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Abstract
Through analysis of written sources, architectural evidence, excavation reports and antiquarian records this paper argues that charnelling of human skeletal remains was more common in medieval England than has hitherto been fully recognized. It became increasingly widespread following formalization of belief in Purgatory in the late 13th century, and charnel houses can be found both at the better-documented greater churches and at parish churches, for which churchwardens’ accounts are important sources. Charnel houses are mainly freestanding buildings in churchyards, or crypts within the body of the church, and both forms are often semi-subterranean, with the carefully maintained charnel visible through windows high in the charnel house walls. There was typically a chapel located above the charnel room, in which prayers for the dead were offered, similar to chantries. The paper presents the first detailed exploration of the potential liturgical contexts for charnelling. It is argued that the most likely form of rite to accompany the translation and deposition of charnel would have comprised a re-enactment of the Office of the Dead followed by an adapted version of the burial service, with possible secondary uses of the charnel house in the days leading up to Easter, the most solemn part of the Christian year.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to Philip Lankester, Nicola Lowe and Chris Guy for discussion of charnel houses, to Allan Adams for his drawing of the charnel house at Holy Trinity, Rothwell, and Ian Atkins for taking the photograph of the crypt at St Mary’s, Beverley. We would like to thank the Rothwell Heritage Centre for permission to reproduce a photograph of the Rothwell charnel. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor for very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. Fieldwork at Rothwell and the Ph.D. thesis of Jenny Crangle were both funded by the University of Sheffield.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Reviewed in J. Crangle, ‘A study of post-depositional funerary practices in medieval England’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield, 2016), ch. 5.
2 Ibid., 159–60; E. Craig-Atkins, J. Crangle, P. S. Barnwell and D. M. Hadley, ‘Charnel practices in medieval England: new perspectives’, Mortality, 24/ii (2019), 145–66.
3 A. Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1257–1301 (Woodbridge 2015), 221–23.
4 R. Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral Close. The evolution of the English cathedral landscape (Woodbridge 2005), 208.
5 V. Sekules, ‘Bishop John Salmon’s Architectural Patronage at Norwich Cathedral’, in Norwich: Medieval and Early Modern Art, Architecture and Archaeology, ed. T. A. Heslop and H. E. Lunnon, BAA Trans. xxxviii (Leeds 2015), 181–200, at 191.
6 N. Orme, ‘The charnel chapel of Exeter Cathedral’, in Medieval Art and Architecture at Exeter Cathedral, ed. F. Kelly, BAA Trans. xi (Leeds 1991), 162–71, at 165.
7 M. H. Rousseau, Saving the Souls of Medieval London: Perpetual chantries at St Paul’s Cathedral, c.1200–1548 (London 2011), 75.
8 C. Thomas, B. Sloane and C. Phillpots, Excavations at the priory and hospital of St Mary Spital, London (London 1997), 68.
9 D. Sherlock and H. Woods, St. Augustine’s Abbey: Report on Excavations, 1960–78 (Maidstone 1988), 9; G. May, A Descriptive History of the Town of Evesham (London 1845), 62; C. Bond, ‘Interpretation of the Chapel of St John and Charnel House, Excavated at the Saturday Marketplace, King’s Lynn’ (unpublished report, King’s Lynn 2015); Registrum Malmesburiense, ed. by J. S. Brewer and C. Trice, Rerum Britannicarum medii æevi scriptores, 72, 2 vols (London 1879–80), II, 124–28, 215–17; R. Willis, ‘The architectural history of the Cathedral and monastery at Worcester’, Archaeol. J., 20 (1863), 83–133, 254–72, 301–18, at 259; W. Page, ‘The borough of Scarborough’, A History of the County of York North Riding: Volume 2 (London 1923), 538–60.
10 J. Stow, Survey of London, ed. H. B. Wheatley (London 1956), 294–95; Rousseau, St Paul’s, 75–76.
11 Gransden, Bury St Edmunds, 223–24.
12 Sekules, ‘Architectural Patronage’, 189–90; Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral, 102; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain, ed. W. H. Bliss, 17 vols (London and Dublin 1893), II, 142, for the quotation.
13 R. Horrox, ‘The Later Medieval Minster’, in Beverley Minster: an illustrated history, ed. R. Horrox (Beverley 2000), 37–50, at 46.
