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English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450-1550
 Gendering the Late Medieval and Early
Modern World

Series editors: James Daybell (Chair), Victoria E. Burke, Svante Norrhem, and
Merry Wiesner-Hanks

This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/
or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite
proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including,
but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural
history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both
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look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world,
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and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material
culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and
power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.

Books in the series:

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World

English Aristocratic Women’s Religious Patronage, 1450-1550: The Fabric of Piety
Chivalry, Reading, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain: From Amadís de
Gaula to Don Quixote
English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450-1550
English Aristocratic Women and
the Fabric of Piety, 1450-1550

Barbara J. Harris

Amsterdam University Press

Cover image: Anne Boleyn Shelton (1556), Queen Anne Boleyn’s aunt and donor of the
stained-glass window at the east end of the south aisle of the church at Shelton, Norfolk. Used
with permission of Mike Dixon, photographer.

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.

isbn 978 94 6298 598 8

e-isbn 978 90 4853 722 8(pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789462985988
nur 685

© B.J. Harris / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
To my grandchildren, Isabel Caiden and Beckett J. Harris
 Table of Contents

Abbreviations 9

Acknowledgements 13

Preface 15

Introduction 17

1 Tombs: Honoring the Dead 25

2 Chantries: The Quest for Perpetual Prayers 51

3 Building for the Congregation: Roofs, Aisles, and Stained Glass 71

4 Adorning the Liturgy: Luxury Fabrics and Chapel Plate 87

5 Almshouses and Schools: Prayers and Service to the Community 103

6 Defining Themselves 115

7 Epilogue: Destruction and Survival 135

Conclusion 151

Appendix 1 Patrons of the Fabric of the Church 157

Appendix 2 Patrons of Tombs 215

Appendix 3 Location of Tombs in Churches 221

Appendix 4 Choice of Burial Companion 227

Appendix 5 Women Who Commissioned Chantries 229

Appendix 6 Commissions of Stained-Glass Windows 231

Appendix 7 Additions or Major Repairs to Churches 233

Appendix 8 Bequests of Vestments 235

Appendix 9 Patrons of Almshouses or Schools 239

Glossary 241

Select Bibliography 247

Archival Sources 249

 Abbreviations

Add’l Ms. Additional Manuscript

BL British Library

CCR Calendar of Close Rolls

chap chapter

CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls

Ed. Editor

ERO Essex Record Office

esp. especially

GEC Cokayne, Complete Peerage

HEH Huntington Library

HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission

HMSO Her Majesty’s Stationary Office

Inq PM Inquisitions Post Mortem

insc inscription

intro introduction by

L&P Letters and Papers of Henry VIII

nd no date

np no publisher

NRO Norfolk Record Office

10  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Pie t y, 1450 -1550

NS New Series

OS Old Series

PRO Public Record Office

pt part

RCHM Royal Commission on Historical Monuments

TE Testamenta Eboracensia

TEAS Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society

TNA The National Archives

TV Testamenta Vetusta

VCH Victoria County History

 Illustrations

Figure 1 Monument of Sir Thomas Barnardiston (1503) and his

widow, Dame Elizabeth (d. 1526). Church at Kedington,
Suffolk. Photograph by the author, 2003. 26
Figure 2 Sir Richard Fitzlewis (1528) and his four wives*. Church
at West Horndon, Essex. Commissioned by his fourth
wife, Jane, née Hornby Norton Fitzlewis. Permission of
the Monumental Brass Society, UK. 30
Figure 3 Ecclesiastical embroidery, Elizabeth Scrope Beaumont
de Vere (1539), widow of fourteenth Earl of Oxford*.
Once an enriched vestment belonging to her private
chapel. She may have bequeathed it to Wivenhoe, the
Essex church where she was buried. Reg. No. T. 138-
1909. Permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 92
Figure 4 Westmorland altar cloth*. Figures of Ralph, the fourth
Earl of Westmorland (1549) and his wife Catherine
Stafford, daughter of the third Duke of Buckingham
(1555). Textiles store, museum no. 35-1888. Permission
of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 93
Figure 5 Altar frontal, St Catherine*. Made for the Neville
family; possibly made for Catherine Stafford (1555).
Museum no. 36-1888. Permission of the Victoria and
Albert Museum. 94
Figure 6 Bedingfield cup*. Hallmark 1518-19. Silver and gilt.
Probably in private chapel. Museum no. M76 1947.
Permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum. 97
Figure 7 Mary, Lady Dacre (c. 1576), widow of Thomas, Lord
Dacre of the South (executed 1533). Permission of the
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada. 116
Figure 8 Mary, Lady Dacre (c. 1576), widow of Thomas, Lord
Dacre, and her son Gregory (1593). Permission of the
National Portrait Gallery, London. 117
Figure 9 Monument of Sir Thomas Kitson (1540), John, second
Earl of Bath (1561) and Margaret Donnington Kitson
Long Bourchier, Countess of Bath (1561). Hengrave,
Suffolk. Photograph by the author, 2003. 120
12  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Pie t y, 1450 -1550

