Reforming Memory: Commemoration of the Dead in Sixteenth-Century Wales 1

Reforming memory: commemoration of the dead in

sixteenth-century Wales1

It has become something of a truism among sixteenth-century historians that attitudes to death and commemoration underwent radical change in the course of the Reformation. Most historians identify as the key to these changes the reformers’ denial of the existence of

Purgatory – described by Eamon Duffy as ‘the defining doctrine of late medieval

Catholicism.2 Of equal importance was the reformers’ critique of the validity of the whole religious culture of indulgences and intercessory prayer for the dead which led A. N. Galpern to describe late medieval Catholicism as ‘a cult of the living in the service of the dead’.3

Ralph Houlbrooke described the combined impact of these changes as ‘one of the great unchartable revolutions of English history’.4

While there is still room for debate about the extent and intensity of the late medieval obsession with death,5 it is clear that these changes resulted in a complete reconfiguration of the content and meaning of memorials to the dead. The main purpose of the medieval monument was to elicit prayers for the dead. Post-Reformation monuments, by contrast, concentrated almost exclusively on the birth and reputation of the deceased, whether for piety and charity, military valour, learning or other service to community and state. This is not to suggest that the emphasis on lineage and achievements was entirely new, or that post-

Reformation monuments were devoid of religious connotation. Medieval tombs could dominate the churches they stood in, and used a range of visual strategies to allude to the achievements and family connections of the deceased;6 and as Peter Sherlock points out, piety was part of the discourse of memory in later monuments.7 Nevertheless, on a medieval monument, praise was usually implicit and almost always accompanied by requests for prayer, some of them complex and offering indulgences in return.8 On post-Reformation monuments, reputation is all.9

1 In continental Europe, the Reformation was even linked with changes in the location of burial. In the largest enclosed cities, by the end of the medieval period, overcrowded graveyards were a threat to health of the living. From the mid-fifteenth century, particularly in

Germany, there was a move towards burial in more spacious civic graveyards outside the walls. While this clearly predates the Reformation, Craig Koslofsky has suggested that the resulting rupture in the relationship between the living and the dead may have made it easier for the reformers to challenge the whole concept of a community which incorporated the dead and gave the living a role in their fate.10 The fear that the same might happen in eighteenth-century France certainly animated the argument against extra-mural burial in

Paris.11

However, there is still debate about the precise chronology and impact of these changes.12

Responses were of course complex and ambivalent, in the Atlantic archipelago as in continental Europe. In France there were continuing disputes over the wish of Huguenots to be burined in consecrated ground.13 In Scotland, burial in churches was forbidden on practical as well as theological grounds but monastic sites continued in use as family cemeteries, dissolved collegiate churches and chantries and even the chancels of churches still in use were also adapted as mausolea, and some landowners built new burial ‘aisles’ adjoining or linked to churches.14

Eamon Duffy argued that change in attitudes to prayer for the dead did not necessarily indicate a wholesale conversion to the new thinking, citing examples from London, Yorkshire and elsewhere to suggest both that testators who did not specifically leave money for prayers nevertheless expected their executors to make arrangements, and that wills which did not refer to prayer for the dead still exhibited other aspects of traditional piety.15

Countering Duffy’s arguments, Robert Whiting found not only a marked decline in all bequests for prayer for souls from 1530 but also an increase in explicit denials of the existence of Purgatory and the validity of masses for souls.16 However, Barbara Harris’s

2 study of élite female piety found that there was if anything an increase in the number of monuments asking for prayer for souls after the Act of Ten Articles.17 She also found inscriptions asking for prayer during the reign of Edward VI and in the early years of

Elizabeth’s reign. Sherlock also found that the majority of monuments before 1560 asked for prayer in some form, but that Elizabeth’s accession was followed by a search for alternative acceptable formulae.18 Unfortunately, as he noted, there was a dip in the production of monuments for the crucial middle years of the century, and those which survive may not be representative.19

However, Harris noted that the construction and endowment of chantries virtually ceased after 1536. Virginia Bainbridge’s analysis of Cambridgeshire wills in the 1530s identified a significant decline in the number of chantry foundations, but suggested that this did not indicate doubts about the validity of prayers for the dead. Instead of establishing permanent foundations, testators were entrusting money for prayers, masses and anniversaries to family members or executors.20 Daniel noted a dramatic decline in chantry foundations in the early sixteenth century, but accompanied by a growing number of testators making specific arrangements for their funerals.21 However, as with the example of extra-mural burial in

Germany, it may be that declining numbers of chantry foundations encouraged a mind-set in which it became easier to question their validity.

In a review article on Harding’s The Dead and the Living in Paris and London and Peter

Marshall’s Beliefs and the Dead, Lee Beier noted the paradox that many recent historians have described the destruction of the doctrine of Purgatory as a radical and traumatic change, but that there was actually very little resistance even to the dissolution of chantries.

He then went on to answer the paradox himself by pointing to the range of strategies for concealing and embezzling chantry property and by arguing that sixteenth-century ‘religious’ rebellions seldom had one cause: the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Prayer-book Rebellion articulated other concerns as well.22 In her comparative study of Paris and London, Vanessa

3 Harding noted the extent of continuity in funerary practice: even in London, where the ideas of the reformers gained considerable traction, funerals in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were still lavish, with doles of food and gowns given to numerous poor people who participated in funeral processions. Churches and particularly chancels continued as favoured places for burial.23

It has also become something of a truism among Welsh historians that Wales was slow and even reluctant at first to accept the changes of the Reformation. While there was little outright recusancy, traditional practices and beliefs continued to coexist with the established church. In 1567 the new bishop of Bangor, Nicholas Robinson, complained to the Privy

Council that his diocese was still largely unreformed:

... ignorance contineweth many in the dregges of superstition ... Images and aulters

standing in churches undefaced, lewde and indecent vigils and watches observed,

much pilgrimage-goying, many candles sett up to the honour of sainctes, some

reliquies yet caried about and all the cuntreis full of bedes and knottes ...24

However, while there seems little evidence of discontent in early sixteenth-century Wales with what the late medieval church had to offer, and little or no evidence of enthusiasm for change, there is also little evidence of overt opposition to the changes of the 1530s and

1540s. Comparing Wales with Ireland, Ciarán Brady and Brendan Bradshaw both assumed that the Reformation in Wales was accomplished, if not with ease, then without resistance.25

More recent research has concentrated on the evidence for low-level resistance to religious change, which makes the lack of overt dissent even more surprising.26 Contrasts with northern and western England are also striking. Why was there no Welsh Pilgrimage of

Grace; why (even more surprisingly) no Prayer-book Rebellion, when in 1549 the Welsh had imposed on them a Book of Common Prayer in the language of the conqueror? And how did

Wales then become a country of chapelgoers?

4 Several answers have been suggested to this puzzle. Hearts and minds were eventually won by the translation of the Bible and (perhaps more importantly) the Book of Common

Prayer into Welsh.27 Reformers like William Salesbury and Richard Davies were able to construct a history of Wales that positioned the ‘Celtic’ church outside the church of Rome and represented the Protestant reforms as a return to the fountainhead of Welsh religious life.28 In the shorter term, the advantages which the Acts of Union offered to the Welsh gentry deprived any nascent opposition of the leadership that any serious challenge would have required.29 However, the ambiguity of the Welsh response remains a paradox.

