigious building projects, funeral rituals and the luxuriousness of guild activities were maintained, perhaps initially as a face-saving exercise but ultimately as a means of trying to prevent a social as well as financial depression? Hence, the physical memorialisation of Boston’s élite continued, with several brasses laid down to merchants of the Staple at Calais, even though the wool trade was now handled mainly via London, and Boston was just their home town, or one in which they felt they had their roots. Their monuments portrayed individuals with less grandeur, displaying them for what they felt they had become. For example, the figure of the rich and prosperous merchant John Robinson (d. 1525) in St Botolph’s, was most likely a stock London-made brass effigy, very similar to those on numerous other early-sixteenth-century graveslabs, yet his monument is the more remarkable as he is accompanied by his four wives; and, business-like as ever, the inscription incorporated [it is lost] a permanent reminder of his guild endowment, so that the mutuality of the perpetual monument and a perpetual endowment to maintain both guild and monument was intended to be preserved forever.

Fens 1 brass and slab workshop was established, most likely in Boston, in the opening decade of the fifteenth century to cater for the new demand for personalised graveslabs.9 As a business enterprise this atelier enjoyed a steady turnover of modest brasses to Bostonians, but it was also sufficiently resourceful to produce large brasses and incised slabs of considerable quality. These satisfied the tastes of not just Boston merchants such as John Nutting and his wife Agnes (d. 1420), but also aristocratic patrons such as the Willoughbys of Spilsby, who chose to continue their dynastic succession of monuments with brasses rather than three-dimensional effigial tombs.10 The products of this Fens-1 workshop fall off c.1435, probably because it was the enterprise of a single master, on whose death the reduced demand for monuments at that economically depressed time militated against the opportunity of a successor. Rebounding from this nadir however, by the start of the sixteenth century the wealth and power of the guilds in Boston and other urban churches was enormous. Their takeover of large areas of the nave and aisles was equally unquestionable, such that maintenance of the church fabric within these guild chapels and the government of the church itself, was a synergy between the guild members, their chaplain(s) and the parish clergy. Curiously, the ever growing wealth of the guilds, visualised and perpetuated in the ongoing construction of the Stump, continued when the town’s fortunes entered the prolonged decline of the mid- to late-fifteenth century. There are several possible reasons for this. Firstly, as we have seen, although mercantile wealth might have been generated elsewhere, merchants frequently retained an association with Boston and donated to the guilds on their death. Secondly, as Sally Badham has discussed in chapter 4, the effects of the income generated from the marketing of indulgences by the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, should not be underestimated. As Robert Swanson has it, ‘the Boston guild is in a class by itself’.11 Thirdly, there may have been well-established patterns of patronage which maintained a level of financial contribution to the guilds, in both vertical (son following father) and horizontal (family matching family) ways. This sponsorship would have gone some way to sustain a continuity of tradesmen and craftsmen in the town, akin to spending one’s way out of a financial recession. Lastly, Gordon Childe’s mortuary theory proposes that when societies became materially and socially settled so their funeral customs and burial rites evolved to be less elaborate and less

10.4 St Botolph’s as a model of urban memorialisation (i) Influences on monument commission The continuing piety of these sixteenth-century merchants was without question. Enhanced and clarified in their testamentary instructions as to the elaboration of their funeral ceremony, burial and subsequent rituals, they looked ultimately towards their parish church, the church associated with their residence and dominating their transactions in the market place, for their burial place.13 And by doing this the numerous intercessory mechanisms in the town were employed appropriately: testators sustained a harmony between the parish and guild clergy – who were responsible for their burial and received the fees accordingly – and the mendicants – who were frequently left financial bequests, but commissioned only to say funeral and anniversary masses – so that the overall number of persons involved in salvitic prayer might be maximised.14 In a rural parish church, where there was relatively little spatial pressure on intra-mural burials, succeeding generations of merchant families might enjoy the opportunity to erect their own

9 S.F. Badham, ‘The Fens I series: an early fifteenth-century group of monumental brasses and incised slabs’, JBAA 142 (1989), pp. 46–62. 10 For a seventeenth-century description of the Spilsby monuments see R.E.G. Cole, (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by Gervase Holles A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (Lincoln, 1911), pp. 84–90; for the tombs, see J. Lord, ‘Repairing and cleaning of the said burying places’, Church Monuments 9 (1994), pp. 83–92; and M. Downing, Medieval military monuments in Lincolnshire, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 515 (Oxford, 2010), passim; and for the brasses see G.E. Jeans, A list of the remaining sepulchral brasses in Lincolnshire (supplement to Lincolnshire Notes & Queries 3, 1893), pp. 64–66. 11 R. Swanson, Indulgences in late medieval England. Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge, 2007), p. 440.

12 V.G. Childe, ‘Directional changes in funerary practices during 50,000 Years’, Man 45 (1945), pp. 13–19; cited by D.E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (Oxford, 1979), pp. 122–24. 13 J. Kermode, ‘The greater towns 1300–1540’, in D.M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge urban history of Britain, volume 1 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 441–65. 14 The parish therefore did not miss out on burial fees and the prestige and ceremony associated with lavish funerals, unlike at Norwich for instance, where mendicant burials were more common, provoking friction between the regular and the parish clergy; see J. Kermode, Medieval merchants – York, Beverley and Hull in the later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 142–43.

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Conclusion monuments, as at Algarkirk (Lincolnshire).15 In urban St Botolph’s, however, where burial space was pressurised, one tombstone may have had to suffice for several generations, in both vertical and horizontal lines of family affiliation.16 Hence, the unknown antiquary, visiting the church in the early seventeenth century, recorded just single monuments to many families, as the generations preceding or succeeding those visibly commemorated may either have replaced an existing image with their own and respectfully adopted the monument for themselves, or else were content with the imagery already in place, ensuring their own remembrance by other means, doubtless involving the guilds. The guilds helped communally to level the ability to be remembered therefore. The basis of difference between the urban and rural platforms of commemoration is the sheer numbers of people and monuments involved. Late-fourteenth-century Boston may have been populated by as many as 5500 individuals, albeit falling to around 3000 by 1563, as Stephen Rigby has discussed in chapter 2. Whether or not a funeral monument was laid down in St Botolph’s, frequent guild-registered funerals added to the timetable of organised processions and feasts.17 These, together with the individual vagaries of a growing number of other ceremonies performed by guild chaplains both in the church and the town at large, became a constant reminder of the guild apparatus for remembering and taking care of their own. Translate that apparatus into its static locus within a church, and then multiply it several times to represent the separate but numerous guilds, and the internal atmosphere of the church – the very busyness and bustle of it – cannot have been so different to the market place outside. It was a world apart from the comparatively peaceful setting of a rural parish church, and where the rural model of memorialisation was quite straightforward. Frequently a free-standing tombchest was loaded with a large effigy of the deceased manorial lord, often in armour and bristling with heraldry and accoutrements, perhaps amplified by further visual imagery in stained glass, or painted decoration on the walls or banners. Dominating the space and asserting the family’s continued lineage authority, the monument, perhaps even more than the liturgy, was ultimately the stimulus for and focus of intercessory prayer.18 Boston society was not lineage governed however, and a meritocratic monumentalism appears to have

predominated in conjunction with the commonality of guild remembrance. Up to the mid-sixteenth century the majority of monuments displayed similar imagery exemplifying the mercantile status of the deceased, whether they were fourteenth-century slabs from Flanders or the late-fifteenth / early-sixteenth-century brasses made in the town itself or imported from London. They were erected to the élite of Boson who were rich and influential on their own account, via personal financial acumen and good trading fortune, as well as, possibly, making it up through the ranks. These individuals may well have married the daughters of similar entrepreneurs, but in death there was little sense of successive or dynastic memorialisation in the commissioning of their modest, flat monumental brasses and slabs. The fact that such relatively unpretentious forms of monument were commissioned was not just pragmatic, in that they could be accommodated on the floor, but also something of an equal, sideways, contemporary acknowledgement of the memorialisation of one’s fellow members of mercantile Boston society, compared to the lineage duty associated with a succession of large and grandiose monuments to generations of the same family.19 The subtlety of this civilian effigial imagery probably reflects a social etiquette of monument commission, and although in striking contrast to the rich individuality of rural monuments, the locations of these urban monumental slabs ensured that they were integrated more successfully into the larger intercessory schemes organised by the guilds. In addition, the names of those commemorated individually by monuments would have duly taken their place in the recital of obits together with those of their fellow guild members, whether or not these others had any alternative form of remembrance. Individual commemoration in towns became truly communal therefore, both laterally with one’s numerous contemporaries in the guild, and vertically in the vibrantly changing dynamic of guild members. The two synergised perfectly in St Botolph’s.20 19 In the dynastic succession of the Catesby family at Ashby St Ledgers (Northamptonshire) portrayed in a series of splendid brasses, the first brass to John Catesby (d. 1404) and his wife depicts him in civilian dress rather than, as might have been more appropriate for his social status in the parish, in armour. Sally Badham and Nigel Saul suggest a number of reasons why this might be so, including the fact that the family ‘were still conscious of their urban origins’, urban memorialisation exemplifying civilian rather than individual armed imagery. See S. Badham and N. Saul, ‘The Catesbys’ taste in brasses’, in J. Bertram (ed.), The Catesby family and their brasses at Ashby St Ledgers (London, 2006), pp. 36–75, at pp. 40–43. 20 The use of obit brasses or tablets within the guild chapels must also be considered. They were commissioned by individuals to operate in conjunction with their own monumental effigies as a perpetual reminder to guild chaplains specifically to be remembered in the recitation of the obit roll. They therefore retained a functionality if the regularity of anniversary masses relating to the deaths of those commemorated by funeral monuments had stalled. Very few of these plates have survived, as they were most likely erected murally, close to guild or chantry altars (so as to be obvious to the priest officiating there), and being both visually conspicuous as well as promoting the doctrine of Purgatory, they were good fodder for the Reformation iconoclast. Their use at Boston can only be hazarded as a part of the intercessory apparatus accommodated within the guild chapels as no documentary or physical traces of them remain. See A.R. Dufty, ‘The Stathum book of hours; an existing MS. mentioned on a 15th-century brass’, in Memorial volume for Sir Alfred Clapham – supplement to the Archaeological Journal 106

15 S. Badham, ‘The Robertsons remembered: two generations of Calais staplers at Algarkirk, Lincolnshire’, in C. Barron and C. Burgess (eds), Memory and commemoration in medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20 (Donington, 2010), pp. 202–17. 16 V. Harding, The dead and the living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 119–46, esp. pp. 127–32; and pp. 157–65. 17 Something of the panoply of these ceremonies is given by C. Gittings, ‘Urban funerals in late medieval and Reformation England’, in S. Bassett (ed.), Death in towns – urban responses to the dying and the dead, 100–1600 (London, 1992), pp. 170–83; and R. Houlbrooke, Death, religion and the family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 255–64. 18 This was symptomatic of an ultimate tendency towards privatisation, with the creation of private and / or chantry chapels for members of the aristocracy and higher gentry; see C. Carpenter, ‘The religion of the gentry in fifteenth-century England’, in D. Williams (ed.), England in the fifteenth century (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 53–74.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Fourthly therefore, was an almost aesthetic appreciation adopted by the corporation towards imagery and artefacts which had previously been integral to the performance of pre-Reformation rituals, because they were keen to emphasize their legitimacy and a sense of continuity – this at a time when the corporation was relatively newly empowered? If St Botolph’s were whitewashed inside and its partitions stripped away, the consequent monochrome and barn-like appearance of the place would have provided an extreme contrast to the visual luxuriance that had existed only a few years before. Would that sheer contrast have been sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the new orthodoxy, and the government?24 Moveable apparatus like lights may have been relocated to dissolve any liturgical links (as after all they served a practical as well as previously a ceremonial purpose) and vestments put away out of sight, but was every statue, every altar, necessarily removed? Was this more of a process of ornamental simplification rather than a complete re-ordering, and perhaps more in keeping with an image-tolerant Lutheran approach to Protestantism than a Calvinist image-hostile solution?25

(ii) Monument survival and preservation The continued survival of these monuments in St Botolph’s during and after the socio-religious changes of the mid-sixteenth century was dependent on several coincident policies, as Derrick Chivers and I have discussed in chapter 7. Firstly, the preservation of their own family monuments by aldermen of the guilds – and then the town corporation – is strongly suspected.21 By doing so these men appear to have perceived a dynastic value in their ancestors’ monuments as tangible evidence of their own lineage when they themselves were precluded either theologically, or socially, from erecting their own monuments. Hence, the urban meritocratic trend of memorialisation prior to the Reformation was now better valued as a dynastic one, and one used to support the growing aspirations of these men, post-Reformation, to achieve gentrification.22 Secondly, the theological change in how these monuments were perceived to function was also imperative to their survival, inasmuch as they provided instruction to the congregation of St Botolph’s of the right beliefs and conduct of their predecessors. Thirdly, the town’s governing body changed matters only a little in the mid-sixteenth century, taking over the formal and practical governance of both church fabric and theology. They substituted for the clerical ordering of the liturgy and the lay aldermen who managed the guilds’ finances, and who effectively maintained the material church. The new town corporation was both wealthy enough and sufficiently empowered to prevent unsupervised iconoclasm therefore, as this might otherwise have been construed as encouraging the infringement of property rights in other contexts.23 They were able to create the appropriate ‘solemn atmosphere’ integral to reformed worship by the removal not of floorslabs and brasses, but instead by taking away structural, non-commemorative components, such as the guild chapels and the parclose screens enclosing them, and to open up the church, making it suitable for the preaching and reception of the Word of God. The hierarchy of sacredness and the exclusivity of guild chapel space were hardly now of concern, but in the laying bare of this space at St Botolph’s, little structural damage appears to have been done.

24

For an opinion judging Elizabethan church architecture to be sympathetic to these aesthetics, as ‘conservative, rustic … even hamfisted’, see H. Colvin, Essays in English architectural history (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 22–51, quote from p. 46. 25 See J.L. Koerner, The reformation of the image (London, 2004), pp. 27–28, 61–68, 156–59, where something of the complex Lutheran ideology of images is clarified, and that per se it was not what the images in themselves were, but the functions that they served. For discussions of how this concept was visualised elsewhere see J. Kroesen and R. Steensma, The interior of the medieval village church (Louvain, Paris and Dudley, 2004), pp. 386–403; and S.C. Karant-Nunn, The reformation of feeling – shaping the religious emotions in early modern Germany (Oxford, 2010), pp. 65–72. Lutheran church architecture is described by A. Spicer, ‘Architecture’, in A. Pettegee (ed.), The reformation world (London and New York, 2000), pp. 505–20 at pp. 507–11. Little work in English has been published on the comparative iconographies of pre- and post-Reformation tomb monuments (for which see footnotes 26 and 78 of chapter 7); but for a general introduction see J. Phillips, The reformation of images – destruction of art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), pp. 111– 39; R. Marks, Image and devotion in late medieval England (Stroud, 2004), pp. 255–75; and more specifically relating to English funeral monuments see N. Llewellyn, Funeral monuments in post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 251–58; and C. Bartram, ‘“Some tomb for a remembrance” – representations of piety in post-Reformation gentry funeral monuments’, in R. Lutton and E. Salter (eds), Pieties in transition – religious practices and experiences c.1400–1640 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 129–44. Luther’s own comments on funerary images were hardly clear cut: ‘If we want to honour graves in some way, it would be more fitting to paint or write on the walls good epitaphs or passages from the Bible, so that they could be seen by those going to tombs or to the cemetery’, quoted by S. Michalski, The reformation and the visual arts – the Protestant image question in western and eastern Europe (London, 1993), pp. 40–41. As Michalski points out (p. 40), Luther could hardly have foreseen the substitution of large elaborate tombs for the side altars of churches and their saintly images, but it suggests a far from reactionary polemic to images of the laity on their own funeral monuments which were never intended to be idolatrous. For recent analyses of the topic relating specifically to tomb monuments in continental Europe see O. Mays, Memoria und Bekenntnis – die Grabdenkmäler evangelischer Landesherren im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation im zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung (Regensburg, 2009), pp. 241–55 on the Protestant understanding of funerary art within an iconographically structured programme; and I. Brinkmann, Grabdenkmäler, Grablegen und Begräbniswesen des lutherischen Adels (Berlin, 2010), who stresses that pre-Reformation

(London, 1952), pp. 83–90; and R. Rex, ‘Monumental brasses and the reformation’, MBST 14 (1993), pp. 376–94, esp. pp. 377–78. 21 Jonathan Finch has traced several brasses with controversial iconography which survived Reformation iconoclasm in Norwich, with a concentration of them in the church of St John Maddermarket. This must surely say something about the abilities of individuals associated with a particular church to safeguard their monumental inheritance. See J. Finch, Church monuments in Norfolk before 1850 – an archaeology of commemoration, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 317 (Oxford, 2000), p. 78. 22 Also described by Finch, Church monuments in Norfolk, pp. 119–21. 23 B. Heal, ‘Sacred image and sacred space in Lutheran Germany’, in W. Coster and A. Spicer (eds), Sacred space in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 39–59, at p. 53; and see also P. Lindley, Tomb destruction and scholarship – medieval monuments in early modern England (Donington, 2007), pp. 21–22, who draws attention to the heralds’ interest in monuments as physical evidence of the right to bear arms, as well as ‘potential damages posed to collective memory and to the social elite’ (p. 21) if tomb monuments were destroyed.

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Conclusion Lastly, there is a pragmatism evident in leaving the monumental floorslabs in situ in the body of the church, as obviously they served a practical purpose in paving the church. While some might have been turned over to hide the imagery, their designs were dominated by figures of simply dressed civilians, which may well have resonated favourably with the corporation as part of their own mercantile archive – remembering the glory days of active trade with Flanders – and consequently have been preserved. If it is presumed therefore that many memorials, especially floor-slabs, were left untouched during the sixteenth century, it is also remarkable that, despite interim piecemeal acts of vandalism during the Puritaninspired ministries of the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries, much material appeared to survive until the Civil Wars. And going on, Boston’s relative isolation during these conflicts, together with the seventeenth-century pewing of the church, probably covering over many brasses and slabs, would have assisted in the continued survival of the original floor. The comprehensive nineteenth-century restoration programme supervised by Scott was just as sympathetic to its preservation. Hence, the survival of the entire church floor relatively intact, despite intermittent pilfering of brass, was purposefully engineered on two occasions – the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; and its survival during the wars of the seventeenth century was by sheer chance.

fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. These were followed by something of a revival in the quality and variety of imports, if not total value of trade, at the start of the sixteenth century.27 Again, as in Boston, the structure and power of the religious guilds system was fundamental to the socio-economic and religious wellbeing of the town’s churches and population, reflected both in the enormous number of guilds, their wealth – fuelled as in Boston by numerous testamentary bequests – and subsequently their overwhelming physical and ritual domination of the churches.28 The guilds’ dominance in towns, and trading ports in particular, was a response to the patterns of migration into these pressurised urban communities and the social difficulties inherent in the settlement of a shifting population. Immigrants tended to use the structure of the guilds to establish social bonds, having the security neither of family nor of a parish community to rely on, and as some guilds prospered and others faltered or merged, so political power tended to become focussed in one or two of the major guilds.29 Unlike Boston though, Lynn received its incorporation charter early on, in 1268, and thereafter the congruence which developed between the religious guilds and civic governance crystallised in the mayor and aldermen of the town being elected from among the aldermen of the Holy Trinity guild, whose chapel was in St Margaret’s church, together with at least thirteen other guilds.30 In this context it is not surprising that monuments to members of the Trinity Guild – the ‘Great Gild’31 – recorded their civic role as well as both their social status and their position in the hierarchy of guild members, and indeed, the town. The lost brass of Walter Coney (d. 1479) was typical, laid down in the guild chapel and depicting him as a prosperous civilian figure, the inscription recounting his life as a merchant, recalling that he had served four times as mayor of Lynn and was an alderman of the merchants’ guild of the Holy Trinity for more than forty years.32 Mackerell records that both his merchant’s mark and the town arms were also blazoned on his gravestone, together with a representation of the Holy Trinity and scrolls around it labelled ‘Laus Deo’, the whole fusing imagery of

(iii) Comparative models of urban memorialisation The wider contextualisation of just one of these periods of risk, during the Reformation, and comparing what happened in Boston to what went on elsewhere, opens up new horizons in the study of urban memorialisation and tests the theory of whether the survival of this monumental legacy was rare. To do this ideally requires a bountiful corpus of antiquarian church notes, comprising accounts made at several points in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so that a decreasing tally of funeral monuments is noted as losses are ongoing.26 A detailed study of this type is well outside the scope of these concluding remarks, but documentary accounts of the monumental remains at the ports of King’s Lynn (Norfolk), and Hull (Yorkshire), provide useful coastal comparisons, and at Coventry (Warwickshire), they are equally relevant too, as a Midlands town with close links to Boston via the medieval cloth trade. The medieval trading history of King’s Lynn mirrored that of Boston, with a peak in the thirteenth century followed by a succession of setbacks in the mid-

27 E.M. Carus-Wilson, ‘The medieval trade of the ports of the Wash’, Medieval Archaeology 6–7 (1962–63), pp. 182–201; V. Parker, The making of King’s Lynn – secular buildings from the 11th to the 17th century (Chichester, 1971), pp. 1–19. 28 The guilds are listed and described by F. Blomefield, An essay towards a topographical history of the county of Norfolk, 2nd edn revised by C. Parkin, 11 vols (London, 1805–10), 8, pp. 515–18; and H.F. Westlake, The parish gilds of mediaeval England (London, 1919), pp. 192–99. 29 K. Farnhill, Guilds and the parish community in late medieval East Anglia c.1470–1550 (York, 2001), pp. 31–34. 30 Blomefield, County of Norfolk, 8, p. 523; A. Metters, ‘“Mixed enterprise” in early seventeenth-century King’s Lynn’, in C. Rawcliffe et al. (eds), Counties and communities – essays on East Anglian history presented to Hassell Smith (Norwich, 1996), pp. 225–40, esp. pp. 225– 27. 31 D.M. Owen (ed.), The making of King’s Lynn – a documentary survey (London, 1984), pp. 60–64, quote on p. 61. 32 B. Mackerell, The history and antiquities of the flourishing corporation of King’s-Lynn in the county of Norfolk (London, 1738), pp. 29–30; the brass is illustrated by R. Gough, Sepulchral monuments in Great Britain applied to illustrate the history of families, manners, habits and arts …, 2 vols (London, 1786–96), 2, pl. 99, opp. p. 268.

ancestors were still of importance for the representation of continuity and legitimacy (p. 159), and going on from this, that Lutheran burial places were regarded as places of dynastic, rather than religious selfrepresentation, such that conversion to a Lutheran creed did not generally lead to a destruction of old funeral monuments symbolic of dynasticism (pp. 358–70). I am very grateful to Dr Steffi Knöll for discussing this literature with me. 26 See Trevor Cooper’s analysis of this methodology in his detailed study of the survival of brasses in East Anglian churches following visits by the iconoclast William Dowsing and his agents; T. Cooper, ‘How many brasses were damaged?’, in Cooper (ed.), Journal of William Dowsing, pp. 396–408.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments almost all of the rest were involved with it as auditors’.38 That said, members of the ruling group in the borough maintained active affiliations to other guilds. It was not the case that a direct and enduring association was formed between the corporation and St Mary’s guild, but more likely that St Mary’s was at the hub of a network of guilds, all enjoying a mutual benefit with the borough’s local government.39 In Coventry (Warwickshire), however, although the prosperity of the town was severely reduced by the early sixteenth century after enjoying a leading position in the fourteenth century as a centre of the cloth trade,40 the apparent survival of pre-Reformation monuments contrasts acutely with what is recorded at Boston, King’s Lynn and Hull. Again, Coventry was a town with a large number of flourishing and important religious guilds, including the mighty Trinity guild, based in Holy Trinity church, and which, like the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Boston, drew its members from all over the country.41 Collectively they were based in the churches of the Holy Trinity,42 St Michael and St Nicholas, all of which also accommodated many chantries; one can only surmise that there was an enormous number and variety of funeral monuments laid down prior to the Reformation which reflected the continually generated intercessory need and family piety fuelling these schemes.43

merchant, guild, and civic authority, within the guild chapel, inside the church itself.33 At least twelve other monuments are noted dating prior to the Reformation of which seven (61%) refer directly to the civic role of the commemorated. Yet in contrast with memorialisation patterns at Boston, monuments did not cease to be laid down at the Reformation, commissions continuing regardless. Between 1550 and 1640 there were on record twenty-seven monuments erected, on twelve of which (44%) there is a reference to the role of the commemorated in civic governance. In St Nicholas’ church in the town the same period was almost as prolific, with twenty-two monuments recorded, twelve of which (55%) referred to the civic status of the deceased.34 Similarly, the published notes of the antiquary Roger Dodsworth, who visited the church of the Holy Trinity, Hull (Yorkshire), in 1620,35 record the inscriptions of sixteen pre-Reformation and sixteen post-Reformation monuments (up to 1620); again, the regularity of monumental commissions was seemingly little disrupted by the Reformation. Twelve of the pre-Reformation monuments (75%), and ten of the post-Reformation monuments (62.5%) mention the deceased’s status as a civic dignitary – as mayor, sheriff or alderman. As at Boston and King’s Lynn there was a well established network of religious guilds by the late medieval period with at least fourteen based in the churches of the Holy Trinity and St Mary.36 Hull was granted a charter of incorporation in 1440 but both before and subsequent to that date a council of burgesses, selected from prominent taxpayers, practically governed the town and also served as aldermen of the guilds. Again as at King’s Lynn there was a strong relationship between one or more of the larger, prestigious guilds and civic governance.37 As Crouch has concluded in his detailed study of the guild of St Mary in Holy Trinity church, between 1456 and 1554 ‘not only did thirteen future mayors of the town hold the office of gild alderman, and twenty-two that of steward,

38 D.J.F. Crouch, Piety, fraternity and power. Religious gilds in late medieval Yorkshire 1389-1547 (York, 2000), pp. 210–14, quote on p. 211. 39 Crouch, Piety, fraternity and power, pp. 213–14. 40 C. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a city: Coventry and the urban crisis of the late middle ages (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 7–30 and passim; and M. Hulton (ed.), Coventry and its people in the 1520s, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 28 (1999). 41 Westlake, Parish gilds, pp. 230–31; L. Fox, ‘The Coventry guilds and trading companies with special reference to the position of women’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society 78 (1962), pp. 13–26; and see also M.D. Harris (ed.), The Register of the Guild of the Holy Trinity, St Mary, St John the Baptist and St Katherine of Coventry, Dugdale Society 13 (London, 1935), pp. xvii–xxii. 42 G.H. Cook, Medieval chantries and chantry chapels (London, 1947), pp. 22–24, illustrates a ground plan of Holy Trinity, Coventry, with (conjectural) areas of the church demarcated to form chapels for the various religious and trade guilds. The common space remaining in the nave is relatively restricted, something akin to what occurred in St Botolph’s, Boston, as Linda Monckton describes in chapter 3. 43 The Coventry workshops of brass and glass which flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries must have encouraged physical memorialisation, and the town’s proximity to the Burton alabaster tomb workshops should also not be underestimated. For an account of the chantries see Sir W. Dugdale, The antiquities of Warwickshire, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1730), 1, pp. 164–79; and see also K.L. Wood-Legh, Perpetual chantries in Britain (Cambridge, 1965), p. 106. Something of the remaining material heritage of the Coventry churches is recorded by C. Davidson and J. Alexander, The early art of Coventry, Stratfordupon-Avon, Warwick and lesser sites in Warwickshire (Kalamazoo, 1985), passim. The survival of St Mary’s Hall, built in 1340–42 as the guildhall of the newly-established merchant guild, and enlarged for the Trinity guild in 1400, is fortuitous amidst the landscape of the bombedout cathedral and the brutal 1960s rebuild of the city centre. Its range of medieval fittings – glass, tapestry, furniture and sculpture, today exemplify its once enormous richness in such things. See R.K. Morris, ‘St Mary’s Hall and the medieval architecture of Coventry’, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society NS 32 (1988), pp. 8–27; for an historical contextualisation of the stained glass see A. Rudebeck, ‘John Thornton and the stained glass of St Mary’s guildhall, Coventry’, Journal of Stained Glass 31 (2007), pp. 14–34; and for a series of papers on the medieval city see L. Monkton and R.K. Morris (eds), Coventry – medieval art, architecture and archaeology in the city and

33

The same inter-relationship of his personal heraldry and merchant mark, the town’s heraldry and imagery of the Holy Trinity, were also found together in the glazing of his town house; Mackerell, King’sLynn, p. 30. There is an unmistakable resonance between domesticity and the guild chapel such that Coney wished both locations to be sites where he desired this powerful iconography, representative of his deep religious piety and social authority, to be displayed for maximum effect. 34 Information from Mackerell, King’s-Lynn, passim; E.M. Beloe, ‘A list of brasses existing in the churches of St Margaret and St Nicholas, King’s Lynn, in 1724’, MBST 2 (1892), pp. 57–59; and Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Gough Norfolk 21. For details of this manuscript and other sources relating to King’s Lynn I am indebted to Mr Peter Heseltine. 35 J.W. Clay (ed.), Yorkshire church notes 1619–1631, by Roger Dodsworth, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series 34 (1904), pp. 191–99; the original manuscript is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Dodsworth 160. Undoubtedly this and other Dodsworth manuscripts hold additional information on other monuments, so while it is accepted that the statistical analysis in this study is based on only a sample dataset, the conclusion is unlikely to be incorrect. For difficulties in interpretation of sets of antiquarian church notes, and those for Yorkshire in particular, see P.J. Lankester, ‘Two lost effigial monuments in Yorkshire and the evidence of church notes’, Church Monuments 8 (1993), pp. 25–44. 36 Westlake, Parish gilds, pp. 233–34; K.J. Allison (ed.), A history of the county of York – East Riding 1 – the city of Kingston upon Hull (Oxford, 1969), pp. 82–85. 37 Allison (ed.), Kingston upon Hull, p. 84.

