Martin Cook’s more detailed study of Elizabeth Barnardiston’s strategies for the afterlife, as promised in Style and belief: the tombs of the Barnardistons of Kedington, Suffolk – Church Monuments Society
In Kedington church, Suffolk, an effigy of a woman stares up with one blue eye (the other has been scraped away). The woman is Lady Elizabeth Barnardiston (c.1460-1526), who funded a suite of measures to continue her memory on Earth, and shorten her passage through Purgatory. These measures are examples of the ones available at the time, for a person of her status. We shall look at them, and ask what impelled her to fund them.
Lady Elizabeth Barnardiston on her chest tomb
First, let’s see who Lady Elizabeth was. She was born Elizabeth Newport in Pelham Furneux, Hertfordshire, into a family of wealth and standing. Her great-grandfather, Robert Newport, was a lawyer and a trusted member of Richard II’s court. He represented Herfordshire in parliament, as did his son Sir William. Her mother was a Tyrwhitt from Lincolnshire, another eminent family of courtiers and MPs.
Her husband was Sir Thomas Barnardiston. Since the fourteenth century, the Barnardistons had accumulated land and wealth by a series of astute marriages to heiresses. Their two main estates were at Great Coates, Lincolnshire, and Kedington, Suffolk (their native district).
After her husband died in 1503, Elizabeth prepared for her own death. She took at least five measures, and added a sixth to her will, but this was not honoured.
This monument was installed at St Nicolas Church, Great Coates, beside the Barnardiston manor. It was probably installed after her husband’s death, since it has his death date on it. Today the monument is in the floor under the altar, but originally it was on the north wall of the chancel.
The brass depicts Sir Thomas and his sons on the left, under the Barnardiston coat of arms; then Lady Elizabeth with her daughters on the right, under the Newport coat of arms. They kneel and pray towards a figure above: Christ stepping out of his tomb over three sleeping guards.
A scroll speech bubble comes from Sir Thomas’ mouth saying, “Ihu miserere mihi” (“Jesus have mercy on me”), whilst Lady Elizabeth’s says, “Fiat voluntas tua” (“Thy will be done”). A brass inscription around of the edge of the slab says, “Pray for the soul of Thomas Barnardiston, Knight, son of the late Thomas Barnardiston of Mikkyl Coates in the County of Lincoln, and Elizabeth his wife, daughter of George Newport Esquire of Pelham in the County of Hertfordshire.”
Between the kneeling figures of Thomas and Elizabeth is more text that we shall look at later.
This seems to be the earliest of the Barnardiston monuments at Kedington. Lady Elizabeth and Sir Thomas lie next to each other in the south aisle, and a tablet at their feet tells us that Sir Thomas was buried at Great Coates, and Lady Elizabeth under this tomb. The date of Elizabeth’s death is left blank, which suggests the monument was built in her lifetime.
Elizabeth commissioned stained glass for the window at the foot of the chest tomb. The glass has now gone, but we have a description of it in Weever’s Antient Funeral Monuments (1631). The design echoed that of the brass at Great Coates, minus the Resurrection scene: Thomas was “kneeling in his complete armour, his coat armour on his breast, and behind him seven sons.”
Elizabeth was on the next pane, kneeling with her coat of arms and seven daughters. The writing in Latin underneath them asked the reader to “Pray for the souls of Thomas Barnardiston, knight, and Elizabeth, his wife, who installed this window.”
The chantry screen, St Peter and St Paul Church, Kedington
In his will, Sir Thomas left land around Brockholes (near Huddersfield) to create a chantry in Kedington church, and to fund “an honest priest yearly to sing and pray for my soul, my wife’s, my children, and William Eyeres, husband to Elizabeth, one of my daughters, my father’s, my mother’s and for the souls of my ancestors.”
Elizabeth acquired a licence to make this a perpetual chantry, and gave lands to increase it funding. The chantry screen remains in the church.
Although Elizabeth did not mention it in her last will (she appears to have made two wills), the tablet at the foot of her chest tomb tells us she “built the church roof new, and covered it with lead.”