There were nevertheless aspects of medieval devotion in Wales which aligned more readily with reformed ideas, and the nature of the Welsh response to the memory of the dead may provide us with a key to understanding these. It must be emphasized that what follows is still speculative and likely to remain so. Evidence for changing attitudes towards death and commemoration in Wales is both sparse and intractable. There are no local probate records, little more than a handful of wills proved at Canterbury, few memorials and in particular an almost complete absence of memorial brasses. However, used with care, the evidence such as it is may at least suggest some possible approaches.

At first sight, it has to be said, the Welsh attitude to death and commemoration seems very much in line with the passive traditionalism of the general Welsh approach to religious change. Wales had few perpetual chantries in comparison with England, but this was probably an indication of agrarian poverty and limited urbanization rather than reluctance to endow institutions for intercessory prayer.30 While it is difficult to give exact figures, the chantry certificates for Wales and the Welsh estates of the Duchy of Lancaster list just over

80 chantries, services and stipendiary priests. Some of these, though, were very slenderly endowed – the stipendiary priest at Amlwch received only 5s a year, and some of the smaller chantries should perhaps be classed as obits. Probate records and surveys like

Valor Ecclesiasticus also enable us to identify a number of endowments which were

5 intended to pe permanent but which do not seem to have survived until 1548. There were also a number of lesser endowments for occasional prayers and masses. Chantries were usually endowed for the recently dead but could also be explicitly for those whose identity was no longer known. An inqusition into concealed lands in 1576 identified property managed by the bailiffs and aldermen of Brecon to provide a priest to say the mass of St

Michael in the town charnel house.31

Glanmor Williams has suggested a decline in numbers of chantry foundations from about

1529 though, as he suggests, this could be explained by the uncertainty of the times rather than by doctrinal change. 32 The small parcels of land and the stocks of sheep and cattle which endowed most of the Welsh chantries were also easily concealed from the Crown’s receivers by the connivance of local officials. The accounts of royal receivers and auditors and the proceedings of various later sixteenth-century concealment commissions added several endowed services to the list, as well as numerous smaller endowments, but an unknown quantity remained hidden.33 (The town of Tenby was still using concealed chantry and hospital lands to fund poor relief in the eighteenth century.34) At first sight, there seems no reason, therefore, to consider that declining numbers of chantry foundations indicated any change in beliefs. The last known chantry foundation in England and Wales was just over the border into Herefordshire, at Welsh Newton, in 1547.35 However, the slender endowments of virtually all these chantry foundations, and the temporary nature of many of them, may possibly suggest not just poverty but a lack of commitment to the idea of post- mortem prayer.

Similarly, there is at first sight no evidence from early sixteenth-century Welsh wills of any decline in enthusiasm for prayers for the soul. We are unfortunately reliant on the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for Welsh probate evidence as so few wills have survived in diocesan and private archives. Nor does Wales have any of the churchwardens’ accounts, church books and other parochial archives which historians like Eamon Duffy and

6 Clive Burgess have used to document late medieval piety.36 However, the Welsh PCC wills for the early sixteenth century include wills of minor landholders, townspeople and even husbandmen, so the social context is reasonably wide; 37 and if (as Felicity Heal suggests) the lack of gentry leadership was crucial, it is clearly important to establish the perspectives of the local élite.38 Of a total of 105 wills before 1530, only 13 (12% of the total) made no provision for post-mortem prayer, and most of those were clearly wills made in haste and leaving the bulk of the estate to the discretion of executors. And of the others, nearly half left the residue of the estate for the health of the testator’s soul as well as making specific provision for intercessory prayer.

Numbers of wills proved at the PCC increased in the 1530s and became much more numerous after 1540 (possibly part of the impact of the Acts of Union). After 1540 the number making no provision for post-mortem prayer rose steadily, but even in the reign of

Edward VI a quarter of all Welsh wills (21 of a total of 85 wills) left something, a few asking for specific prayers but most leaving the residue of the estate. There was a limited recovery during Mary’s reign, with nearly half of all testators leaving something for post-mortem prayer, but numbers declined rapidly after Elizabeth’s accession.

However, these crude statistics tell only part of the story. Rhianydd Biebrach has noted that

Welsh provision for post-mortem prayer, while virtually universal, was not as generous as the provision in comparable English counties.39 In particular, she has noted the paucity of

Welsh requests for trentals, the sequences of thirty specific Masses which so many English testators ordered to be said after their funerals. Similarly, while there are Welsh examples of endowments for prayers on the anniversary of the death, and for lights in front of paintings and carvings in the church, they are neither as numerous nor as generous as those in

English probate records. Nor does Wales appear to have had many formally constituted gilds, whose activities in England made a major contribution to corporate provision of intercessory prayer. In a study of the influence of Lollardy on popular piety in pre-

7 Reformation Kent, Robert Lutton has coined the phrase ‘parsimonious piety’ to explain the popularity of the Lollard critique of lavish provision of charity in return for prayer.40 This phrase clearly does not work for Wales, where provision for intercessory prayer was almost universal, but Rhianydd Biebrach’s perception of ‘tranquillity’ in the Welsh approach to death may contribute to understanding the lack of overt resistance to change.

The distribution of early wills which omit provision for prayer for the soul does have some interesting patterns, though the numbers involved are so small that it is difficult to put much weight on them. There is for example a small but potentially significant cluster of early refuseniks in Knighton and Presteign, two border market towns which were key nodes in the cattle and wool trades. Only four wills survive from Glamorgan in the 1520s but of those, only two made any provision for prayer. The other two did however make bequests to Cardiff friaries which may have been indulgenced.41 Other early wills which made detailed bequests but left nothing for prayer came from as far afield as Beaumaris (Ang) and Llanarmon-yn-Iâl

(Denb).42

There is of course considerable debate among historians about the value of wills as indicators of religious orientation. Much of this has centred around the preambles, but there is also doubt about the weight which can be placed on bequests.43 Some at least of the testators who made no bequests for prayer for the souls nevertheless had clear traditionalist leanings. It is, for example, surprising to find no specific reference to prayer for the dead in the will of John Morgan, bishop of St David’s (d 1504).44 However, as he left money for a chapel over his burial place, vestments and a printed mass book to his new chapel at

Llandeilo Fawr and money for bells for the collegiate church of Llanddewi-brefi, he probably felt he was well provided for spiritually.

As Eamon Duffy has pointed out, it should be no surprise to see declining numbers of bequests for prayer for souls after the confiscation of chantry endowments.45 It is therefore even more remarkable that, even during the reign of Edward VI and after the confiscation of

8 chantry endowments, a few testators continued to leave money for prayers. As late as the spring of 1552, Morgan Jenkin of Dingestow (Mon) left £6 13s 4s for his funeral and his soul’s health.46 Even more high-profile was the gift of Sir Charles Herbert of Troy and his wife

Elizabeth to the parish church of Wonastow. A three-light window, it contained their arms and the inscription ‘Orate pro bono statu Caroli Herbert, Arm., et Eliz. uxoris ejus, qui hanc fenestram vitriari fecerunt’.47 While this window did not explicitly ask for prayer for their souls, it implied that the prayers of others were expected to benefit them. They were in a small minority: but that is possibly what we should expect in the light of government policies.

With so few wills to work from, it is difficult to provide a chronology of the re-establishment of the validity of prayer for the dead after the accession of Mary Tudor. Eamon Duffy has pointed to the slow recovery of confidence in intercessory endowments in the early years of

Mary’s reign.48 There were some early Welsh endowments. Within little more than a year of

Edward’s death, and at the height of the controversy over Mary’s Spanish marriage, Roger

David ap Prichard of Grosmont (Mon) was leaving £10 to be distributed for his soul and all

Christian souls.49 The following February, Thomas Llywelyn Goch, a yeoman of Merthyr

Tydfil (Glam) made more elaborate provision: Sir Richard ap Rhys, curate of Merthyr, was to say five masses of the Five Wounds for him, and his executors were to provide for the

Trental of St Gregory to be said for his soul and all Christian souls.50 However, there were fewer wills making specific provision for prayer during Mary’s reign: the tendency was to leave the residue of the estate.