14 Testamenta Eboracensia: A Selection of Wills from the Registry at York, ed. A Raine and J. W. Clay, Publications of the Surtees Society, 4, 30, 45, 53, 79, 106 (Durham 1836–1902), III, 19; A. P. Baggs, L. M. Brown, G. C. F. Forster, I. Hall, R. E. Horrox, G. H. R. Kent and D. Neave, ‘Medieval Beverley: The Guilds and their plays’, in A History of the County of York East Riding: Volume 6, the Borough and Liberties of Beverley, ed. K. J. Allison (London 1989), 42–49, at 45.
15 W. Page, ‘Colleges: Holy Trinity or Thoresby, Lynn’, in A History of the County of Norfolk: Volume 2, ed. W. Page (London 1906), 454–55, at 454.
16 Orme, ‘Exeter Cathedral’, 166; Rousseau, St Paul’s, 76; Stow, Survey of London, 295.
17 Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral, 208; Sekules, ‘Architectural Patronage’, 190–91.
18 Gransden, Bury St Edmunds, 222–23; R. Lane, ‘Early Fabric in Historic Towns: Ely, Cambridgeshire’, Vernacular Architecture, 48 (2020), 1–22, at 8.
19 Rousseau, St Paul’s, 75.
20 The Chartulary of St John of Pontefract, ed. R. Holmes, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 25, 30, 2 vols (Leeds 1899–1902), I, 36–37.
21 C. G. Henderson and P. T. Bidwell, ‘The Saxon minster at Exeter’, in The early Church in Western Britain and Ireland: Studies presented to C. A. Ralegh Radford, ed. S. Pearce (Oxford 1976), 145–75, at 169.
22 V. Green, The History and Antiquities of the City and Suburbs of Worcester, 2 vols (London 1796), I, 54–56; Willis, ‘Worcester’, 258–59; Chris Guy pers. comm. 15 December 2016.
23 C. Thomas, Life and Death in London’s East End (London 2004), 34–35.
24 Bond, ‘Charnel House’.
25 T. Gnanaratnam, The excavation of St Peter’s church and graveyard, Vaughan Way, Leicester 2004–2006, Vol. 1, Report No. 156 (Leicester 2009), 78, 87.
26 P. Beacham and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Cornwall (New Haven, CT, and London 2014), 110–11; D. Gilbert, The Parochial History of Cornwall (London 1838), 77.
27 B. Cherry and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Devon, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth 1989), 151; J. Cox, St Anne’s Chapel, Paternoster Row, Barnstaple, Devon. A conservation management plan for Barnstaple town council (Exeter 2001), 15, 36–37; Crangle, ‘Post-depositional’, 173.
28 C. Johnston, ‘St Anne’s Chapel—The Grammar School’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 2, pt I (1867), 4–23, at 4.
29 M. Bridge, St Anne’s Chapel, Paternoster Row, Barnstaple, Devon. Tree-ring analysis of oak timbers from the roof and crypt (London 2012).
30 N. Ohler, Sterben und Tod im Mittelalter (Düsseldorf 2003), 149.
31 RCHME, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in Herefordshire, 3 vols (London 1931–34), I, 103; N. Lowe, ‘New findings at the parish church of St Mary, Witney (Oxfordshire). The fourteenth-century north transept and monument’, Church Monuments, 34 (2019), 77–104, at 89.
32 A. P. Baggs, L. M. Brown, G. C. F. Forster, I. Hall, R. E. Horrox, G. H. R. Kent and D. Neave, ‘Religious Life’, in Borough and Liberties of Beverley, ed. Allison, 231–50 at 237.
33 H. Clarke, S. Pearson, M. Mate and K. Parfitt, Sandwich. The ‘completest medieval town in England’. A study of the town and port from its origins to 1600 (Oxford 2010), 84–86.
34 Craig-Atkins et al., ‘Charnel practices’.
35 Ibid., 158–59.
36 T. Tatton-Brown, ‘A new survey of the fabric of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Bosham, West Sussex’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 144 (2006), 129–54, at 136; E. Williamson, T. Hudson, J. Musson and I. Nairn, The Buildings of England. Sussex: West (New Haven, CT, and London 2019), 169.