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Conclusion Yet out of this profusion, by 1640 Sir William Dugdale noted just two pre-Reformation monuments, both in St Michael’s church – one in the Drapers’ chapel to Julian Nethermyll (d. 1539) who was styled in the inscription as ‘Quondam Major huius Civitatis’; and the other in the Mercers’ chapel to Elizabeth Swillington (d. 1546) and her two husbands, the second of which, Ralph Swillington, was ‘Recordatoris Civitatis Coventrie’.44 Of the other twenty-three monuments he noted dating between 1550 and 1640, only three (13%) mentioned any civic role of the deceased; they were instead primarily commemorating the gentry, their inscriptions comprising individualistic epitaphs and eulogies.45 Dugdale’s failure to record pre-Reformation monuments, as he does so enthusiastically elsewhere in the county, can only be due to the fact that these tombs were destroyed in the midsixteenth century by the fervent ‘anti-Catholic and Puritan tendencies in the city [which] erupted in the 1560s in an orgy of iconoclasm’.46 This radical tone was set by the burning of the ‘Coventry seven’ in 1519,47 and heightened acutely in Mary’s reign by several more burnings of Protestants despite mayoral, official civic sympathy for their plight.48 The closure of the religious houses in the 1530s, the curtailment of the chantries later on and the wholesale abandonment of the timeless, comfortable rituals of religious orthodoxy with them, came hard during a prolonged period of economic depression in the city.49 In such conditions it is not difficult to understand why the elements of the Reformation quickly gained ground as symbolic of new hope; for instance, a profound gap in the previously vibrant religious pageantry and social life of Coventry opened up, resulting not only from the demise of the Trinity guild but also from the enforced abandonment of the popular cult of the Virgin Mary.50 To

take its place the social life of Coventry was driven instead by preaching, with the swift importation of Protestant ministers, the corporation taxing every house in the town simply to maintain them. ‘The influence of the Puritan town council and their preachers was quick and radical: Mass was suppressed, images and relics beaten down and burnt in the streets, churches whitewashed, and in an excess of zeal even the registers of St Michael’s were burnt because they contained “some marks of Popery”.’51 Coventry’s churches were rigorously cleansed of virtually everything therefore, even organs, and funeral monuments were evidently no exception to this ruthlessness. Ironically, they reappeared in the very same churches soon after, as by incorporating Protestant-inspired epitaphs and eulogies the up and coming gentry of the town utilised this now ideologically tolerable means of commemoration as a means of exemplifying their social importance as the city’s fortunes improved, and in churches stripped of their fittings and radically sanitised, mural monuments would have been visually all the more obvious ranged up on the plain, whitewashed walls. These urban models of the perpetuation – or not – of memorialisation during and following the Reformation demonstrate both similarities and disparities. It is certain that prior to the Reformation all the parochial churches and chapels in Boston, Coventry, Hull, and King’s Lynn were dominated materialistically by the guild chapels, where rituals involved large numbers of guild chaplains to uphold the theological demands of the guild members, both dead and alive. ‘They were an integral part of the fabric of urban life in pre-Reformation England and, together with the chantries, the colleges and the thousands of endowments for obits, lamps and lights, must have given urban dwellers a feeling of pride and satisfaction.’52 Monuments placed in these chapels, together with other fixtures and fittings, all combined to create a cohesive memory of the departed and encouraged prayer for their ultimate salvation. The location of these monuments in guild chapels was intended forever to reserve that privileged burial space for that person, their wider family and descendants, despite the fact that few merchant dynasties endured and reuse of precious floor space for new burials was a widespread phenomenon.53 In

its vicinity, British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 33 (2011). 44 Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1, p. 167. The workshop responsible for Nethermyll’s monument is discussed by J. Bayliss, ‘Richard Parker “The Alablasterman”’, Church Monuments 5 (1990), pp. 39–56, at pp. 43–46; and its religious context by J.S. Alexander et al., ‘The Gylbert monument in Youlgreave church: memorial or liturgical furnishing?’, Church Monuments 21 (2006), pp. 94–111, at pp. 107–09. The Swillington tomb is discussed by J. Bayliss, ‘Richard and Gabriel Royley, tombmakers’, Church Monuments 6 (1991), pp. 21–41, at pp. 23–25. 45 Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1, pp. 167–72 (monuments in St Michael’s) and pp. 174–77 (Holy Trinity); and see also J. Astley, The monumental inscriptions in the parish church of St Michael, Coventry (Coventry, 1884). The post-Reformation monuments in the three towns of King’s Lynn, Hull and Coventry show a reduction in noting civic status compared to the incidence on monuments pre-Reformation, tending to confirm and widen the relevance of Finch’s observation on the decline in the prestige of civic office-holding in Norwich from the late-sixteenth century onwards; see Finch, Church monuments in Norfolk, p. 118. 46 W.B. Stephens (ed.), A history of the county of Warwick – 8 – the city of Coventry and borough of Warwick (Oxford, 1969), pp. 208–21. 47 G. Townsend, The acts and monuments of John Foxe, 8 vols (New York, 1965 edn), 4, pp. 557–58. 48 Townsend, John Foxe, 7, pp. 384–402. 49 Stephens (ed.), City of Coventry, p. 217; and D. Leech, ‘Stability and change at the end of the middle ages: Coventry 1450–1525’, Midland History 34.1 (2009), pp. 1–21, esp. pp. 16–21. 50 C. Davidson, ‘“The devil’s guts”: allegations of superstition and fraud in religious drama and art during the reformation’, in C. Davidson and

A.E. Nichols (eds), Iconoclasm vs. art and drama (Kalamazoo, 1988), pp. 112–21. 51 Stephens (ed.), City of Coventry, pp. 218. 52 P. Cunich, ‘The dissolution of the chantries’, in P. Collinson and J. Craig (eds), The reformation in English towns 1500–1640 (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 159–74, at p. 164. 53 Kermode, Medieval merchants, p. 303. A verbatim account of this kind of recycling is contained within the chapel wardens’ accounts of St Nicholas’ chapel, King’s Lynn. In 1617 the wardens paid 10s 8d ‘about takinge up the greate grave stones now remayninge in the Church’; yet in 1624 they received £5 ‘of Mr. Thomas Girlinge Oldarman for a gravestone which is to be layd upon his mother in the Church’. This was a much higher fee than was charged for ‘breaking the ground’ to accommodate a burial, which fee ranged from 3s 4d to 10s 0d, as was fairly standard. Clearly, the wardens had appropriated and removed some graveslabs in 1617 but then were selling them off intermittently at a handsome profit to cover new graves, each presumably with a new inscription engraved on what was the underside of the original slab. See E.M. Beloe, Extracts from the chapel wardens’ accounts of St Nicholas’ chapel, King’s Lynn, from the year 1616 to the date of the restoration of

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Boston, while the gravestones and rituals of memorialisation forged a link between individual, family and guild, in Coventry, Hull and King’s Lynn the elements of memorialisation expanded to acknowledge a role in civic government too. The shattering effects of the demise of the guilds in 1547 were cushioned economically to some extent in that all four towns managed to negotiate for themselves, sometimes under duress, some of the landed and material assets of the guilds.54 For instance, faced with the threat of local guild lands being devolved to central government, the burgesses of Coventry and King’s Lynn were particularly vociferous in their opposition to the ‘Act for the Dissolution of Chantries’ (1547) and the proposed ‘gifting’ of the chantry lands to the king. Such was the trouble they caused that the town burgesses won the day, and in return for grants to their borough of local guild lands, they ceased opposition to that particular parliamentary Act.55 In Boston, too, the newly-founded corporation absorbed both aldermen and endowments from the guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, albeit at a price; much as elsewhere with strong links between guilds and corporation, the theological orthodoxy changed but the power base remained virtually the same. Such was the socio-religious discontent in Coventry, however, that only in this town (of the ones looked at here) were the churches sacked by iconoclasts who the corporation either ignored, or may actively have encouraged in their drive towards a corporate Protestantism. On the other hand, although there must have been losses from the chantries and guild chapels at Boston, Hull and King’s Lynn, many funeral monuments in these towns survived unscathed into the Elizabethan period and beyond. What enhances the irony of this differential survival of urban monumental heritage is the fact that in all four places, not only Coventry but just as much in Boston, Hull and King’s Lynn, the towns’ governing bodies enthusiastically embraced a Protestantism, quickly focussing into a Puritanism, maintained by civic sponsored preaching. While in Coventry the sense of religious intolerance and reformation was brought to fever pitch, making an iconoclastic orgy inevitable, the consistent lack of similar such destruction in the three coastal ports is striking. This says something about the overall degree of control by these corporations over their churches both liturgically and materially; any Reformation-inspired damage had to be officially sanctioned and carefully orchestrated, and such a policy did not condone random piecemeal destruction by rioters. Paradoxically, large sums of money were expended in the 1550s in fact on repairing St Botolph’s, and as an additional example, in 1578 the corporation in Hull paid for restoring the east window of Holy Trinity church ‘following damage said to have been done by a mob.’56 Did these three coastal

towns absorb a Lutheran-based, image-tolerant Protestantism therefore, influenced more from historic and current contact with the towns of the Hanse than from inland? Following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1473 and the end of the war with the Hanse, of all the east coast ports of England which had enduring Hanseatic connections before the dispute, only King’s Lynn reestablished regular trade links afterwards. Sixteenthcentury Hanseatic trade continued to focus on London, although the currency of north German theology would have continued to spread via the cross-currents of coastal shipping along English coastal waters, emanating from London.57 Compared to communications by land therefore, was the North Sea in fact more of a conduit of religious beliefs emerging from northern Germany, in tandem with patterns of trade, rather than a barrier? Was there also a civic pride in the preservation of monuments in their – the councils’ – churches? And was this also particularly the case in Hull and King’s Lynn in that it permitted a continuity of memorialisation throughout the period of the Reformation and beyond, which recognised civic office-holding and maintained its own impetus uninterrupted? 10.5 Urban memorialisation as a corporation pedigree The chronological lines of memorials to mayors collectively formed a corporation pedigree, as an expanding archive of civic remembrance initially established in guild chapels and subsequently wrapped up in the overall monumental landscape of the church. PreReformation these monuments invited intercessory prayer as well as exemplifying the civic role of the commemorated, such that a visual mnemonic of mayoral, corporation continuity developed, which was echoed verbally in the recitation of obits. This mnemonic of personal memory persisted, although with a revised commemorative purpose after the Reformation, when all monuments, old and new, were contemplated within a much plainer, secularised church interior, and where Bible reading and preaching were now the norm. An appreciation of civic duty by individuals became more tangible at this time, in the evolving fashion for portraits of mayors to be commissioned, or donated, to produce a collective display by organisations rather than individuals.58 These, and other artefacts, such as the civic regalia, extended the commemoration of civic office holding from the church into the town hall, underpinning its legitimacy, and motivated by the desire to exemplify the unbroken lineage, traditions and responsibilities inherent in assuming a civic role, when by the very nature of its organisation the personnel changed year on year.59 In the 57 See P. Dollinger, The German Hanse (London and Basingstoke, 1972), pp. 311–17; Owen, Making of King’s Lynn, pp. 334–36; M. Kowaleski, ‘Port towns: England and Wales 1300–1500’, in Palliser (ed.), Cambridge urban history of Britain 1, pp. 467–94; and S. Jenks, ‘Lynn and the Hansa – trade and relations in the Middle Ages’, in K. Friedland and P. Richards (eds), Essays in Hanseatic History (Dereham, 2005), pp. 94–114, esp. pp. 103–06. 58 R. Tittler, The face of the city – civic portraiture and civic identity in early modern England (Manchester, 2007), passim, but esp. pp. 47–68. 59 That such things were treasured from generation to generation is in no doubt. For example, the will of John Aldwyck (d. 1444), alderman of

his most sacred majesty king Charles the second (King’s Lynn, 1926), pp. 12, 16. 54 Cunich, ‘Dissolution of the chantries’, p. 173. 55 A. Kreider, English chantries – the road to dissolution (Cambridge MA., and London, 1979), pp. 193–96, 261. 56 Allison (ed.), Kingston upon Hull, p. 291.

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Conclusion same way that funeral monuments were frequently employed as a tool visibly to gloss over both real and potential lacunae in the lineage continuity of a manorial lordship,60 or even to invent a monumental lineage,61 there is a profound sense that painted civic portraits served a similar purpose en masse.62 And on an individual basis, portraits were commissioned, just like monuments, as a display of the reformed belief of the sitter, and as one element in that person’s desire for salvation.63 Curiously though, while funeral monuments remained in the public domain, the painted portraits of these civic leaders – men who were striving for remembrance as having achieved new socio-economic heights of responsibility – were displayed only to the privileged few who were permitted to gain access to the council chamber.64 The restrictions on the display of the portraits actually increased the potency of their meaning, as they would have been viewed in a location at the very heart of the corporation, together with the council regalia and other symbolically meaningful artefacts. The resonance of these portraits with preReformation funeral monuments housed within guild chapels is quite unmistakable: apart from the requests for salvitic prayer, there is a strong continuity of purpose between the commemorative atmosphere engineered in a guild chapel and that predetermined in the town hall. The council chamber came to parallel the church as a hall of remembrance: the portraits of mayors forever looked down on their successors in government sitting in their correct hierarchical order, and in church their funeral monuments operated a wider didacticism encouraging the achievement of salvation through virtuous civic activities, viewed by the council members and the congregation, again all seated in a specific order of precedence. Another element of continuity was in the wearing of processional robes. Prior to the Reformation what related specifically to a retinue of guildsmen all in ceremonial dress, headed by their master, and processing through the town on their feast days or the funerals of guild members, was

perpetuated later on in a secularised form, in the use of mayoral and aldermanic robes for formal corporation occasions.65 Going on from this, the lineage descent of the mayoral title in a town might be viewed as in parallel to that of a landed family in the country. Inclusion in this vertical pedigree, and preserved forever in the monumental archive – whether in stone in the church or in paint in the council chamber – went some way therefore to satisfy the omnipresent aspirations of these town merchants to gentrification and ultimate aggrandisement.66 The inclusion of long and elaborate epitaphs and eulogies on their monuments, inspired by the spirit of Renaissance humanism which was spreading throughout western Europe,67 went even further in signalling a desire not just for gentrification via civic service but that the latter should lead to chivalric honour, the very summit of meritocratic aspiration.68 As members of the civic élite, they might be considered to have achieved this status in life, with the visible panoply of mayoral office, wearing luxurious robes and taking a pivotal role in civic processions and dinners, as well as a manifest civic authoritarianism in the passage and enforcement of laws; and equally so after their death, via the exemplifications of their funeral monuments – with versified inscriptions in Classical Latin, Renaissanceinspired architecture, and sporting newly acquired heraldry.69 Benjamin Mackerell was sensitive to this archive of social ambition, as when writing in the early eighteenth century on the destruction of the tombs at King’s Lynn in the Civil wars, he laments, ‘whereby we are deprived of the Memory of some of our Antient and Eminent Magistrates here in Town, as well as other noted Persons of distinction.’70 Memorialisation in Coventry contrasted strongly with this lineage continuity, as although it recommenced rapidly post-Reformation, because virtually every pre-Reformation monument recalling civic office had been destroyed there was no visible tradition to uphold,71 so new commissions were free to emphasise social standing instead.

Kingston upon Hull, specified the bequest of ‘my best coverd pece unto ye Mare of Hull and it to be delivered to whome that next s(h)all be chosyn Mare after hym, and so fro(m) Mare to Mare while it may indore’; J. Raine (ed.), Testamenta Eboracensia; or wills registered at York … part 2, Surtees Society 30 (London, 1855), p. 105. 60 For a pre-Reformation example see N. Saul, Death, art and memory in medieval England – the Cobham family and their monuments, 1300– 1500 (Oxford, 2001); and for post-Reformation instances see Llewellyn, Funeral monuments, pp. 300–04. 61 John, Baron Lumley (d. 1609) was quite indefatigable in erecting tomb monuments to give an impression of lineage continuity at Cheam (Surrey), Arundel (Sussex) and a series of tombs at Chester-le-Street (Durham); see N. Llewellyn and C. Gapper, ‘The funeral monuments’, in M. Evans (ed.), Art collecting and lineage in the Elizabethan age – the Lumley inventory and pedigree (Roxburghe Club, 2010), pp. 34–38; and C.D. Liddy with C. Steer, ‘John Lord Lumley and the creation and commemoration of lineage in early modern England’, ArchJ 167 (2010), pp. 197–227. 62 P. Marshall, Beliefs and the dead in reformation England (Oxford, 2002), pp. 284–86. 63 T. Cooper, ‘Predestined lives? Portraiture and religious belief in England and Wales, 1520–1620’, in T. Hamling and R.L. Williams (eds), Art re-formed – re-assessing the impact of the reformation on the visual arts (Newcastle, 2007), pp. 49–63. 64 Tittler, Face of the city, pp. 148–65; and R. Tittler, ‘Faces and spaces: displaying the civic portrait in early modern England’, in Hamling and Richardson (eds), Everyday objects, pp. 179–87.

65

P. and J. Clark (eds), The Boston assembly minutes 1545–1575, LRS 77 (1987), pp. xviii, 48, 50. P. Clark and P. Slack, English towns in transition 1500–1700 (London, 1976), pp. 120–21. 67 Rex, ‘Monumental brasses and the reformation’, pp. 386–92. 68 N. Llewellyn, ‘Honour in life, death and in the memory: funeral monuments in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series 6 (1996), pp. 179–200. 69 N. Llewellyn, ‘Claims to status through visual codes: heraldry on post-Reformation funeral monuments’, in S. Anglo (ed.), Chivalry in the renaissance (Woodbridge, 1990), pp. 145–60; and Llewellyn, Funeral monuments, pp. 363–77. 70 Mackerell, King’s-Lynn, p. 77. 71 The fifteenth-century civic leaders of Coventry were recorded by portraiture, but the intensity of the image-driven iconoclasm there in the 1550s probably precluded the production of more; see Tittler, Face of the city, pp. 49, 63. 66

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Churche of Saincte Botolphe in Boston’.75 However, no monument to him as an individual was recorded in the church early in the seventeenth century by the unknown antiquary, so presumably none was ever erected. In which case perhaps he was anonymously interred in the Robinson family grave, still marked by the brass to John Robinson (d. 1525) and his wives and family. The difference between Boston, Hull and Lynn was that at the two latter ports the monumental matrix combined mayoralty and mercantilism, and crystallised the evolving humanist ideal of public service.76 The one continually fed off the other in a chronologically expanding mutuality which reflected the changing face of memory in life and in death. The matrix of memorialisation at Boston did not exemplify this rhetoric. It remained a mnemonic for the memory of merchants but lost its dynamism at the Reformation and transposed simply into a static archive of commemoration. Tolerant, possibly continental-influenced civic government keen on preserving artefacts of family and civic lineage, seems to have been the key to monument preservation during the mid-sixteenth century; the floor at Boston was only preserved because of it. Ultimately its survival to the present day combined good luck, and a fortuitous geographical location, with sixteenth century iconoclastic restraint – a symbiosis unhappily found all too rarely in other urban churches.

10.6 Urban memorialisation at Boston – final thoughts How does this theorising of civic remembrance relate to St Botolph’s? Lacking an established corporation involvement early on the pre-Reformation monuments at Boston present as a static, mercantile archive; prior to 1545 they had no additional role in maintaining an official civic pedigree. The Reformation curtailed memorialisation in Boston therefore, with succeeding generations buried under existing commemorative floorslabs or in unmarked graves. Without the repetitive commemorative customs of civic office manifest at Hull and King’s Lynn, the Boston aldermen were either insufficiently motivated, lacked the self-confidence, or were too highly image-sensitive to maintain the preReformation rhythm of memorialisation. They were, after all, a local government in infancy, and much of the corporation’s early activities were concerned with the establishment of a pattern of administrative continuity and authority. Boston borough officials were, hence, keen to be regarded as a new élite in holding their civic office, as one of their earliest ordinances in 1555 was to rule that members of the corporation ‘shall come in a decent order in their gownes like Townes men of such a corporation at all tymes’. Equally to bolster their own legitimacy they ordered that ‘the Charter of this Burrowgh whereby it is incorporatyde shalbe redd iiij tymes by the yere’.72 The control over iconoclasm and the careful preservation of existing funeral monuments in St Botolph’s are obvious consequences of this mandate for self-recognition. If damage on the scale of Coventry had been authorised, and much civic heritage destroyed, the new corporation would have been bereft of any lineage whatsoever as an élite in the town – what price its authority then? Commissioning new funeral monuments to themselves, though, was obviously a perceived step too far in the increasingly Puritan atmosphere of the town.73 The wills of two merchant-mayors exemplify further this contrasting attitude to memorialisation, one from Hull and the other from Boston, written only a decade or so apart. William Richardson (d. 1603) was mayor of Hull in 1591, and although he willed that he was to be buried ‘within the pailes [boundaries] in Trinitye churchyearde’ he was celebrated inside Holy Trinity church by a monument that had all it took to establish a claim to chivalric honour: there was a long eulogy in classical Latin verses, and the formal inscription described him not only as a merchant and mayor but as ‘Generosissimi viri’ – the ultimate gentleman.74 On the other hand, Thomas Robinson (d. 1590) was mayor of Boston in 1582, and styling himself unequivocally in his will as ‘gentleman’ he wished to be buried not in the ‘churchyearde’ but quite categorically ‘within the parishe 72 Clark (eds), Boston assembly minutes, pp. xiv–xviii, 19; and Tittler, Face of the city, pp. 121, 143. 73 ‘Urban Puritanism was the strongest expression of urban magistrates’ interest in social control’, a favourite ploy of Puritan preachers being to blame social problems on deep-seated sins redolent of a Catholicism, which needed to be rooted out of the community; see Clark and Slack, English towns, p. 151. 74 TNA: PROB11/107, fols 69v–70v; proved 8 February 1603. The monument no longer appears to exist but was recorded by Dodsworth, for which see Clay (ed.), Yorkshire church notes, pp. 198–99.