Apart from these few examples, though, the recovery of individual confidence in the validity of prayers for the dead was slow – and, perhaps more significantly, the sums left were small and the requests for prayer couched in general terms. When Richard David Apowell Fychan, a burgess of Abergavenny, made his will in May 1555, within a year of England’s return to the Catholic fold, he left money for forgotten tithes and funeral expenses (and 7s for the repair of the bridge over the Usk, at a time when bequests for repair of roads and bridges

9 were clearly considered a spiritual duty) but nothing specifically for his soul’s health. The preamble of the will also has a faintly evangelical flavour: he left his soul to God, ‘trusting by the merits of Christ’s passion that I am saved’. One might therefore have assumed that his sympathies were with the Protestant rebels. In a codicil dated 3 Sept 1557, however, he left

£5 to Sir John Howell to pray and sing for his soul and all Christian souls for a year in the

Rood church of Abergavenny.51

Some testators persisted in publicly endowing prayers for the dead in the early years of

Elizabeth’s reign. In January 1559, Morgan Thomas Moryce of Howick (Mon) was appropriately cautious: he left a reversionary legacy ‘to maintain service for my soul, if the law of the realm bear with this, if not for the reparation of highways and bridges’.52

Thereafter, there was a marked falling off, but well into the 1560s a scatter of testators made defiant provision for prayer for their souls.53 As late as 1575 Thomas Gruffydd ap Jenkin of

Aberdare (Glam) left the residue of his estate ‘to the praise of almightie God and the health of my sowle’.54

Episcopal visitation returns also suggest the survival of these practices in the face of official condemnation. Marmaduke Middleton’s rather ill-tempered injunctions for his new diocese of

St David’s in 1583 give a very full indication of customs which he found in south-west Wales

– wooden crosses at the resting-places of the funeral procession, bells, candles, prayers for the dead, offerings at funerals, month’s mind and year’s mind, communal casting of earth on the corpse.55 All this was in a diocese where his predecessor Richard Davies, translator of much of the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer into Welsh, was an earnest and diligent reformer. Trevor Owen suggests that some of the nineteenth- and early twentieth- century customs connected with death and burial in Wales might have a pre-Reformation origin. Among others, he identified the decoration of the room where the body lay with tau crosses of laurel and gifts of food and clothing to the poor who attended the funeral. A particularly telling survival, transmuted into the Protestant nonconformist tradition, was the

10 funeral sermon on the first or second Sunday after the funeral: according to Owen, this was often referred to as yr ail gladdedigaeth (‘the second burial’) or the Month’s End, a clear corruption of the Month’s Mind.56

The evidence of wills is therefore ambivalent: before 1530, bequests for prayer for the dead were virtually universal but in most cases far from generous. Thereafter bequests continued but declined in both numbers and scale. In particular, few wills after 1547 made specific and detailed provision for prayer. When the rector of Llanwenarth (Mon), Morgan Lloyd, made his will in 1552 he concluded with a bequest of the residue of his estate for his soul’s health.

This was a gesture of defiance but not a very powerful or costly one. Having clearly anticipated the 1549 legalisation of clerical marriage, he had already had to provide for ten children and two grand-children.57 The evidence of actual practice is equally ambiguous. On the one hand, it is clear from the complaints of successive bishops that traditional commemorative practices continued in spite of official attempts to control them. On the other hand, these traditional practices were not seen as a threat to public order and seem to have been at the level of ‘folk tradition’, explained as ignorance.

There are two further sources for sixteenth-century Wales which have the potential to clarify this ambiguity: memorial carvings and vernacular poetry. Wales had an indigenous tradition of incised slab and effigy memorials but this seems to have gone into decline from the mid- fourteenth century, possibly connected with the impact of the Black Death and, later, the

Glyndŵr uprising.58 There are very few late medieval monuments, and even fewer with inscriptions: for the period 1485-1540, at the most generous estimate, fewer than 50 memorials survive and of these only 17 have surviving inscriptions.59 While it is possible that inscriptions have been removed in order to protect the whole monument from iconoclastic damage,60 there are cases in which it is clear that no inscription was ever planned.61

Absence of evidence may not be evidence of absence, but it is just possible that the apparent reticence of the Welsh in matters of commemoration may be the result of

11 something other than material poverty. In particular, it may be significant that so very few memorial brasses survive from medieval Wales: eight surviving or recorded brasses before

1560, plus a few indents, is fewer than some English parishes. On the one hand, this is usually explained by material poverty and the remoteness of Wales from the London workshops.62 On the other hand, one of the attractions of brasses was the scope they offered for more complex inscriptions. There is a virtually complete absence of memorials for the key period 1540-60; and memorials from 1560 onwards usually have unimpeachably ‘Protestant’ inscriptions recording the virtues and achievements of the deceased.

Virtually all the surviving late medieval inscriptions in Wales do ask for prayer for the souls of the deceased, though they rarely go beyond the simple formula of ‘Orate pro anima ... ‘ or

‘Cuius anima deus propicietur’. However, two monuments in north Wales may suggest alternative perspectives. Both are to members of the urban community, and in the period before the Acts of Union residence in towns was technically barred to the Welsh. In reality, though, the culture of many of the little Welsh boroughs drew on Welsh as well as English roots, and the individuals commemorated by these monuments had Welsh ancestry and

Welsh connections.

The earlier is a brass in the parish church of Llanbeblig (the parish which included the

Edwardian borough of Caernarfon) to Richard Foxwist, a Caernarfon scrivener.63 [Insert fig 1 about here ] He died in 1500, but the brass was not installed until after the death of his wife, an unknown time later. It is completely idiosyncratic, like none of the products of the known

English workshops of the period. Foxwist is depicted actually on his deathbed, with his eyes open, propped up on pillows and naked but for a nightcap and blanket (clearly not a shroud).

In his hands he is holding a shield with the Five Wounds of Christ, and alongside him are the tools of his trade and his own family’s coat of arms. The inscription, in floridly neoclassical

Latin, identifies him and his wife, records their virtues and his devotion to the cult of the Five

Wounds, and gives the year of his death:

12 In quo pre multis scribendi gloria fulsit

Ricardus Foxwist hic pede tritus adest

Annus Christe tuus fuit Md luce patrici

dum tent expirans vulnera quinque tua

Corporis atque sui tandem pars additur altra

dum coniunx uno clauditur in tumulo

Hec que Johanna fuit ac Spicer nata Johanne

Pauperibus larga iusta pudica fuit

(Richard Foxwist, in whom the glory of writing outshone many, is here trodden by

foot. Thy year, O Christ, was 1500 in the Father’s light when he expiring holds Thy

five wounds. And at last the other part of his body is added when his wife is enclosed

with him in one tomb. She, who was Joanna, daughter of John Spicer, was generous

to the poor, just and modest)

However, crucially, it makes no mention of prayer for his soul.

While this memorial commemorates an Englishman living in Wales, it was presumably designed not by him but by either his widow or their children. Richard Foxwist himself came originally from Cheshire and trained in London, but his wife’s family were from

Carmarthenshire and her mother was clearly Welsh. However we interpret the memorial, then, we are looking at a product of cultural conflation.

