Introduction: South Wales from the Thirteenth to the Early Sixteenth Century

Summary

This book is the first large-scale study of the medieval funerary monuments of south Wales, an area blessed with an eclectic, but largely unknown, monumental heritage. Ranging from plain and decorated cross slabs at one end of the design scale to richly carved effigial monuments on canopied tomb-chests at the other, there is plenty to repay the attentions of the historian. As a group, the monuments closely reflect the turbulent history of the southern March of Wales, its close links to the West Country and its differences from the ‘native Wales’ of the north-west. As individuals, they offer fascinating insights into the spiritual and secular concerns of some of the leading families of the southern March, many of whom we otherwise know little about. Church Monuments in South Wales offers a much-needed Celtic contribution to the growing corpus of literature on the monumental culture of late-medieval Europe, which, for the British Isles, has been dominated hitherto by English studies. Recent research, most notably in Nigel Saul's study of the Cobham brasses and his survey of medieval English monuments, as well as in the scholarly journal Church Monuments, has demonstrated that the study of funerary sculpture is a multi-disciplinary subject enabling a view of the spiritual, social, political and cultural lives of the late-medieval gentry and aristocracy which can rarely be achieved through documentary evidence alone.

In the last few decades a paradigm has been established for the history of the stylistic development, production and patronage of the funerary monument up to the Reformation. However, Church Monuments in South Wales shows that in many ways the story of this unique part of the British Isles is substantially different to that of the better-studied English regions, such as East Anglia, the Midlands and Yorkshire, and is therefore a timely reminder that our understanding of British monumental culture as a whole is still skewed towards the richer and better-populated areas – a shortcoming which this book aims to address. Church Monuments in South Wales provides a comprehensive illustration and explanation of the monumental culture of this region at a time of great social change. It focuses heavily on the social groups who commissioned and were commemorated by funerary monuments, and how their changing fortunes, tastes and pre-occupations moulded the distinctive attributes of that culture as an organic product of its time and place.