75

TNA: PROB11/76, fols 74v–75v; proved 31 August 1590. P. Sherlock, Monuments and memory in early modern England (Oxford, 2008), pp. 151–54. 76

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Appendix 1 Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston by Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham Anon AnonMS Badham 1979 Badham 1989 Badham 2010 Bertram Butler Cameron Cotman Creeny 1884 Creeny 1891 Cole Edleston Gough Grange Greenhill Greenhill 1965 Greenhill 1976 Greenhill 1986 Haines Holles Jebb JW Kerrich Lack and Whittemore Lewin Lincoln Wills 5 Lincoln Wills 10 Ludat Macklin Marrat MS Norris 1978 Norris 1977 Page-Phillips 1980 Page-Phillips 1989

Anon., Descriptive & historical account of St Botolph’s church, Boston (Boston, 1842) London, British Library, Add. MS. 36295, Anon. church notes of Lincolnshire, previously attributed to Francis Thynne, 1603–07 S. Badham, Brasses from the North East (London, 1979) S. Badham, ‘The Fens 1 series: an early fifteenth-century group of monumental brasses and incised slabs’, JBAA 142 (1989), pp. 46–62 S. Badham, ‘The Robertsons remembered: two generations of Calais staplers at Algarkirk, Lincolnshire’, in C.M. Barron and C. Burgess (eds), Memory and commemoration in medieval England, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 20 (Donington, 2010), pp. 202–17 J. Bertram (ed.), Monumental brasses as art and history (Stroud, 1996) L. Butler, ‘Minor medieval monumental sculpture in the east Midlands’, ArchJ 121 (1964), pp. 11–53 H.K. Cameron, ‘The 14th-century school of Flemish brasses’, MBST 11 (1976), pp. 50–81 J.S. Cotman, Engravings of sepulchral brasses in Norfolk and Suffolk, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1839) W.F. Creeny, A book of facsimiles of monumental brasses on the continent of Europe (Norwich, 1884) W.F. Creeny, Illustrations of incised slabs on the continent of Europe (Norwich, 1891) R.E.G. Cole (ed.), Lincolnshire church notes made by Gervase Holles A.D. 1634 to A.D. 1642, LRS 1 (Lincoln, 1911) R.H. Edleston, ‘Incised monumental slabs’, 6 parts, parts 1–4 in Annual Reports of the Peterborough Natural History, Scientific and Archaeological Society 61–65 (1933–37), part 5 (privately printed, Barnard Castle 1942), part 6 (privately printed, Darlington 1943) R. Gough, Sepulchral monuments in Great Britain, 2 vols in 5 or 8 (London, 1786–96) A. de la Grange and L. Cloquet, ‘Études sur l’art à Tournai et sur les anciens artistes de cette ville’, Mémoires de la société historique et littéraire de Tournai 20 (1887) Numbering system in F.A. Greenhill, Monumental incised slabs in the county of Lincoln (Newport Pagnell, 1986) F.A. Greenhill, ‘An incised slab at Gressenhall’, Norfolk Archaeology 23 part 4 (1965), pp. 423–26. F.A. Greenhill, Incised effigial slabs – a study of engraved stone monuments in Latin Christendom, c.1100 to c.1700, 2 vols (London, 1976) F.A. Greenhill, Monumental incised slabs in the county of Lincoln (Newport Pagnell, 1986) H. Haines, Manual of monumental brasses, 2 parts (London, 1861, re-printed Bath, 1970) London, British Library, Harley MS. 6829, Gervase Holles’ antiquities of the county of Lincoln, 1634–42 G. Jebb, A guide to the church of S. Botolph with notes on the history and antiquities of Boston and Skirbeck (3rd edn, Boston, 1921) Numbering system in J. Wheeldon, The monumental brasses in St. Botolph’s Church, Boston, History of Boston Series 9 (Boston, 1973) London, British Library, Add. MS. 6732, church notes of Thomas Kerrich, early 19th century W. Lack and P. Whittemore, A series of monumental brasses, indents and incised slabs from the 13th to the 20th century (2001 and continuing) S. Lewin, An account of the churches in the division of Holland (Boston, 1842). C.W. Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills, A.D. 1271 to A.D. 1526, LRS 5 (Lincoln, 1914) C.W. Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills, A.D. 1505 to May 1530, LRS 10 ( Lincoln, 1918) H. Ludat, ‘Ein Zeugnis westfalisch-englischer Beziehungen in Mittelalter’, Westfaler – Hefte für Geschichte Kunst und Volkskunde 29 (1951), pp. 47–51 H.W. Macklin, Monumental brasses (London, 1890, many subsequent editions) W. Marrat, The history of Lincolnshire, topographical, historical and descriptive, 3 vols (Boston, 1814–16) Numbering system in M. Stephenson, A list of monumental brasses in the British Isles (London, 1926, Appendix 1938; repr. London, 1964) M. Norris, Monumental brasses: the craft (London, 1978) M. Norris, Monumental brasses: the memorials, 2 vols (London, 1977) J. Page-Phillips, Palimpsests - the backs of monumental brasses, 2 vols (London, 1980) J. Page-Phillips, ‘Three Flemish fragments’, MBST 14 (1989), pp. 324–28 170

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Portfolio book Rousseau Swanson Saul Stukeley Tennenhaus Thompson 1820 Thompson 1856 Van Belle 2006 Van Belle 2008 Way Wheeldon

Monumental Brass Society, Monumental Brasses: the Portfolio plates of the Monumental Brass Society 1894–1984 (London, 1988) H. Rousseau, Frottis de tombes plates, catalogue descriptif (Brussels, 1912) R.N. Swanson, Indulgences in late medieval England. Passports to paradise? (Cambridge, 2007) N. Saul, English church monuments in the middle ages (Oxford, 2009) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Top. gen. e 61, William Stukeley’s antiquarian and topographical drawings, early 18th century Dr and Mrs M. Tennenhaus, ‘Hanseatic merchants in England – 1. Boston’, MBST 11 (1976), pp. 189–97 P. Thompson, Collections for a topographical and historical account of Boston and the hundred of Skirbeck in the county of Lincoln (London, 1820) P. Thompson, History and antiquities of Boston (Boston, 1856) R. Van Belle, Vlakke grafmonumenten en memorietaferelen met persoonsafbeeldingen in West-Vlaanderen (Bruges, 2006) R. Van Belle, Op de drempel van de eeuwigheid – Unieke wrijfprenten van magistrale grafmonumenten 1218>1802 (Koksijde, 2008) A. Way, ‘Engraved sepulchral slabs’, ArchJ 7 (1850), pp. 54–55 J. Wheeldon, The monumental brasses in St. Botolph’s church, Boston, History of Boston Series 9 (Boston, 1973)

Thanks are due to William Lack and Phillip Whittemore for help with this appendix generally; and to Lawrence Butler on the cross-slabs.

171

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Section 1 - Brasses where some of the inlay survives or is recorded in antiquarian rubbings

Plan 11.1 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the brasses. The brass inlays for items 4 (slab lost), 5, 13 and 15 are loose and stored in the Library. Inlays for brasses 2, 8, 10, 11 and 12 appear to be lost.

172

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Out of piety he contributed many goods to the Guild of [St] Peter, ?And with peas his clothing is sprinkled.

Brass 1 (MS I) Walter Pescod (d. 1398) Name of commemorated: Walter Pescod

Description: Pescod is shown in civil dress with a mantle. His gown is powdered with a pea-pod or peascod device, arranged to form the letter W, a punning reference to his name.

Occupation: Merchant of Boston Date: 1398

Fig. 11.2 Detail of brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398). The matching figure of his wife is lost and there is no antiquarian drawing of it known. They stand under an elaborate triple canopy with saints in the sideshafts. Originally the sideshafts contained fourteen saints with their names in their haloes, of which remain: John the Evangelist, James the Great, Matthew, Philip, Simon, Thomas, Bartholomew, James the Less, Jude and Peter. [Those in italics are saints to whom there were Boston guilds]. There would also have been an image of St Paul. Haines plausibly suggests that the lost central figures were of the Holy Trinity. The top left-hand corner of the slab is now covered.

Fig. 11.1 Brass to Walter Pescod (d. 1398). Position: The brass is to the north of the high altar, but was formerly in north aisle of nave in the former SS Peter and Paul guild chapel

Comparative dating evidence: Few London Series B brasses are as elaborate as this but the indent of the lost brass of Thomas of Woodstock (d. 1397) in Westminster abbey also shows the central figure flanked by inhabited side buttresses supporting an arcade of niches. The figure can be compared with that at Chipping Campden (Gloucestershire) to William Grevel (d. 1401). Dimensions: Slab 292 x 135 cm.

Workshop: London B Stone type of slab: Purbeck marble Inscription: The lost verse inscription read: Ut referunt Metra Mercator olim vocitatus, Pescod sub petra Walterus hic est tumulatus. Qui quinto Julii discessit ab orbe Kalendas MC ter octo cui nonageno mage prendas. Multa Petri Gildae bona contulit ex pietate. Vestis et versus Pisis interstinctae. As these verses tell you, a merchant, who was once called Walter Pescod is buried here under this stone. Who departed this world on the fifth day before the Kalends of July [28 June] A thousand, thrice a hundred, eight [added] to which ninety more should be added [1398]

Will: Does not survive References: AnonMS, fols 16v and 17r; Holles, fol. 205; Kerrich, fol. 21r; Marrat, p. 46; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, pp. 49–50; Thompson 1856, p. 193; Macklin, pp. 58 and 70; Cole, p. 155; Jebb, p. 71; MBST 4, pp. 24, 171; 5, p. 238; 13, pp. 232, 288, 190–91; Wheeldon, pp. 3, 4 (upper part of eff.), 10 and 16; Norris 1977, pp. 57 and 68; Norris 1978, p. 73, fig. 52 (detail), p. 171 (upper part); Portfolio book, pl. 88; Bertram, pp. 28, 149; MBSB 102, p. 39; 107, p. 127; Saul, p. 249. 173

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Brass 2 (MS XVII 1) unknown ?civilian Name of commemorated: … Walsoken Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1400 Position: Lost Workshop: Too fragmentary to establish Stone type of slab: Unknown

Fig. 11.4 Brass to John Strensall (d. 1408).

Fig. 11.3 Two rubbings of fragment of marginal inscription from brass to a member of the Walsoken family. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London.

Position: The brass is to the north of the high altar, but was almost certainly originally in the former Corpus Christi Guild chapel

Inscription: Marginal inscription fragment reading ‘… Walsokne …’.

Workshop: Fens 1

Description: Fragment of marginal inscription in textura quadrata style lettering, cut in relief.

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: Lost, with no antiquarian record of the wording.

Comparative dating evidence: Textura quadrata style lettering superseded textura praecissa on English brasses in the 1380s.

Description: Strensall is shown in a cope with saints in the orphreys. They are: John the Baptist, Peter, Thomas, Jude, John the Evangelist, Paul, Andrew and Bartholomew, all of whom were saints to which Boston guilds were dedicated. Strensall originally stood under a single canopy and there was a marginal inscription with quatrefoils at the corners, probably bearing the symbols of the four evangelists, but these plates are now lost. The top of the slab is missing.

Dimensions: 4 x 2.8 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Brass 3 (MS II) John Strensall (d. 1408) Name of commemorated: John Strensall [or Stransgill or Stranshale] Occupation: Rector of St Botolph’s 1381–1408 Date: 1408

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 11.5 Detail of brass to John Strensall (d. 1408). Comparative dating evidence: The flaring hair and facial features can be compared with that shown on incised slabs from the Fens 1 workshop at Great Grimsby to Geoffrey Pedde (d. 1408) and William and Millicent Weel (c.1410). Dimensions: Slab 194 x 104 cm. Will: Does not survive References: Kerrich, fol. 21r; Gough, vol. 2.1, p. cccxiv; Jebb, p. 85; MBST 1.10, p. 12; 13, p. 481; Wheeldon, cover, pp. 3, 7 and 16; Norris 1978, p. 65, fig. 89; Badham 1979, p. 19, pl. 18a; Badham 1989, pp. 49, 60; MBSB 95, p. 723 (det.).

Brass 4 (MS VII) John Nutting d. 1380, and wife Agnes (d. 1420) Name of commemorated: John and Agnes Nutting Occupation: Probably a merchant. Date: 1420 (Agnes died 26 November 1420) Fig. 11.6 Lost brass to John Nutting and his wife Agnes (d. 1420).

Position: The indent was originally at the east end of the nave but was lifted in the early 1980s in works designed to install underfloor heating and have nave altar installed. The slab remained for a time propped against the wall, but was removed to a skip in 1983–84, together with two Flemish slabs. The remaining parts of the brass (portions of a large canopy with sideshafts with three weepers or saints and part of the base) are preserved in the library, although other plates recorded in rubbings in the Society of Antiquaries’ collections have been lost.

Inscription: Holles records part of it, which read: Johes Nutting obiit in Crastino / Nativitatis Beae Mariae 1380. Litera / Dnicalis G. Agnes uxor ejus obiit 26 / die Novembris, Ano 1420. John Nutting died the day after the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary [9 September] 1380 Dominical letter G; his wife Agnes died 26 November in the year 1420.

Workshop: Fens 1

Description: The remaining portion of the slab shows indents of a civilian and wife above a rectangular inscription. Below are inlays of two groups of offspring, showing two sons and seven daughters.

Stone type of slab: Unio Purbeck marble

Comparative dating evidence: The heavy canopy can be compared with an indent at Louth (Lincolnshire) and the 175

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston brass at Spilsby (Lincolnshire) produced in the early 1420s to William, 5th baron Willoughby d’Eresby and his wife Lucy. Boston MS VIII (see below) is also very similar. Dimensions: Slab 305 x 315.5 cms; effigies 95 cms. Will: Does not survive References: AnonMS, fol. 16r; Holles, fol. 204; Marrat, 1, p. 45; Thompson 1820, p. 96; Lewin, p. 46; Thompson 1856, p. 192; Cole, p. 154; Norris 1978, p. 104; Lack and Whittemore, 2, pl. 31.

Brass 5 (MS VIII) Thomas Gull (d. 1420) and wife Name of commemorated: Thomas Gull Occupation: Unknown Date: 1420 Position: The indent is at the west end of the nave, adjoining – and partly covered by – the font, under which a small piece of latten is trapped. A plate from the canopy is loose in the library. Workshop: Fens 1 Stone type of slab: ?Re-used Tournai marble slab, probably originally from a Flemish incised slab.

Fig. 11.7 Brass to Thomas Gull (d. 1420).

Inscription: Lost, but Holles recorded Thomas Gull obiit 7 die Decembris Ano Dni 1420. Thomas Gull died 7 December in the year of our Lord 1420. Description: The composition comprises a civilian and lady, with their heads on cushions, under a heavy canopy with inhabited sideshafts.

Fig. 11.8 Section of inlay from brass to Thomas Gull (d. 1420).

Comparative dating evidence: The heavy canopy can be compared with an indent at Louth (Lincolnshire) and the brass at Spilsby (Lincolnshire) produced in the early 1420s to William, 5th baron Willoughby d’Eresby and his wife Lucy. Boston MS VII (see above) is also very similar.

Brass 6 (MS III) Richard Frere (d. 1424), and wives Alice and Johanna Name of commemorated: Probably Richard Frere and his wives Alice and Johanna

Dimensions: Slab 290 x 172 cms; effigies: 150 cms; section of inlay 13 x 68 cms.

Occupation: Merchant of Skirbeck and Boston Date: 1424 (Frere died 6 July 1424) Position: The indent is at the west end of the south aisle. The remaining brass inlay is mural on a board on the south wall.

Will: Does not survive References: AnonMS, fol. 16v; Holles, fol. 205; Marrat, 1, p. 45; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, p. 48; Thompson 1856, p. 193; Cole, p. 155; MBST 10, p. 280.

Workshop: Fens 1 Stone type of slab: spine bearing oolitic limestone

176

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Description: A bracket brass with the figures of a civilian and two wives under canopy in head of a bracket. The remaining figure of the lady shows that her hands were held in the orans position, rather than clasped in prayer. There were two shields either side of the stem of the bracket; they probably held merchant’s marks rather than arms.

Fig. 11.10 Brass to Richard Frere (d. 1424). Comparative dating evidence: The upraised hands and sleeve drapery mirror the Fens 1 brass at North Witham (Lincolnshire) to William Misterton (d. 1424) and an incised slab from the same workshop formerly at Great Grimsby to Geoffrey Pedde (d. 1408). The drapery pattern is replicated on the brass of the early 1420s at Spilsby (Lincolnshire) to baron Willoughby d’Eresby and an incised slab from the same workshop at Screveton (Nottinghamshire) to an unknown knight and his two wives.

Fig. 11.9 Brass to Richard Frere (d. 1424). Inscription: The lost verse foot inscription read: Hic jacet prostratus Ricus Frere tumulatus, Gildam dilexit, quam munere saepe provexit. Anno milleno C obit quater et duodeno Bis Julii senoque die migravit ameno. Uxor et Alicia sepelitur, juncta Johanna. Spreverunt vitia, gustant caeli modo manna. Audit quique pie Missam cum voce Mariae Alte cantatam, per Gildae vota locatam, Papa dies donat centum veniaeque coronat Nonus ei vere Bonifacius, hunc reverere.

Dimensions: Slab 212.5 x 101 cms; plate 54 x 47 cms. Will: Does not survive References: Holles, fol. 204; Marrat, 1, p. 47; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Thompson 1856, p. 192; Cole, p. 154; Wheeldon, pp. 12, 16; Norris 1977, p. 69; Badham 1979, pl. 18b; Badham 1989, pp. 49, 51 and 61.

Here lies prostrate Richard Frere, buried, he loved the Guild, which he often promoted with a donation. he died in the year one thousand, four times a hundred, and twelve twice, and on the sixth of July he went to a better place. His wife Alice is also buried together with Johanna; They shunned vices; may they soon taste the manna of heaven. Whoever hears Mass devoutly, with the antiphon of Mary sung well, as was established by a vote of the Guild, may the Pope give him one hundred days of pardon; and may Boniface IX crown him, in truth, that he may worship.

Brass 7 (Not recorded by MS) unknown ?civilian Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1425 Position: Middle of south aisle Workshop: Fens 1

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston Stone type of slab: ?Re-used Tournai marble slab, probably originally from a Flemish incised slab.

Fig. 11.11 Rectangular plate with effaced figure, c.1425. Inscription: None Description: Rectangular plate above an indent of a foot inscription. Remaining plate worn smooth, but the size suggests that only a single figure was shown on it. Comparative dating evidence: Outline has cusps very similar to brass no. 6.

Fig. 11.12 Lost brass to Thomas Flete (d. 1450) with rubbing of lost inlay inserted.

Dimensions: 4 x 2.8 cms. Inscription: The lost verse inscription read: Ecce sub hoc lapide Thomas1 Flete sistit humatus Vi mortis rapidae, generosus semper vocitatus. Hic quisquis steteris2 ipsum precibus memoreris, Sponsam defunctam simul Aliciam sibi junctam. MC quater quadringeno quoque deno, Martia quarta dies exstat ei requies. 1. Stukeley has ‘Henricus’. 2. Stukeley has ‘veneris’ Behold under this stone rests Thomas Flete buried after the swift stroke of death; he was always called a gentleman, Whoever you be that stand here, remember him in your prayers, together with his deceased wife Alice who was joined to him. A thousand, four times a hundred, forty and ten, the fourth day of March; may rest exist for him. Description: Thomas Flete and his wife Alice are shown in civilian dress under a canopy with a shield and crest mounted on the top of the middle pinnacle. A foot inscription completes the composition. None of the inlay survives. However, a lost brass of a lady with a dog at her feet fits this indent (a rubbing of it is preserved in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London). Part of the figure was palimpsest, having part of a London B lady of c.1400 on the reverse.

Will: N/A References: None

Brass 8 (MS IV) Thomas Flete (d. 1450), and his wife Alice Name of commemorated: Probably Thomas Flete and his wife Alice Occupation: Possibly an attorney Date: 1450 Position: The indent is at the east end of south aisle, in the former guild chapel of St Mary the Virgin Workshop: Norwich 1 Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 11.13 Palimpsest reverse of lost figure to Alice Flete. Comparative dating evidence: The figure of the lady can be compared with many Norwich 1 brasses in Norfolk including at Blickling to Roger and Cecily Felthorp (d. 1454) and at Salle to Thomas Roose (d. 1441) and his wives and John Funteyn (d. 1453) and his wives. Dimensions: Slab 202.5 x 79.5 cm; effigies 895 cms. Will: Does not survive References: AnonMS, fol. 16v; Holles, fol. 206; Stukeley, fol. 51v; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, p. 49; Cole, pp. 155–56; MBST 4, pp. 189 (obv. and rev.), 330; Wheeldon, p. 19; Page-Phillips 1980, 1, p. 78 and 2, p. 140; MBSB 106, pp. 115–16.

Fig. 11.14 Brass to unknown person, ?c.1450.

Brass 9 (Not recorded by Mill Stephenson) Unknown ? c.1450

Workshop: Probably London Stone type of slab: Purbeck marble.

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Inscription: Lost.

Occupation: Unknown

Description: The composition comprises an inscription, around which are placed four scrolls. Four shields at the corners complete the composition. Only the shield in the top left-hand corner survives, but it is worn smooth.

Date: ? c.1450 Position: The indent is in the north aisle.

Comparative dating evidence: The composition is not one which can be dated precisely. Dimensions: 220 x108 cms. Will: N/A References: None

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Brass 10 (MS X) Unknown

Workshop: Probably London

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: Probably second half of fifteenth century Position: Loose in the library. No surviving slabs have indents of the right size and shape.

Fig. 11.16 Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Matthew. Type of slab: Unknown Inscription: Lost Description: Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Matthew. It is possibly from the same brass as brass no. 10, but the borders of the two symbols are of different widths, even though the overall dimensions are comparable

Fig. 11.15 Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Mark. Workshop: Probably London

Comparative dating evidence: Insufficient remains for detailed parallels.

Type of slab: Unknown Inscription: Lost

Dimensions: 10 cms diameter.

Description: Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Mark. It is possibly from the same brass as brass no. 11, but the borders of the two symbols are of different widths, even though the overall dimensions are comparable.

Will: N/A References: None

Brass 12 (MS X) Unknown

Comparative dating evidence: Insufficient remains for detailed parallels.

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Dimensions: 10 cms diameter.

Occupation: Unknown

Will: N/A

Date: Probably second half of fifteenth century

References: None

Position: Loose in the library. No surviving slabs have indents of the right size and shape.

Brass 11 (MS X) Unknown

Workshop: Probably London Type of slab: Unknown

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown

Inscription: Lost

Date: Probably second half of fifteenth century Position: Loose in the library. No surviving slabs have indents of the right size and shape. 180

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 11.17 Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Matthew. Description: Barbed quatrefoil with symbol of St Matthew. Comparative dating evidence: Insufficient remains for detailed parallels. Fig. 11.18 Brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1470.

Dimensions: 9.3 cms diameter.

Description: The figures are both very worn. The man is dressed in a fur-trimmed, ankle-length gown with a slit at the front and slightly gathered and raised sleeve heads. His hair is relatively short. His wife wears a high-waisted gown with tight sleeves and has a mitred headdress on her head. An embattled base suggests that the composition originally had a canopy.

Will: N/A References: None

Brass 13 (MS V) Unknown civilian and wife, c.1470 Name of commemorated: Unknown

Comparative dating evidence: Similar figures can be found at Long Crendon (Buckinghamshire) 1468; Quethiock (Cornwall) 1471; and Great Linford (Buckinghamshire) 1473.

Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1470 Position: Loose in the library

Dimensions: Male 112.5 x 34.7 cms; female 106 x 36.7 cms; base 15.4 x 77.2 cms.

Workshop: London D

References: Jebb, p.71.

Stone type of slab: Slab does not survive

Brass 14 (MS VI) Unknown civilian and wife c.1490

Inscription: Lost, with no antiquarian record of the wording.

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: ? c.1490 Position: In 1984 a broken slab, the top half of which was thrown out, was recovered from under seating in the north aisle. The bottom of the slab was at the west end of the church in the shop in 2010.

181

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston Workshop: London F

Brass 15 (MS IX) Athelard Bate (d. 1501) and wives Anna [Agnes] and Elena.

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone

Name of commemorated: Athelard Bate

Description: The remaining (bottom) portion of the slab shows indents of a civilian and wife above a rectangular inscription. Below are inlays of two groups of offspring, showing two sons and seven daughters. Two evangelistic symbols were at the bottom corners.

Occupation: Merchant of the Staple of Calais Date: 1501 Position: Next to the Flete indent (Brass 7) in the chapel of the former guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the south aisle. The group of sons survives and is currently loose in the library. Workshop: London F Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: Holles recorded the inscription as: Athelardus Kate [sic for Bate] Mercator Stapulae Aldermannus Gildae Corporis Christi obiit in Vigilia Sci Matthiae Ano Dni 1501. Uxores ejus Anna ac Dna Elena. Athelard Kate, merchant of the Staple of Calais, Alderman of the Corpus Christi Guild died on the eve of [the feast of] St Matthew [20 September] 1501. His wives Anna [Agnes] and Lady Elena [also lie here].

Fig. 11.19 Remains of brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1490.

Description: The remaining portion of the slab shows indents of a civilian and wife above a rectangular inscription. Below are inlays of two groups of offspring, showing two sons (surviving) and seven daughters.

Comparative dating evidence: The sons can be paralleled on the 1487 brass at Oakley (Hampshire). The daughters are similar to the lady on that brass, albeit with a slightly different headdress. See also Sherborne St. John (Hampshire) 1492.

Comparative dating evidence: The outline of the lady is distinctive; it compares well with Terling (Essex) 1503 and Blisworth (Northamptonshire) 1503. The group of sons at Boston is similar to that at Blisworth.

Dimensions: 116.5 x 111 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Fig. 11.20 Inlay of children from brass to unknown civilian and wife, c.1490.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

References: AnonMS, fol. 16v; Holles, fol. 206; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, p. 49; Thompson 1856, p. 193; Cole, p. 154.

Brass 16 (Not recorded by MS) unknown Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1425 Position: In display case in tower Workshop: uncertain Stone type of slab: N/A

Fig. 11.23 Disjointed fragments of brasses. Inscription: None

Fig. 11.21 Indent to Athelard Bate (d. 1501) and family.

Description: Fragment of part of canopy. Comparative dating evidence: N/A Dimensions: not recorded (fragment inaccessible) Will: N/A References: None

Fig. 11.22 Group of sons from brass to Athelard Bate (d. 1501). Dimensions: Slab 178 x 78 cms; effigies 47 cms. Will: Athelard Bate: TNA: PROB11/13, fols 127r–127v; Agnes Bate: PROB11/14, fols 210r–211r. 183

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Section 2 - Indents of lost brasses (excluding examples with only an inscription indent)

Plan 11.2 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the indents.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Indent 1 Unknown c.1400

Indent 2 Unknown civilian or priest, c.1420

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Occupation: Unknown

Occupation: Unknown

Date: c.1400

Date: c.1420

Position: The indent at the west end of the south aisle, immediately outside the shop.

Position: The indent is in the middle of the south aisle. Workshop: Fens 1

Workshop: ?London A Stone type of slab: Spine-bearing oolitic limestone Stone type of slab: Purbeck marble Inscription: Lost Inscription: Lost

Fig. 11.25 Indent of unknown priest, c.1420. Description: The outline of the figure is worn but it commemorates a civilian or a priest. He stands under a canopy and has a rectangular inscription at his feet. Comparative dating evidence: The small size of the canopy and figure and the design of the canopy are similar to the bracket brass to Richard Frere (d. 1424) at Boston – see brass no. 6 (MS III) above. Dimensions: Slab 144.5 x 85 cms.

Fig. 11.24 Indent with cross, c.1400.

Will: N/A

Description: The composition comprises a cross with octofoil head and a marginal inscription. The crosshead is worn and while it is likely that it was open it cannot be determined whether it held a figure.

References: None

Indent 3 Unknown c.1425

Comparative dating evidence: Cross brasses are not easy to date unless they enclose a figure. The best comparators for this one are indents at Dunwich (Suffolk) c.1390 and Elmswell (Suffolk) 1406.

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1425

Dimensions: Slab 136 x 68 cms. Will: N/A

Position: The indent is in the middle of the south aisle near the slab for the Frere brass (brass no. 6 [MS III]).

References: None

Workshop: Fens 1

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Fig. 11.27 Indent of unknown civilian and wives, c.1430. Comparative dating evidence: The composition is too worn for analysis. Dimensions: Slab 290 x 137 cms; effigies 85 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Indent 5 Unknown c.1425

Fig. 11.26 Indent with figures on rectangular plate, c.1425.

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone

Occupation: Unknown

Inscription: Lost

Date: c.1425

Description: The composition comprises rectangular figure plate above a marginal inscription.

Position: The indent is on the south side of the church towards the east end of the nave, probably in the former chapel of SS Peter and Paul.

Comparative dating evidence: Outline has cusps very similar to brass no. 6, dated 1424

Workshop: ?London

Dimensions: Slab 210 x 94.5 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Indent 4 Unknown civilian and ?two wives, c.1430 Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: ? c.1430 Position: The indent forms the threshold to the south door Workshop: Unclassified Stone type of slab: Re-used Tournai marble, probably originally used as a Flemish incised slab. Inscription: Lost. Description: The indent is very worn. There are three main figures, probably a civilian and two wives, with an inscription beneath. They probably stand under a canopy, perhaps with shields.

Fig. 11.28 Indent with cross and kneeling figures, c.1425.