The other memorial relevant to this discussion is in the parish church of St Mary and St

Nicholas, Beaumaris (another of Edward I’s military boroughs). It commemorates a merchant of the town, Richard Bulkeley, and his wife Elizabeth.64 [Insert fig 2 about here] Like the

Foxwists, the Bulkeley family came from Cheshire. The inscription has no date of death but from the genealogical records of the family it has been dated to about 1530. Like the Foxwist memorial, it is in elaborate neoclassical Latin:

13 Hoc tegitur tumulo Ricardus nomine Bulkeley

huius mercator providus oppiduli

Elizabeth coniunx custos fidissima sacri

coniugii que sub hoc marmore clausa iacet.

Juncta deo unus fuerat quibus una voluntas

post obitum maneat unus item tumulus

(In this tomb is buried Richard, by name Bulkeley, a prudent merchant of this little

town. Also Elizabeth, the most faithful guardian of their holy marriage, who lies

enclosed under this marble stone. When she was joined with God, he was alone,

who together had been of one mind. After death may one tomb likewise remain for

Like the Foxwist memorial, it conspicuously omits any mention of prayer for the dead.

Nevertheless, also like the Foxwist memorial, it is otherwise entirely traditional in its visual imagery. Richard and Elizabeth are depicted at prayer before the standard late medieval depiction of the Trinity, God the Father supporting the crucified Christ, while the dove of the

Holy Spirit hovers above Christ’s head. Richard and Elizabeth both have speech scrolls from the liturgy of the Mass: his reads ‘Osanna in excelsis’, hers ‘Kyrie eleison’. Between them, and below the Trinity, are indents for a shield and a scroll, both now missing.

Unlike the Foxwist memorial, however, the Bulkeley brass is quite typical of the products of the English workshops. It is in fact quite advanced in its design. Richard and Elizabeth are depicted not in the medieval style, full length as standing figures or effigies, but kneeling either side of two prayer desks, with their children kneeling behind them – what Jonathan

Finch has described as ‘an active depiction of the new piety’.65 The overall design was to become one of the most popular for small brasses, in England as well as Wales, but in 1530 it was ahead of its time. The focus on personal piety and family devotion, the depiction of the couple as they were in life rather than as effigies, is entirely in line with the emphasis of the

14 inscription on commemorating their virtues rather than imploring prayer for their souls. But all this is accompanied by traditional visual imagery and Eucharistic devotion.

However, it is also clearly important to consider the words they are given to utter. Many late medieval brasses placed speech scrolls in the mouths of the dead bewailing their state and asking for prayer. Elizabeth Bulkeley makes her own prayer for mercy, and Richard Bulkeley seems to have confidence in his fate. Likewise, Richard Foxwist clutches his very conventionalized depiction of the Five Wounds and seems to place his whole trust in Christ’s sacrifice.

So how are we to read the absence of requests for prayers in these two monuments? The inscriptions are complicated and some thought has clearly gone into the content and expression: it seems unlikely (to say the least) that a request for prayer could have been left out by accident. It is also worth remembering that the Foxwist memorial only gives the year of his death, and the Bulkeley memorial is undated. Later medieval monuments increasingly recorded the date of death in order to stimulate prayer on the anniversary. The Bulkeley monument (and possibly also the Foxwist monument), as far as we can see, discourages this strategy in favour of a more general reflection on the status and achievements of the deceased.

The Foxwist memorial does seem very early for opposition to the doctrine of Purgatory and prayer for the dead, though of course we only know Richard’s year of death: the wording of the inscription (‘corporis atque sui tandem pars additur altra ...’) suggests his wife died some time after him, and she could have lived into the 1520s or even the 1530s. Unfortunately, we know nothing about their children (who were presumably responsible for the detailed completion of the memorial, even if Richard and Joanna had indicated what they wanted) beyond their names.

With the Bulkeley memorial we are on slightly firmer ground. This is a later memorial, from the period when (according to Whiting) bequests for prayer for souls were drying up in at

15 least some parts of England. While we cannot locate Richard and Elizabeth in the Bulkeley family pedigrees, we can identify their son Arthur, who became bishop of Bangor, and it seems quite likely that he would have had at least some input into the design of the memorial. He was primarily a lawyer and administrator and could perhaps best be described as a moderate reformer.66 In 1530 he was chaplain to Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, which gave him some useful Court connections.67

Arthur’s position at Court in the early 1530s would also have placed him in contact with the increasingly acrimonious debate over Purgatory and the status of the dead.68 In the early

1530s he was an adherent of Cromwell’s, but by 1537 he had fallen out of favour. In that year he suggested himself as a commissary to restore discipline among the clergy of the diocese of Bangor but was refused. In the same year, his kinsman Sir Richard Bulkeley of

Beaumaris recommended him to Cromwell as a chaplain but this again was refused. His affirmation of support for the Six Articles in 1539 and his signature on the declaration of

Convocation annulling Henry’s marriage to Ann of Cleves have been seen in the light of his opposition to Cromwell rather than as indicating theological or political conservatism.

Nevertheless, he was clearly moderate in his religious convictions, and could probably be described as an administrator rather than a spiritual leader, though Nia Powell makes a good case for regarding him as increasingly radical in his later years. His concern for religious education (for the clergy as well as the laity), and the books he left to the Cathedral in

Bangor specifically to establish a library there, suggest reforming humanism; but the books included the Paraphrase on the Epistles of Erasmus, a savage critic of the excesses of late medieval spirituality who nevertheless remained firmly within the Catholic fold. If he was responsible for the inscription on his parents’ monument, it would be in line with his cautious and balanced approach to religious change.

There is certainly no reason to suppose that Caernarfon and Beaumaris were in the forefront of reform in Wales. There is some evidence to suggest early reception of Reformed ideas in

16 Carmarthen, which partly lay behind Bishop Barlow’s wish to remove the see of St David’s there in the 1530s: and it may be worth remembering that Joan Foxwist came from

Carmarthenshire. Trade certainly helped to carry Reformed ideas but from what little we know about the north Wales boroughs it had had little effect there. Nicholas Robinson singled out Beaumaris as an example of traditional funeral practices in 1570: a corpse had been buried there with candles and singing of psalms. Robinson was prepared to accept that this had been done out of ignorance, but he described it as ‘a folishe custome there used’, implying it was normal practice in the area.69

It may be relevant to compare the Beaumaris and Caernarfon evidence with the evidence from Shrewsbury, a larger town but one with a similar mix of English and Welsh cultures.

Elizabeth Murray has made a case for considering Shrewsbury as divided in religion, with co-ordinated public displays of iconoclasm in 1547 but considerable evidence for resistance to change and the preservation of church goods and vestments.70 Much of her dissertation deals with the social soundscape of traditional religious practice and the impact of the

Reformation on bells and bell-ringing. Here again the evidence is ambivalent, with bell- ringing continuing, often on the same occasions but with theoretically different functions.

There are also some telling comparisons between the north Wales boroughs and Bristol – like Shrewsbury a much larger town but with a sizeable community of Welsh extraction.

