Death Across Oceans by Mytum Burgess (ed)

Author:Mytum, Burgess (ed)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2018-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Other breastplate shapes observed include the lozenge and shield. Where it was possible to observe relevant details, at St. George’s all lozenge shapes were associated with females, both children and adults (Table 5). The titles of the females were all “Miss,” indicating that they were unmarried. The two shield breastplates that could be associated with sexed individuals were, in contrast, associated with adult males. Although admittedly these samples are small, these observations are consistent with heraldic convention in which the shape of depositum plates referred to the sex and marital status of the deceased. Thus, lozenge shapes were reserved for young girls and spinsters; shields were reserved for boys and young men (Litten, 1993:109).

Only two examples of lozenge-shaped breastplates and one example of a shield-shaped breastplate were found at St. Luke’s. The extent to which the dictates of heraldry prevailed at St. George’s and St. Luke’s requires further analysis. From the beginning of the eighteenth century heraldic convention started to fall out of popularity, with the result being that by the nineteenth century coffin fitters were unfamiliar with this convention, even though the shapes continued to be used (Litten, 1993). It is therefore noteworthy that the use of lozenge and shield shapes at St. George’s reflects a familiarity with heraldic convention by undertakers and possibly also their clients. In contrast, this familiarity was not seen at Christ Church, Spitalfields, and St. Martin’s, Birmingham (Hancox, 2006). Other claimed conventions were rectangles with a central cartouche and rectangles with central squares, which were associated with married women or widows and married men or widowers, respectively, but these have not yet been tested against archaeological assemblages.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grips tended to be of a plain, rounded style with no embellishments (Miles et al., 2008). At St. Luke’s and Bloomsbury, this plainness was not the case, with the majority of grips having some form of decoration, including the form with two winged cherubs at the center above a central flower with floral and leaf motifs (Figure 4), which is a very common design from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Miles et al., 2008:64) and is similar to CCS 4.

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