The well-known paper on the Funeral Effigies of The Kings and Queens of England by Sir William St. John Hope (Archaeologia, lx, 1907) is a splendid documentary and factual source of information about the effigies themselves. Comparatively little, however, is known about their homes throughout the ages, though it is on record that after the funeral of Elizabeth of York in 1503 her ‘pikture’ was ‘had to a secret place by St. Edward's shrine’. Henry Keepe, writing in 1682, shows that they were then in the upper part of the Islip Chapel, and this is corroborated by J. T. Smith's amusing account of a conversation between Nollekens the sculptor and an abbey verger named Catling in 1786.