While Clive Burgess’s studies have amply documented the richness of traditional religion in late medieval Bristol, there is by the middle of the sixteenth century evidence for both early enthusiasm for reform and considerable division in the urban community.71

If we found memorials like these in south-east England, we might well interpret them in the light of Lollard ideas.72 We have absolutely no evidence for Lollardy in north-west Wales – but then we have very little evidence of anything in north-west Wales in the late medieval period. Glanmor Williams has pointed to the possibility that the Lollard Bible had some influence on early Welsh biblical translation, but that is all.73 It may just possibly be significant

17 that one of the early wills cited above which failed to make provision for prayer for the deceased was the will of another Beaumaris Bulkeley.74 Hugh Bulkeley was a younger son of the William Bulkeley who was probably commemorated by the alabaster chest tomb in

Beaumaris. Like the Foxwists, the Bulkeleys came from Cheshire, where the Lollard movement was certainly present. Nevertheless, it would clearly be overstating the case to interpret this one will as evidence for a Lollard nucleus in south-east Anglesey based around the family. Further, if the two monuments are evidence of early unease about the practice of prayer for the dead, their visual imagery suggests that we cannot take them as indicating enthusiasm for wider-ranging reform. The ‘literary turn’ may lead one way but the ‘visual turn’ pulls us back. ‘Parsimonious piety’ would certainly account for the gradual decline in bequests for prayer for the dead, but including a request for prayer on an existing memorial was in fact a cost-effective way of securing intercession.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that we cannot put the people of the sixteenth century in neat little boxes on the basis of their religious orientation. Henry VIII was not alone in enthusiastically promoting some aspects of reform and equally enthusiastically attacking others. David Loades has discussed in some detail the doctrinal ambiguities of the attitude of the Henrician church towards prayers for the dead and the development of a more consistent line during the reign of Edward VI.75 Certainly, after the Henrician changes, absence of bequests for prayer did not necessarily indicate reformed convictions. In a will made in 1541, Hywel ap Thomas ap Gwilym ap Hywel of Llanfable in Momouthshire left four nobles for repairing the churchyard cross and £10 to repair and buy church bells but nothing specifically for prayer for his soul. (He may have thought he had done enough: he was certainly confident enough to request burial in the old Easter sepulchre of the church.)76

While the two monuments discussed above can be read as showing unease about prayer for the dead in an otherwise traditionalist context, it is also possible to demonstrate continuing belief in intercessory prayer in an otherwise Reformed context. Thomas Stacy had Denbigh

18 connections and was inter alia registrar of the diocese of St Asaph. In his will dated 1552 he left to the bishop of Ely a gold ring with ‘a T and a S to be graven in yt, that he maye ware yt on his lytle finger to be a memorye to praye for my soule’.77 The bishop of Ely at that date was Thomas Goodrich, described by Felicity Heal as ‘one of the elder statesmen of the

Protestant movement’, an evangelical reformer with no other evidence of Catholic or traditionalist sympathies.78

Alec Ryrie has suggested that, while the beliefs and practices of late medieval religion may have been both popular and well rooted, the ideas of the reformers, once articulated, had a seductive charm.79 The medieval doctrine of purgatory was psychologically compelling but made huge demands on the living. Thus, the reformers’ argument that purgatory was a sham and a confidence trick offered not just freedom from fear but freedom from financial pressures. Ryrie cites Patrick Collinson’s analogy between the abolition of purgatory and the forcible closure of hospices for the terminally ill.80 However, we could also perhaps consider as an analogy the Thatcherite attacks on the public sector in the UK in the 1980s.

Arguments for ‘care in the community’ sounded convincing but they were also used to reduce the tax bill.

Katherine Olson has made the very illuminating suggestion that we also need to remember the importance of fashion in the endowment and design of memorials, as in other aspects of religious belief and practice.81 There were some extremely high-profile monumental inscriptions in the early sixteenth century which omitted a request for prayers for the dead, notably the monuments which Henry VIII commissioned Pietro Torrigiani to provide for his parents and his grandmother Lady Margaret Beaufort. Barbara Harris has suggested that in this case the absence of requests for prayer might have been because they seemed superfluous: the tombs are set in the magnificent Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey which

Henry VII and his mother established as part of a lavish complex of intercessory foundations.82 Nevertheless, the tombs of Westminster Abbey certainly provided influential

19 models for seventeenth-century monumental design,83 and it is possible that their influence was felt even earlier. Perhaps a little nearer to home was the monument constructed at the

Greyfriars in Carmarthen to Henry VII’s father Edmund Tudor, with its florid Latin epitaph and the traditional request (in English) that God would have mercy on his soul but no explicit request for prayer.84 Browne Willis recorded Latin verses on the tomb of Bishop Edward

Vaughan of St David’s (d 1521/2) which ask God to welcome him into Heaven (adapting the

Vulgate text of Matthew 25:21) but do not explicitly ask God to have mercy on his soul or request prayer for him.85

Peter Sherlock has suggested that the Westminster monuments in particular are an early

(for England) example of the Renaissance cult of fame, Henry VIII’s attempt to emulate

Margaret of Austria’s tomb for her husband Philibert at Brou and the French royal tombs at

St Denis.86 The Welsh examples may also indicate a link between consciously classicising

Latinity and a preference for laudatory inscriptions over requests for prayer. The Bulkeley brass is conventional in appearance though ahead of its time in design, and typical of the products of the London workshops. However, the Foxwist brass is quite idiosyncratic: nothing quite like it survives elsewhere. Sally Badham has suggested that it was probably commissioned from a local craftsman who was more accustomed to working in stone.87 Is it too fanciful to suggest that in their wish for a fashionable monument for their parents the

Foxwists’ children decided on an inscribed brass but lacked the contacts to commission one from London and secured instead this distinctive local product with its conventional iconography and highly unconventional inscription?

It is tempting to see a pattern in these two idiosyncratic brasses, but they are only two examples, albeit from a very small data set. There are however other sources for the cult of fame in commemoration of the dead in late medieval Wales. In contrast with the paucity of wills and tomb carvings, late medieval Wales has a substantial corpus of vernacular poetry.

It has been quarried for evidence of both social perspectives and religious ideas: Ceinwen

20 Thomas’s pioneering work in the 1930s was taken up and developed by Glanmor Williams, notably in The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation.88 More recently, Jane

Cartwright, Christine James and Andrew Breeze have all made use of poetry alongside other literary sources to understand late medieval spirituality in Wales.89 John Gwynfor Jones has also used it to elucidate the Welsh perspective on gentility in the era of the Acts of Union.90

However, its potential is still far from exhausted. Part of the problem is that, while the earlier poetry to the Welsh princes and aristocracy has been edited (most recently under the auspices of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth), much of the later fifteenth-and sixteenth-century poetry is still in manuscript. The decline of the bardic tradition in later medieval Wales has meant that the later poetry is difficult to understand, subordinating sense to the exacting requirements of the complex traditional metres. Study of the later texts has necessarily focused largely on philological issues, and the value of the poetry as evidence for mentalités in the crucial period of the Reformation needs more emphasis.

There is a long-standing convention in traditional Welsh bardic poetry of the marwnad – a title which translates as ‘elegy’ but has little of the elegaic about it.91 The main focus of the marwnad was grief, a grief which the poet was expected to share: there are frequent references to copious tears. It was also customary for the poet to praise the lineage of the deceased and his or her achievements while living. The poets might ask for prayer, but this was rarely if ever the main ostensible purpose of a marwnad. Leadership and valour, hospitality and service to the state were more important. Piety featured in these poems but as an aspect of the behaviour appropriate for the uchelwyr rather than as a plea for forgiveness.92 Guto’r Glyn’s elegy to William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, begins with a reflection on the analogies between the battlefield of Edgecote and the Dance of Death.93

However, the theme of memento mori is not developed: rather, the poet uses imagery reminiscent of earlier epic verse in an outpouring of grief for the loss of a generation of leaders.