186

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Stone type of slab: ?Spine bearing oolitic limestone slab Inscription: Lost Description: The slab has been cut down and is mostly smeared with cement which obscures much of the indents. The composition comprises the fructed stem and stepped calvary of a cross. Kneeling figures are at either side, and prayer scrolls snake upwards. There is a shield at the top right hand corner. Comparative dating evidence: The remaining outline of the male figure is similar to that on the Spicer brass at Burford (Oxfordshire) 1437. However, the prayer scrolls are of a different shape. Dimensions: Remaining section of slab 98 x 53.5 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Indent 6 Unknown civilian and wife, c.1480 JW43

Fig. 11.29 Indent of unknown civilian and wife, c.1480.

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Indent 7 John Dale (d. 1482) and wife JW26

Occupation: Unknown

Name of commemorated: Probably John Dale

Date: c.1480

Occupation: Merchant of the Staple of Calais

Position: In middle of north aisle adjoining north wall

Date: He died in 1482, but the brass may have been made later, perhaps on the death of his wife.

Workshop: Insufficient remains to indicate workshop origin, but it is probably London work. Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone slab Inscription: Lost Description: The bottom left-hand part of a slab, it shows the lower section of a civilian and wife, under a canopy. Below part of an inscription is a group of eight offspring, either all daughters or with a daughter on the right-hand side. A shield completes what remains of the composition. The spacing suggests another husband and group of offspring plus at least one shield are missing. It has been reused as a vault cover for ‘L.W. 1776’. Comparative dating evidence: The long gown of the civilian on the left points to a date in the late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth century. The trailing gown of the daughter on the right of the group suggests a date of not later than c.1485. The outline of the canopy shaft also suggests a date before c.1490. Dimensions: Slab now 79.5 x 83 cms. Will: N/A

Fig. 11.30 Indent probably commemorating John Dale (d. 1482).

References: None 187

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston Comparative dating evidence: There are no extant Fens 2 cadaver brasses, but the outline and proportions are reminiscent of Fens 2 indents in Lincolnshire at Tattershall. They are not securely dated but may be from c.1500.

Position: The indent is in mid south aisle of the nave Workshop: Fens 2 Stone type of slab: Spine-bearing oolitic limestone

Dimensions: Slab (cut down) 188 x 120.5 cms; effigies 91 cms.

Inscription: The lost inscription read in part: Johes Dale Mercator Stapulae (Fenestrarum Reparator) obiit 16 die Februarii Ano Dni 1482. John Dale, merchant of the Staple of Calais (who repaired the windows) died 16 February in the year of our Lord 1482. The transcript appears incomplete with the beginning and ending omitted.

Will: Does not survive References: Holles, fol. 205; Kerrich, fol. 21r; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, p. 47; Thompson 1856, p. 193; Cole, p. 154; MBST 17, p. 179; Saul, p. 331.

Indent 8 Roger Shavelock and his wife Joan (d. 1488) JW 29 Name of commemorated: Roger Shavelock Occupation: Taylor/draper Date: 1488 Position: The indent is in the south aisle, to the east of the south porch. Workshop: London F Stone type of slab: Purbeck marble Inscription: The lost verse inscription read: To ye mortal coarse, yt lyeth here under stone, Was of Roger Shavelocke ye wife clepyd Ione Of London he was Citizen, on Pilgrimage he went To our Lady of Walsingham, with full good intent, And so header [hither] to yeir countrey, disporting in yeir life. But cruell death, yt spareth none, he took away ye wife In ye yere of our Ld 1488, ye day of Ascention, All good Christian pepull pray for hir of yr devotion.

Fig. 11.31 Indent probably commemorating John Dale (d. 1482).

Description: The figures of a civilian and wife are turned slightly towards each other. Her figure outline is very worn but his suggests a date of c.1470. Prayer scrolls snake upwards to an image of the Trinity and other scrolls pepper the slab. There is a rectangular inscription at their feet and below are groups of offspring, seven sons and one daughter. Four shields, perhaps for merchants’ marks, and a marginal inscription complete the composition. Comparative dating evidence: Sideways-turned swaying figures are characteristic of London F work of the late-fifteenth century. Civilian figures are not common but a comparable one is Rainham (Essex) c.1480.

Fig. 11.32 Angels and souls from indent probably commemorating John Dale (d. 1482). Description: Two shrouded figures and angels carrying souls in winding cloth above, plate inscription and 4 shields. John Dale’s arms were a fesse and a crescent in chief. 188

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Description: Small figure of a priest under a canopy with a shield above and plate inscription at foot. Comparative dating evidence: The canopy is unlike London types. The composition is small and awkward so may be from the Fens 2 workshop.

Fig. 11.33 Indent commemorating Roger Shavelock and wife Joan (d. 1488).

Fig. 11.34 Indent commemorating Alan Lamkin (d. 1498).

Dimensions: Slab 236.5 x 99 cms; effigies 100 cms.

Dimensions: Slab 191.5 x 86 cms.

Will: Does not survive, if made.

Will: Does not survive.

References: AnonMS, fol. 16r, 17r; Holles, fol. 204; Kerrich, fol. 21r; Marrat, 1, p. 47; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Thompson 1856, p. 192.

References: AnonMS, fol. 16v; Holles, fol. 205; Lewin, p. 48; Thompson 1856, p. 193; Cole, p. 154.

Indent 9 Alan Lamkin (d. 1498) JW44

Indent 10 Unknown priest, c.1500 JW21

Name of commemorated: Alan Lamkin

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Occupation: Canon of the Premonstratensian house at Barlings (Lincolnshire).

Occupation: Priest Date: c.1500

Date: 1498

Position: The indent is at the east end of south aisle in the area of the chapel of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Position: Indent adjoining north wall of north aisle towards east end, possibly in the area of the chapel of the former guild of SS Peter and Paul.

Workshop: Fens 2

Workshop: ?Fens 2

Stone type of slab: Spine-bearing oolitic limestone

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone

Inscription: Lost

Inscription: Alanus filius Robti Lamkin, quondam Canonicus professus Monasterii beae Mariae de Barlinges, obiit undecimo die Maii Ano Dni 1498. Alan, son of Robert Lamkin, formerly canon of the monastery of the Blessed [Virgin] Mary at Barlings, died 11 May in the year of our Lord 1498)

Description: A chalice with an inscription beneath Comparative dating evidence: The outlines mirror York series 2 chalice brasses but this workshop ceased operations c.1475 and no examples are known this far 189

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston Workshop: Unknown

south. Indents of chalice brasses of similar design are to be found at Spalding (Lincolnshire) (2) and Wisbech (Cambridgeshire), suggesting that the Fens 2 workshop produced chalice brasses to commemorate the clergy.

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: Lost Description: An angel carrying a soul in a winding sheet above a rectangular inscription. Comparative dating evidence: None Dimensions: 100 x 91 cms; figure 30 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Indent 12 Unknown civilian, c.1500 JW30 Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown

Fig. 11.35 Chalice indent commemorating unknown priest, c.1500.

Date: c.1500

Dimensions: Slab 181 x 76 cms; chalice 196 cms.

Position: West end of central aisle of nave

Will: N/A

Workshop: Unknown

References: None

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone

Indent 11 Unknown c.1500

Inscription: Lost

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown

Fig. 11.37 Indent of unknown person, c.1500. Description: Indent mostly filled with cement. A small figure of a civilian and a rectangular inscription, too indistinct for detailed analysis. Comparative dating evidence: Figure too indistinct for analysis. Dimensions: Slab 195 x 35.5 cms; effigy 21 cms.

Fig. 11.36 Indent to unknown person, c.1500.

Will: N/A

Date: c.1500 or perhaps slightly earlier.

References: None

Position: The indent is at the west end of the nave 190

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Indent 13 Unknown priest, c.1500 JW31

Indent 14 Unknown c.1500 Name of commemorated: Unknown

Name of commemorated: Unknown priest Occupation: unknown Occupation: Vicar or chantry chaplain. Date: perhaps c.1500 Date: c.1500 Position: Indent at west end of central aisle of nave Workshop: ?Fens 2 Stone type of slab: Spine-bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: Lost

Fig. 11.39 Indent to an unknown person, c.1500. Position: South aisle Workshop: Unknown Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: Lost Description: A figure of a praying angel above an inscription Comparative dating evidence: None Dimensions: Slab 169 x 51.5 cms; figure 24 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Indent 15 Unknown civilian and wife, c.1510

Fig. 11.38 Indent of unknown priest, c.1500. Description: A figure of a priest in a cope with a prayer scroll above his head and two inscriptions beneath his feet.

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Comparative dating evidence: The angular scroll is unlike London work but can be compared to likely Fens 2 products such as Indent 15 at Boston.

Date: c.1510 Position: Indent in south aisle of nave

Dimensions: Slab 190 x 85.5 cms; effigy 80 cms.

Workshop: Fens 2

Will: N/A

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone.

References: None

Inscription: Lost

Occupation: Unknown

191

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston Description: The slab is very worn. It has faint indents of a civilian and wife above a foot inscription.

Comparative dating evidence: The male figure standing on a prominent mound of grass is similar to a Fens 2 indent in Peterborough Cathedral (Cambridgeshire).

Comparative dating evidence: The figures appear to be comparatively long in relation to their widths. A Fens 2 indent with similar dimensions can be found at Lyddington (Rutland).

Dimensions: Slab 163.5 x 83.5 cms; effigies 48 cms. Will: N/A

Fig. 11.40 Indent to an unknown civilian and wife, c.1510. Dimensions: Slab 190 x 102 cms; effigies 70 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Indent 16 Unknown armoured figure and lady, c.1510 JW40

Fig. 11.41 Indent to an unknown knight or esquire and wife, c.1510. References: None

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown

Indent 17 Unknown civilian and wife, c.1520 JW16

Date: c.1510

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Position: Indent in middle of central aisle of nave

Occupation: Unknown

Workshop: Fens 2

Date: c.1520

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone

Position: The indent is set hard against the mid south wall of the nave

Inscription: Lost

Workshop: London G

Description: The two figures, the male in armour and his lady in a pedimental headress, turn slightly towards each other. Beneath a rectangular inscription are groups of offspring, six sons and six daughters. Two shields are at the top of the slab. Slab reused for burial ‘S.H. 1779’.

Stone type of slab: Spine-bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: Lost

192

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Thomas Robertson Mercator Villae Calisiae obiit … die Mensis …. et Elizabetha uxor ejus quae obiit 25 die Aprilis Ano Dni 1495, et Maria uxor altera quae obiit 2 die Julii Ano Dni 1520 … Thomas Robertson, merchant of the Staple of the town of Calais, who died … day of the ... month ... and his wives Elizabeth who died 25 April in the year of our Lord 1495 and Mary who died 2 July in the year of our Lord 1520 … The transcript appears incomplete with the beginning and ending omitted.

Description: The composition features the figures of a male and female in civilian costume turned slightly towards each other. There is a rectangular inscription below their feet and a shield between them. Possibly the lost inlay for the shield displayed their arms, but a merchant’s mark may be more likely.

Fig. 11.42 Indent of unknown civilian and wife, c.1520. Comparative dating evidence: His long gown and long hair and her pedimental headdress point to a date of c.1520. Her outline compares with Gloucester, St Maryle-Crypt (1519).

Fig. 11.43 Indent of brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531).

Dimensions: Slab 208 x 82.5 cms; effigies 53 cms. Will: Does not survive References: None

Indent 18 Thomas Robertson (d. 1531), and wives Elizabeth Gooding, d. 1495, and Mary Saxby, d. 1520 JW14 Name of commemorated: Thomas Robertson and wives Elizabeth Gooding and Mary Saxby Occupation: Merchant of the Staple of Calais, from Algarkirk Date: Thomas d. 1531, but it appears that his date of death was not filled in so the brass may have been made c.1520 after the death in that year of his second wife Mary.

Fig. 11.44 Detail of indent of brass to Thomas Robertson (d. 1531). Description: Thomas and his wives were shown in civilian dress. Thomas’s figure was engraved on one plate as is normal, but, unusually, the figures of both of his wives were engraved on the other main plate. Below them was an inscription and shield. Four more shields at the corners of the slab (not shown in the lower illustration) complete the composition. The arms of Robertson, silver a chief gules, over all a bend engrailed

Position: The indent is at the west end of the nave Workshop: Fens 2 Stone type of slab: Spine-bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: The lost inscription read: 193

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston Fundavit duos Capellanos in Gildae beae Mariae Virginis in Ecclia Parochial Sci Botulphi de Boston imppetuum celebraturos p aiabus &c. Obiit circa annum aetatis suae 72, primo die mensis Martii, Ano Dni 1525. ... John Robinson, esquire, merchant of the Staple of the town of Calais, his wives Anna, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Eleanor. He founded two chaplains in the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the parish church of St Botolph in Boston, to celebrate [Mass] in perpetuity for the souls etc [sc. His, his wives and all the faithful]. He died around the age of 72 on 1 March in the year of our Lord 1525.

blue a martlet gold, would have been engraved on some at least of these shields. None of the inlay survives. Comparative dating evidence: Another example of Fens 2 work with two figures on a single piece of brass is an indent at Tattershall (Lincolnshire). Thomas Robertson and his father Nicholas both had Fens 1 brasses at Algarkirk (Lincolnshire). Dimensions: Slab 268.5 x 139 cms; effigies: 29.5 cms. Will: TNA: PROB11/24, fols 68r–72v.

The beginning is clearly omitted. References: AnonMS, fol. 16v; Holles, fol. 205; Marrat, 1, p. 45; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, p. 48; Thompson 1856, p. 193; Cole, p. 155.

Indent 19 John Robinson (d. 1525) and wives, Anna, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Eleanor JW15 Name of commemorated: John Robinson and his wives, Anna, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Eleanor. Occupation: Merchant of the Staple of Calais Date: 1525 Position: The indent is at the west end of the nave Workshop: London G Fig. 11.46 Details of indent of brass to John Robinson (d. 1525).

Stone type of slab: Spine-bearing oolitic limestone

Description: John Robinson and his four wives were shown in civilian dress. His figure is in the centre, facing fully to the front and he is flanked by two wives on each side, their figures turned towards him. Under each wife is a small plate which showed figures of the offspring they bore him: one under Anna, three under Elizabeth I, two under Elizabeth II and one under Eleanor. Above John’s figure was a shield; it was blazoned with his arms azure a fesse dancetty between 3 falcons or. A marginal inscription with quatrefoils at the corners, probably originally engraved with symbols of the four Evangelists, completed the composition. None of the inlay survives. Comparative dating evidence: The outlines of the ladies can be compared with extant London G brasses at Amersham (Buckinghamshire) to Elizabeth de la Penne (d. 1521), Calverton (Buckinghamshire) to Joan Rokys (1519) and at Wantage (Berkshire) to the wives of Walter Tawbott (d. 1522). This last comparator also has a frontfacing civilian of the same shape as John Robinson’s figure.

Fig. 11.45 Indent of brass to John Robinson (d. 1525). Inscription: The lost inscription read: Johes Robinson Arm. Mercator Stapulae villae Callisiae, Anna, Elizab; Elizabetha et Alianora uxores ejus.

Dimensions: Slab 306 x 150 cms; effigies 93.5 cms.

194

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Will: John Robinson, TNA: PROB11/23, fols 39v–41v; Eleanor Robinson, Lincoln Wills 10, pp. 100–01.

Andrew (Dorset) 1526. The surviving inscription there is in London F script.

References: AnonMS, fol. 16v; Holles, fol. 206; Marrat, 1, p. 45; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, p. 48; Thompson 1856, p. 193; Cole, p. 155; Badham 2010, p. 205.

Dimensions: Slab 72 x 57.5 cms; effigy 34.5 cms.

Indent 20 Unknown lady, c.1525

References: None

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Indent 21 John Leeke (d. 1527), and wives Alice and Joan JW32

Will: N/A

Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1525

Name of commemorated: Probably John Leeke and his wives Alice and Joan

Position: Fragment built into east face of the wall separating the nave and the tower

Occupation: Merchant of Boston Date: 1527 Position: Middle aisle of nave Workshop: ?Fens 2

Fig. 11.47 Indent of unknown lady, c.1525. Workshop: London F. Stone type: Purbeck marble Inscription: Lost

Fig. 11.48 Indent probably commemorating John Leeke (d. 1527).

Description: Fragment of a slab with a kneeling lady with a prayer scroll leading to a devotional image of indistinguishable form. There is an inscription below, a shield behind the female figure and another short scroll to the left of the lady. It was almost certainly from the back wall of a wall monument with tombchest and canopy.

Stone type of slab: Reused Tournai marble, probably originally used for a Flemish incised slab. Inscription: The lost inscription read: Johes Leeke Mercator de Boston / obiit ultimo die Februarii Ano Dni 1527. Alicia et Johanna uxores ejus ...

Comparative dating evidence: The shape of the scroll and the outline of the lady are paralleled at Milborne St

195

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston John Leeke merchant of Boston died on the last day of February in the year of our Lord 1527. His wives Alicia and Johanna.... The inscription is clearly incomplete with the end and probably the beginning omitted.

Workshop: London G

Description: The three shrouded figures are forward facing. Prayer scrolls of inelegant straight shape are above their heads and above them is an image of the Trinity. Below a rectangular inscription are groups of offspring, five sons and two daughters. Four shields, presumably for merchants’ marks complete the composition.

Description: The composition features figures of a male and female in civilian costume turned slightly towards each other. His long gown and long hair and her headdress point to a date of c.1535. There is a rectangular inscription below their feet and a shield between them. Possibly the lost inlay for the shield displayed their arms, but a merchant’s mark may be more likely. Groups of seven sons and three daughters complete the composition.

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone Inscription: Lost

Comparative dating evidence: The figures are unlike London workshop types. The may be Fens 2. The angled inscriptions compare broadly with indent 9 at Boston.

Comparative dating evidence: The bulky male figure compares with the front-facing figure of Prior Robert White (d. 1534) at Royston (Hertfordshire). The lady compares with the front-facing figure of an unknown lady of c.1535 at Aldenham (Hertfordshire). As a sidewaysturned pair they compare with the lost brass to an unknown civilian and wife at Abbots Langley (Hertfordshire) dated c.1540 and the brass to Sir Anthony Fitzherbert (d. 1538) at Norbury (Derbyshire).

Dimensions: Slab 247 x 140 cms; effigies 94 cms. Will: Lincoln Wills 10, pp. 40–43. References: Holles, fol. 204; Thompson 1820, p. 97; Lewin, p. 47.

Indent 22 Unknown civilian and wife, c. 1535 JW20

Dimensions: Slab 130 x 90 cms; effigies 32 cms.

Name of commemorated: Unknown

References: Kerrich, fol. 21r; Cole, p. 154.

Occupation: Unknown

Indent 23 Unknown lady, c.1535

Will: N/A

Date: c.1535

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1535

Fig. 11.49 Indent to unknown civilian and wife, c.1530. Position: The indent is at east end of south aisle in the area of chapel of the former Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, close to the slabs of the lost brasses to Thomas Flete and Athelard Bate.

Fig. 11.50 Indent to unknown lady, c.1535. 196

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Position: Fragment built into east face of the wall separating the nave and the tower

Description: Rectangular inscription with indent of plate above which has proved difficult to interpret.

Workshop: London G

Stone type of slab: Spine bearing oolitic limestone

Description: Fragment of a slab with a standing sideways-turned lady in a Paris cap with a prayer scrolls leading to a devotional image at the top right hand corner, perhaps a Trinity. There is an inscription below. Five shields complete the composition. It was almost certainly from the back wall of a wall monument with tombchest and canopy.

Inscription: Lost Description: An odd shape, difficult to interpret, above a rectangular inscription. Comparative dating evidence: None Dimensions: Slab 176.5 x 110 cms.

Stone type: Purbeck marble Will: None Inscription: Lost References: None Comparative dating evidence: The outline of the lady is similar to Great Linford (Buckinghamshire) 1536 and Taplow (Buckinghamshire) c.1540. Dimensions: Slab 77 x 54 cms; effigy 41.5 cms. Will: N/A References: None

Indent 24 Unknown Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: Difficult to say Position: The indent is inside the north door Workshop: Difficult to say

Fig. 11.51 Indent of indeterminate date to unknown person. 197

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Section 3 – Effigial Incised Slabs surviving or known from antiquarian rubbings

Plan 11.3 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church Boston, showing the position of the slabs using Greenhill’s numbering. Greenhill 15 was not found in 2008–09. 198

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Greenhill 2 – JW 8 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1325–30 Position: on the floor of the west end of the nave, south of the font. Description: the figures of a civilian and wife are almost effaced, but a few incised lines remain of the straight folds of the lady’s dress around her feet. The heads and hands were inlaid in a white composition, now all lost except for most of the man’s head. Fig. 11.53 Inlays of heads and hands, c.1325-30. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type: Tournai marble, very badly worn. Inscription: none

Fig. 11.54 Inlays of heads and hands of male civilian figure, c.1325–30.

Fig. 11.52 Slab of civilian and wife with inlays of heads, hands and inscription, c.1325–30.

Comparative dating evidence: the elongated fingers of the inlaid hands, and the narrow brass inscription fillet suggest a date in the earlier part of the fourteenth century; see two slabs at Damme, Belgium, both anonymous and both c.1320; [illustrated Van Belle 2006, pp. 233–34).

The outline of inlays of the lady’s head is peculiar in depicting a splayed base, perhaps representing a veil which covered her shoulders. The marginal inscription was also inlaid but in brass, with quatrefoil evangelistic? symbols at the corners; there are frequent deeper areas cut into the slab because of the undercutting needed to house the backing plates used to join the strips of brass fillet together.

Dimensions: 259 x 129.5 cms. References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 21.

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston The lady is dressed in a veil, wimple and a long, simple gown which terminates in folds at her feet; there is no footrest. The inscription is on a marginal fillet in Lombardic letters, but the left-hand strip has been cut away completely and the right-hand portion is covered by a radiator. Greenhill noted only a few words, ‘Eius’ and ‘Amen • Hic Iacet’ along the lower fillet, confirming the characteristic use of separate epitaphs for the two persons, each inscription occupying half of the margin around the figures.

Greenhill 3 – JW 44a Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1325–30 Position: on the floor of the outer north aisle, towards the east end, partly covered by a radiator. Description: the figures of a civilian and wife are incised standing under a double canopy with cusped internal arches and supported on slender side and central shafts. The male figure wears a long straight gown, the folds of which demonstrate a slight bowing of his right leg against the fabric; the sleeves terminate just below the elbows. His feet, encased in pointed shoes, rest on a dog.

Fig. 11.56 Lower half of slab with man’s footrest and canopy shaft bases, c.1325–30. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type: Tournai marble, worn with surface exfoliation in parts, and cut down. Inscription: none Comparative dating evidence: sleeves and posture of the male figure’s right leg similar to Adam de Franton (d. 1325) Wyberton (Lincolnshire), [illustrated Greenhill 1986, pp. 134–35, pl. 20]; canopy style resembles the slab of Jacob von Auchy (1332), Sint-Salvatorskirk, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 131]. Dimensions: 203 x 91.5 cms. References: Edleston, 4, p. 6, pl. 6 [with inconsistencies]; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 21.

Greenhill 4 – JW 41 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1330–40

Fig. 11.55 Slab of civilian and wife, c.1325–30.

Position: on the floor of the outer north aisle, close to the north door.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments composition as there are no rivet holes / lead plugs suggesting brass inlays.

Fig. 11.57 Slab of civilian with inlays for head, hands and inscription, c.1330–40. Description: the partially effaced figure of a male civilian is represented standing under the faint traces of a canopy. There are definite cusps around the man’s head, and the base of a thin side shaft by his right foot.

Fig. 11.59 Recessed areas of head and hands for ?mastic inlays on civilian slab, c.1330–40. The marginal inscription on a fillet is also recessed, with roundels at the angles of the slab for evangelistic symbols and halfway down the long sides perhaps for heraldry or a merchant’s mark. It is unclear whether this marginal indent was once filled with composition or brass as much of it has now been infilled with modern plaster; but there is no evidence of any rivets, rivet holes or deeper recessed portions suggestive of backing plates required for joining brass plates together, so originally a marble or composition is likely. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, worn surface and with some exfoliation; a large area of the lower right hand corner is broken off diagonally. Comparative dating evidence: close effigial comparisons with the slab of Adam de Franton (d. 1325) Wyberton (Lincolnshire) [illustrated Greenhill 1986, pp. 134–35, pl. 20].

Fig. 11.58 Base of canopy shaft on civilian slab, c.1330– 40.

Dimensions: 216 x 81 cms. References: Edleston, 5, p. 6, pl. 2 [with inconsistencies]; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 22.

The rounded silhouette of the head and hands of the figure are recessed and were originally filled with

201

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston most likely with composition, as there is no evidence of brass fixings. The indentation of the man’s head has since been filled with modern cement.

Greenhill 5 – JW 7 Name of commemorated: John …. and wife Date: c. 1340–50? Position: on the floor at the west end of the nave, north side.

Fig. 11.61 Detail of slab with recessed head and hands of female figure, mastic? inlays lost, c.1340–50? The outline of the head of the lady suggests that she was wearing a veil; the outline of the inlays of both sets of hands, with their long, straight fingers closely conjoined, is very similar to those on the de Smalenburgh slab (Greenhill 18). Inscription: on a marginal fillet, starting at the upper left corner and running clockwise, in Lombardics: ‘Hic iacet iohannes … / …e uxor eivs pro qvarvm animabvs omnibvs dicenti(bv)s mater pater / et Ave Maria ?Ienanes ep(o?)ns… / … ?decessit … ?die(s) indvlgentie …’ Much of the lettering is unclear, far more so than when Edleston and Greenhill recorded the words as above. Reference to an indulgence in the inscription is unusual (Greenhill 1976, 1, p. 291; Swanson, pp. 107–09). Fig. 11.60 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, c.1340–50? Description: the figures of a civilian and wife, both dressed in long plain gowns reaching to their feet. They stand under a fine double canopy with cusps underneath the arches and fine trefoil crockets above, terminating in a fleur-de-lys. A slender central shaft provides support between the figures, and flying buttresses extend between the side shafts and the architectural superstructure. The heads and hands of the effigies were originally inlaid,

Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type of slab: Tournai marble; the upper and central parts of the slab are very worn.

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Fig. 11.62 Inscription detail of lower right-hand corner of slab, c.1340–50?

Fig. 11.63 Slab of the lower part of an effigy showing drapery, c.1325–40.

Comparative dating evidence: the canopy, outline of the male figure and the hands, are similar to those on the slab to Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340), Boston / Greenhill 18; the canopy details and outline of female headdress are as on an anonymous slab (c.1350) Sint-Salvatorskirk Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 134]); canopy details, male figural similarities and female headdress as on an anonymous slab (c.1350) SintSalvatorskirk, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2008, p. 20].

Greenhill 7 – JW 12 Name of commemorated: Unknown, but potential attribution to Sir Thomas de Moulton (d. 1322) and wife Alice Date: c.1325–40 Position: on the floor of the west end of the nave, the upper right corner covered by the font steps.

Dimensions: 216 x 100 cms.

Description: The figures of a male civilian on the right and probably his wife on the left, in dress typical of the second quarter of the fourteenth century; his feet rest on a hound and there is a small lapdog at the feet of the lady. The heads and hands of the figures, the fillet of the marginal inscription and the symbols at the corners, were all inlaid in brass – dowel holes with lead and rivets remain. A large sword is located squarely between the figures, an equal armed cross with rounded ends is above their heads, and there are two subsidiary figures of saints either side of the upper cross-arm, which were also inlaid, but as there are no lead plugs in these areas, they were infilled most likely in a whitish cement, traces of which remain, and of which Greenhill provides a chemical analysis – calcium carbonate with silica.