In 1514, Lady Elizabeth gave the St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, 100 marks to buy a manor at Coton, Cambridgeshire. The profits from this funded a scholar at the college called “My Lady Barnardiston’s child.”
The scholar would recite the psalm “De Profundis” daily, which asks God to “grant to the souls of Thy servants departed the remission of all their sins.”
Elizabeth spent the last few years of her life as a corrodian at Walsingham Priory. In her will, she wished to be buried “in the Church of the priory of our Lady of Walsingham by the awter of saint Kateryn.”
Despite the Prior at Walsingham being the sole executor of her will, her wish was not granted. As we saw from the tablet by her chest tomb, she was actually buried at Kedington. Still, we can perhaps assume that if her wish had been granted, she would have had an inscription or monument at Walsingham.
Having seen the range of measures Elizabeth took to prepare for death, we can now ask “What impelled her to take them?” We can answer this question by looking at religion, status, tradition and psychology.
Religion is the most obvious motivator for these measures. Christianity at the time, of course, believed in purgatory as a precursor to Heaven, where you suffered for the sins you had not atoned for on earth. It was also believed that the prayers of the living shortened a soul’s time in purgatory, and praying for the dead would decrease your own debt of penance. Most measures Elizabeth took elicited prayers for herself and her family, so they would suffer less in purgatory.
The scholar and the “honest priest” prayed for them and their families, for example, and the stained glass at Kedington, and the brass at Great Coates, both asked the viewer to pray for them.
We mentioned another inscription on the brass at Great Coates, between the figures of Thomas and Elizabeth. This says, “In the worship of the Resurrection of our Lord and for the soul of Sir Thomas Barnardiston, knight, and Dame Elizabeth his wife and of your charity say a pater noster, ave and credo and you shall have 100 days of pardon to your meed [i.e. as your reward].”
Elizabeth Barnardiston on the brass at Great Coates
This is the second request for prayers on the same brass. The Barnardistons incentivised people to pray for them by offering a precise exchange rate between number of prayers and days less penance.
The strength of Elizabeth’s desire to be prayed for is shown by her determination to obtain a perpetual licence for the chantry. Her son and heir Thomas refused to give her the deeds of the manor that was to fund the chantry. In response, she took him to the Court of Chancery and sued him.
Contributing to the upkeep of the church, like paying for a new roof, was also a way of gaining merit, and just the presence of monuments in the churches reminded people to pray for Elizabeth and her husband, and diminish their time in Purgatory.
Whatever the religious motives, it’s undeniable that the measures Elizabeth took promoted the status of herself, her husband and the Barnardistons. Being able to afford monuments, stained glass, chantries and people to pray for them set the Barnardistons apart from other people at Kedington and Great Coates. As with other gentry at the time, these projects made wealth blatant, since they changed the structure of the churches, and made it clear who had the power to do so.
But Elizabeth did not just assert the wealth status of her family, she added a spiritual status. Remember that the brass at Great Coates was on the north wall of the chancel, the traditional location of the Easter Sepulchre. This would have been a focus of prayers and ceremony in the Easter period, and would have converged attention on Elizabeth and her family.
Whilst it was not unusual for the wealthy to have a monument at the Easter Sepulchre, the Great Coates brass goes further: it pictures Elizabeth’s family and Jesus together. She and her family are present as he steps out of his tomb. They put themselves in the Easter story, and give themselves a “first among equals” status among Christians.
Christ steps out of his tomb, Great Coates brass
Elizabeth’s choice to live in Walsingham Priory also expresses a concern for status. This was one of the most renowned pilgrimage sites in Europe, which drew nobility and kings (including Henry VIII, when he was younger). Elizabeth wasn’t retiring to a secluded life of penance and poverty. Walsingham was a place whose fame drew Erasmus, and who satirised it for its worldliness and wealth.