21 Many marwnadau concluded with a request for prayer but in most cases this reads as a matter of form and the implication was that the prayer was not really needed. Placing the request for prayer at the end of the marwnad may suggest that the poem is building to it, but could also be read as reducing its visibility and hence its importance. There was a comparable move in wills after about 1540 towards placing bequests for prayer at the end rather than the beginning of the will.

Thus far, much of the poetry reflects the ‘tranquility’ which Rhianydd Biebrach has found in

Welsh approaches to death and commemoration. This is by no means universal: some of the Welsh poetry about the Last Judgement, for example, suggests considerable anxiety.

Lewys Morgannwg wrote vividly of his terror of seeing Satan at the head of the balance when his soul was weighed.94 On the other hand, Guto’r Glyn’s elegy to Gwerful ferch Madog confidently anticipated the Archangel Michael weighing her goodness in the balance.95 His own last poems reflect the same ultimate confidence. While he spoke of his fear of death and judgement, he was assured of God’s sustenance:

F’un ceidwad, fy Nuw cadarn,

Fy nawdd fydd yn nydd y farn,

Fy noddfa, fy niwedd fyd,

Fo nef a’i gartref i gyd.96

Gutyn Owain’s elegy to Guto’r Glyn praised his valour as a soldier as well as his skill as a poet and confidently anticipated his salvation:

A’r ail oes i gael yr aeth

Gwledd Dduw, a’i arglwyddïaeth.97

There is little overlap between the surviving evidence for monumental inscriptions, wills and elegies. This should not surprise us: as indicated above, we have only a few surviving inscriptions from the end of the medieval period. Apart from a few wills in estate collections,

22 we have only the wills proved at Canterbury, and these were almost by definition the wills of the more anglicized of the Welsh élite. However, the strategies of commemoration – bequests, poetry and tomb carving – were not necessarily exclusive, and could differ in emphasis. Sir William Mathew of Radur (Glam), for example, who died in 1528, was praised for his valour and hospitality in a poem by Lewys Morgannwg,98 but his tomb in Llandaff

Cathedral still made the traditional (if formulaic) request for prayer for his soul. William

Herbert, earl of Pembroke, left a will making several requests for prayer.99 It is a particularly poignant document, confused and rambling, clearly made in haste and under terrifying circumstances. He had been captured at the battle of Edgecote and was executed the following day. As well as Guto’r Glyn’s marwnad, elegies to him survive from Huw Cae

Llwyd,100 Hywel Swrdwal101 and Llywelyn ap Morgan.102 All these concentrate on his valour and lineage, and on the treachery of the English. Hywel Swrdwal mentions the need for prayer and concludes with the hope that there will be a feast in Heaven for Herbert and those who died with him (which echoes Herbert’s own bequest for the souls of all who died in the battle). However, the main focus of the poem is on Herbert’s reputation in this world.

This should not be seen as conflicting with the evidence of his will, but it is a clear shift of emphasis.

Traditional Welsh praise poetry is thus surprisingly close in tone to the ‘new’ Renaissance cult of fame, which, Peter Sherlock suggests, ‘filled the void left by the Reformation’s removal of intercession for the dead’.103 . Monuments which praised the lineage and reputation of the deceased, whether for piety and charity, military valour, learning or other service to community and state, can be found before the Reformation but clearly became much more common from the later sixteenth century. But in Wales there was already a culture of praising the dead for lineage, piety and charity, military valour and service to the state, and this may have taken precedence over imploring passers-by to pray for forgiveness for their sins

23 None of this really engages with serious debate over the theology of Purgatory and intercessory prayer, still less with other aspects of reform. That may in itself be part of the point. While the Bulkeley and Foxwist monuments seem deliberately to eschew requests for prayer, they are otherwise entirely conventional. The poets who wrote in lavish praise of their dead patrons also wrote poems to the saints and their shrines. Lewys Morgannwg went on in later life to write in praise of Henry VIII’s reforms, but at the time when he wrote his marwnad to Sir William Mathew he was also begging the statue of the Virgin Mary at Penrhys to help him to salvation. The worst insult Hywel Swrdwal could hurl at the troops of Warwick and

Clarence was that they were Lollards.104 It is perhaps precisely because they came from within an otherwise unimpeachably Catholic tradition that these expressions of new thinking could gain traction. As Ryrie points out, one did not become a committed evangelical by accepting one aspect of their ideas. However, by accepting one aspect of their thinking, ‘one aligned one’s life with those who were preaching in defence of what you had done, and against those who had denounced it’.105 As with the move towards extramural burial in some

German cities, the Welsh preference for praising the dead rather than (or in addition to) begging for prayer for their souls may have contributed to a mentalité in which a challenge to traditional Catholic thought in other areas was at least possible. While it is surprising to find that preference reflected in the very traditional form of bardic poetry, and in memorials in two little trading boroughs in north Wales, it may help us as we struggle to understand the transformation of Wales from traditional Catholicism to Protestant nonconformity. In the broader context, it is salutary to remember that patterns of belief and social identity on the

Atlantic periphery can in some contexts anticipate and may even help to explain developments in the European cultural heartland.

24 1 This article is based on a paper given to the ‘Insular Christianity, 1530-1750’ symposium in

March 2010, co-hosted by Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, Dublin, and sponsored by the Irish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I am grateful to Dr Robert

Armstrong and Dr Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, convenors of the symposium, and to the other participants for a very fruitful discussion. I am also grateful to the British Academy for a Small

Research Gant which has enabled me to work on the early Welsh wills in the National Archive.

2 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 8.

3 ‘The legacy of late medieval religion in sixteenth-century Champagne’ in C. Trinkaus with H. O.

Oberman (eds), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden: Brill,

1974), pp.141-76, quotation on p. 149.

5 For an overview see Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2003), p. 103.

6 Andrew Martindale, ‘Patrons and minders: the intrusion of the secular into sacred spaces in the late Middle Ages’ in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts: Studies in Church History 28

(Oxford: Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1995), pp. 143-78

7 Claire Bartram, ‘ “Some Tomb for a Remembrance”: representations of piety in post-Reformation gentry funeral monuments’ in Robert Lutton and Elizabeth Salter (eds), Pieties in Transition: religious practices and experiences, c 1400-1600 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 129-43; cf Peter

Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 4,

104-27.

8 On the complex issue of indulgences for prayer see R. N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late

Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 408-13. 9 Richard Rex, ‘Monumental brasses and the Reformation’, Transactions of the Monumental

Brass Society 14 (1990), 376-94. Other studies include Jonathan Finch, ‘A reformation of meaning: commemoration and remembering the dead in the parish church, 1450-1640’ in David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (eds), The Archaeology of Reformation, 1480-1580 (Leeds: Maney, 2003), pp. 437-49, and, for Danish comparanda, Jörn Staecker, ‘A Protestant habitus: 16th century Danish graveslabs as an expression of changes in belief’ in idem pp. 414-36.

10 Craig M. Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: death and ritual in early modern Germany,

1450-1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

11 Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500-1670 (Cambridge

University Press, 2002), p. 82.

12 for a discussion of variations on an intensely local scale, see Robert Lutton, ‘Geographies and materialities of piety: reconciling competing narratives of religious change in pre-Reformation and

Reformation England’ in Lutton and Salter (eds), Pieties in Transition.

13 see, for example, Penny Roberts, ‘Contesting sacred space: burial disputes in sixteenth- century France’ and Vanessa Harding, ‘Whose Body? A study of attitudes towards the dead body in early modern Paris’, both in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead: death and remembrance in late medieval and early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000), pp. 131-48 and 170-87.