37 Lowe, ‘St Mary, Witney’, 83–86.
38 A. Suckling, History and Antiquities of the County of Suffolk, 2 vols (London 1846), I, 18.
39 B. Street, Historical Notes on Grantham and Grantham Church (Grantham 1857), 49; J. McNeill, ‘The Church of St Wulfram 3: Architecture, Patronage and Context’, in The Making of Grantham: The Medieval Town, ed. D. Start and D. Stocker (Heckington 2011), 95–108, at 105.
40 N. Orme and J. Cannon, Westbury-on-Trym: Monastery, Minster and College (Bristol 2011), 141–42.
41 Anon., ‘Westbury-on Trym’, The Church Builder, 29–32 (1868), 16–22.
42 Orme and Cannon, Westbury-on-Trym, 115, n. 22.
43 F. Blomefield, An Essay Towards A Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 11 vols (London 1805–10), IV, 273.
44 K. Boivin, ‘The Chancel Passageways of Norwich’, in Norwich, ed. Heslop and Lunnon, 307–23, at 316.
45 M. Bloxam, On the charnel vault at Rothwell Northamptonshire and on other charnel vaults elsewhere (Northampton 1855), 3–4.
46 ‘E. Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 8 vols (Canterbury 1797–99)’. (Leave: VIII, 185.)
47 C. Palmer, The History of the Town and Castle of Tamworth: In the Counties of Stafford and Warwick (London 1845), 252.
48 T. Farrow, ‘Dry bones live: a brief history of charnel houses, 1300–1900AD’, Epoch Magazine 1 (2020) https://www.epoch-magazine.com/farrowdryboneslive.
49 Hasted, Kent, VIII, 251–52.
50 Ibid., 185.
51 Hasted, Kent, VI, 31; for other examples, see Crangle, ‘Post-depositional’, 159–241.
52 Stow, Survey of London, 184.
53 E. MacKenzie, Historical Account of Newcastle-upon-Tyne: including the Borough of Gateshead (Newcastle upon Tyne 1827), 248.
54 F. Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History (New York 1865), 174–78.
55 Stow, Survey of London, 241.
56 For example, at St Oswald’s, Malpas (Cheshire), the crypt under the chancel appears always to have been a treasury: R. Richards, Old Cheshire Churches, with a Supplementary Survey Relating to the Lesser Old Chapels of Cheshire, rev. edn (Didsbury 1973), 221.
57 For example, the charnel deposit excavated at St Bride’s, London, in a 17th-century brick-built crypt is clearly not in a medieval context; its origins are unknown, but it is notably adjacent to a medieval crypt: G. Milne, St. Bride’s Church London. Archaeological Research 1952–60 and 1992–5 (London 1997), 107; Crangle, ‘Post-depositional’, 231–39.
58 Henderson and Bidwell, ‘Exeter’, 169.
59 Thomas, Life and Death, 34–35.
60 Gnanaratnam, St Peter’s Church, 78.
61 Green, Worcester, 58.
62 Craig-Atkins et al., ‘Charnel practices’, 155–58.
63 V. Harding, ‘Burial choice and burial location in later medieval London’, in Death in Towns: Urban responses to the dying and the dead, 100–1600, ed. S. Bassett (Leicester 1992), 119–35, at 128–29; J. C. Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts from the Fourteenth Century to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (London 1913), 169.
64 C. Burgess, The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints’ Church, Bristol. The Churchwardens’ Accounts, Bristol Record Society Publications, 46 & 53, 2 vols (Bristol 2000), II, 142, 340.
65 T. B. Dilks, R. W. Dunning and T. D. Tremlett, Bridgwater Borough Archives, 5 vols (Taunton 1933–71), II, 187–92, 228–32; V, 46–54, 59–63, 67–73.
66 For the full complexity of the debate over Purgatory, see J. Le Goff, The birth of Purgatory (London 1984); S. Tugwell, Human immortality and the redemption of death (London 1990), esp. 110–55.
67 See Peter Lombard, Distinctions, iv, 12.5, translated in E. F. Rogers, Peter Lombard and the Sacramental System (New York, 1917), 144–46. The nature of the medieval and Tridentine Mass is discussed in J. A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, 2 vols (Notre Dame, IN 2012), I, 175–95.