Elizabeth presumably planned to have a memorial there, where thousands of pilgrims passed, and where her family’s renown would be enhanced, and their passage through Purgatory shortened. As we saw, this was not to be. Perhaps she died whilst visiting Kedington, and her son didn’t want the expense of transporting her to Walsingham. After all, he’d already seen a chunk of his estate vanish into a chantry.
Another explanation for Elizabeth’s suite of measures is tradition. Monument-building and paying for chantries and obits was common across the landed class at this time, so to some extent Elizabeth was following this broader tradition. However, she was also following family tradition.
She was brought up in Furneux Pelham, where Weever tells us the Newports were “very fair entombed.” There were monuments to her parents, her great-grandfather, and other Newport ancestors. The only one surviving of these is a chest tomb to her great-grandfather Sir Robert Newport (d. 1417).
Elizabeth’s great grandfather Sir Robert Newport on his chest tomb at Furneux Pelham
Her brother Robert (d. 1518) died before her and has a brass at Furneux Pelham, which has a similar design to that at Great Coates, except it probably had the Virgin and Child in the middle, rather than the Resurrection scene.
Robert Newport (Elizabeth’s brother) and his wife. Notice the indent in the middle at the top, which probably had an image of the Virgin and Child.
On the Barnardiston side, we know that her father-in-law was buried “on the north side of the altar under the window” at Great Coates. Again, this was the location of the Easter Sepulchre, and it’s likely he had a monument there. There only remains a badly-chipped slab on the ground. There is also a large brass to Thomas’s grandmother, Isabella Kelke.
So we can see that Lady Elizabeth was not just responding to contemporary trends in memorialisation, or the common practice of the gentry, but was also following family tradition.
Finally, we can turn to modern theories in psychology to explain Lady Elizabeth’s means of memorialisation. Terror Management Theory (TMT), for example, suggests that humans are motivated by the fear of death and our inability to avoid it (“mortality salience”). In particular, we try to reconcile our instinct for survival with the certainty we will die.
One way to reconcile this contradiction is to seek “symbolic immortality.” Here, we take measures to symbolically live on after death. Permanent monuments are examples of symbolic immortality. Elizabeth had her image in stained glass and brass, but of course her effigy is the most graphic. It is three-dimensional, life-sized and would have been in colour. It would have given her a life-like presence in the church.
The prayers of the chantry priest and the scholar, and of all the people who they asked to pray for them, also gave symbolic immortality. They kept the living speaking Elizabeth and her husband’s names, and thinking about them. It was a way of keeping a perpetual presence on Earth.
Another psychological theory is the Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM). According to this, our underlying goal is to seek meaning. We do this by connecting the relationships and events in our world into a unified model of how things operate, and why things are the way they are. This gives us a sense that we can explain and predict the world, and so make it less threatening.
According to this theory, we deal with anxiety using techniques similar to those predicted in TMT, but for different reasons. We assert a belief framework that makes death less threatening, in which we can find symbolic immortality, but also a meaning to our life and our death.
This meaning may not be religious. For example, the family was clearly important to Elizabeth and Thomas, and the coats of arms of the Barnardistons and Newports are always present on their monuments. Apart from indicating their heritage, these coats of arms represented a tradition and a role, a pattern for Elizabeth and Thomas to follow, which gave a purpose and place to their lives. Perhaps the family also gave them a sense of symbolic immortality: they were part of something high status and powerful that would endure beyond them.
Lady Elizabeth is like the smallest Russian doll in a three-doll set. The largest doll represents the broad religious and cultural beliefs at the time that explain memorialisation, the middle doll is the family of Elizabeth and Thomas, who gave more specific context and traditions, and finally there is Lady Elizabeth herself. The amount of measures she took implies she felt particularly anxious about death, so her actions not only reflect broader practices and beliefs, but also her own psychology and faith.
Though Elizabeth took measures to stay in the thoughts of the living, she has remained in their thoughts for reasons she couldn’t have planned. According to a local guidebook, the villagers thought she was so holy that her effigy had curative powers, and they touched it or chipped bits off to treat rheumatism. Today, some people leave flowers on her effigy, and say you sometimes see her walking the grounds of the manor.
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