14 Andrew Spicer, ‘ “Defyle not Christ’s kirk with your carrion”: burial and the development of burial aisles in post-Reformation Scotland’, in Gordon and Marshall, The Place of the Dead.

15 The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 504-23

16 Robert Whiting, ‘Local Responses to the Henrician Reformation’ in Diarmaid MacCulloch (ed.),

The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 203-26, esp. pp. 213-5; idem, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English

Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1989), graphs on pp. 276-80, and Local Responses to the English Reformation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 72-7.

17 Barbara J. Harris, ‘The fabric of piety: aristocratic women and care of the dead, 1450-1550’,

Journal of British Studies 48 (2) (April 2009), 308-35.

18 Monuments and Memory, 106-7.

19 Monuments and Memory, 103-4.

20 Virginia R. Bainbridge, ‘The medieval way of death: commemoration and the afterlife in pre-

Reformation Cambridgeshire’, Prophecy and Eschatology: Studies in Church History 10 (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1994), pp. 183-204, esp. pp. 201-4.

21 Christopher Daniel, Death and Burial in Medieval England (London and New York: Routledge,

1997), p. 196.

22 in Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 167-73.

23 Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London. For burial in church, and in specific locations in church, see esp. pp. 55, 130-2; for the endowment of funeral doles and distribution of charity at funeral sermons, pp. 170-1. See also idem, ‘Choices and changes: death, burial and the

English Reformation’ in Gaimster and Gilchrist (eds), The Archaeology of Reformation, pp. 386-98.

24 [London]: T[he] N[ational] A[rchive] SP12/44 no. 27, edited in David Mathew, ‘Some

Elizabethan Documents’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 6 (1933), 77-8.

25 See, for example, Ciarán Brady, ‘Comparable histories?: Tudor reform in Wales and Ireland’ in

S. G. Ellis and S. Barber (eds), Conquest and Union: fashioning a British state, 1485-1725 (London and New York: Longman, 1995), pp. 64-86; Brendan Bradshaw, ‘The Tudor Reformation in Wales and Ireland: the origins of the British Problem’ in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The

British Problem c 1534-1707 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 39-65; idem, ‘The English

Reformation and identity formation in Wales and Ireland’ in Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts

(eds), British consciousness and identity: the making of Britain, 1533-1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998), pp. 43-111.

26 See, for example, K. Olson, Religion, Reformation, and Society in Wales and the

Marches,c.1400-1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr Olson for extensive discussion of her work in advance of publication.

27 Philip Jenkins, ‘The Anglican church and the unity of Britain: the Welsh experience, 1560-1714’ in Ellis and Barber, Conquest and Union , pp. 115-38.

28 Bradshaw, ‘Tudor Reformation in Wales and Ireland’, pp. 79-81.

29 Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland, p. 129.

30 For a general discussion of the evidence see Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church from

Conquest to Reformation (2nd edn, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976), pp. 290-7.

31 TNA E178/3503.

32 The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation, p. 293

33 Receivers’ accounts in TNA SC6; records of concealment commissions in TNA E178. For discussion of concealment-hunting, described by Joel Hurstfield in The Queen’s Wards, London:

Longman, 1958, 34, as ‘one of the great outdoor sports of Elizabethan England’, see Christopher

Kitchin, ‘The quest for concealed land in the reign of Elizabeth I’, Transactions of the Royal

Historical Society 5th ser. xxiv (1974), 63-78. 34 G. D. Owen, ‘Agrarian Conditions and Changes in West Wales during the Sixteenth Century’

(unpublished PhD thesis University of Wales, 1935), p. 287, cited in Williams, Welsh Church, p.

35 G. H. Cook, Medieval Chantries and Chantry Chapels (London: Phoenix House, 1963), p. 76.

36 see, for example, Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath (New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 2001); Clive Burgess, The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints, Bristol (3 vols,

Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1995-2004).

37 See for example, the will of Ieuan Tanner of Redwick (Mon), husbandman, 15 Feb. 1544, TNA

PROB 11/30/55: though as he left a substantial landed estate and gave £5 for a priest to pray for his soul for a year, 20s to his parish church to buy banners and 20s to repair the causeway to the church, he was quite comfortably off for a husbandman.

38 Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland, p. 129.

39 Rhianydd Biebrach, 'Monuments and Commemoration in the Diocese of Llandaff c.1200- c.1540’ (unpublished Ph D thesis, Swansea University, 2010, 217-87.

40 Robert Lutton, Lollardy and orthodox religion in pre-Reformation England: reconstructing piety,

Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006, esp pp 95-99, 130-48. I am grateful to Alexandra Walsham for this reference and for a very useful discussion of Lutton’s findings.

41 TNA PROB 11/23/72, 113

42 TNA PROB 11/15 /255; PROB 11/19 /118.

43 see for example M. L. Zell, 'The use of religious preambles as a measure of religious belief in the sixteenth century', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 50 (1977), 246-249; P. Vines,

‘ “In the name of God, Amen”: seeking the testator’s authentic voice in research using wills’, Law Text Culture 6(1) (2002), accessed online at http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? article=1085&context=ltc (3 January 2010)

44 TNA PROB 11/14/86

45 Stripping of the Altars, pp. 504-5.

46 TNA PROB 11/35/145.

47 ‘Pray for the well-being of Charles Herbert, esq., and his wife Elizabeth, who caused this window to be glazed’. J. A. Bradney, A History of Monmouthshire... vol 1 part i: The Hundred of

Skenfrith (London: Mitchell Hughes and Clark, 1907), p. 41, citing an unspecified edition of Charles

Heath’s Historical and descriptive accounts of the ancient and present state of Ragland Castle.

Part of the window (though apparently not the inscription) could still be seen at the beginning of the twentieth century but Bradney recorded its removal the year before he wrote up the chapter on

Wonastow.

48 The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 521-2. Cf Caroline Litzenberger, The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540-1580 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 edn), pp.

94-5, on diminution of bequests for prayer in Mary’s reign.

49 Will made 14 July 1554. TNA PROB 11/37/48.

50 TNA PROB 11/37/224.

51 TNA PROB 11/39/333.

52 TNA PROB 11/42A/295.

53 See, for example, Alice Morgan, a widow from Caerleon (Mon) and Morus ap Thomas, parson of Llansannan (Denb), both 1566: TNA PROB 11/48/423; PROB 11/48/534 54 PROB 11/57/252

55 W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration... vol III: Visitation Articles and

Injunctions, 1583-1603 (London and Milwaukee: A. R. Mowbray for the Alcuin Club, 1924), p. 149.

Middleton’s injunctions went some way beyond official policy: he disapproved of the Prayer Book name for the service of churching of women and he ordered that stained glass windows as well as paintings and carvings in churches be defaced. Idem, p. 150.

56 Trefor Owen, Welsh Folk Customs (Llandysul: Gomer, 1994 edn), pp. 185-6.

57 TNA PROB 11/35/133

58 Colin Gresham, Medieval Stone Carving in North Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,

1968): see pp. 9-10 for the decline after 1400; John Rodger, ‘The stone crosses of South Wales and Monmouthshire’, Transactions of the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society 44 (1911), 24-64.

59 This figure includes flat incised slabs as well as effigies and non-effigial tomb chests. I am at present compiling a database of medieval (c 1100-c 1540) tomb carvings in Wales on which these figures are based.

60 For a discussion of this see Phillip Lindley, Tomb Destruction and Scholarship (Donington:

Shaun Tyas, 2007), p. 21.