References: Edleston, 4, p. 5, pl. 2 [with inconsistencies]; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 22.

Greenhill 6 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1325–40 Position: on the floor of the west end of the nave, by the entrance to the parish office. Description: a portion of the lower half of a slab bearing a few nondescript lines of drapery, from a male or female civilian effigy. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, extremely worn. Inscription: none Dimensions: 64 x 97 cms. References: Greenhill 1986, p. 22.

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston particular to the commemorated. Hence, perhaps the slab was to Sir Thomas de Moulton, a scion of one of the knightly families of Lincolnshire rooted in Boston, and in the early fourteenth century was the joint owner, with his wife, of the advowson of the hospital of St John, at Skirbeck, on the town’s outskirts (Thompson 1856, pp. 466–67).

Fig. 11.66 Detail of slab c.1325–40 with recessed areas of cross, saints and the heads of the effigies, inlays lost. The significance of the large sword, imparting a knightly symbolism to this civilian effigy, as well as the equalarmed cross, might be symbolic of the Knights of St John, although other examples of slabs to Knights of the Order have a different type of Maltese cross depicted (Greenhill 1976, 1, pp. 219–20).

Fig. 11.64 Slab of civilian and wife with heads, hands, inscription, sword, cross and saints once inlaid, c.1325– 40.

Fig. 11.67 Detail of slab c.1325–40 with recessed area of the sword hilt, inlays lost. Perhaps this Boston representation was more in keeping with a member of the lay confraternity of the Order, such as Frère Gerars (?1272), Villers-le-Temple, Belgium [illustrated Creeny 1891, pl. 20; Rousseau, pp. 19–20; Greenhill, 1976, 2, pl. 121a]. Circumstantially, also, the

Fig. 11.65 Detail of slab with the recessed head of the lady, brass inlay lost c.1325–40. The prominence of the sword and cross in the overall design is remarkable, suggestive of a symbolism 204

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments date of Sir Thomas’ death in 1322 is concurrent with the proposed date / style of this slab. Whether the unusual position of the female figure on the left side of the slab – the position of prestige – has any significance here is hard to say; possibly the figures represented a lady and her son (Sir Thomas?). The cross design is not dissimilar to that originally inlaid in composition on a Tournai slab c.1325 in St Mary’s church, Barton-on-Humber (Lincolnshire) (see Greenhill 1986, p. 17) illustrated Fig. 11.68.

Greenhill 8 – JW 46 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1330–40 Position: probably under a wooden platform at the east end of the nave, and therefore currently hidden, but possibly removed and disposed of when the nave altar was installed. Greenhill noted the slab in the chancel in 1929, but by 1933 Edleston found it had been ‘recently removed from the centre of the chancel to the east end of the nave at the north side’.

Fig. 11.68 Cross slab indent in slab of Tournai marble, c.1325, St Mary’s, Barton-on-Humber (Lincolnshire). Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type of slab: Tournai marble; generally worn. Inscription: none Comparative dating evidence: shape of the head and hands inlays and male figure draperies similar to those on an early-fourteenth century slab at Damme, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 234]; similarly on the slab to … van Bos (d. 1334), Lo, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, pp. 343–44].

Fig. 11.69 Rubbing of slab to priest c.1330–40, now lost or covered (Society of Antiquaries, Greenhill collection 1929).

Dimensions: 245 x 120.5 cms.

Description: outlines of the upper part of the figure of a priest in mass vestments, with traces of a canopy. Greenhill recorded that the head, hands, chalice below the hands, a large rectangular apparel on the skirt of the alb, and the marginal inscription, were all originally, inlaid, possibly in brass, but that most of the recesses had been plastered smooth with modern infill, as demonstrated by his rubbing. The veracity of Edleston’s rubbing with the details of the canopy is hard to judge but the presence and size of the cusps over the man’s head look appropriate.

References: BL, MS. Add. 6732, fol. 20r; Edleston, 2, p. 3, pl. 6; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, pp. 22– 24.

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Greenhill 9 – JW 9 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1325–40? Position: on the floor of the west end of the nave Description: rectangular slab with the matrices for the head and hands of a man and woman, side by side.

Fig. 11.71 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, c.1325–40? The matrices are empty of composition but have been undercut at the edges to give the adhesive a better hold.

Fig. 11.70 Rubbing of slab to priest c.1330–40, now covered or lost, by R.H. Edleston (1933). Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type of slab: Tournai marble; the lower part of the slab was worn smooth. Inscription: none Comparative dating evidence: slab to a priest (c.1330) at Ashby Puerorum (Lincolnshire) [illustrated Greenhill 1986, pl. 21]; and similarly (1340) Sint-Salvatorskirk, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 133]. Dimensions: 221 x 110.5 cms. (from rubbing) References: Edleston, 5, p. 6, pl. 1; Greenhill 1976, 2, p.3; Greenhill 1986, p.24.

Fig. 11.72 Detail of the matrix of the male head with undercutting for the composition inlay. The incised lines of the figures have been completely worn away.

206

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Description: Effigy of a priest presumably in mass vestments but all effaced; Greenhill (late-1920s) discerned faint traces of engraving of one shoulder and some letters in the marginal inscription, but these are now very hard to make out. Head, hands, chalice and feet once inlaid in composition, but as traces of a rivet in a lead plug remain in the indent of the head this must have been of brass.

Fig. 11.73 Detail of the matrix of the marginal brass fillet showing dowels and rivets. Around the slab is the indent for a thick brass fillet; small patches of undercutting are evident and several dowels with brass rivets remain together with the channels for pouring lead into the rivet holes. The slab was re-used as a tombstone to one Richard Write (d. 1805), printer and one of the Boston Loyal Volunteers, a ten line inscription to whom now occupies the central area of the slab. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges

Fig. 11.74 Slab of priest with inlaid head, chalice, hands and feet, c.1325–40?

Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, worn flat; small piece at the lower right corner is missing Inscription: none Comparative dating evidence: The rounded shape of the man’s hairstyle drawing in to a narrow neck is suggestive of the Tournai / Bruges workshops of the mid-fourteenth century; see slab to … Van Bos (d. 1334), Lo, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 343]; Boston, Greenhill 18, Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340); an anonymous brass fragment (c.1350), Assebroek, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, pp. 113–14]; and a similar brass fragment in the Gruuthuse Museum, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Page-Phillips 1989, p. 325].

Fig. 11.75 Detail of rivet and lead plug in matrix of the head, c.1325–40?

Dimensions: 234 x 132 cms.

Workshop: Tournai / Bruges

References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 24.

Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, very poor condition with much surface flaking and wear.

Greenhill 10 – JW 5

Inscription: none

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Comparative dating evidence: inlays on the slab to a priest (c.1330) Ashby Puerorum (Lincolnshire) [Greenhill 1986, pl. 21]; Sint-Salvatorskirk (1340) Bruges, Belgium [Van Belle 2006, p. 133]; the rounded outline of the head inlay and prominent neck (though this might be the orphrey of the amice?) similar to anonymous brass fragment (c.1350), Assebroek, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, pp. 113–14].

Date: c.1325–40? Position: On the floor at the west end of the nave towards the north side; partially covered.

207

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston plastered up, presumably to provide a level surface in the main passageway of the nave, but there are the remains of rivets in these indents. The presence of these subsidiary figures suggests that there was originally a canopy over the principal effigies.

Fig. 11.76 Upper part of slab of priest c.1325–40 with details of marginal fillet to upper left corner. Dimensions: 228.5 x 117 cms. References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 3; Greenhill 1986, p. 24.

Greenhill 11 – JW 35

Fig. 11.78 Detail of three subsidiary figures, c.1330–40?

Fig. 11.79 Head and hands of the female figure showing repair to the stone, c.1330–40? One interesting and contemporary feature is the use of a thin strip of Tournai stone let into the slab horizontally across the lady’s head, probably due to a fault in the slab at this point. There are two dowel holes in the head of the female figure and one in her hands, so presumably these features of both male and female figures were in brass – proven by a rubbing dated 1907 in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries which shows the indent of the lady’s head (identifiable by the outline of the additional repair strip of marble) with the hands below in brass inlay. Unfortunately, virtually all engraved detail is obliterated. Haines noted the survival of the brass hands in a slab in the nave in 1861, but by 1926 the plate had

Fig. 11.77 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and subsidiary figures above, c.1330–40? Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1330–40? Position: on the floor of the middle aisle of the nave Description: large slab of Tournai marble worn absolutely smooth but with matrices remaining for the heads and hands of the two principal figures, and above their heads six small figures of ?saints or ?weepers. The matrices of four of these have subsequently been 208

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments become detached from its slab, as Stephenson noted it as ‘loose in library’; it now appears to be lost.

Fig. 11.80 Nineteenth-century impression of the indent of the head of the female figure with the inlaid brass hands in situ, c.1330–40. Rubbing: Society of Antiquaries of London.

Fig. 11.81 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1325–40? Workshop: Tournai / Bruges

Workshop: Tournai / Bruges

Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, effaced

Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, very worn

Inscription: none

Comparative dating evidence: outlines of the inlays similar to faces / headdresses on the slab to Adam de Franton (d. 1325), Wyberton (Lincolnshire) [illustrated Greenhill 1986, pl. 20]; and also on a slab (c.1325), SintJanshospitaal, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 130].

Comparative dating evidence: The worn outlines of the inlay indents and absence of incised lines suggest only that this slab is similar to many others produced in the Tournai / Bruges workshops of the first half of the fourteenth century; for which see Boston, Greenhill 5, 9 and 11.

Dimensions: 285 x 136 cms.

Dimensions: 251.5 x 124.5 cms.

References: Haines 1861, 1, p. 23, 2, p. 117; Stephenson 1926, p. 281; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 24.

References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 25.

Greenhill 13 – JW 33

Greenhill 12 – JW 34

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Date: c.1325–40?

Date: c.1325–40?

Position: on the floor in the middle aisle of the nave

Position: on the floor of the middle aisle of the nave

Description: large slab of Tournai marble worn completely smooth, but with the indents for the heads and hands of a man placed between two female figures. The indents have been plastered in.

Description: rectangular slab of Tournai marble worn completely smooth, but with the matrices for inlays of the heads and hands of two principal figures still evident but only as shallow indentations in the slab’s surface. The marginal inscription has been partially cemented over, especially on the left long side of the slab. 209

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 25.

Fig. 11.83 Detail of the heads and hands with indent for a small brass inscription plate, c.1325–40?

Greenhill 14 – JW 36 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1325–40? Position: on the floor of the inner north aisle towards the east end Description: rectangular slab of Tournai marble with considerable surface flaking.

Fig. 11.82 Slab of civilian and two wives(?) with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1325–40?

All incised lines have disappeared but there are relatively deeply cut indents remaining for the heads and hands of a civilian male figure and his wife, and a marginal inscription with rounded symbols at the corners and halfway down the long sides. Several rivets / lead plugs remain in the inscription fillet and the figures’ heads.

Around the composition is the partial indent of a marginal inscription fillet inlaid in brass with symbols at the corners. Just below the indent of the man’s hands is a further indent for a small horizontal brass inscription plate. This may have been a later addition, appropriating the slab, though Greenhill also suggests that it could also have been for a small precatory inscription placed on his breast.

Workshop: Tournai / Bruges

Workshop: Tournai / Bruges

Stone type of slab: Tournai marble; surface exfoliation and wear.

Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, effaced

Inscription: none

Inscription: none

Comparative dating evidence: The worn outlines of the inlay indents and absence of incised lines suggest only that this slab is similar to many others produced in the Tournai / Bruges workshops of the first half of the fourteenth century; for which see Boston, Greenhill 5, 9 and 11.

Comparative dating evidence: the very worn outlines of the inlays and lack of incised lines remaining makes any comparison challenging, other than it is typical of Tournai / Bruges workshops in the second quarter of the fourteenth century; see the slab to a man and two ladies dated c.1350, Sint-Salvatorskathedraal, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2008, pl. 12]. A small precatory plate inlaid transversely is also seen on a c.1360 Tournai / Bruges slab at Gressenhall (Norfolk) [illustrated Greenhill 1965, opp. p. 423]. Dimensions: 277 x 146 cms. 210

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 25.

Greenhill 15 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1325 [from Greenhill] Position: originally on the floor of the outer north aisle – not found in 2008. Description: [from Greenhill 1986] civilian and wife with heads, hands and marginal inscription once inlaid, but inlays now lost – the indents are too worn to hazard whether they were for brass or composition. No rubbing or photo of this slab has been traced. Workshop: Not known Stone type of slab: whitish marble Inscription: none Comparative dating evidence: N/A Dimensions: 223.5 x 99 cms. References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 25. Fig. 11.84 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1325–40?

Greenhill 16 – JW 24 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1325–40 Position: on the floor of the inner south aisle Description: figure of a priest in mass vestments with head and hands once inlaid, indents of the hands and chalice present but difficult to make out, and the Yshaped orphrey of the chasuble and the apparel of the alb also inlaid. These indents are relatively shallow and suggest composition inlay, compared to the deeper indents, all for brass, of the marginal inscription, with evidence of separate backing plates, and evangelistic symbols at the corners, with lead plugs and rivets remaining. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, worn

Fig. 11.85 Detail of the matrix of the lady’s head and hands, c.1325–40? Dimensions: 208 x 111 cms. 211

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston Comparative dating evidence: very similar figure style to the slab to Niclais Blankard (c.1340), SintSalvatorskirk, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 133], and that of an unknown priest (c.1350) at Sint-Jacobskapelle, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 403]. Dimensions: 204.5 x 98 cms. References: Edleston, 5, p. 7, pl. 2; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 3; Greenhill 1986, p. 24.

Greenhill 18 – JW 4 Name of commemorated: Wessel, called Smalenburgh Date: 1340 Position: on the floor at the east end of the outer north aisle Description: extremely well preserved slab of dark Tournai marble incised with the figure of a male civilian with long curly hair, dressed in a long, plain tunic. His feet rest on a dog, the head of which is turned around to look over his shoulder. Above is an elaborate singlearched canopy with an embattlement above, the tiling patterns of which are typical of Bruges rather than Tournai work, supported by large, compartmentalised side-shafts with flying buttresses stabilising the central tabernacle. The marginal inscription is engraved on a thin fillet in raised Lombardic letters with a recessed background. There is an evangelistic symbol at each corner. The slab originally was laid down in the church of the Franciscan friars, Boston. It was excavated from that site in the early nineteenth century and eventually (1897) taken to St Botolph’s church for its better preservation.

Fig. 11.86 Priest in mass vestments with various inlays, c.1325–40.

Fig. 11.87 Upper half of slab with priest in mass vestments with various inlays, c.1325–40.

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Fig. 11.89 Detail of the slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340).

Fig. 11.88 Rubbing of the slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340). Workshop: Bruges? Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, cracked across in several places (Haines suggests that this was when the slab was removed to St Botolph’s) but with surface deficits now filled in with a fine dark cement. Fig. 11.90 Slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340).

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Fig. 11.91 Detail of the slab of Wessel de Smalenburgh (d. 1340). Inscription: HIC IACET WISSELVS D(I)C(TVS) / SMALENBVRGH CIVIS ET MERCATOR MONASTERIENSIS QVI OBIIT FERIA SEXTA / POST NATIVITATEM BEATE MARIE / VIRGINIS ANNO DOMINI M CCC XL ANIMA EIVS REQVIESCAT IN PACE AMEN Comparative dating evidence: the engraving of the head and the depiction of the long gown are very similar to those on the brasses of Adam de Walsokne (d. 1349) and Robert Braunche (d. 1364) at King’s Lynn (Norfolk) [illustrated Cotman, 1, pls 1 and 2]; and others of the mid-fourteenth century, see Cameron, pp. 78–81. The canopy structure is very similar to that on the slab to a man and two ladies dated c.1350, SintSalvatorskathedraal, Bruges, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2008, pl. 12]

Fig. 11.92 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1340–50?

Dimensions: 243 x 110.5 cms.

Workshop: Tournai / Bruges

References: Thompson 1846, p. 112; Way, pp. 54–55; Haines, 1, pp. 23–24; Jebb, p. 54; Edleston, 2, p. 1, pl. 1; Ludat, pp. 47–51; Wheeldon, p. 2; Tennenhaus, pp. 189– 97; Greenhill 1976, 1, pp. 204–05; 2, p. 14, pl. 110b; Greenhill 1986, pp. 25–26, pl. 3; Van Belle 2006, p. 73.

Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, very worn Inscription: None

Greenhill 19 – JW 10 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1340–50 Position: on the floor of the nave at the west end Description: very badly-worn slab of Tournai marble with the almost completely effaced figures of a male civilian, and a lady in a long cote-hardie with tippets. The heads, hands, marginal inscription and what is presumed by Greenhill to be the central shaft of a canopy – but could be an inscription fillet separating the two figures – were all inlaid in brass. Many rivets and lead plugs remain in these indents.

Fig. 11.93 Upper half of the slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, c.1340–50? Comparative dating evidence: Although the effigies show a later style of dress, and the outlines of the inlays also suggest a date in the second quarter of the fourteenth century (see for example Boston, Greenhill 9, 10, 11 and 13), the technique of using an inscription fillet to separate 214

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments several rivets / lead plugs remaining. Above the principal figures are those of three small ?saints, which were originally inlaid in some form of composition.

the effigies is also found on what is probably an earlier slab of c.1320 at Damme, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, pp. 233–34]. Dimensions: 231 x 126 cms. References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, p. 26.

Greenhill 20 – JW 13 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1350?

Fig. 11.95 Upper part of slab of civilian and wife, c.1350? Workshop: Tournai / Bruges Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, worn Inscription: None Comparative dating evidence: the tippets of the lady’s dress and the dogs at the feet resemble those on the slab to Pieter van Doornik (d. 1357) and his wife Margriete (d. 1360), Damme, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 236].

Fig. 11.94 Slab of civilian and wife with inlaid heads and hands, and marginal inscription, c.1350?

Fig. 11.96 Lower part of slab of civilian and wife with thick marginal fillet, c.1350?

Position: on the nave floor at the west end

Dimensions: 262 x 132 cms.

Description: slab of Tournai marble engraved with the effigies of a male civilian and a lady, all except the bottom of each figure effaced. There is a dog under the feet of the male figure, and the lady has a lapdog between her feet. Traces of the base of a central shaft of a canopy remain. The heads and hands of the figures, as well as a very wide marginal fillet, were all inlaid in brass, with

References: Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 14; Greenhill 1986, pp. 26–27.

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Greenhill 21 – JW 23 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1360–70? Position: on the floor of the inner south aisle

Fig. 11.98 Detail of canopy engraving by shoulder of priest in mass vestments, c.1360–70. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges / Ghent? Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, with considerable surface wear and exfoliation Inscription: None Comparative dating evidence: very similar to the Tournai slabs of Florens de Varennes (c.1370), Aire-surla-Lys, Pas-de-Calais, France; and to an anonymous priest (c.1370), at Sint-Jacobskapelle, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 403]. Dimensions: 187 x 77.5 cms. References: Edleston, 5, p. 7, pl. 3; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 4; Greenhill 1986, p. 27.

Greenhill 22 – JW 37 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1350–60 Position: on the floor of the inner north aisle Fig. 11.97 Priest in mass vestments with various inlays, c.1360–70.

Description: engraved effigies of a man in civilian dress and a lady standing under a double canopy. The man wears a tunic buttoned down the front and reaching to mid-thigh, with hose and pointed shoes. The lady wears a long surcoat falling to her feet with a mantle over her shoulders. The double canopy is elaborate with a superstructure incorporating the figures of ?three saints. The heads and hands of the effigies, the marginal inscription and eight roundels – which may well have contained the symbols of the four evangelists at the corners, and merchants’ marks or heraldry down the long sides of the inscription fillet – were all inlaid, the relatively shallow matrices suggesting a composition was used rather than brass.

Description: figure of a priest in mass vestments, nearly effaced, but with many parts of the effigy and surround represented by matrices originally housing some kind of composition and / or brass. The head, hands, chalice, Yshaped orphrey of the chasuble, maniple, stole and apparel of the alb have relatively shallow indents and were all presumably in mastic; the matrix of the marginal inscription is deeper, with evidence of backing strips, so was of brass. There are still very vague traces of an incised canopy.

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Fig. 11.101 Detail of slab of a civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1350–60. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges – as some of the details of the canopy suggest Bruges work Stone type of slab: Tournai marble with light surface wear. Inscription: None Comparative dating evidence: Brasses of Albrecht Hovener (d. 1357), Stralsund, Germany [illustrated Creeny 1884, facing p. 15], and Robert Braunche (d. 1364), King’s Lynn (Norfolk) [illustrated Cotman, 1, pl. 2]; and the slabs of Aleaune Van Bassevelde (c.1360), once in the Musée de l’École Saint-Luc, Tournai, Belgium [now lost but illustrated Grange, opp. p 152], and c.1360 at Damme, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, p. 239].

Fig. 11.99 Civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1350–60.

Dimensions: 174 x 85 cms. References: Edleston, 2, p. 3, pl. 5 (with inconsistencies); Wheeldon, p. 15; Greenhill 1976, 1, p. 208; 2, p. 15; Greenhill 1986, p. 27, pl. 22.

Greenhill 23 – JW 42 Name of commemorated: Unknown Date: c.1360–70 Position: on the floor of the outer north aisle

Fig. 11.100 Detail of slab of a civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1350–60.

Description: a slab of Tournai marble engraved with the effigies of a male civilian and lady standing under a double canopy with a central shaft terminating above in a crocketed pinnacle between the figures. The man is dressed in a cote-hardie with long tippets hanging down, over a tight-sleeved undertunic, and a chaperon. The lady is also in a cote-hardie with long tippets and showing prominent pockets, over a tightsleeved kirtle. The heads, hands, narrow central shaft of 217

Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston the canopy and the broad marginal fillet which bore the inscription, were all originally inlaid in brass.

Fig. 11.103 Head of male civilian showing lead plugs originally for brass inlay, c.1360–70. The hands have now been inlaid with (modern) plaster, but the heads of both figures and the marginal indent all have lead plugs remaining, some with rivets.

Fig. 11.102 Slab of a civilian and wife under canopy with inlays, c.1360–70.

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Fig. 11.104 Hands of male civilian showing lead plug and brass rivet originally for brass inlay, c.1360–70. Workshop: Tournai / Bruges – the simplicity of the principal figures suggests a Bruges origin Stone type of slab: Tournai marble, worn surface with some exfoliation; also trimmed at the head, foot and lower right corner Inscription: None Comparative dating evidence: Slabs at Koksijde, c. 1350, and Damme, c.1350–60, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle, 2006, pp. 236–37, 314–15], and to Jan van Hazebrouck (d. 1378) at Ieper, Belgium [illustrated Van Belle 2006, pp. 284–85]. Dimensions: 223.5 x 108 cms. References: Edleston, 4, p. 6, pl. 7; Greenhill 1976, 2, p. 15; Greenhill 1986, pp. 27–28.

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Section 4 – Cross slabs

Plan 11.4 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the cross slabs.

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Cross Slab 1

Cross Slab 2

Name of commemorated: Unknown

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown

Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1220–40 Date: c.1180–1220 Position: Upright in recess in south wall of nave, to the west of the undersized cross slab 3. Clearly not its original position; it may well have originally been laid down in the previous church on this site.

Position: On floor in recess at east end of south aisle of nave. Clearly not its original position; it may well have originally been laid down in the previous church on this site.

Workshop: Barnack quarries Workshop: Barnack quarries Stone type of slab: Barnack Stone type of slab: Barnack Inscription: None Inscription: None

Fig. 11.105 Cross slab, c.1180–1220. Description: Tapered slab with slight coping to centre line. Nimbed quatrefoil head, three-step calvary, roundended, loosely flowing ribbon ornament (known as the double omega) to either side of stem. The central shaft extends from the extreme top of the slab to the bottom, beyond the cross head and calvary. This slab is placed on a Barnack stone coffin. All carving is raised, apart from an incised line along the edge of the vertical side of the slab.

Fig. 11.106 Cross slab, c.1120–40.

Comparative dating evidence: Examples in Butler, pp. 120–22.

Description: Tapered slab with an incipient roll chamfer, as indicated by incised lines on the upper face of the slab and around the vertical faces of the edges. The remainder of the carving is raised. Nimbed quatrefoil head, stepped calvary, round-ended ribbon ornament with tightly-curled terminals (known as the double omega) to either side of stem.

Dimensions: Length 189 cms; width at top 62 cms, and at bottom 31 cms; depth 10.5 cms.

Comparative dating evidence: Examples in Butler, pp. 120–22.

Will: N/A

Dimensions: Length 147 cms; width at top 48 cms and at bottom 33 cms; depth 9.5 cms.

References: None

Will: N/A References: None

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Cross Slab 3 Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1300–50 Position: Upright in recess in south wall of nave, to the east of cross slab 2. Clearly not its original position; it may well have originally been laid down in the previous church on this site.

Fig. 11.108 Cross slab, c.1300–50, drawing by Lawrence Butler. Description: Tapered slab, with marked coping to centre line. Simple head with rounded fleur-de-lis terminals, a shaft. Comparative dating evidence: Examples in Butler, pp. 135–37. Dimensions: Length 90 cms, width at top 36cms and at bottom 27 cms; depth 9.5 cms. Will: N/A Fig. 11.107 Cross slab, c.1300–50.

References: None

Workshop: ?Haydour quarries Stone type of slab: From southern end of outcrops of Lincolnshire limestone, possibly Heydour. Inscription: None

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Section 5 – Relief effigies

Plan 11.5 Floor plan of St Botolph’s church, Boston, showing the position of the effigies.

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Catalogue of the pre-Reformation monuments of St Botolph’s, Boston

Effigy 1 Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1450 Position: In recess in south wall of nave Workshop: Thought to be a later product of the workshop of Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, carvers of Chellaston. Stone type of slab: Alabaster Inscription: None

Fig. 11.110 Detail of effigy to unknown man, c.1450.

Fig. 11.109 Tomb monument to unknown man, c.1450.

Effigy 2

Description: A relief effigy in full armour of the midfifteenth century. The figure is represented straightlegged with the hands raised in prayer and the feet supported by a lion looking away from the effigy’s right. The head rests on a great helm. The effigy lies on a high tomb chest; the front is decorated with figures of standing angels holding frontal shields underneath cusped arches.

Name of commemorated: Unknown Occupation: Unknown Date: c.1450 Position: In recess in south wall of nave

Comparative dating evidence: The closest comparators are the alabaster effigies to Sir William Ap Thomas (d. 1446) at Abergavenny (Monmouth); Sir Henry Sapcote (d. 1452) at Burley-on-the-Hill (Rutland); Sir Richard Bulkeley (d. 1451) Cheadle (Cheshire) and the figure attributed to Sir Richard Vernon (d. 1456) Tong (Shropshire).

Workshop: Thought to be a later product of the workshop of Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton, carvers of Chellaston. Stone type of slab: Alabaster Inscription: None

Dimensions: Length 182 cms.

