Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066-1550

The subject of this volume is introduced by a review of various concepts of the European and English Middle Ages concerning death and the dead, emphasizing contemporary concerns for the fate of the soul and methods for alleviating its purgatorial sufferings. This is followed by chapters on the rituals of death and burial, securing spiritual support for the dead, the significance of physical location of the corpse, and which dead bodies were excluded from Christian burial.

In the most interesting chapter, “The Bodily Evidence,” the author (a researcher for the York Archaeological Trust) deals with skeletal evidence and its interpretation, with a good section on infant burials. Suggestions are made as to illnesses among medieval populations as indicated by osteological characteristics, and the potential for newer techniques, including DNA analysis, in reanimating the past. Daniell emphasizes advances in these studies since the 1960s. Chapter 6, “Cemeteries and Grave Goods,” is less successful, the author too narrowly and immediately linking assumed changes in religious belief with changes in burial custom. His discussion of specific archaeological finds, however—such as burials over charcoal, “ear muffs,” and tokens of life buried with the dead—is interesting.

The final chapter, “Death from the Conquest to the Reformation,” is an attempt at an overview and, more than that, an examination of three themes that affected death and burial beliefs and rites: doctrines concerning purgatory from the twelfth century; the impact of the Black Death of the fourteenth century; and the English Reformation. There is a rather simplistic cleaving to the long-questioned idea propounded by, for example, Jacques Le Goff, that purgatory was a twelfth-century theological construct, though Daniell does acknowledge that purgatorial ideas were circulating long before this period. On the whole, however, the case for linking burial customs to purgatorial beliefs is weak, at least as propounded here. The author also creates problems for himself in assuming that there was such an entity as “the Church,” when many variations, disputed doctrines, and local rituals marked that expansive corporation, even within the narrow compass of medieval England.

The emotional and psychological consequences of the Black Death, as these influenced ideas about death and burial, are adequately discussed, as are the effects of the Reformation—for example, in causing the dissolution of monasteries and the destruction of tombs reflecting Catholic doctrines and of chantries, to which so much death-ritual was closely linked by the later Middle Ages. There is a good appendix on the burials of Jews and lepers, in which Daniell states that the latter were ritually buried while still alive. A second appendix, on “The Living,” would have been better as part of the text itself.

On the whole, this is a helpful vade mecum for those who have no familiarity with the topic. However, the reader must be prepared for a somewhat wooden style and a rather naive, generalizing use of medieval visions and sermons (which included motifs sometimes as old as the fifth century). There are slips of interpretation and reason—such as, for example, insufficiently explaining ad succurrendum burials, or the use of iron bands as penitential devices; or assuming that there was more sunshine in the Middle Ages, or that only non-Christians tended to drown. There are also slips of fact: for example, Lyndwood is usually known as a canonist rather than a sermon-writer, and Thomas Cantilupe’s heart was buried at Ashridge, not in Hereford.

One would like to see more about translations (ceremonial reburials) of saints’ bones, the effects of adipocere formation in creating “uncorrupted” bodies, and how society treated other special dead, such as traitors or heretics. The vast twelfth-to-thirteenth-century literature on ghosts returning from purgatory, which would have strengthened the author’s contentions, is insufficiently explored, as are the numerous medieval records of men whose accustomed fare was death—England’s coroners. Apart from these cavils, however, this is a good book, packed with information, as well as...