SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

Colourful, spectacular, erudite – does funerary art get much better than this?

To unravel the history of any old settlement in Britain, start at the church. Apparently, Norman walls may have Saxon long-andshort work in them, betraying a preConquest foundation; there might even be fragments of Roman tiles and bricks. Stained glass, if Victorian or later, often commemorates local families. Monumental brasses from the 13th century usually honoured local crusader knights, then later magnates and their families. Most striking of all are the funerary monuments.

Oddly enough, these are almost the only aspect of church interiors to become more ornate after the Reformation, which otherwise rendered churches plainer. Many English churches of the 14th century or older have simple alabaster knights recumbent in recesses (though some from the 1320s and 1330s have wooden knights because of alabaster shortages). The school of English medieval sculpture, otherwise familiar from gargoyles and tracery, became adept at recreating the human form. One of the finest pre-Reformation tombs, to be found in Ely Cathedral, is that of Bishop Kilkenny, who died in 1257, but whose memorial looks remarkably more contemporary.

An Italian influence reached

England after 1507, when Henry VIII – as yet Roman Catholic – asked the Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiani to design his father’s tomb. This started a fashion, mimicked by the landed classes, for the ornate tomb-chest, which developed to show either recumbent or kneeling effigies of a man and his wife on top, often under a canopy, with kneeling representations of their often numerous children, either below or behind them.

To understand what such tombs can tell us, it helps to have a pocket guide to heraldry to hand. The same devices that decorate such tomb-chests can often be seen painted on hatchments – lozenge-shaped wooden boards – hanging high on the walls of the church. These used to be hung over the doors of grand houses when someone died, and after the funeral were moved to the church.

The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were the zenith of funerary art. Even the smallest churches house grand monuments: typically a man and his wife, in sumptuous robes with elaborate ruffs, lie next to each other on their tomb-chest in an attitude of prayer. Some have grand, exotic canopies: at Kirtling, in south-east Cambridgeshire, the tomb of the second Lord North lies beneath a massive six-poster canopy, topped with the most colourful roof and statuary. North died in 1600 and his tomb dates from the decade afterwards, its components showing the transition from medieval to renaissance art.

By 1630, inscriptions – depending on the locale – are in English rather than

TOMB WITH A VIEWSir Christopher Hatton’s tomb in old St Paul’s Cathedral