January 2010

British Church Monuments Through The Ages

Farnham DFAS, meeting at the Maltings, was treated to an enthralling combination of education and entertainment on Tuesday, Jan 19th. The speaker was Jane Kelsall, Lecturer in Fine Arts, and her subject was Public Statements and Private Lives: British Church Monuments through the Ages. Throughout the talk the details of the private lives of those commemorated threw fascinating and unexpected lights on their monuments.

With consummate skill Mrs Kelsall traced the development of memorial monuments in English churches – the most commonly found examples of sculpture in this country – from just after the Norman Conquest to the mid-twentieth century. She showed how simple bas-reliefs evolved into tomb-chests topped by effigies of notable people. The figures became more lifelike and vigorous, sometimes with details such as the joined hands of a married couple or an s-decorated collar denoting Lancastrian allegiance. A slide of the twelfth century monument in Gloucester Cathedral to Robert of Normandy, which was repainted in 1666 and left unaltered since, shows how these memorials would have looked in their original colours in the Middle Ages. As it happened the seventeenth century painter was also painting the organ pipes, so the two are colour-coordinated.

The Renaissance brought changing styles, a shift away from Gothic towards classically inspired monuments and the Reformation led to a move away from religious imagery such as angels, although classical putti were still acceptable. Theatrical, even operatic, monuments developed in the age of baroque and rococo in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These could be either ludicrous or tenderly moving – we saw examples of both. The nineteenth century Gothic Revival saw a return to mediaeval-inspired styles but the custom of commissioning huge funerary monuments died out in the twentieth century. Lloyd George’s budget imposing death-duties may have dealt it a severe blow, although Mrs Kelsall showed a handful of fascinating C20 tombs, including one showing Lady Edwina Mountbatten as a child.

The lecturer made her impressive and enlightening scholarship unforgettable by the many anecdotes she recounted about the people commemorated. Among the most fascinating was Lady Elizabeth Russell, an Elizabethan NIMBY. She sued Richard Burbage for trying to site a theatre near her property. In revenge Shakespeare used her son, Sir Thomas Hoby, as the recognisable prototype for the ridiculous Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night. Equally interesting was the tale of the second wife of the first Earl of Coventry. She commissioned an elaborate monument for her husband and herself in 1710 but her stepson, the second earl, refused to allow it in the parish church on the grounds that his father had demeaned the family by marrying his housekeeper, whose parents were working-people. It went to a barn. When the stepmother remarried, her wealthy new husband rescued the monument from its barn and put it in his own chapel in Elmley Castle near Evesham, where it still is.

If Mrs Kelsall’s mission was to inform, instruct and entertain, she succeeded magnificently.

Copy by Jan Herbert
Picture by Garham Parlett