The Politics of Burial in Late Medieval Hereford

BURIAL has long been seen by historians and archaeologists as a telling indicator of personal and collective identity.1 How individuals in the late Middle Ages saw death in relation to a personal life story, a family and affinity network, the local community, organised religion and God, has been investigated primarily through last wills and testaments, with additional insight gained from the material evidence of some high-class burial monuments: effigies, grave slabs, brasses and chantry chapels.2 Collective ideas about the afterlife and more worldly concerns for commemoration and ‘memorialisation’ have also been investigated by aggregating this material, with the execution of a testator's wishes seen as the realisation of socially conditioned values and beliefs.3 On those occasions, however, when place of burial, or payment for burial, became a contentious local issue, we can see further into the social and cultural past and directly address the importance of burial in the expression and formation of personal and communal identities.4 This article is an investigation of the politics of burial in late medieval Hereford focussing precisely on such disputes. Using the records of conflict to investigate burial immediately focuses attention on the political charge carried by this emotive issue. Disputes over jurisdiction and revenue streams may have been common at all levels of late medieval politics, but disputes over burial rights were additionally driven by the fervour of personal, familial and communal sensitivities. This meant that such disputes were full of political potential: the potential for enmities to be translated into dramatic action and the potential for social relations, particularly communal identities and leadership, to be reshaped

Afterlife · Archaeology · Art · Jurisdiction · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Medieval Literature and History

• Continuity and individuality in Medieval Hereford, England

  Open Access•Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir, B Rogers et al.•Journal of Archaeological Science…•2018

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