2 - Patrons and Subjects: The Social Status of those Commissioning and Commemorated by Monuments in South Wales

Summary

The inhabitants of late-medieval south Wales had access to a wide range of native and imported forms of monumental commemoration. The nature of this supply was of course important in shaping fundamental aspects of the region's commemorative culture, but just as crucial was the influence of the demand end of the market, and it is to the patrons of monuments that we must now turn. What kinds of people commissioned and were commemorated by sepulchral monuments in south Wales? How did their status and background dictate the appearance of their monuments? How did the character of this group change over the period, and how did this in turn affect the region's monumental landscape?

Written evidence of the process of commissioning monuments in Wales during this period is scanty. There are no surviving contracts as there are for a small number of English tombs, but a handful of testamentary requests have come to light. As wills are rarely fulsome sources of evidence for the patronage of monuments it is not surprising that these examples are not very forthcoming about the process of ordering a monument, but they at least give us some sense of the social classes that were interested in doing so and, to some extent, the form of monument that was required. The lack of satisfactory written evidence is ultimately of little concern to the focus of this chapter, however, as the monuments are themselves sufficient witnesses to the status, and frequently the identity, of those they commemorate. This is not to say that they are foolproof in this respect. As chapter five will demonstrate, monuments were sometimes designed to obscure or enhance the truth about their subjects rather than lay it bare, while the identity of the patrons of many of the surviving anonymous cross slabs must remain lost to us.

In order to analyse the nature of the patronal group commissioning monuments in south Wales it is necessary first to return to the break-down of monument types outlined in chapter one. Graph 3 (above) indicates the numbers of monuments known to have been erected to clerics, ‘knights’, women and civilian males throughout the period, as well as the small number of others which are either of indeterminate type or depict pilgrims or cadavers.