4 - Spirituality and the Desire for Salvation

Summary

The primary motivation behind the commissioning and erection of memorial monuments across medieval Christian Europe was spiritual – the easing of the soul's path through purgatory, which the monument aimed to effect by soliciting prayers from clergy and passers-by. Such requests were implicit in the very existence of the monument in the first place, drawing attention to the plight of the deceased in an eye-catching and persuasive manner, but they could also be made explicit through elements of the tomb's design and location. In common with their counterparts throughout Britain and Europe, many medieval Welsh monuments include devotional imagery or inscriptions calling for prayers, or were sited in a spiritually potent part of the church, in the chancel or near a side altar or image. In some cases monuments formed just one part of a wider commemorative scheme that may have included chantries, stained glass and other parts of the church fabric and fittings; as one scholar has recently expressed it, monuments were ‘another vital weapon in the battle for salvation’.

MEDIEVAL WELSH SPIRITUALITY

Two very different forms of written evidence which allow us an (admittedly distorted) view of medieval Welsh popular spirituality as expressed by the individuals themselves, or their proxies, are wills and poetry. Both indicate that the Welsh were orthodox and conservative in their religious beliefs, a view confirmed by the material evidence to be gleaned from monuments. Welsh testators were not only entirely mainstream in their interests, they also seem to have been largely unfamiliar with (or uninterested in) the more exotic of the new devotional trends, whether orthodox or heterodox in nature.

Given this religious conservatism it is not surprising that devotion to the Virgin Mary is a thread running throughout the available evidence, and within Wales as a whole she was more popular than any other saint. Testators commended their souls to her and requested burial before her image or in chapels dedicated to her, while several chantries and lights are known to have been dedicated to her. The famous shrine of the Virgin at Penrhys in the Rhondda Valley proved so powerful a draw for pilgrims that it was bringing in £6 per annum just before the Dissolution and Llantarnam Abbey derived one-fifth of its income from offerings there.5 In 1493 Thomas Kemmys, a gentleman of Newport, left a velvet gown to adorn the image in his will.