The Medieval Chantry Chapel: An Archaeology (review)

A chantry, Simon Roffey reminds us, was a foundation and endowment of a Mass, by one or more benefactors, to be celebrated at an altar for the soul of the founder/s and other specified persons. The majority of such intercessory foundations were of short duration and were celebrated at existing altars. The wealthy, however, were able to endow services in perpetuity, and might commission purpose-built structures, in which the services could take place. Such chapels were usually either appropriations of existing areas, by screening them off, or newly constructed spaces, occasionally even fully independent structures. Chantry chapels were once a very noticeable feature of many English parish churches, and Roffey describes them as probably the most common, and amongst the most distinctive, of all late-medieval religious foundations.

Roffey’s book aims to revise or supplement earlier studies such as G. H. Cook’s Mediaeval Chantries and Chantry Chapels, 2^nd edition (London, 1963), and Kathleen Wood-Legh’s, Perpetual Chantries in Britain (Cambridge, 1965), through the archaeological study of eighty examples from Hampshire, Somerset, and Wiltshire. Roffey’s major thesis is that “far from being primarily individualist or indeed ‘private’ monuments, chantry chapels were in fact of great relevance to the wider community” (p. 6). In this view, he is indebted to Clive Burgess’s work, the influence of which is acknowledged throughout the book. Although Roffey at one point concedes (p. 17) that “some foundations . . . represented a privatization of church space,” he later claims that they “actively promoted inclusivity and communal participation and greatly embellished, enhanced and encouraged parish church religious practice”(p. 161). Roffey is, in effect, following Eamon Duffy in maintaining that: “chantry monuments reflected a ‘personalization’ and not a privatisation of church space”: chantry chapels “nourished everyone’s religious experience and cannot be seen as a symptom of privatization” (p. 41).

After a general introduction, Roffey examines the origins of the chantry in chapter 2. Chantries proliferated astonishingly from the late-thirteenth century: 2,182 royal licences to found chantries were granted between 1281 and 1547. Chapter 3 investigates earlier intercessory foundations in a somewhat inconclusive search for precedents, and Roffey turns to the surviving physical evidence in the fourth chapter: there, he lists his historical sources and defines the principles of his archaeological methodology, applying it to his sample area in chapter 5. His analysis of features such as screens and squints leads him to the view that there was visual access to chantry altars in most cases for the ordinary laity and that services were staggered, so that chantry Masses did not start before Mass at the high altar. Chapter 6 looks at the social and religious context, and chapter 7 examines the effects of the Reformation, particularly the placing of monuments to “deritualize” former liturgical space. Some acquaintance with Nigel Llewellyn’s voluminous writings on this subject would certainly have improved the chapter. Chapter 8 contains case studies of three individual chapels, and the final chapter draws some conclusions.

The book unfortunately bears every sign of a rush through publication for the current “Research Assessment Exercise,” a baneful measure put in place to measure “productivity” in British universities. The ground plans are generally so schematic as to be of very limited use, the photographs are often poor, and there are numerous typographical errors, misquotations and other infelicities. Occasionally, it is even unclear what the author means—for example, on, p. 93: “Changes in the status or use of chapels sometimes afforded the architectural emphasis of new areas within them.” Short as it is, this book is also very repetitive.