Charnel-associated burial and monuments in late medieval England: Henry Barton’s effigy and its afterlife at Old St Paul’s Cathedral

Abstract

In late medieval England, high-status individuals sometimes requested burial and/or memorialisation in association with charnel chapels, which primarily housed the exhumed and redeposited remains of the anonymous collective dead. The monument of Henry Barton (d.1435) in the charnel chapel at Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London, was one such memorial which held distinctive secular as well as religious resonance in context. In order to fully situate its significance, 40 examples of English cathedral, monastic, and parish charnel-associated burials and/or monuments will be identified and explored here for the first time. Their interrogation will furnish a broad understanding of this phenomenon’s meaning and motivation within the context of intercessory belief and mortuary practice in late medieval Catholic England. Further consideration of Barton’s monument will trace its revaluation following the 1547 dissolution of the chantries, which catalysed the widespread destruction of associated structures and material culture. While Barton’s effigy was subsequently destroyed in 1549, an ‘old worn stone’ bearing his name remained visible at the chapel site until c1666. Critical consideration of its form and survival will provide insight into the status of pre-Reformation monuments in the post-Reformation cathedral landscape, as well as the fate of the charnel chapel structure and site itself.