Figure 10 Monument of Sir Richard Knightley (d. 1534) and

his widow Jane Skennard Knightly (1550). Church at
Fawsley, Northamptonshire. Permission of “Walwyn,
www.-professor-mortiarty.com”. 128
Figure 11 Sir Thomas Stathum (1470) and his two wives*. Church
at Morley, Derbyshire Commissioned by his widow and
second wife, Elizabeth Permission of the Monumental
Brass Society, UK. 129
 Acknowledgements

As with all scholars, my professional and personal lives are inextricably

intertwined. I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank publicly five
people dear to my heart who helped me from the moment I conceived of
writing English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety until the moment
I finished writing the last page. One of them, Linda Levy Peck, is a cherished
friend and colleague. Throughout the process of working on this project,
I have benefited from her encouragement, the tough questions she asked,
and her valuable suggestions. I have also prof ited immensely from my
conversations with another long-time friend, Judy R. Walkowitz, who brings
the perspective of a scholar working in another field to her reading of my
work. Judith Bennett and Cynthia Herrup both read a relatively late draft
of this book. I benefited enormously from their suggestions and critique.
I also profited from the questions and suggestions Bennett and Herrup
made after they read earlier versions of this project delivered as papers at
the Anglo-American Conference and History of London Seminar at the
Institute of Historical Research in London.
At home, the connection between my personal life and scholarly work
is even closer. My husband Stanley Chojnacki has heard endlessly about
English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety and the extraordinary
women who grace its pages. He is a wise critic and an inexhaustible source
of love and support. I doubt there is another historian of Renaissance Venice
who is on such close terms with Anne, Lady Scrope (1498) or Margaret,
Countess of Bath (1561). I still wonder at the good fortune that brought us,
two historians of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century aristocratic women,
together in a partnership that encompasses every aspect of our lives.
I can never thank the Mellon Foundation enough for its generosity in
awarding me an Emeritus Faculty Fellowship for 2008-2010. It enabled me
to make two extended research trips to London, to purchase some essential
books, and to purchase the permission to publish the illustrations in this
volume. I hope English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety meets the
foundation’s expectations.
As always, I owe the possibility of writing in my field to the resources of
libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. I especially want to mention the British
Library and the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Huntington
Library in Pasadena, California, and the Davis and Wilson libraries at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Jessica Collins,
archivist of the Clothworkers’ Company, London, helped me to locate the
14  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Pie t y, 1450 -1550

companies’ records on Margaret, Countess of Kent, who figures throughout

this book. The Monumental Brass Society deserves thanks for its generosity
in allowing scholars to use its wonderful images without charge.
While I was writing this book, the fabric of my personal life was im-
measurably enriched by the birth of my only son’s children, Isabel Caiden
and Beckett J. Harris. They are sources of unending joy to me. I dedicate
this book to them in the hope that sometime in the future it will give them
great pleasure to know how much they meant to me as I was writing it.
 Preface