61 See, for example, the monuments of Sir Richard Herbert of Coldbrook at Abergavenny (Mon) and John Butler at St Brides Major (Glam).

62 J. M. Lewis, Welsh Monumental Brasses (Cardiff: National Museum of Wales, 1974), p.9.

63 For a more detailed discussion of this monument and its iconography see M. Gray, ‘The brass of Richard and Joan Foxwist at Llanbeblig: death, commemoration and the Reformation in Wales’,

Transactions of the Caernarfonshire Historical Society 72 (2011), 54-68. 64 For a more detailed discussion of this monument and its iconography see M. Gray, ‘The brass of Richard and Elizabeth Bulkeley in Beaumaris: some new light on the Reformation in Wales?’,

Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society 2010, 9-25.

65 Jonathan Finch, ‘Sacred and secular spheres: commemoration and the “practice of privacy” in

Reformation England’ in Carola Jäggi and Jörn Staecker (eds), Archäologie der Reformation :

Studien zu den Auswirkungen des Konfessionswechsels auf die materielle Kultur (Berlin; New

York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 195-210, quote on p. 200.

66 On Bulkeley, see Nia Powell, ‘Arthur Bulkeley, Reformation Bishop of Bangor, 1541-1552/3’,

Journal of Welsh Religious History n.s. 3 (2003), 23-52, summarized in the same author’s article on Bulkeley in the ODNB.

67 S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, c 1484-1545 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

68 discussed in detail in Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, pp. 49-92.

69 TNA SP12/69/14, 53, quoted in Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 128.

70 ‘The implementation and impact of the Reformation in Shropshire, 1545-1575’ (unpublished

MA dissertation, Melbourne College of Divinity, October 2007). Cf also Barbara Coulton,

‘Implementing the Reformation in the Urban Community: Coventry and Shrewsbury 1559-1603’,

Midland History 25 (2000), 43-60.

71 see, e.g., Burgess, The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints, Bristol, passim; Whiting, Local

Responses to the English Reformation, pp. 65, 108, 111-12, 120-3, 158-9 and references therein.

72 A suggestion made by Prof. Tony Carr in discussion following the delivery of an earlier version of this paper to the Anglesey Antiquarian Society in November 2009. 73 Wales and the Reformation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), p. 29, referencing I.

Thomas, Yr Hen Destament Cymraeg, 1551-1620 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1988), p. 24.

74 TNA PROB 11/15/ 255

75 D. Loades, ‘Rites of passage and the prayer books of 1549 and 1552’ in M. Wilks (ed.),

Prophecy and Eschatology (Studies in Church History Subsidia 10, Oxford: Blackwell for the

Ecclesiastical History Society, 1994), pp. 205-15.

76 Bradney, A History of Monmouthshire ... vol 1 part ii, The Hundred of Abergavenny (London:

Mitchell Hughes and Clarke, 1906), p. 293.

77 D. R. Thomas, ‘Extracts from Old Wills relating to Wales’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 4th ser. 13

(1882), 120.

78 ODNB

79 ‘Counting sheep, counting shepherds: the problem of allegiance in the English Reformation’ in

Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 84-110.

80 in ‘England’ in The Reformation in National Context, ed. Robert Scribner, Roy Porter and

Mikulás Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 88.

81 In discussion at the same meeting of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society in November 2009.

82 Harris, ‘The Fabric of Piety’, p. 322.

83 Adam White, ‘Westminster Abbey in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Powerhouse of Ideas’,

Church Monuments 4 (1989), 16-53. 84 W. B. Jones and E. A. Freeman, The History and Antiquities of St David’s (London: J.H. & J.

Parker, J. Russell Smith, & J. Petheram, 1856; reprinted Haverfordwest: Pembrokeshire County

Council, 1998), p. 112, gives the inscription as recorded by Browne Willis, Survey of the Cathedral

Church of St David’s (London: printed for R. Gosling, 1717), pp. 10-11. The present monument is a later restoration.

85 Willis, St David’s, pp. 19-20; Jones and Freeman, St David’s, p. 124.

86 Monuments and Memory, p. 130.

87 pers. comm.

88 Ceinwen Thomas, 'The social and religious history of Wales from 1350 to 1550, as reflected in the literature of the period' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, National University of Ireland, Dublin, 1940);

Williams, Welsh Church, pp. 416-30, 461-522.

89 See, for example, Jane Cartwright, Feminine sanctity and spirituality in medieval Wales (Cardiff:

University of Wales Press, 2008); Christine James, ‘Penrhys: mecca’r genedl’ in Hywel Teifi

Edwards (ed.), Cwm Rhondda (Llandysul: Gomer, 1993), pp. 4-44; idem, ‘ “Y Grog Ddoluriog

Lowrym”: Golwg ar y Canu i Grog Llangynwyd’, Llên Cymru, 29 (2006), 64-109. Andrew Breeze,

The Mary of the Celts (Leominster: Gracewing, 2008) lists most of his substantial output of journal articles. See also the present author’s Images of Piety (Oxford: BAR Archaeopress, 2000).

90 His extensive publications are summed up in Concepts of order and gentility in Wales 1540-

1640,( Llandysul : Gomer, 1992) and The Welsh gentry 1536-1640 : images of status, honour and authority (Cardiff : University of Wales Press, 1998).

91 I owe many of the points in the following paragraphs to Dr Brian Lewis of the Centre for

Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies of the University of Wales, to whom I am very grateful for discussion and advice. See his ‘Opening Up the Archives of Welsh Poetry: Welshness and Englishness during the Hundred Years’ War’, conference paper presented at the 'Approaching the

Middle Ages: Wales and Brittany' One-day Conference at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and

Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, 24 January 2009, and available online at http://www.wales.ac.uk/Resources/Documents/Research/OpeningArchivesWelshPoetry.pd f (consulted 25.3.11). I am also grateful to Rhianydd Biebrach for sharing her research and to

Gerald Morgan of Aberystwyth University.

92 On poetry of a slightly later period as evidence for concepts of gentility see the numerous works by J. Gwynfor Jones, especially Concepts of order and gentility, The Welsh gentry 1536-1640, and

‘Welsh gentlewomen : piety and Christian conduct c.1560-1730’ , Journal of Welsh Religious

History, 7 (1999).

93 Gwaith Guto’r Glyn, ed. J. Ll. Williams and I. Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,

1961), no. 53 (pp. 142-4).

94 see, for example, A. Cynfael Lake, ed., Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg. 2 vols. (Aberystwyth: Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 1998), ii, no 103 (p. 507).

95 Gwaith Guto’r Glyn 68 (p. 182)

96 Gwaith Guto’r Glyn 119 (p. 307)

97 Gwaith Guto’r Glyn 124 (p. 317); E. A. Rees, A Life of Guto’r Glyn (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2008), pp.

245-50.

98 Lake, ed., Gwaith Lewys Morgannwg 1, 38-42 (no. 4)

99 TNA PROB 11/5/305 100 Leslie Harries, ed., Gwaith Huw Cae Llwyd ac eraill (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1953),

5 ; [Aberystwyth]: N[ational] L[ibrary of] W[ales], Peniarth MS 67, 4.

101 Dylan Foster Evans (ed.), Gwaith Hywel Swrdwal a’i deulu (Aberystwyth: Canolfan

Uwchefrydiau Cymreig a Cheltaidd, 2000), p. 7.

102 NLW Peniarth MS 67, 4.

103 Sherlock, Monuments and Memory, p. 132.

104 Gwaith Hywel Swrdwal 7 (p. 36).

105 Ryrie, ‘Counting sheep’, p. 103.