3 - Materials, Production and Supply

Summary

In the early twentieth century, when monumental effigies began to receive the attention of art historians, it was widely assumed that their production, like that of other high-status consumer items, was an urban phenomenon, and was generally linked to work on major ecclesiastical sites such as Wells, Westminster and York. In the 1920s, Alfred Fryer put Bristol at the centre of the production of freestone effigies found throughout the West Country, which were also exported to locations across southern Wales and into Ireland. This workshop, it was argued, was originally set up by the masons who had worked on the west front of Wells Cathedral in the early thirteenth century, and was said to have continued there until the sixteenth. The products of the workshop were held to have certain characteristics, such as the use of Dundry stone and the lengthwise carving of mail down the arms of military effigies. The existence of the Bristol workshop and the supposed homogeneity of its products have since been challenged by Brian and Moira Gittos, who pointed out that Fryer's geological deductions were not always correct and that examples of lengthwise mail can be found far outside the supposed area of Bristol influence. It is now understood that many sources of monumental production flourished in the West Country during the Middle Ages, although it is still true to say that Bristol played a crucial part in the export trade of monuments made from Dundry and some other West Country stones, including across the south Wales coastline. The current understanding of the wider medieval monument industry is that it was highly complex and heterogeneous, sculpted effigies, cross slabs and brasses being manufactured variously in urban workshops, at quarries, at ecclesiastical building sites, by local masons and by itinerant craftsmen. This variety of organisational structures is reflected in the eclecticism of the monuments of south Wales, although it will become apparent in this chapter that this is more a feature of the earlier part of the period.

The erection of a commemorative monument was the end result of a complex interrelationship of factors bearing upon both the patron of the memorial and the craftspeople responsible for producing it, and thus was inevitably influenced by the basic market forces of supply and demand.