Dates appear in the Old Style, but the year is assumed to have begun on
1 January rather than on 25 March. For money, I have used the pre-decimal
form in effect until 1971: 20 shillings equaled one pound; 12 pence equaled
one shilling. A mark, which was a money of account and not a coin, was worth
13 shillings and 4 pence. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized,
except in the case of personal proper names in epitaphs and on tablets and
similar objects.
At a time when a laborer in the building trade earned less than £4 a
year and a master mason less than £8, the minimum landed income of
a nobleman was £1,000 a year and that of an average knight £200-£400 a
year. These figures give some idea of the relative wealth of the aristocracy.
Throughout the book, I have called aristocratic women by the titles that
they and their contemporaries used. In the case of noblewomen, they were
known by their husbands’ titles. Knights’ wives were called ‘Lady’ during
their husbands’ lifetimes, a title that lapsed when their husbands died,
because a knighthood was not hereditary. As widows, they were addressed
using the honorific title ‘Dame’. These are the usages in the women’s wills, the
only sources in which the great majority of them ever referred to themselves
by name. The dates in parentheses after women’s and men’s names are either
the year they died or the year they wrote their wills.
Legal terms, religious terms, terms referring to items of clothing and
textiles, and other obscure terms are explained in the glossary.
The books and articles in the footnotes are listed in abbreviated form;
the full details are available in the bibliography.
 Introduction

English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450-1550 is the f irst
comprehensive study of Yorkist and early Tudor aristocratic women’s role in
the flowering of religious art—architecture, sculpture, stained glass, engrav-
ing, textiles, and plate ornaments—that transformed English churches
in the century before the break with Rome. They enlarged, restored, and
decorated their parish churches and other favorite religious institutions;
built tombs, stained-glass windows, chantry chapels, and altars; endowed
almshouses and schools to perform works of charity and pray for their
souls; and donated many priceless and luxurious textiles, jeweled objects,
and plate to adorn the celebration of the Mass.1 The vast majority of these
women’s projects were designated for the parish churches where their
principal manors or castles were located, the parish being the community
that formed the basis of their social, economic, and political position. As
members of a community’s leading family, these women expected and
received the deference of the community’s inhabitants, a high proportion
of whom were their tenants and servants. In return, they built, restored, and
beautified their parish churches, the sole public buildings in the majority
of these communities, while their commissions were the only art most of
their neighbors ever encountered.2
Whatever projects they commissioned, the religious purpose of their
patronage was the same: to secure perpetual prayers for their souls and the
souls of their closest kin. All the evidence indicates that members of the
aristocracy continued to believe in the doctrine of Purgatory and to trust
in the efficacy of prayers for the dead throughout the 1530s and into the
1540s. Only the intervention of the state interrupted and finally stopped
their gifts, providing yet further confirmation of the revisionist argument
that widespread, often active, support for the Church and religious status
quo existed in the generation or two before Henry VIII’s break with Rome.3
As we shall see, however, the tombs and buildings that aristocratic women
built served equally important secular purposes. They consciously planned

1 A chantry was an endowment to pay for perpetual prayers for the soul of the donor and
anyone else she specified. It consisted of an altar or chapel dedicated for that purpose and was
located in a church designated by the donor; in some cases, it was a separate building.
2 Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, Volume 1: Laws Against Images, 16.
3 See, for example, Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under
the Tudors; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580;
Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath; J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People.
18  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Pie t y, 1450 -1550

their monuments, chapels, and additions to their parish churches to proclaim

their and their families’ status and wealth, and to represent their dominant
position in their villages. In a culture that believed that the social and
political hierarchy formed part of the divine order of creation, they saw
no contradiction in projects that embodied both worldly and spiritual
aspirations. On a more personal level, the women’s commissions gave them
a unique opportunity to define their identities by choosing where they
wanted to be buried and with whom, and how they wanted to be described
in their epitaphs and heraldic shields.
Although historians have written about the commissions and accomplish-
ments of a handful of the wealthiest and most visible of these women—Alice
de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk (1475), Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Rich-
mond (1509), and Margaret Hungerford, Lady Botreaux and Hungerford
(1478) come immediately to mind—they have not incorporated the broad
achievement of aristocratic women as patrons of religious art into their
accounts of Yorkist and early Tudor culture. 4 English Aristocratic Women
and the Fabric of Piety fills this gap in the historical record. It demonstrates
that the daughters, wives, and widows of noblemen and knights were active
participants in the movement that transformed and beautified the physi-
cal structure of English churches in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries. It is a study of a specific aspect of these women’s activities, not an
account of their complete lives as individuals. Where such accounts exist,
they have been included in the footnotes and bibliography.
When they initiated their artistic and architectural projects, Yorkist
and early Tudor aristocratic women drew on the personal and material
resources they had accumulated while they managed their households and
estates, raised their children and arranged their marriages, and cultivated
and exploited their families’ patronage networks. As they faced death, they
turned to projects that would speed them and their close kin on the pathway
to heaven and maintain their presence in their parishes.5 Exercising the
kind of agency that had characterized their achievements as wives, mothers,

