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Through analysis of written sources, architectural evidence, excavation reports and antiquarian records this paper argues that charnelling of human skeletal remains was more common in medieval England than has hitherto been fully recognized. It became increasingly widespread following formalization of belief in Purgatory in the late 13th century, and charnel houses can be found both at the better-documented greater churches and at parish churches, for which churchwardens' accounts are important sources. Charnel houses are mainly freestanding buildings in churchyards, or crypts within the body of the church, and both forms are often semi-subterranean, with the carefully maintained charnel visible through windows high in the charnel house walls. There was typically a chapel located above the charnel room, in which prayers for the dead were offered, similar to chantries. The paper presents the first detailed exploration of the potential liturgical contexts for charnelling. It is argued that the most likely form of rite to accompany the translation and deposition of charnel would have comprised a re-enactment of the Office of the Dead followed by an adapted version of the burial service, with possible secondary uses of the charnel house in the days leading up to Easter, the most solemn part of the Christian year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1502 the 13th-century Lady Chapel at the east end of Westminster Abbey was demolished to make way for its new incarnation. Clearance of the site also required the destruction of a chapel dedicated to St Erasmus, which had stood on the south side of the Lady Chapel for only a quarter of a century. This article explores the documentary evidence for the short-lived St Erasmus chapel, from its construction at the behest of Elizabeth Woodville in the late 1470s, to its use for royal burials and to house the abbey's relics of St Erasmus, and ultimately its fate at the beginning of the 16th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a neglected funerary monument of the 1340s and its much-embellished architectural setting in the north aisle of the parish church of Ducklington (Oxon.). The monument takes the unusual form of a Tree of Jesse while the walls carry a series of sculptural reliefs depicting scenes from the Life of the Virgin. It is argued that the space was a Lady chapel housing a chantry, and that the sculpture draws on imagery associated with the liturgy of the Mass and the liturgical hours to create an integrated devotional and commemorative programme of benefit to patrons and parishioners alike. The patrons have been traditionally identified as members of the Dyve family, long-standing proprietors of Ducklington manor until the mid-14th century. The connection is fully explored for the first time, drawing on antiquarian accounts of lost stained glass. Martha, widow of Henry Dyve (d. 1327) who held the manor in dower, is proposed as the likely originator of the monument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mansionary (from the Latin mansio, ‘a dwelling’) was a member of a community of four to ten secular priests governed by a provost and required to reside by and serve a chantry chapel, similar to a cathedral canon or beneficed chantry priest. Every day they would sing the Hours of Our Lady and offer two Masses, one in honour of Our Lady or the Holy Trinity, and the other for the dead kin of the chantry founder. The chapels they served were attached to a cathedral or a parish church. Those established by the monarch often had pastoral duties, sometimes involving a school or hospice. In Lithuania, they appear from the late 15th century at the cathedrals of Vilnius, Varniai and Lutsk (in Janów Podlaski), and represented a considerable financial investment to establish and maintain. After the Council of Trent, they become even rarer, and concentrate more on pastoral and other educational duties. The paper discusses what a mansionary priest was, and how many of them served in the Diocese of Vilnius and other sees within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Why was it deemed meet and fit to establish a mansionariate in Lithuania at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, and how were such foundations affected by local Reform movements?

This short account outlines the fortunes of stained glass presenting the coat of arms of the Annesley family (paly of six, argent and azure, over all a bend gules), currently in a Kraków-based private collection. The provenance of this fourteenth-century object has been traced back to one of the quatrefoil fields in the tracery of the east window of the chancery annexed to the Old Church in Annesley/ Nottinghamshire (the foundation of that chapel dates back to 1363). The stained-glass was an integral part of a larger composition - even in the eighteenth century the east window of the chapel still featured it among other heraldic emblems along with scenes of The Birth of Jesus, The Adoration of the Magi and The Crucifixion; at the bottom, there was an image of the donor of that stained glass window, supposedly John III de Annesley, with his wife and daughter. The construction of a new church in Annesley in 1874 led to the gradual dilapidation of the Old Church. In the 1930s, all the remaining stained glass hitherto ornamenting the Old Church was transferred to one of the windows in the church in Holme, except that in the case of two heraldic stained glass motifs the originals were replaced in the new location with copies, and one of them replicated the medieval Annesley escutcheon, whose genuine counterpart remained in the possession of the owner of the Annesley Hall. It is supposed that it was in the 1970s that that stained-glass object became a commodity available on the antique art market. Then, in 1997, the artefact was purchased by Barbara Gesicke, only to change hands in 2019 and start gracing a Cracow-based private collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A battlefield memorial is designed to preserve a memory of the act of conquest or, in the rare cases of memorials erected by the defeated, a memory of resistance, as well as the more straightforward commemoration of the dead. Where the memory of the landscapes of war persists there must be a commitment to preservation and a continuing, if not necessarily continuous, ritual. Thus each battlefield is not only commemorated or forgotten by contemporaries; it also has an evolving life history. Medieval battlefields were often commemorated by the erection of chapels and other permanent memorials, but after the Reformation they were seen as accidental landscapes which remained unmarked and were gradually reabsorbed into the agrarian pattern. From the eighteenth century battlefields were rediscovered, first by antiquarians, who revived the practice of memorialization, and then by contemporaries who began again to preserve and memorialize the battlefields of the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of the Tudor religious reforms in the rural upland parish of Kirkby Malhamdale, Craven, in the Yorkshire Dales, from the late medieval period, when it was dominated by the economic power of the monasteries, during the Dissolution and subsequent changes, to 1603. Although early churchwardens' accounts have not survived for the parish, the analysis draws upon a variety of contemporary sources including wills, ecclesiastical documents, manor court rolls and other miscellaneous material, as well as the fabric and structure of the parish church itself. Aspects of worship and ritual in Kirkby Malham, the response to the reforms, and the extent to which conformity in the reformed Church of England was established in the parish by the end of the sixteenth century, are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]