Description: A relief effigy of a lady, wearing a surcote ouverte over a tight-sleeved underdress, with a cloak over all. She holds her hands in prayer and rests her head on a cushion

Will: N/A References: Anon., pl. facing p. 38; Thompson 1856, p. 184; Jebb, p. 63.

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Fig. 11.111 Tomb monument to unknown woman, c.1450. which is held by two seated angels. The effigy lies on a high tomb chest decorated with lozenges set within quatrefoils. Today it is painted with the arms of Tilney, a chevron between three griffins’ heads, but this is a modern restoration which is not accurate. The tomb chest may not belong to the effigy. Comparative dating evidence: Margaret Freville, 2nd wife of Sir Hugh Willoughby (d. 1448) at Willoughbyon-the-Wolds (Nottinghamshire). Dimensions: Length 186 cms. Will: N/A References: Anon., pl. facing p. 38; Thompson 1856, p. 184; Jebb, p. 63.

Fig. 11.112 Detail of effigy to unknown woman, c.1450.

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Appendix 2 A survey of the floor monuments in St Botolph’s, Boston, undertaken in 1978–83 by Brian Gittos and Moira Gittos

Introduction The following notes and plans are the result of visits to Boston by Brian and Moira Gittos together with Sally Badham in the summer of 1978; they were were largely consolidated into a single document in 1983. The notes were, in part, annotations to two copies of the 1973 guide by Jeremy Wheeldon.1 Area sketch plans were made on site, while the complete nave floor plan and the notebook catalogue were drawn up and compiled in 1983. The starting point was Wheeldon’s guidebook. His numbering system for the monuments he describes was followed and expanded to cover another fifty-six floor stones. This took the total to 105, although a few of these stones were quite plain and only noted because of their geological interest. Two sets of annotations to Wheeldon’s descriptions were made separately, by Brian and Moira Gittos, and by Sally Badham. Separate notes were made for the additional slabs, many accompanied by small thumbnail sketches to show the general layout (a sample page is shown in Fig. 12.1). A series of floor sketch plans was made dealing with the tower floor (Fig. 12.2) and the body of the church (nave and aisles) divided into quadrants. The latter were subsequently consolidated into a single A2 sheet (Fig. 12.3). The consolidated notes included Wheeldon’s descriptions and they have been retained in what follows, because they greatly assist with making the information more intelligible.2

Fig. 12.1 Sample page from the 1983 notebook, showing thumbnail sketches.

The notes themselves are terse and at times highly abbreviated. In bringing the notes to publication, the abbreviations have been expanded and punctuation added in the interests of clarity. The notes include some colloquialisms, which need to be seen in the context of a fieldwork document, rather than a finished publication. They were intended for private reference, not public consumption and thus include terminology of significance to the authors, but probably obscure to others. The commentary elucidates terms which would otherwise be meaningless to readers.

Fig. 12.2 Tower floor plan of St Botolph’s showing location of the slabs. 1 J. Wheeldon, The monumental brasses in St Botolph’s church, Boston, History of Boston Series 9 (Boston, 1973). 2 The authors are greatly indebted to Jeremy Wheeldon for permission to quote extensively from his publication.

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Fig. 12.3 Consolidated floor plan of the nave of St Botolph’s with the piers blocked out.

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A survey of the floor monuments in St Botolph’s, Boston, undertaken in 1978–83 The comments centre on three aspects in particular: what is represented, the techniques used and the material. The stone type was, at this stage in our developing understanding of petrology, a matter of some speculation and debate. The notes do not (except in the case of Purbeck marble) seek to identify the material outright but concentrate on gathering information that might eventually lead to an identification. Aspects such as the material’s surface appearance (including colour) are addressed, how the stone has been worked and any evidence of surface decay. Here too, words were heavily abbreviated. The term ‘Unio’ occurs in a number of places, both with and without a capital letter. It refers to Purbeck marble which in addition to the densely-packed, characteristic, freshwater snail shells (Viviparus carinifer), contains isolated fossils of much larger freshwater mussels (Unio valdensis).3 At the time we suspected that this might have special relevance, an impression that has not stood the test of time. However, the term occurs frequently in these notes and stands as a shorthand for Purbeck marble. On the main floor plan (Fig. 12.3), a number of slabs are annotated with GH numbers. These refer to Greenhill’s Lincoln volume and represent an attempt to correlate the slabs plotted with those that Greenhill recorded.4 Cross references have been included in the catalogue to the numbering used in Appendix 1, to enable readers to access easily the fuller descriptions there. The catalogue drawn up in 1983 records the slabs grouped in terms of their locations on the sketch plans, rather than in numerical or chronological order. This presentation has been retained, although it may be less convenient from a reference point of view. The importance of these notes lies in their date. In the intervening thirty to thirty-five years, losses have occurred, most notably sustained through the re-flooring of the tower c.1986. Since the survey was made a small number of new slabs has been discovered as a result of removal of the Victorian pews. There are also a few additional indents not spotted in the 1978 survey. Neither of these groups of slabs has been added to the catalogue below. The notes constitute, as far as the authors and editors are aware, the only attempt at a full record of the medieval floor slabs in St Botolph’s church, Boston.

3

For a detailed and illustrated description see S. Badham, ‘An interim study of the stone used for the slabs of English monumental brasses’, MBST 13 part 6 (1985), pp. 475–83. 4 F.A. Greenhill, Monumental Incised Slabs in the county of Lincoln (Newport Pagnell, 1986).

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The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Key to the Conventions used in the Catalogue Convention Italic text [Text in square brackets] Text without brackets (Text in round brackets)

Significance Quotation from Wheeldon. Sally Badham’s comments from her annotated copy of Wheeldon. Brian and Moira Gittos’s comments from their notes. Authorial comments, including descriptions of the sketches in the notes. Cross reference to numbering in Appendix 1.

CATALOGUE Tower Floor 1 Indent of a large rectangular brass, 9' x 5'3". Flemish, 14th or early 15th century. Slab size (in three sections) 9'6" x 5'10". [Rivets round edge. Hacked out, mainly very slight shaling.] 2 Indent of a floriated cross - border inscription. English, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab broken – 3'9" x 3'3". [Spotty Purbeck – Unio.]

3 Indent of a civilian - four shields. English, middle - late 15th century. Slab – 6'7½" x 2'5". [Purbeck, covered.] (There is some uncertainty about the precise location of this slab. Sally Badham described it as ‘covered’ and there is only a tentative indication of it on the tower floor plan, which does not correspond to where it is indicated on Wheeldon’s plan. It may have been under a carpet. Perhaps significantly, the only other slab which is described as ‘covered up’ is number 77 which was nearer to where slab 3 is shown by Wheeldon. Therefore, there was probably some carpet in this area). 63 (Sketch of shaft and rectangular base of a cross?) [Purbeck.] 65 [Cross with foot inscription. Very worn and broken, Purbeck.] 66 [Border inscription and typical evangelists symbols with backing plates. Very broken up, also rivets down inscription. Bad shaling.] 67 [Purbeck ½ slab very broken up – canopy.] 68 (Sketch of rectangular slab with two shields oddly placed.) [Unio, very worn.] 69 (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular inscription indent.) [Unio, very worn.] 70 [Plain but odd stone.] 71 (Sketch of rectangular slab with a row of three rivets, for an inscription plate?) [Unio.] 72 (Sketch of square slab with central rectangular indent.) [Purbeck, cut down.] 73 [Purbeck & inscription cut down.] (This slab is not indicated on the tower floor plan and may have been under carpet, see comments on number 3 above). 74 [Black stuff. Late inscription.] 75 (Sketch of rectangular slab with indents for two rectangular inscription plates set one above the other. The upper smaller than the lower.) [Unio, worn.] 76 (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate and shield adjoining it below.) [Unio.] 77 (Sketch of rectangular slab with indents for a rectangular inscription and two shields below it but not touching it.) [That funny curly stone – covered up.] (‘Alwalton?’ has been added later in black ink as opposed to blue, as a result of developing knowledge of stone types. The slab was unfortunately discarded during the re-flooring of the tower before a return visit to check this slab could be made. If this identification were correct, it would be highly significant in terms of the rarity of the use of this stone for medieval memorials.) 78 (Sketch of rectangular slab with indents for two shields oddly placed.) [Purbeck.] 229

A survey of the floor monuments in St Botolph’s, Boston, undertaken in 1978–83 South west quarter (of the nave, including west end of south aisle). 7 Incised slab of a civilian and wife – head and hands once inlaid with brass or marble. Flemish, late 14th century slab – 7'1” x 3'3". [Hacked out indents - no rivets - no shaling - pitted and chipping - hands V top - 2 fault (lines?) sparkly stuff, quartz?] Hard & black. Diagonal quartz filled fault lines. Chipped effect in indents. Chips instead of flakes. Pitted. Fingertips ‘V’ topped.

8 Incised slab of a civilian and wife - border inscription with evangelist symbols at corners inlaid with brass, now lost. Head and hands inlaid with marble part left. Flemish, late 14th century. Slab – 8'5½" x 4'1". [Shaling, no rivets – head + hands, inscription and evangelist symbols conventional backing plates.]

9 Incised slab of a civilian and wife - head and hand inlaid with marble or brass – border inscription in brass – lost. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 7'7" x 4'3". [Slight shaling, wide border inscription - backing plates and rivets - no rivets - hands and head.]

10 Incised slab of a civilian and wife – head, hands, border inscription (with evangelist symbols and shields), and central shaft once inlaid with brass. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 7'6½" x 4'1". [Doubtful whether evangelists at corners. Yes to backing plate positions, rivets at corners. No shields - circular protuberances in the centre longitudinal inscription, backing plates - small scale shaling - smoother indents, square-topped hands. Hands - 1 rivet, heads 2 rivets.] Prob. square topped (‘lozenge plaques’ crossed out) in middle of inscription lines at side. Rivet holes. Backing plates Some flaking, not much. Indent smoothed. Flat-topped hands. Some incising remains. No shields. No real evidence for the evangelist symbols.

11 Indent of a brass to a civilian and wife, with head on cushions. Canopy, border inscription, and side panels with figures of the Saints (part left). Possibly Flemish, mid 15th century. Slab – 9' 6" x 5' 8". [Hacked out background in parts, otherwise smooth, many rivets - black stone, small scale shaling of surface. Lines down middle. Skirt flaring out on civilian.] Black. No real flaking. Rivets. One piece of brass remains trapped under font. Smooth. Indent tending towards chipping. Shaley surface. Central thin shaft, cf 10.

12 Incised slab of a civilian and wife – head, hands, and border inscription with the Evangelist symbols once inlaid with brass. Sword, two small figures (possibly St Anne – Virgin Mary or Saints), and cross inlaid with brass or marble. Now lost. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 8' x 3'11". [Shaling at bottom. 2 rivets head, one rivet hands. Square topped hands - backing plate sword, Evangelist symbols. Inscription (has) backing plates down (it) - 1 rivet 2 backing plates.] Square topped hands. Head – two rivets, hands – one rivet. No rivets but backing plate on sword. Backing plates and rivets but not on outer figures. Shaley surface, not flaking.

13 Incised slab of a civilian and wife. Head, hands and border inscription once inlaid with brass. Three small figures, central figure possibly Virgin Mary and child. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 8' 7" x 4' 4". [Shaling. Head 2 rivets, hands 1 rivet, very wide inscription, backing plates and rivets.] Wide inscription - 4½”. No Evangelists. Backing plates, rivets. Hands: square top and very thin. Very shaley surface, starting to break up.

14 Indent of a brass to a civilian and two wives. Five small shields - foot inscription - lost. Height of figures 11½".English, mid 16th century. Slab – 8' 10" x 4' 6". [4 shields at the corners, one under figures - like JRG sample?] (The phrase ‘JRG sample’ is shorthand for the stone being a type noted by J.R. Greenwood which was used extensively for setting brasses in East Anglia. It has subsequently been categorised as a spine-bearing oolitic limestone, although the location at which it was quarried has not been identified.)

15 Indent of a brass to a civilian and four wives. From left to right - first wife with one child underneath - second with three children - third with two children - fourth with one child. Border inscription with shields on corners. English, c.1500, height of figures 3'. Slab – 10' x 5'. [Like JRG sample].

16 Indent of a brass to a civilian and wife with merchant mark. Figure size 1'4½". English, c. 1530. Slab – 6'10" x 2'9". [Unio Purbeck]. 230

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Indent of brass, whole area engraved, with foot inscription and merchant mark. Height including inscription 1'1".Possibly Flemish, 15th or early 16th century. Slab – 6'8" x 3'4½" [Pinkish in indent light grey].

Indent of a bracket brass (top part of brass remains, see No. 49) to a civilian and two wives. Inscription, stem, and two shields lost. Flemish, c. 1400. Slab – 7' x 3'3". [Unio Purbeck.]

Indent of a brass to a civilian and wife with seven sons and daughters, four shields, Trinity, prayer labels, foot and border inscriptions. Height of figures 2'3". English, c. 1490. Slab – 7'9" x 3'3". [Purbeck.]

Indent of a brass to a civilian or lady with foot inscription. Height of figure 8”. English, late 15th or early 16th century. Slab – 6’3” x 2’9½”. [Odd dark grey.]

Indent of a brass to a Priest with prayer label and foot inscription. Height of figure 2'7½”. English, mid 15th century. Slab – 6'3" x 2'9½”. [Odd dark grey.]

Indent of a brass to a civilian and two wives in shrouds with five (?) sons and two daughters. Four shields, foot inscription, Trinity, and three prayer labels. Height of figures 3'. English, c.1500. Slab – 8' x 4'7". [Black stuff, hacked out.]

Incised slab of a civilian and two wives. Head, hands and border inscription once inlaid with brass or marble. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 9'2" x 4'10". [Slight shaling, filled with cement. Round bottom hands.]

Incised slab of a civilian and wife - very worn. Head, hands, and border inscription once inlaid with brass or marble. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 8'3" x 4'1½”. [Very slight shaling.]

(Sketch of rectangular slab with indent of rectangular inscription plate towards top end.) [Buff grey.] Cut-down slab. Inscription. Grey, pale. (The description of the stone as being buff grey or buff in colour is used throughout Sally Badham’s notes as an identifier of a stone which has subsequently been categorised as a spine-bearing oolitic limestone, although the location at which it was quarried has not been identified.) (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent of rectangular inscription plate towards top end and a small shield immediately below it.) [Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent of rectangular inscription plate towards top end.) [Unio Purbeck, cut down, inscription - 2? figures.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent of rectangular inscription plate towards top end.) [Buff grey.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent of rectangular inscription plate towards opposite end to previous examples.) [Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent of rectangular inscription plate towards middle.) [Buff grey – ½ slab.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent set length ways.) [Buff grey.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular - or possibly square - indent set centrally.) [Very small, Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for a shield? set centrally.) [Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate towards top end and a small shield immediately below it.) [Buff.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate towards top end.) [Unio Purbeck.] 231

A survey of the floor monuments in St Botolph’s, Boston, undertaken in 1978–83 99 100 101

17 18

19

20

21 22 23

24

25 26

27 35

46

92 93

(Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate towards top end.) [Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indications of the location of two figures and a foot inscription. Below this two circular devices.) [Two figures with roundels. Purbeck.] [Black – Shaling. ?Inscription worn.] (Subsequent viewing of this slab in raking light revealed that there were also three figures forming part of a very worn composition.)

South east quarter of nave ( including east end of south aisle) Six sons (three loose) fixed on pillar. English, c.1500. Height of figures 5" – belong to indent No. 18. [Gone.]

Indent of a brass to a civilian and two wives with nine sons (See No. 17) and five daughters. Trinity above main figures. Four shields - height of figures 1'6". English, c.1500. Slab – 5'10" x 2'6½”. [Dark grey.]

Indent of a brass to a civilian and wife - foot inscription, canopy with shield (or merchant mark), and crest, height of figures 2'11". English, c. 1470. Slab – 6'7½” x 2'6½”. [Unio Purbeck.]

Indent of brass to a civilian and wife. Seven?sons, three daughters, height of figures 12½”. English, c.1530. Slab – 4'3½” x 2'11½”. [Brownish grey.]

Indent of a chalice, brass, and inscription. English, c.1500. Slab – 6' x 2'9". [Brownish grey.]

Indent of a brass originally whole area engraved figure(s) and canopy. Height including foot inscription 3'½”. Possibly Flemish, 15th century. Slab – 6' x 3'1". [Purbeck] Incised slab of a priest with head, hands, chalice, maniple, stole, apparel, and inscription with evangelist symbols inlaid with marble or brass (now lost). Flemish, late 14th century. Slab – 6'1½” x 2'6". [Inscription as usual, very slight shaling, apparel has backing plates.]

Incised slab of a priest with head, hands, orphreys, and apparel once inlaid with marble? Border inscription with evangelist symbols inlaid with brass (lost). Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 6'8" x 3'2½”. [Bad shaling - backing plates on apparel and inscriptions.]

Effaced brass - foot inscription, lost. Similar to No. 22.Height including foot inscription 2’4".Possibly Flemish, 15th century. Slab – 7'8" x 3'4½”. [Dark black stuff, slight shaling.] Indent of brass to a civilian and wife in shrouds. Also indent for two angels who are carrying the souls of the deceased up to Heaven in a winding sheet. Two shields, foot inscription. Height of figures 3'. English, c.1490. Top part of slab missing. Slab – 6'2" x 3'11½”. [Fawn gray.]

Indent of brass, whole area engraved, with foot inscription and merchant mark. Height including inscription 1' 1". Possibly Flemish, 15th or early 16th century. Slab – 6'8" x 3'4½”. Incised slab of a civilian and wife. Head, hands, six figures (possibly Saints and Virgin Mary and Child), border inscription with Evangelist symbols, and four shields once inlaid with brass. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 9'4" x 4'7½”. [Fairly smooth.]

Indent of a brass to a civilian and wife. Large canopy (two rows), figures in the side shafts (three remaining), prayer labels, and inscription. Possibly Flemish, mid 15th century. Slab – 10' x 4' 3½”. [Unio Purbeck.]

(Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for inscription plate and shield immediately below.) [Fawn grey.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for inscription plate and shield below.) 232

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

94 95 96 98 102 103 104 105

[Fawn grey.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for inscription plate and shield below.) [Black, big, slight shaling.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for inscription plate.) [Pale grey, blotchy.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for inscription plate.) [Grey, big, blotchy.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent. This appears to have been a rectangular plate with trefoil ends and shield immediately below.) [Blotchy, grey.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate.) [Brownish grey.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate.) [Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate and shield immediately below it.) [Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with indent for rectangular inscription plate.) [Purbeck.]

North east quarter of the nave (including east end of north aisle) 36 Incised slab of a civilian and wife. Head, hands, and border inscription with Evangelist symbols and two shields once inlaid with brass. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 6’9” x 3’7½”. [Rather like Birds Eye. Petit Granit? Head - two rivets; hands - one rivet. Slight shaling, typical corners, inscription with backing plates.] (Black Birds Eye is a stone type found in the Midlands which has a dense black matrix with tiny round crinoidal fossils. Petit Granit from the Low Countries is similar in appearance.)

37 Incised slab of a civilian and wife. Head, hands, border inscription with Evangelist symbols, and four shields once inlaid with brass or marble. Flemish, c.1350. Slab – 5'8" x 2'9½". [No rivets or backing plates. Surface smooth - bit hacked out.]

38 Indent of a brass to a lady - foot inscription. Height of figure 9".English, 15th or early 16th century. Slab – 5'8" x 1'8½". [Black slab, slight shale effect.]

39 Indent of a brass with canopy and foot inscription. Possibly Flemish, 15th century. Slab – 4'9" x 2'9". [Unio Purbeck.] 40 Indent of a brass to a man in armour and wife. Six(?)sons, six(?) daughters, two shields, and foot inscription. Height of figures 1’6".English, c.1510. Slab – 5'5" x 2'9". [Brick colour, white-grey mixture, stone fine grain - looks light, pinky tinge.]

42 Incised slab of a civilian and wife. Head, hands, border inscription, and central shaft once inlaid with brass. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab (part lost) – 7'4" x 3'3½". [Civilian 3 rivets head, small shield? Central shaft not to top.] White stone?

43 Indent (lower part only) of a brass to a civilian and wife with eight(?) children, part of side shaft, and one shield. English, c.1470. Slab – (broken size) 2'7" x 2'9". [Purbeck]

44 Indent of a brass to a Priest under a canopy with side shafts, one shield, and foot inscription. Height of figure 12". English, mid 15th century. Slab – 6'4" x 2'9½". [Same as 91, little and funny.]

44a Incised slab of a civilian and wife. Late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 6'7" x 3'1". [Smooth black stuff.]

45 Incised slab of a Priest, head, hands, chalice, apparel, and border inscription once inlaid with brass. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 7'3" x 3’7½". [Hands 1 rivet. Head and chalice filled in. Many backing plates, rivets at corners.]

83 (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate.) 233

A survey of the floor monuments in St Botolph’s, Boston, undertaken in 1978–83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 97

[Between numbers 39 and 40. Grey.] [Four corner shields, inscription, scrolls. Blotchy Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate.) [Grey-brown streaky stuff.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate.) [Light grey-brown.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate.) [Unio Purbeck.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate and two shields above it.) [Grey-brown.] [Purbeck. Rivets. Top ½ canopy. Slab?] (‘Slab?’ probably means that the stone type was uncertain.) [Purbeck. Two figures + inscription. Cemented in.] [Inscription. Dark grey.] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate.) [Black, shaley.]

Sanctuary 47 A brass to Walter Pescod (and wife lost) merchant and benefactor to the Guild of SS. Peter and Paul. Originally fourteen saints in the canopy – John the Evangelist – James the Great – Matthew – Philip – Simon – Thomas – Bartholomew – James the Less – Jude – Peter. Other Saints and marginal inscription lost. Note the use of PeasCods on his mantle and canopy (an example of a Rebus). English, 1398. Once in the north aisle, moved to its present position in the middle of the 19th century. Slab – 9’7” x 4’5”. [Unio Purbeck. London B? Much less fossiliferous than number 48.]

48 A brass to a Priest. Thought to be John Strensall, Rector 1381–1408. In cope with the following Saints on the Orphreys. John the Baptist – Peter – Thomas – Jude(?) – John the Evangelist – Paul – Andrew – Bartholomew. Canopy and border inscription lost. Height of figure 5’3”. English, c.1400. Slab (part lost) – 6’4½” x 3’5”. [Best Purbeck, seems brownish, very packed with fossils. Lincolnshire – Fens Series 1.]

North west quarter (of the nave including the west end of the north aisle) 4 Incised slab to Wisselus De Smalenburgh, citizen and merchant of Munster in Germany. Died at Boston in 1312 [sic]. Was Found on the former site of the Franciscan Friary in Boston and transferred in 1897. Flemish. Slab – 8’ x 3’9”. Apparently no fossils (on minute inspection). Very hard. No flaking. Has been oiled. All incising remains. (Slab re-located to Chapel of SS Peter and Paul in north-east part of nave in 2009.)

5 Incised slab of a Priest with head and chalice inlaid with brass. Now lost. Flemish, 14th or early 15thcentury. Slab – 7’ x 3’9”. Inscription incised – almost all lost. Surface flaking. Rivet holes. [Incised inscription. Black flaking stone.]

6 Indent of a floriated cross – border inscription. English, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 4’4” x 2’3”. Purbeck 79 (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate near top.) [Unio Purbeck.] 80 [Funny thing. Pink in indent.] (Description of stone as ‘pink in indent’ an identifier of a stone which has subsequently been categorised as a spine-bearing oolitic limestone, although the location at which it was quarried has not been identified.)

81 (Sketch of square slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate near top.) [Buff grey.] 82 (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate near top.) [Cream fawn. Big blotches.] 41 Incised slab of a civilian. Head, hands, and border inscriptions with Evangelist symbols and shields once inlaid with marble or brass. Flemish, late 14th or early 15th century. Slab – 7’ x 2’7½”. [Fairly smooth. No rivets.]

50a (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for ?inscription plate with trefoil ends.) [Buff grey.] Stone – whitish, hard. 234

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments 51 64

Two evangelist symbols joined by strip at the top. No points on the symbols. [Buff grey] (Sketch of rectangular slab with rectangular indent for inscription plate.) [Grey-buff.]

