The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy

Author:Eamon Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300108286
Publisher: Yale University Press

Death and Memory

The language of memory pervaded the cult of the dead: the obsequies celebrated for each departed soul on the seventh and the thirtieth day after burial, and on the first anniversary, were called the week's, month's, and year's “mind” or remembrance. The focal point of the Church's liturgy of supplication for the dead, All Souls’ Day, was properly called the “Commemoration” of All Souls. It was, of course, the desire for prayer which lay at the root of this preoccupation with remembering. The dead needed to be remembered, for the dead were, like the poor, utterly dependent on the loving goodwill of others. For all the stories of apparitions and Purgatory spirits walking to disturb their survivors, it was orthodox teaching that the living hold no direct converse with the dead.70 For medieval people, as for us, to die meant to enter a great silence, and the fear of being forgotten in that silence was as real to them as to any of the generations that followed. But for them that silence was not absolute and could be breached. To find ways and means of doing so was one of their central religious preoccupations. For what late medieval English men and women at the point of death seem most to have wanted was that their names should be kept constantly in the memory and thus in the prayers of the living.

For the well-to-do, this presented few problems. If not many of the wealthy were building and endowing perpetual chantry foundations in the parish churches of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they still lavished money on long-term mortuary provisions. Like other forms of conspicuous consumption, these were certainly designed to display the testator's wealth and social status, and for that reason they were attacked by preachers and moralists. They had a less suspect religious rationale, however, which was, quite simply, to make it impossible for the living to forget or ignore the founder's name and his or her continuing spiritual need. One form of such provision was to create a class of pensioner whose sole occupation was to remember the benefactor – the chantry priest (perpetual or temporary) is an obvious example, but the creation of almshouses or the endowment of existing institutions provided another. The poor men of John Estbury's Berkshire almshouse, founded before his death in 1507, were required not only to recite daily parts of the Little Hours of the Blessed Virgin, the penitential Psalms and the Office for the Dead in the parish church at Lambourne, but to gather each midday after Mass round Estbury's tomb and recite the Paternoster and Ave Maria, before which the senior bedesman announced aloud and in English that they prayed “For John Isburies sowle, the sowls of his parents, auncestors, frendes, and all christian sowles”.71 Nor was such provision confined to religious services. It was a common mark of familial piety to adopt the monastic custom of reciting the “De Profundis” for dead benefactors (especially parents) during grace at meals.

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