A Royal Grave in a Fifteenth-Century London Parish Church

Summary

London was as much a city of the dead as it was of the living. Generations of lay investment in city churches had given rise to a sky-scape of spires, church towers and steeples; the city churches and monasteries represented a multi-layered legacy of building activities funded by Londoners as patrons and benefactors. Nowhere was this investment remembered so visibly as in their funerary monuments. And yet in the early part of the twenty-first century only thirty-five medieval monuments remain in city churches. But if the surviving evidence is poor, the written record is rich. This essay will consider the written evidence for burial and commemoration in medieval London and the motivations which led to the compilation of these records. In examining these accounts, an unusual instance of aristocratic burial in one of the city’s parish churches has emerged, providing a reference to an unnamed ‘countesse of Huntyngdon’, whose grave was recorded in the church of St. James Garlickhithe, before the great fire of 1666. This is a rare instance of a noblewoman’s burial in a city church and deserves closer scrutiny. Who was this mysterious lady and what led a countess to be buried in a parish church in London, rather than in one of the city’s many religious houses?

There are two important pre-Reformation records of London’s lost tombs: a collection of heraldic accounts and a unique burial register compiled by the Greyfriars for the burials in their Newgate convent. The earliest of the heraldic accounts is a ‘visitation of burials’ made by Thomas Benolt in the early years of the sixteenth century. There are two copies of this record in the College of Arms, both of which have been marked, corrected, added to and commented on by later users: they were living documents with a functional purpose. But neither of the two surviving copies is a complete record of London’s tombs and they are but a selection of those memorials which were of particular interest to Benolt. This selectivity can be seen, for example, at the London Grey Friars where the herald recorded 120 tombs for royalty, aristocracy, the gentry and wealthy Londoners. Yet we know from the Greyfriars’ own burial register (discussed below) that there were, in fact, 684 monuments within their convent.