235

Appendix 3: Boston wills mentioned in chapters 4 and 6 Abbreviations ELW Lincs Wills LCC LRS 5 LRS 10 LRS 24 SC TNA

Name John John John John William Agnes Athelard John Edward Jane William Thomas Richard Joseph John Bartholomew John Thomas Sir Thomas Edmund William John Robert William William Agnes William Robert Richard John Richard Margaret John Walter Nicholas Gilbert William Anne William Robert Gilbert Alice George Richard Ott Thomas

Aberay Abrey Akey Almondson Anabull Bate Bate Bate Bawtree Bawtree Bawtree Bellow Belman Beneson Bowcher Brown Brown Bryggs Bucknam Burte Butler Buttre Carre Cawod Cempe Chapman Cockler Colle Colyn Coplay Coste Cothoth Cowell Cowper Craythorne Dale Dodde Dymoke Ettwell Felyngham Fissher Frankys Garner Gaunt Gisberton Godfree

A.W. Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills, (Lincoln 1888) A.R. Maddison (ed.), Lincolnshire Wills. First Series AD 1500–1600 (Lincoln, 1888) Lincoln Consistory Court (Lincolnshire Archives) C.W. Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills, LRS 5 (Lincoln, 1914) C.W. Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills, LRS 10 (Lincoln, 1918) C.W. Foster (ed.), Lincoln Wills, LRS 24 (Lincoln, 1930) Staple of Calais The National Archives

Occupation

Date

Will reference

Pewterer ?Pewterer

1499 1510 1534 1531 1535 1505 1502 1505 1531 1509 1509 1526 1510 1526 1539 1538 1499 1537 1540 1531 1538 1523 1518 1478 1538 1521 1545 1530 1510 1540 1506 1504 1504 1521 1534 1533 1535 1521 1538 1533 1506 1531 1530 1532 1512 1540

TNA: PROB11/12, fols 179v–180r TNA: PROB11/16, fol. 195v LCC 1522–34, fols 124r–124v LRS 24, p. 130 LCC 1535–37, fols 49r–49v TNA: PROB11/14, fols 210r–211r TNA: PROB11/13, fols 127r–127v TNA: PROB11/14, fols 214r–214v LRS 24, pp. 210–11 TNA: PROB11/16, fols 107r–107v TNA: PROB11/16, fols 107v–108r LRS 10, pp. 213–14 TNA: PROB11/16, fol. 264v LRS 5, pp. 175–77 LCC 1538–40, fol. 313v LCC 1538–40, fol. 312v TNA: PROB11/11, fols 258v–259r LCC 1535–37, fol. 108r LCC 1538–40, fol. 312r LRS 24, pp. 218–19 LCC 1538–40, fol. 189r TNA: PROB11/21, fols 86r–86v TNA: PROB11/19, fols 74v–74r TNA: PROB11/16, fols 258r–261r LCC 1538–40, fol. 192v TNA: PROB11/20, fols 127r–128v TNA: PROB11/30, fols 179v–180r LRS 10, pp. 174–75 TNA: PROB11/16, fols 195r–196v TNA: PROB11/28, fols 108r–108v TNA: PROB11/15, fols 17r–17v TNA: PROB11/14, fols 161r–161v TNA: PROB11/14, fols 177v–178r LRS 5, pp. 104–05 Lincs Wills, p. 12 LCC 1532–34, fol. 123r LCC 1535–37, fol. 97v TNA: PROB11/20, fols 63v–64r TNA: PROB11/27, fols 163r–163v LCC 1532–34, fol. 87v TNA: PROB11/15, fols 52v–53r ELW, p. 175 LRS 24, p. 75 LRS 24, pp. 190–91 LRS 5, pp. 49–50 LCC 1538–40, fol. 288v

Draper Pattern maker Widow Merchant SC Merchant SC Widow Merchant SC Mariner Merchant SC Esquire Priest

Merchant SC Merchant SC Spinster Priest Merchant SC Widow Fisherman

Barber Widow Merchant SC Merchant SC Priest Cordwainer

236

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments

Name Simon Nicholas Walter Agnes Sir Thomas William William William John Christopher John Agnes George William Adlard John John Richard William Richard Robert Jannett John Thomas Robert Alice John Symond William Thomas Agnes Thomas William Richard Robert John Robert William Johane William Thomas William William Elizabeth John William William Adam Edward William John Katherine Margaret Richard John Katherine Nicholas Elizabeth John William

Occupation Goodhale Gray Green Grosewell Gybson Harbred Harcastle Hassyll Haule Herteley Hoode Howson Howson Howsone Hubbard Huchenson Humfrey Hycks Jackson Jefferay Johnson Lamykn Leek Leeke Lownd Lowys Lowys Maukeby Maulteby Maye alias Poynter Murre Murre Murre Nonewyk Oryall Osbarn Osse Osse Palmer Palmer Papforde Parker Parker Paxford Payn Paynell Paynter Pennington Phillipp Pinchbyk Pollerde Pulvertoft Quykrell Quykrell Qwykerell Randall Rasur Rede Rede Reede

Merchant SC Goldsmith Priest Mercer

Merchant SC Widow Merchant SC Merchant SC Yeoman Grocer Mercer Mariner Fishmonger Widow Mercer Butcher Widow Merchant SC Widow Roper Draper Sadler Merchant Widow Merchant SC Gentleman Smith Widow Mercer Esquire Toft Draper Esquire Pewterer Widow Notary Widow Gentleman Widow Merchant SC 237

Date

Will reference

1530 1533 1532 1488 1533 1532 1528 1533 1514 1497 1519 1531 1524 1507 1526 1534 1504 1533 1538 1531 1533 1508 1527 1527 1527 1450 1445 1513 1530 1536 1539 1530 1534 1527 1538 1447 1506 1513 1509 1504 1537 1530 1530 1538 1504 1498 1537 1525 1538 1534 1533 1451 1534 1528 1465 1501 1498 1486 1507 1509

LRS 10, p. 170 LCC 1532–34, fol. 181r TNA: PROB11/24, fol. 136v TNA: PROB11/8, fols 153r–154r LCC 1532–34, fols 141v–142v LCC 1532–34, fol. 7r LRS 10, pp. 92–93 LCC 1532–34, fols 129r–130r LRS 5, p. 59 TNA: PROB11/11, fol. 121r TNA: PROB11/19, fol. 169r LRS 24, p. 150 LRS 10, pp. 212–13 TNA: PROB11/15, fol. 195v TNA: PROB11/22, fol. 63v TNA: PROB11/25, fols 47r–47v TNA: PROB11/14, fols 109v–109r LCC 1532–34, fol. 139v LCC 1538–40, fol. 22r LRS 24, pp. 154–56 LCC 1532–34, fol. 134r TNA: PROB11/16, fols 65v–66r LRS 10, pp. 40–43 LRS 10, pp. 55–56 LRS 10, p. 60 ELW, p. 175 ELW, p. 169 TNA: PROB11/17, fol. 131r LRS 24, p. 26 LCC 1535–37, fol. 196v LCC 1538–40, fol. 313r LRS 24, pp. 42–43 LCC 1534 etc, fols 103r–104r LRS 10, p. 62 LCC 1538–40, fols 37r–37v ELW, p. 170 TNA: PROB11/15, fols 2v–3r TNA: PROB11/17, fols 146 –147r TNA: PROB11/16, fols 85v–86v TNA: PROB11/14, fols 297v–298r LCC 1535–37, fols 198v–199r LRS 24, pp. 19–20 LRS 24, pp. 57–58 TNA: PROB11/26, fols 71v–72v TNA: PROB11/14, fols 94v–95r TNA: PROB11/11, fols 179r–179v LCC 1535–37, fols 205r–205v TNA: PROB11/22 LCC 1538–40, fols 63v–64r LCC 1532–34, fol. 124r LCC 1532–34, fol. 179r ELW, p. 176 LCC 1532–34, fols 337v–338v LRS 10, pp. 114–15 ELW, p. 188 TNA: PROB11/13, fols 116v–117r TNA: PROB11/3, fols 243r–244r TNA: PROB11/17, fols 200r–200v TNA: PROB11/15, fols 151v–152r TNA: PROB11/16, fols 96v–97v

Boston wills mentioned in chapters 4 and 6

Name

Occupation

Date

Will reference

Thomas Robertson John Robinson Eleanor Robynson John Robynsonne Roger Rouse James Rowe John Rowe Robert Rydder Hugh Schawe William Sellers William Sene Andrew Shallok Richard Shallok Christian Sharpe Roger Shipwright John Smyth Richard Stowing Johannes Stoylt Jenet Strayle William Sutton John Sybsay Barnard Symond Simon Temper Sir Anthony Tode Robert Tomlinson Thomas Tototh Andrew Trollope John Trolloppe Edmund Tweede Johanna Tymes William Walker Jeffrey Wayse Jenet Werner John White Robert Whyte William Wightman Robert Willinson Beatrice Woodhouse Stephen Woodhouse Thomas Wright Margaret Wyske

Merchant SC Merchant SC

1534 1525 1528 1500 1532 1531 1531 1531 1531 1535 1533 1531 1531 1537 1538 1506 1532 1501 1507 1525 1519 1505 1538 1534 1534 1493 1519 1539 1538 1498 1538 1539 1534 1511 1527 1532 1515 1536 1531 1534 1499

TNA: PROB11/27, fols 40r–40v TNA: PROB11/23, fols 39v–40v LRS 10, pp. 100–01 TNA: PROB11/12, fol. 39r LCC 1532–34, fols 70r–71r LCC 1520–31, fol. 335r LRS 24, p. 164 LRS 10, pp. 105–06 LRS 10, pp. 189–91 LCC 1534 etc, fol. 84r LCC 1532–34, fols 313v–314r LRS 24, p. 207 LRS 24, pp. 162–63 LCC 1535–37, fol. 209r LCC 1538–40, fols 279v–280r TNA: PROB11/15, fols 53v–54r LCC 1532–34, fols 18v–19r TNA: PROB11/13, fols 117r–119r TNA: PROB11/15, fols 150v–151r TNA: PROB11/22, fols 133r–133v TNA: PROB11/19, fol. 104v TNA: PROB11/15, fol. 120v TNA: PROB11/27, fols 128r–128v LCC 1532–34, fols 262v–263r TNA: PROB11/25, fols 42v–43v TNA: PROB11/10, fol. 29v TNA: PROB11/19, fols 145v–146r TNA: PROB11/26, fol. 118v LCC 1538–40, fol. 41v TNA: PROB11/11, fols 232r–232v LCC 1538–40, fol. 20r TNA: PROB11/26, fol. 119r LCC 1532–34, fol. 245v TNA: PROB11/16, fol. 281r LRS 10, pp. 47–48 LCC 1532–34, fols 20v–21r TNA: PROB11/18, fol. 152r LCC 1535–37, fol. 218v LRS 24, p. 161 LCC 1534 etc, fol. 79v TNA: PROB11/10, fols 242v–243v

Gentleman

Skinner Draper Husbandman Widow Fishmonger Merchant Widow Gentleman merchant SC Merchant SC Merchant SC ?Priest Merchant SC Armiger

Wife Draper Fisherman

Widow

238

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IV – Unpublished Theses Bernard, R.-P. , ‘La sculpture funéraire mediévale à Paris (1140–1540)’, 2 vols (Unpublished Université Paris IV doctoral thesis, 2000). Blanchard, I.S.W., ‘Economic change in Derbyshire in the late middle ages, 1272–1540’, (Unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1967). Boldrick, S., ‘The rise of the chantry space in England from ca. 1260 to ca. 1400’, Unpublished University of Manchester Ph.D. thesis, 1997). Despodt, V., ‘Gentse grafmonumenten en grafschriften tot het einde van de Calvinistische republiek (1584)’, 3 vols, (Universiteit Gent, afstudeerwerk tot het behalen van de academische graad van licentiaat in de geschiedenis, 2000-01). Mattinson, A., ‘Topography and society in Boston, 1086–1400’, (Unpublished University of Nottingham M.Phil. thesis, 1996). Rigby, S.H., ‘Boston and Grimsby in the middle ages’ (Unpublished University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1983).

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Index Illustration references in bold type; the number refers to the page on which the illustration appears, not the illustration number. Belgium Assebroek 207 Bruges 76, 81, 96, 159n Hanseatic funerals at 90 incised slab workshops 76, 81, 82, 88, 159n, 212 incised slabs see incised slabs, Flemish Gruuthuse Museum 207 Sint-Janshospitaal 209 Sint-Salvatorskirk 200, 203, 206, 207, 210, 212, 214 Damme 199, 205, 215, 217, 219 Ghent incised slab workshops 76 Musée de Bijloke 84n Ieper 219 Koksijde 78n, 219 Lo 205, 207 Sint-Jacobskapelle 212, 216 Tournai 160 brass workshops 74n, 82, 159n incised slab workshops 74n, 76, 78, 82, 85, 212 incised slabs see incised slabs, Flemish marble 74n, 77, 87 see also incised slabs, Flemish Musée de l’École Saint-Luc 217 Saint-Jacques church 83n, 85n St Katherine’s church 97 St Quentin’s church 97 Villers-le-Temple 204 Belle, John 20, 21, 66, 107, 147 Bellow, Thomas (1526) 236 Belman, Richard (1510) 236 Beneson, Joseph (1526) 56, 236 Bentley, William 146 Berkshire Wantage 194 Beverley (Yorkshire) Minster 37, 38 St Mary’s church 38 Bishop, John (1412) 142, 148 Bitton, Thomas, bishop of Exeter (1307) 87, 88 Black Birds Eye stone 233 Blankard, Niclais (c.1340) 212 Blessed Apostles guild 50, 51, 56, 70, 115 Blickling (Norfolk) 179 Blisworth (Northamptonshire) 182 Bodmin (Cornwall) 52, 58n Bokenale, Richard 66n Bolle, Richard (1591) 131 Bolton Priory (Yorkshire) 12, 14 Bonde, William (1485) 103, 109, 109, 126, 127 Boston 1204 charter 13, 14, 21 administration 13, 14, 21, 22, 163 Barditch 8 borough status 12, 13, 21, 56, 72, 124, 169 brass workshops see Fens 1 brasses, Fens 2 brasses

Abbots Langley (Hertfordshire) 196 Aberay, John and Margaret (1499) 56, 236 Abergavenny (Monmouthshire) 153, 153, 224 Abrey, John (1510) 236 Aileward, Richard 66, 147 Aire-sur-la-Lys (France) 216 Akey, John (1534) 236 Aldenham (Hertfordshire) 196 Alford (Lincolnshire) 20 Algarkirk (Lincolnshire) 116, 116, 117, 162, 194 Alilaunde, Gilbert 43, 67 All Hallows guild 51, 56, 71 Almondson, John (1531) 236 Aloul, Jean 85 Alwalton (Huntingdonshire) marble 229 Amersham (Buckinghamshire) 194 Anabull, William (1535) 70, 236 Ancaster (Lincolnshire): stone 89, 89; cross slab workshop 89, 89 Annable, Lucie (1535) 60 Ardern, John 3 Ascension of Our Lord guild 20n, 51, 52, 56, 70 Ashby Puerorum (Lincolnshire) 78n, 84n, 206, 207 Ashby St Ledgers (Northamptonshire) 110, 162n ‘Ashford black’ marble 74 Assebroek (Belgium) 207 Assumption of the BVM guild 51, 71 Auchy, Jacob von (1332) 200 Augustinian Friary (Austin Friars) 1, 9n, 33, 41, 102, 123 Avesnes, Jehan d’ 85 Aylesby (Lincolnshire) 20 Ayscugh, Sir William and wife (1509) 104, 104 Baissi, Jacques de 82 Baragh, Thomas 63, 65 Baret, John, rector of St Botolph’s 16, 43 Barnack (Northamptonshire): stone 89; cross slab workshop 88, 221, 221 Barres, Simon de 66n Barton-on-Humber (Lincolnshire) St Mary’s church 84, 84, 94n, 142, 144, 149, 160, 205, 205 St Peter’s church 77 Bassevelde, Aleaune Van (c.1360) 217 Bate, Athelard, Agnes and Alice (1501) 113, 113, 114, 126, 141, 141, 182, 183, 196, 236 Bate, John (1505) 236 Bawtree, Edward (1531) 236 Bawtree, Jane (1509) 71, 236 Bawtree, William (1509) 236 Baxster, Stephen 68, 110 Baxter, William 68 Beale, William 3

257

Index incised slabs see incised slabs, Flemish Gruuthuse Museum 207 Sint-Janshospitaal 209 Sint-Salvatorskirk 200, 203, 206, 207, 210, 212, 214 Bryggs, Thomas (1537) 236 Buckinghamshire Amersham 194 Calverton 194 Great Linford 181, 197 Long Crendon 181 Taplow 197 Bucknam, Thomas (1540) 236 Bulkeley, Sir Richard (1451) 153, 153, 224 Burford (Oxfordshire) 187 Burkes, Roger (1460) 120 Burley-on-the-Hill (Rutland) 153, 153, 224 Burte, Edmund (1531) 50n, 236 Burton-on-Trent (Staffordshire) alabaster workshops 165n Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) brass workshops 129 Butler, William (1538) 236 Buttre alias Belynga, John 103, 236

churches see St Botolph’s church; St Peter’s church/hospital cloth trade 11, 12, 14-20, 23-26 coastal trade 12, 26, 156 crane 26, 27 decline of 15, 22-28 economic history 6-20, 156 fair see St Botolph’s Fair fish trade 11, 15, 17, 18, 24-26 friaries see Augustinian Friary; Carmelite Friary; Dominican Friary; Franciscan Friary guilds see religious guilds lead trade 12, 17, 24, 26 medieval topography 8, 32 metal trade 15, 18 Pescod Hall 4, 27, 27, 142, 145 population 9, 16, 23, 124, 162 port of 3, 8-10, 12, 14-16, 18, 19, 23-26 see also Witham, River salt trade 12, 17, 26 Shodfriars Hall 18, 27, 68, 68 staple 1, 3, 16, 20, 22, 145 steelyard 3, 24, 41, 81n town plans 7, 157 wax trade 11, 15, 16, 19 wine trade 11, 14-16, 19, 24 woad trade 11, 17, 18, 24 wool trade 3, 10, 11, 14-20, 23, 24, 26; with Flanders 10, 11; with Italy 11 Bourchier, Humphrey, Lord Cromwell 22 Bowcher, John (1539) 236 Brandesburton (Yorkshire) 87 Braose, Sir John de (1426) 88n Brasse, John 16 brasses, English 5, 60, 87, 89, 98-150, 156, 160, 162, 173-183, 232, 234, 88, 98, 104-107, 110, 112, 113, 116, 136-141, 143, 144, 149, 173-183; location plan 172 imagery 120, 121, 149, 173-175 indents 103-106, 108-122, 136, 139-141, 175, 176, 178, 179, 182, 185-197, 230-233, 88, 104, 105, 108-116, 118-120, 137, 176, 178, 179, 183, 185197; location plan 184 palimpsest 137, 138 preservation through 16th century 126, 127, 163 see also shroud brasses; workshops, brass brasses, Flemish 76, 76, 78, 82-85, 85n, 92, 94n, 122, 139, 140n, 159n, 207, 208, 229-233 comparative cost 87 workshops 74n, 82, 159n Braunche, Robert (1364) 82n, 84, 94n, 214, 217 Briggs, Richard (1584) 131 Bristol, St Mary Redcliffe 34, 41 Brittany, Alan, count of 8, 9, 31n Brittany, Stephen, count of 9, 31 Brothertoft (Lincolnshire) 71, 72 Brown, Bartholomew (1538) 236 Brown, John (1499) 236 Browne, Thomas 125 Bruges (Belgium) 76, 81, 96, 159n Hanseatic funerals at 90 incised slab workshops 76, 81, 82, 88, 159n, 212

cadaver brasses see shroud brasses Calais (France) staple 16, 22 Blessed Resurrection chapel 116 St Mary’s church 116 St Nicholas’s church 116 St Peter’s church 116 Staple chapel 116 Calonne, Thierry de 85 Calverton (Buckinghamshire) 194 Cambrai, Isabeau de (1342) 83n Cambridge brass workshops 129 Cambridgeshire Wisbech 190 Carmelite Friary (Whitefriars) 1, 9n, 32, 33, 41, 117, 123, 124 Carre, Robert (1518) 103, 236 Catel, Williaume 83 Catesby family 162n Catesby, John (1404) 162n Catesby, Sir William (1479) 110 Catine, Ernous 97 Cawod, William (1478) 55, 56, 102, 236 Cempe, William (1538) 236 Chapman, Agnes (1521) 236 Cheadle (Cheshire) 153, 153, 224 Chellaston (Derbyshire) alabaster workshop 153, 224, 224, 225 Cheshire Cheadle 153, 153, 224 Chipping Campden (Gloucestershire) 173 Christian, Ewan 37n Clay, Elizabeth (1537) 60 Clermont, Béatrice de 85 Cobham, John (1399) 103 Cockler, William (1545) 236 Coggeshall, John de (1384) 127n Cokhede, William 66n Coldstream, Nicola 37, 38 258

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Dorset Milborne St Andrew 195 Douai (France) 160; brass workshop 83 Dugdale, Sir William, antiquary 166 Dunwich (Suffolk) 185 Durham, County Staindrop 153 Dymoke, Anne (1521) 236

Colle, Robert (1530) 236 Colyn, Richard (1510) 236 Coney, Walter (1479) 164, 165n Conyngburgh, John 148 Coplay, John (1540) 236 Cornwall Bodmin 53, 58n Quethiock 181 Corpus Christi guild 20, 50-52, 56, 58, 67, 93, 99, 159 calendar of obits 50, 52, 56, 71, 107, 111 chamberlains 20, 56, 107, 114, 115 chapel 4, 43, 43, 67, 68, 90, 93, 100-102, 109, 115, 174; demolition of 67, 90, 132 guildhall (Shodfriars Hall) 18, 19, 68, 68 landholdings 50 membership 3, 20, 22, 25n, 58, 59, 67, 72, 98n, 106, 108, 113-115, 117, 119, 147 procession 55, 93 relic 54 seal 52, 53 Coste, Richard (1506) 236 Cothoth, Margaret (1504) 236 Cotton, John, rector of St Botolph’s 130, 132, 134 Couvès, Jacques 82 Coventry (Warwickshire) 34, 46, 164-169 brass workshops 129, 165n cloth trade 16, 17, 25, 146, 165 decline of 25 Puritan iconoclasm 166, 167, 169 religious guilds 17, 59, 146, 165 Holy Trinity church 31, 53, 165 St Mary’s Hall 165n St Michael’s church 31, 34, 45, 165, 166 St Nicholas’s church 165 Cowell, John (1504) 51, 52, 69, 101, 103, 236 Cowper, Walter (1521) 236 Craythorne, Nicholas (1534) 236 Crofton, Thomas 146 Cromwell, Humphrey Bourchier, Lord 22 cross slabs 60, 88, 89, 92, 159, 221, 221, 222, 222; location plan 220 Croun, Alan de 9 Croun lordship 13, 21

Edleston, Robert H. 74, 205, 206 Edmons, Robert 66n Edward III 67 Edward the Black Prince 67 Edwards, Thomas 66n effigies, alabaster 151-155, 151-155, 224, 224, 225, 225; location plan 223 Elmswell (Suffolk) 185 Ely, Reginald of, master mason 36 Essex Rainham 188 Terling 182 Esterlings 3, 11, 25, 81n Ettwell, William (1538) 236 Exeter (Devon) Cathedral 48, 87, 88 Fellowship of Heaven guild 50-52, 71, 72 Felthorp, Roger and Cecily (1454) 179 Felyngham, Robert (1533) 236 Fens 1 brasses 19, 106, 109-112, 121, 122, 127-129, 139, 148, 150, 161, 174-177, 185, 194, 234, 107, 110-112, 174-177, 185 Fens 2 brasses 104, 108, 115, 116, 119, 122, 128, 188196, 104, 105, 108, 115, 116, 118, 119, 188-193, 195 Fissher, Gilbert (1506) 236 Fitzherbert, Sir Anthony (1538) 196 Fleet (Lincolnshire) 83n Fleming, Alan (1361) 84 Flete, Thomas and Alice (1450) 105, 105, 106, 106, 113, 127, 135, 137, 137, 138, 178, 178, 179, 196 Fosdyke, Robert de 66n Foss Dyke 9, 16, 25 Fotheringhay (Northamptonshire) 46 Foxe, John, martyrologist 130 France Aire-sur-la-Lys 216 Calais staple 16, 22 Blessed Resurrection Chapel 116 St Mary’s church 116 St Nicholas’s church 116 St Peter’s church 116 Staple chapel 116 Douai 160; brass workshop 83 Paris 129 Reims Cathedral 85n Sury-près-Léré 85n Franciscan Friary (Friars Minor/Grey Friars) 1, 3, 9n, 11, 33, 41, 79, 123, 124, 212, 234 Frankys, Alice (1531) 236 Franton, Adam and Sibile de (1325) 75, 75, 76, 77n, 91, 92, 96n, 200, 201, 209 fraternities see religious guilds

Dale, Gilbert (1533) 236 Dale, John (1482) 118, 118, 187, 187, 188, 188 Damme (Belgium) 199, 205, 215, 217, 219 Derby, William 106 Derbyshire Chellaston alabaster workshop 153, 224, 224, 225 Norbury 196 Devon Exeter Cathedral 87, 88 Dinesby, Sir Thomas de 111 Dinley, William and Mary (1626) 131n Dobe, Robert 125 Dodde, William (1535) 236 Dodsworth, Roger, antiquary 165 Dominican Friary (Blackfriars) 1, 3, 9, 10, 33, 41, 123, 124 Doornik, Pieter and Margriete van (1357) 215 Dore, Peter 3 259

Index Hanse 5, 11, 14, 17-19, 23-26, 79, 79, 81, 82, 90, 91, 123, 156, 159, 167 Haradyn, Stephen 146 Harboullet, Jehan 83 Harbred, William (1532) 237 Harcastle, William (1528) 237 Harecourt, William 147 Harsik, John 19, 20 Harvey, John H. 36 Hassyll, William (1533) 70, 237 Hasty, Sir Henry 142 Haule, John (1514) 69, 71, 237 Hawton (Nottinghamshire) 37 Hazebrouck, Jan van (1378) 219 Healing (Lincolnshire) 20 Heckington (Lincolnshire) 36, 37, 89 Hedon (Yorkshire) 40 Heit, Ludekin vander 3 Herteley, Christopher (1497) 237 Hertfordshire Abbots Langley 196 Aldenham 196 Royston 196 St Albans Abbey 87, 140n Hever (Kent) 104 Hewett, John 66n Heydour (Lincolnshire) quarries cross slab workshop 222, 222 Holbeach (Lincolnshire) 37, 37 Holles, Gervase, antiquary 4, 60, 66, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 131, 175, 176, 182 Holmenlyne, Stephen de 69 Holmeton, John 20 Holyrood guild 50-53, 56, 71 Holy Trinity guild 20n, 50-52, 56, 68, 107, 119 bequest 114 brasses 68 chapel 68 finances 68 guildhall (Trinity chamber) 68 seal 52, 54 Hoode, John (1519) 103, 237 Hough, Atherton 130 Hovener, Albrecht (1357) 217 Howden (Yorkshire) 37-39, 39, 41 Howson, Agnes (1531) 237 Howson, George (1524) 237 Howsone, William (1507) 237 Hubbard, Adlard (1526) 56, 237 Hull (Yorkshire) 26, 81, 164, 166, 167, 169 religious guilds 165 Holy Trinity church 40, 41, 156, 165, 167, 169 St Mary’s church 165 Hulle, John and Johanna de 142, 147 Humfrey, John (1504) 69, 237 Huntingdonshire Alwalton marble 229 Huntingfield, Sir William de (1376) 3, 123 Hussey Tower 1 Hutchynson, John (1534) 60, 237 Hycks, Richard (1533) 56, 65, 71, 237

Frenne, Jakemon de 83 Frere, Richard, Alice and Johanna (1424) 60, 68, 109, 110, 110, 119, 176, 177, 177, 185 Freville, Margaret (1448) 155, 155, 225 friaries see Augustinian Friary; Carmelite Friary; Dominican Friary; Franciscan Friary Funteyn, John (1453) 179 Gallin, Hermann (1365) 82 Gargate, Watier 82 Garner, George (1530) 236 Garrard, Thomas, schoolmaster 130 Gass, Robert 42, 43 Gaunt, John of 22 Gaunt, Richard (1532) 236 Gerars, Frère (?1272) 204 Germany Lübeck, Marienkirche 82, 91n Stralsund 82, 217 Gernoun, Philip 3, 20, 107 Ghent (Belgium) incised slab workshops 76 Musée de Bijloke 84n Gibson, John 68, 110 Gisberton, Ott (1512) 236 Gloucester, Thomas of Woodstock, duke of (1397) 149, 149, 173 Gloucester, St Mary-le-Crypt 193 Gloucestershire Chipping Campden 173 Godfree, Thomas (1540) 236 Godpenye, John 3 Goldesburgh, Eve de 98 Goldsborough (Yorkshire) 98, 98 Goodhale, Simon (1530) 68, 237 Gooding, Elizabeth (1495) see Robertson, Thomas (1531) Gosberton (Lincolnshire) 59 Gotere, Andrew de 60 Gotere, Galfrid de la 60 Granméz, Biertris de 97 Grantham (Lincolnshire) 46 Gray, Nicholas (1533) 237 Great Coates (Lincolnshire) 20 Great Grimsby (Lincolnshire) 13, 20-22, 27, 175, 177 Great Linford (Buckinghamshire) 181, 197 Green, Walter (1532) 237 Greene, Ralph and Katherine (1419) 153, 154 Greenhill, F.A. 74, 76, 102 Gressenhall (Norfolk) 210 Grevel, William (1401) 173 Grosewell, Agnes (1488) 237 guilds see religious guilds Gull, Thomas (1420) 110, 111, 111, 121, 139, 139, 141, 176, 176 Gybson, Thomas (1533) 123, 237 Hake, Matthew 25, 115 Halden, William, 68, 110 Halton Holegate (Lincolnshire) 83n Hampshire Oakley 182 Sherborne St John 182 260