68 For a fuller discussion, see Craig-Atkins et al., ‘Charnel practices’, 159–62.
69 N. Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages: History and Representation (Oxford, 2009), 114–17.
70 K. Boivin, ‘Two-story Charnel-House Chapels and the Space of Death in the Medieval City’, in Picturing Death, 1200–1600, ed. S. Perkinson and N. Turel (Leiden 2020), 79–103, at 101; see also Lowe, ‘St Mary, Witney’, 88.
71 Crangle, ‘Post-depositional’, 159–241.
72 Craig-Atkins et al., ‘Charnel practices’, 161.
73 T. More, The Last Things, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, K. G. Rodgers and C. H. Miller, 15 vols (New Haven, CT, 1997), I, 139.
74 For Whithorn, see P. Hill, Whithorn and St Ninian: The Excavation of a Monastic Town, 1984–91 (Stroud 1999), 253.
75 London, British Library, MS Harley 6466. There is an account of the history and discovery of the manuscript in A. Buckle, ‘“Entumbed Right Princely”: The Re-Interment of Richard Beauchamp, Early of Warwick, and a Lost Rite’, in The Yorkist Age, ed. H. Kleineke and C. Steer, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 23 (Donnington 2013), 399–415. The Sarum rite is published in Manuale ad usum percelebris ecclesie Sarisburiensis, ed. A. J. Collins, Henry Bradshaw Society, 91 (London 1958), 152–62.
76 Missale ad usum insignis et preclarae ecclesiae Sarum, ed. F. H. Dickinson (Burntisland 1863), col. 303.
77 For examples of reservation in the sacristy, see E. Martène, De antiquiis ecclesiae ritibus, 2nd edn, 4 vols (Antwerp 1726–8), III, cols 372, 375, 379 (twice), 382 (twice), 389, 390, 392, 394. The confusion was comprehensively formally discussed by the Church in 1896: see Decreta authentica Congregationis sacrarum rituum ex actis eiusdem collecta, 6 vols in 7 (Rome 1898–1912), IV, 419–29. See also N. C. Brookes, The Sepulchre of Christ in Art and Liturgy, with special reference to the Liturgical Drama, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, 7, pt 2 (Urbana, IL 1921), 187–90.
78 Processionale ad usum insignis ac praeclarae ecclesiae Sarum, ed. W. G. Henderson (Leeds 1883), 73.
79 There is a good short introduction, with a gathering together of almost all the known evidence, in P. Sheingorn, The Easter Sepulchre in England, Early Drama, Art and Music Reference Series 5 (Kalamazoo 1987).
80 K. Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford 1933), I, 157 and 280–81.
81 Processionale ad usum Sarum, 91–94. See Breviarium ad usum insignis ecclesiae Sarum, ed. F. Proctor and C. Wordsworth, 3 vols (Cambridge 1878–88), cols dcccvii–dcccix.
82 R. Stapper, ‘Mittelaterliche Ostergebräuche der Siftsherren zu Kleve’, Römische Quartalscrift für christliche Altertumskund und für Kirchengeschichte, 35 (1927), 171–82, esp. 175 and 180–81.
83 For examples of demolition, see Sherlock and Wood, St. Augustine’s Abbey, 10; D. J. Lamburn, ‘The Minster and the Reformation’, in Beverley Minster, ed. Horrox, 50–64, at 56; Gnanaratnam, St Peter’s church, 78; Thomas, Life and Death, 34–35; Crangle, ‘Post-depositional’, 228–39.
84 Gilchrist, Norwich Cathedral, 208; Green, Worcester, 56; Gransden, Bury St Edmunds, 222; E. M. Beloe, Our Churches: King’s Lynn, Norfolk (Cambridge 1900), 37–40; Bond, ‘Charnel House’, 7; Cox, Barnstaple, 3; Gilbert Cornwall, 76.
85 Stow, Survey of London, 295.
86 G. Johnston, ‘Excavation of an Ossuary at Fotheringhay Church, Northamptonshire’, Northamptonshire Archaeology, 29 (2000–01), 161–92.
87 Harding, ‘Burial choice’, 128, 134, n. 53.
88 R. Gilchrist and B. Sloane, Requiem. The medieval monastic cemetery in Britain (London 2005), 195.