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Boston an outport for 12, 16, 25 brass workshop 89 Cathedral 89; image of BVM 117; Tournai slab 83, 83 decline of 16, 25 wool trade 16 Lincolnshire Alford 20 Algarkirk 116, 116, 117, 162, 194 Ancaster: stone 89, 89; cross slab workshop 89, 89 Ashby Puerorum 78n, 84n, 206, 207 Aylesby 20 Barton-on-Humber St Mary’s church 84, 84, 94n, 142, 144, 149, 160, 205, 205 St Peter’s church 77 Brothertoft 71, 72 Fleet 83n Gosberton 59 Grantham 46 Great Coates 20 Great Grimsby 13, 20-22, 27, 175, 177 Halton Holegate 83n Healing 20 Heckington 36, 37, 89 Heydour quarries cross slab workshop 222, 222 Holbeach 37, 37 Long Sutton 83n Louth 46, 110, 111, 175, 176 Moulton 39, 40 North Witham 177 Pinchbeck 59 Sibsey 34 Sleaford 38, 40 Spalding 39, 40, 190 religious guilds 59 Spilsby 160, 176, 177 Stallingborough 104, 104 Surfleet 59 Sutterton 59, 117 Swineshead 59 Tattershall 41n, 46, 46, 55, 115, 115, 188, 194 Thorganby 84n Well 20 Whaplode 59 Wigtoft 59 Wrangle 59 Wyberton 75, 75, 76, 77n, 78n, 91, 92, 96n, 200, 201, 209 religious guilds 59 Littlebury, Humphrey 3, 25, 26 Lo (Belgium) 205, 207 London All Hallows church 81, 90n Austin Friars 81, 102 Dominican Friary 40 Franciscan Friary 40 St Lawrence Poultney church 81 St Margaret’s church, New Fish Street 127n Vintners Company 145, 146, 148 London A brasses 185, 185

Ieper (Belgium) 219 incised slabs, English 89, 102, 177 incised slabs, Flemish 3-5, 46, 74-99, 121-123, 138, 139, 156-160, 162, 164, 176, 177, 186, 195, 199-219, 230234, 75, 78, 80, 83, 84, 90, 91, 138, 140, 176, 186, 195, 199-219 comparative cost 85-88 double tombs 95-97, 158, 159 ease of transportation/installation 85 location plan 198 standard dimensions 84, 85 workshops 74n, 76, 78, 81, 82, 85, 88, 159n, 212 inscriptions 60, 77n, 79, 91, 102, 121, 126, 149, 150, 173, 175, 177, 178, 188, 193-195, 214 Isbrande, Herman (1533) 123 Jackson, William (1538) 237 Jefferay, Richard (1531) 237 Johnson, Robert (1533) 237 Kent Hever 104 Minster-in-Sheppey 84n Kent, Abraham, restorer 151, 152, 154, 155 Kerrich, Thomas, antiquary 4, 90, 106 Kessell, Godfrid van (1403) 81, 90n Kilkenny, Andrew de, dean of Exeter (1302) 87, 88 King, Edward 134 Kings Lynn (Norfolk) 12, 26, 79, 169 destruction of monuments 168 fair 10 religious guilds 49, 50n, 164-167 steelyard 24, 81n St Margaret’s church 76, 76, 82n, 84, 94n, 139, 156, 214, 217 St Nicholas’s church 165, 166n Knights Hospitallers 8 Kocet, William 60 Koksijde (Belgium) 78n, 219 Kylmere, Andreas 81 Kyme, William de 69 Lambard, Simon 66n Lamkyn, Alan (1498) 108, 108, 127, 189, 189 Lamkyn, Janette (1508) 56, 70, 71, 108, 237 Lamkyn, Robert 108 Lancaster, Blanche, duchess of 22, 67 Laneham (Nottinghamshire) 39 Langley, Katherine 60 Leek, Robert 117 Leeke, John, Alice and Joan (1527) 56, 71, 114, 119, 119, 126, 127, 195, 195, 196, 237 Leeke, Thomas (1527) 237 Leland, John, antiquary 1, 6, 11, 14, 24, 25, 27, 31, 32, 34, 42, 43, 55, 72, 81n, 123, 124, 156 Leland, Robert 60 Leverton, Henry 66 Libergiers, Huges (1263) 84n limestone, oolitic 128, 141, 174, 176, 178, 182, 185-194, 196, 197, 230, 231, 234 Lincoln 261

Index St Margaret’s church 76, 76, 82n, 84, 94n, 139, 156, 214, 217 St Nicholas’s church 165, 166n Norwich brass workshops 129 Norwich 1 brasses 105, 105, 106, 178, 178, 179 religious guilds 49 Blackfriars 40 St John Maddermarket 163n St Peter Mancroft 39 Salle 179 Walsingham 117, 120 North Collingham (Nottinghamshire) 39 North Witham (Lincolnshire) 177 Northamptonshire Ashby St Ledgers 110, 162n Barnack: stone 89; cross slab workshop 88, 221, 221 Blisworth 182 Fotheringhay 46 Lowick 153-155 Peterborough Cathedral 104, 105, 192 Northumberland Newcastle brass workshop 98 Blackfriars 83n Northwood family (1319-35) 84n Norwich (Norfolk) brass workshops 129 Norwich 1 brasses 105, 105, 106, 178, 178, 179 religious guilds 49 Blackfriars 40 St John Maddermarket 163n St Peter Mancroft 39 Norwode, Robert 19 Norys, John 66n Nottingham, St Mary’s church 34, 39 Nottinghamshire Hawton 37 Laneham 39 Newark 84 North Collingham 39 Screveton 177 South Collingham 39 Willoughby-on-the-Wolds 155, 155, 225 Nutting, John and Agnes (1420) 4, 111, 112, 121, 139, 140, 141, 161, 175, 175

London B brasses 99, 121, 129, 148, 150, 173, 173, 178, 179, 234 London D brasses 112, 113, 181, 181 London F brasses 112, 113, 113, 119, 120, 182, 182, 188, 189, 195, 195 London G brasses 114, 114, 192, 193, 194, 194, 196, 196, 197 London marblers 88 Long Crendon (Buckinghamshire) 181 Long Sutton (Lincolnshire) 83n Louth (Lincolnshire) 46, 110, 111, 175, 176 Lowick (Northamptonshire) 153-155 Lownd, Robert (1527) 237 Lowys, Alice (1450) 237 Lowys, John (1445) 237 Lübeck (Germany) 17; Marienkirche 82, 91n Lyddington (Rutland) 192 Mare, Thomas de la, abbot of St Alban’s (c.1350) 87 Marynge, Thomas de 66n Maukeby, Symond (1513) 237 Maulteby, William (1530) 237 Maye alias Poynter, Thomas (1536) 237 merchant’s marks 75, 91, 91, 92, 109, 126, 164, 177 Milborne St Andrew (Dorset) 195 Mill, Edmund (1452) 106 Mille, Gregory 20 Minster-in-Sheppey (Kent) 84n Misterton, William (1424) 177 Monmouthshire Abergavenny 153, 153, 224 Monson, William John 4 monuments see brasses, English; brasses, Flemish; cross slabs; effigies, alabaster; incised slabs, English; incised slabs, Flemish; shroud brasses Mosan incised slab workshops 77, 96n Moulton (Lincolnshire) 39, 40 Moulton, Sir Thomas and Alice de (1322) 203-205, 204 Mounteville family 3, 124 Mur, Jean de 82 Murre, Agnes (1539) 237 Murre, Thomas (1530) 56, 237 Murre, William (1534) 237 Nethermyll, Julian (1539) 166 Neville, Sir Ralph (1425) 154 Newark (Nottinghamshire) 84 Newcastle (Northumberland) brass workshop 98 Blackfriars 83n Newton, William (1545) 103, 109, 126 Noble, William 145 Nonewyk, Richard (1527) 237 Norbury (Derbyshire) 196 Norfolk Blickling 179 Gressenhall 210 Kings Lynn 12, 26, 79, 169 destruction of monuments 168 fair 10 religious guilds 49, 50n, 164-167 steelyard 24, 81n

Oakley (Hampshire) 182 Orange, John 140, 141 Orby, Lady Margaret de 4, 104, 121, 122, 127 Ornsgale, Isberne de 102 Oryall, Robert (1538) 237 Osbarn, John (1447) 103, 237 Osse, Robert (1506) 70, 237 Osse, William (1513) 103, 237 Oxfordshire Burford 187 Palmer, Johane (1509) 237 Palmer, John (1431) 106 Palmer, William (1504) 237 Papforde, Thomas (1537) 237 262

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments charitable work 49, 52, 53 commemoration 49, 50, 52, 56, 94, 95, 160-162 Corpus Christi procession 55 dissolution 50, 51, 54, 72, 124, 167 guildhalls 52 livery 52, 55, 56 membership 49, 56-60 political function 52 posthumous entry 56, 113 public works 52 relics 54, 55 seals 52, 53, 54 social/business function 22, 49, 50, 52, 59, 160 see also All Hallows guild; Ascension of Our Lord guild; Assumption of the BVM guild; Blessed Apostles guild; Corpus Christ guild; Fellowship of Heaven guild; Holyrood guild; Holy Trinity guild; St Anthony’s guild; St George’s guild; St James’ guild; St John the Baptist guild; St Katherine’s guild; St Mary’s (or BVM) guild; SS Peter and Paul guild; SS Simon and Jude guild; St Thomas’s guild; Seven Martyr’s guild Remigius, bishop of Lincoln (1093) 83 Richardson, William (1603) 169 Richmond, honour of 8, 13, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 52, 114 Rievaulx (Yorkshire) 4 Robertson, Nicholas, Isabelle and Alice (1498) 116, 116, 117, 194 Robertson, Thomas, Elizabeth and Mary (1531) 50n, 115-117, 115, 116, 119, 126, 127, 193, 193 Robinson, John I (1500) 58, 114, 238 Robinson, John II, Anne, Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Eleanor (1525) 72, 73, 100, 101, 110, 114, 114, 115, 117, 119, 126, 127, 161, 169, 194, 194, 238 Robinson, John III 115 Robinson, Richard 126 Robinson, Thomas (1590) 169 Rochford, John 19, 20, 42 Rokys, Joan (1519) 194 Roos, Mary, Lady (1394) 4, 104, 121, 127 Roose, Thomas (1441) 179 Rosetur, William 60 Rouse, Roger (1532) 238 Rowe, James (1531) 237 Rowe, John (1531) 237 Royston (Hertfordshire) 196 Rubius, Hans 81 Rutland Burley-on-the-Hill 153, 153, 224 Lyddington 192 Rydder, Robert (1531) 238 Rynd, William 88

Paris (France) 129 Parker, William (1530) 237 Patrington (Yorkshire) 37, 47 Paxford, Elizabeth (1538) 103, 237 Payne, John (1504) 70, 237 Paynell, William (1498) 237 Paynter, William (1537) 237 Paysgode, Henry 142 Peascod, Richard 142 Pedde, Geoffrey (1408) 175, 177 Penne, Elizabeth de la (1521) 194 Pennington, Adam (1525) 50n, 237 Pescod, Walter and Matilda (1398) 4, 22, 66, 99, 100, 103, 109, 120-122, 127, 136, 136, 137, 137, 142, 143, 145, 160, 173, 173, 234; as member of religious guilds 146, 147 Peterborough (Northamptonshire) Cathedral 104, 105, 192 Petit Granit stone 78n, 233 Petwardyn, Robert (1431) 155 Petwardyn, Roger 155 Philippa of Hainault, queen of England 67 Phillipp, Edward (1538) 237 pilgrim’s token 71, 72 Pinchbeck (Lincolnshire) 59 Pinchbyk, William (1534) 237 Place, G. G., architect 34 Poignières, Jehan li 85 Poland Toruń 82 Pollerde, John (1533) 237 portraits, civic 168 Prentys, Thomas, carver 153-155, 224 Prie, Marie de (1347) 85n Prote, Ralph 142 Pulborough (Sussex) 106 Pulvertoft, Katherine (1451) 69, 237 Purbeck marble 87, 88, 89, 98n, 139, 173, 175, 179, 179, 185, 185, 188, 189, 195, 195, 197, 228-234 Pynson, Richard, printer 65 Pywk, Luke 66n Quethiock (Cornwall) 181 Quykrell, John (1465) 66n, 237 Quykrell, Margaret (1534) 237 Quykrell, Richard (1528) 66n, 70, 237 Rainham (Essex) 188 Randall, Katherine (1501) 237 Rasur, Nicholas (1498) 237 Rede, Elizabeth (1486) 56, 70, 71, 102, 114, 126, 237 Rede, John (1507) 237 Rede, William (1400) 106, 126 Rede, William (1509) 56, 71, 72n, 100, 101, 237 Reims (France) Cathedral 85n religious guilds 4, 46, 47, 49-73, 94, 101, 102, 124, 159162, 164, 165, 167 altar-sharing 53 bequests 56 chapels 4, 40, 42, 49, 52, 90, 102, 127, 160, 162n, 166, 168; location plan 61 chaplains 49, 53, 93n

St Albans Abbey (Hertfordshire) 87, 140n St Anthony’s guild 51, 52, 71 St Botolph’s church 1, 3, 6, 16, 29-48, 62, 66, 68, 70, 72, 89, 125, 2, 6, 30, 34-36, 38, 62, 66, 68, 70, 133 advowson 8, 32, 151 altars 72 as burial location 33, 40, 59, 92, 117, 134, 135, 158 chancel 19, 43-45, 44, 45, 103 263

Index indulgences 41, 60, 161; Scala Coeli indulgence 47, 62, 65 livery 56 property inventory 50-52, 54, 55, 65, 160 relics 54, 55, 71 seal 52n, 53 staff 41, 60, 114, 115, 119 vestments 51, 52, 117 vestry 135 St Quintin, Sir John de (1397) 87 St Thomas’s guild 51, 56, 71 SS Peter and Paul guild 20, 20n, 43, 50-52, 56, 66, 70, 117, 142, 160 bedehouses 66 chapel 66, 66, 69, 99, 102, 103, 108, 125, 128, 132, 135, 148, 173 chaplains 66 funerals 66 guildhall 66 painted glass 66 patent 147, 147 property 66 seal 52, 54 vestry 135 Walter Pescod’s association with 66, 99, 146-148 SS Simon and Jude guild 19, 20n, 51, 56, 68-70 chapel 69 commemoration 69 Salisbury (Wiltshire) Cathedral 98n Salle (Norfolk) 179 Sanderson, Robert, bishop of Lincoln 130 Sandford, Francis, antiquary 149 Sapcote, Sir Henry (1452) 153, 153, 224 Saxby, Mary (1520) see Robertson, Thomas (1531) Scaldienne incised slab workshops 77, 82 Schawe, Hugh (1531) 62, 65, 238 Scott, Sir George Gilbert, architect 100, 136, 139, 151, 164 Screveton (Nottinghamshire) 177 Seamer (Yorkshire) 98n Selby Abbey (Yorkshire) 37 Sellers, William (1535) 238 Selowe, Thomas 142 Seman, Simon (1433) 142, 144, 160 London vintner 142, 145,146 London office-holder 148 Agnes his widow 145, 148 Sene, William (1533) 238 Seven Martyrs guild 50-52, 71 membership 56, 71 Shallok, Andrew (1531) 238 Shallok, Richard (1531) 62, 70, 238 Sharpe, Christian (1537) 238 Shavelocke, Roger and Joan (1488) 119, 120, 120, 188, 189 Sherborne St John (Hampshire) 182 Shipwright, Roger (1538) 238 Shropshire Tong 153, 153, 224 shroud brasses 110, 118, 118, 187, 188, 188, 195, 196, 231, 232 Sibsey (Lincolnshire) 34

chantries 47, 58, 126 choir stalls 3, 45, 131, 132 churchyard 31, 32, 43, 134 clergy 23, 32, 41, 45, 72, 109, 117, 160 see also Baret; Cotton; Smithe; Strensall; Truesdale; Vezano; Wooll Cotton or Founders’ Chapel 42, 58n, 69, 138 destruction of great rood 130 floor plan c.1725 35, 134 font 42 guild chapels 52, 72 indulgence 32, 43 Lady chapel 46, 60, 62, 62, 65 mendicant influence on nave plan 40, 41, 47, 158 monuments see brasses, English; brasses, Flemish; cross slabs; effigies, alabaster; incised slabs, Flemish; shroud brasses painted glass 104 pewing 34, 47, 90, 132, 135, 136, 141, 164 previous church 8, 31, 34, 39, 60, 136 proposed college of BVM 33, 44 Puritan iconoclasm 130, 131, 134, 164 restoration 1843-53 136, 137, 139, 151, 164 St Botolph’s tabernacle 50n sale of vestments 125 Stump 2, 3, 6, 19, 29, 30, 36, 42, 43, 45-48, 45, 46, 103, 104, 158, 161 Taylors Hall 69, 70 St Botolph’s Fair 1, 3, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 19, 26, 31, 32, 52, 94 St George’s guild 50-53, 56, 68, 110 chapel 58n, 69, 110 chaplain 68 guildhall 69 seal 54 St James’ guild 20n, 51, 70 bequest 56, 117 chapel 70 St John the Baptist’s guild 19, 51, 56, 69, 70 St John’s church/hospital 1, 4, 8, 23, 31-33, 72, 101, 102, 151, 156, 159, 204 advowson 204 demolished 131 monuments removed to St Botolph’s 131, 132, 151, 155 St Katherine’s guild 20n, 50-52, 56, 69 St Mary’s (or BVM) guild 20, 22, 36n, 41, 43, 46, 47, 50-56, 58-60, 72, 107, 114, 115, 117, 147, 159, 160, 167 admission certificate 63 altar of the Pièta 65 bedehouse 65 bequests 72, 106, 114, 115 Chantry House 41, 65 chapel 60, 62, 62, 65, 95n, 102, 105-107, 109, 111, 114, 132, 141, 182, 189, 196; screens with loft 60 choir school 41, 55 commemoration 52, 115 finances 62, 65 funerals 52 guildhall 4, 19, 20, 20, 43, 54, 55, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72

264

The church of St Botolph, Boston, Lincolnshire and its medieval monuments Tattershall lordship 13, 21, 22 Tattershall (Lincolnshire) 41n, 46, 46, 55, 115, 115, 188, 194 Taverner, John, choirmaster and composer 41, 55, 56, 103, 123, 130 Tawbott, Walter (1522) 194 Temper, Simon (1538) 238 Terling (Essex) 182 Thompson, Pishey, local historian 5, 22, 31-33, 36, 43, 74, 129 Thorganby (Lincolnshire) 84n Thorlande, William and Margaret 50, 71 Thorneton, William 66 Thorpland, John de 66n Thymbleby, William de (1385) 95n, 107 Thynne, Francis, antiquary 4, 100, 120 Tiel, Catherine de 82 Tilney family 3, 34, 42, 43 arms of 151, 225 Frederick 56 Margaret 3, 34, 42, 43 Margery 42, 155 Philip 43, 155 Tode, Anthony (1534) 238 Tomlinson, Robert (1534) 238 Tong (Shropshire) 153, 153, 224 Torrington, John Byng, 5th viscount 135 Toruń (Poland) 82 Tototh, Thomas (1493) 56, 238 Tournai (Belgium) 160 brass workshops 74n, 82, 159n incised slab workshops 74n, 76, 78, 82, 85, 212 incised slabs see incised slabs, Flemish marble 74n, 77, 87 see also incised slabs, Flemish Musée de l’École Saint-Luc 217 Saint-Jacques church 83n, 85n St Katherine’s church 97 St Quentin’s church 97 Towneley, Robert (1588) 131 Trollope, Andrew (1519) 71, 238 Trolloppe, John (1539) 238 Truesdale, John, rector of St Botolph’s 42, 155 Trygge, Robert and Alice (1436) 112 Tumby, John 16 Tumby,Walter 60 Tweede, Edmund (1538) 238 Tymes, Johanna (1498) 238

Sint-Jacobskapelle (Belgium) 212, 216 Skelton, John 68, 110 Skirbeck, James 19, 20 Sleaford (Lincolnshire) 38, 40 Smalenburgh, Wessel de (1340) 3, 11n, 76, 79, 80, 123, 159, 202, 203, 207, 212, 213, 214, 214, 234 Smithe, William, rector of St Botolph’s (1505) 103, 108, 108, 109, 126 Smyth, John (1506) 238 Sorsby, Thomas 125 South Collingham (Nottinghamshire) 39 Spaigne, William 22 Spalding, Richard 69 Spalding (Lincolnshire) 39, 40, 190 religious guilds 59 Spaynge, Hugh 60 Spilsby (Lincolnshire) 160, 176, 177 Spurrell, Mark 42 Staffordshire Burton-on-Trent alabaster workshops 165n Staindrop (co. Durham) 153 Stallingborough (Lincolnshire) 104, 104 Stevenson, Richard 42, 43, 155 Stokes, Edmund de 21 stone types see Alwalton marble; Ancaster stone; ‘Ashford black’ marble; Barnack stone; Black Birds Eye stone; effigies, alabaster; limestone, oolitic; Petit Granit stone; Purbeck marble; Tournai marble Stowing, Richard (1532) 238 Stoylt, Johannes (1501) 70, 103, 238 Stralsund (Germany) 82, 217 Strayle, Jenet (1507) 238 Strensall, John, rector of St Botolph’s (1408) 4, 100, 103, 106, 107, 107, 109, 120, 121, 127n, 136, 137, 174, 174, 175, 234 Stukeley, William, antiquary 30, 35, 42, 43, 105, 106, 133, 134, 135, 137n Suffolk Bury St Edmunds brass workshop 129 Dunwich 185 Elmswell 185 Surfleet (Lincolnshire) 59 Sury-près-Léré (France) 85n Sussex Pulborough 106 Winchelsea 40 Wiston 88n Sutterton (Lincolnshire) 59, 117 Sutton, Fulco de 66n Sutton, John 16 Sutton, Oliver, bishop of Lincoln (1299) 89 Sutton, Robert, of Lincoln 16 Sutton, Robert, carver 153-155, 224 Sutton, William (1525) 50n, 58, 238 Swillington, Elizabeth and Ralph (1546) 166 Swine (Yorkshire) 154 Swineshead (Lincolnshire) 59 Sybsay, John (1519) 238 Symond, Barnard (1505) 103, 238

Varennes, Florens de (c.1370) 216 Verghe, Lotars de le (1346) 97 Vernon, Sir Richard (1456) 153, 153, 224 Vezano, Giffred de, rector of St Botolph’s 32, 33 Villers-le-Temple (Belgium) 204 Vyrley, Thomas (1454) 81n Wakele, John 146 Walker, William (1538) 238 Walsingham (Norfolk) 117, 120 Walsoken family (c.1400) 138, 138, 174, 174 Walsokne, Adam de (1349) 76, 76, 82n, 84, 214 Wantage (Berkshire) 194 Warendorp, Wedekin (1350) 82

taille d’épargne 83 Taplow (Buckinghamshire) 197 265

Index Lincoln 89 London A brasses 185, 185 London B brasses 99, 121, 129, 148, 150, 173, 173, 178, 179, 234 London D brasses 112, 113, 181, 181 London F brasses 112, 113, 113, 119, 120, 182, 182, 188, 189, 195, 195 London G brasses 114, 114, 192, 193, 194, 194, 196, 196, 197 London marblers 88 Newcastle 98 Norwich 129 Norwich 1 brasses 105, 105, 106, 178, 178, 179 Tournai 74n, 82, 159n York 89, 98, 129 York 2 brasses 109, 109, 189 cross slab Ancaster 88, 89 Barnack 88, 221, 221 Heydour quarries 222, 222 incised slab Bruges 76, 81, 82, 88, 159n, 212 Ghent 76 London marblers 88 Mosan 77, 96n Scaldienne 77, 82 Tournai 74n, 76, 78, 82, 85, 212 Wrangle, Robert 66 Wrangle (Lincolnshire) 59 Wright, Thomas (1534) 238 Write, Richard (1805) 207 Wyberton (Lincolnshire) 75, 75, 76, 77n, 78n, 91, 92, 96n, 200, 201, 209 religious guilds 59 Wyse, William 142 Wyske, Margaret (1499) 238

Warwickshire Coventry 34, 46, 164-169 brass workshops 129, 165n cloth trade 16, 17, 25, 146, 165 decline of 25 Puritan iconoclasm 166, 167, 169 religious guilds 17, 59, 146, 165 Holy Trinity church 31, 53, 165 St Mary’s Hall 165n St Michael’s church 31, 34, 45, 165, 166 St Nicholas’s church 165 Wayse, Jeffrey (1539) 72, 103, 238 Weel, William and Millicent (c.1410) 175 Well (Lincolnshire) 20 Werner, Jenet (1534) 238 Westminster Abbey 149, 149, 173 Weston family 155 Whaplode (Lincolnshire) 59 Wheeldon, Jeremy 5, 103, 117, 122, 226, 229 White, John (1511) 238 White, Robert, prior (1534) 196 Whyte, Robert (1527) 238 Wightman, William (1532) 50n, 71, 238 Wigtoft (Lincolnshire) 59 William ap Thomas, Sir (1446) 153, 153, 224 Williams, John, bishop of Lincoln 131 Willinson, Robert (1515) 238 Willoughby family 160, 161 Willoughby d’Eresby, William, 5th baron (c.1420) 176, 177 Willoughby-on-the-Wolds (Nottinghamshire) 155, 155, 225 wills 33, 47, 50n, 51, 56, 70, 71, 81, 82, 94, 95n, 97, 100-103, 114-117, 119, 123, 148, 161, 236-238 Wiltshire Salisbury Cathedral 98n Winchelsea (Sussex) 40 Wisbech (Cambridgeshire) 190 Wiston (Sussex) 88n Witham, River 8, 9, 25, 32, 158 sluice 8, 9, 25, 115, 158 Witham family 3, 124 Woodhouse, Beatrice (1536) 238 Woodhouse, Stephen (1531) 69, 238 Woodstock, Thomas of, duke of Gloucester (1397) 149, 149, 173 Wooll, Thomas, rector of St Botolph’s 130 workshops alabaster Burton-on-Trent 165n Chellaston 153, 224, 224, 225 brass Bury St Edmunds 129 Cambridge 129 Coventry 129, 165n Douai 83 Fens 1 brasses 19, 106, 109-112, 121, 122, 127129, 139, 148, 150, 161, 174-177, 185, 194, 234, 107, 110-112, 174-177, 185 Fens 2 brasses 104, 108, 115, 116, 119, 122, 128, 188-196, 104, 105, 108, 115, 116, 118, 119, 188-193, 195

Yogge, Thomas (1509) 59 York brass workshops 89, 98, 129 York 2 brasses 109, 109, 189 Minster 37, 44, 44, 46 St Mary’s Abbey 8, 9, 13, 31-33, 37, 40, 43, 107 Yorkshire Beverley Minster 37, 38 St Mary’s church 38 Bolton Priory 12, 14 Brandesburton 87 Goldsborough 98, 98 Hedon 40 Howden 37-39, 39, 41 Hull 26, 81, 164, 166, 167, 169 religious guilds 165 Holy Trinity church 40, 41, 156, 165, 167, 169 St Mary’s church 165 Patrington 37, 47 Rievaulx 4 Seamer 98n Selby Abbey 37 Swine 154

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