4 Goodall, God’s House at Ewelme; Michael Hicks, “Chantries, Obits and Almshouses,” 79-
98; Michael Hicks, “The Piety of Margaret Lady Hungerford,” 99-118; and Michael Hicks, “St.
Katherine’s Hospital, Heytesbury: Prehistory, Foundation, and Re-foundation, 1409-79,” 119-32;
all in Hicks, Richard III and His Rivals; Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, 72, 203-250;
Jones, “Colleyweston—An Early Tudor Palace,” in Williams, England in the Fifteenth Century,
129-41; Patricia Coulstock, The Collegiate Church of Wimborne Minster.
5 Throughout English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, my discussion of their roles
and resources relies on my earlier work, English Aristocratic Women 1450-1550. Chapter 5 on
widows is particularly relevant.
Introduc tion 19

and widows, they took the initiative in selecting the sites of their tombs,
chapels, almshouses and schools, decided whether and how to repair or add
to their parish churches, participated in planning their projects, and chose
the epitaphs and escutcheons that would identify them and their families
on the monuments, windows, and buildings they had commissioned.6
English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety is also the first large-
scale study of the subjectivity of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century
aristocratic women, a dimension of the past largely invisible in written
documents. In this book, subjectivity refers to women’s outward expression
of their identity and the actions they took as a consequence of it.7 They devel-
oped their identity in a social context in which their families and lineages,
class, and activities as wives, mothers, and widows played the principal part.
In a period before the appearance of journals and autobiographies and one in
which writers rarely used letters for self-reflection, scholars have few ways of
discovering how women identified themselves and how these identifications
shaped their choices and actions. Although we lack documents of this kind,
however, historians can find women’s understanding of themselves reflected
in their letters and wills, the most important primary sources used in this
study. Furthermore, when aristocratic wives and widows built the tombs,
chantries, almshouses, schools, and churches that form the subject of this
book, their choices reflected conscious decisions about how they wanted to
represent themselves, their families, and their religious beliefs. The projects
they undertook in the late 1530s and 1540s gave them the opportunity to
signify publicly, occasionally in opposition to their families, their response
to the unprecedented religious revolution through which they were living.
For Yorkist and early Tudor aristocratic women, the process of defining
themselves was particularly challenging because of the complexity of their
families, the key social unit against which they identified themselves.8 Unlike
their male kin, who belonged to their natal families throughout their lives,
they joined one family after another as they married and remarried, in most
cases retaining old ties as they established new ones. Well over 50 percent
of the widows of peers and 80 percent of the widows of parliamentary
knights remarried.9 As a result, the foundation of their identity remained
fluid long after they were mature adults. It was only when aristocratic

6 On this understanding of female agency, see Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of
Historical Analysis,” 28-50.
7 James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England, 166-67.
8 On this point see, for example, ibid, 159; Natalie Davis “Boundaries and the Sense of Self,” 53-63.
9 Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 162.
20  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Piet y, 1450 -1550

women contemplated dying and had to choose where and with whom they
wanted to be buried that they had to signify—and perhaps even explicitly
recognize for the first time—how they defined themselves. The identities
the women claimed at this juncture determined the location and design
of their tombs, chantries, almshouses, and schools and the churches they
designated as recipients of their bequests.
Wherever and whatever they built, aristocratic women’s constructions
asserted their and their families’ power in their parishes. Their tombs and
chapels occupied space in their churches that had previously belonged to
the congregation as a whole. They filled the nave, aisles, and chancels with
tombs, altars and chapels in places that had previously served a communal
purpose. Many of them actually blocked the entrances to their chapels
with screens or locked gates, displaying their ownership in the clearest way
possible. They also asserted their status by decorating the aisles, towers, and
windows they constructed and the vestments and ornaments they donated
with their family arms. In all these ways, they played a major part in the
process that Andrew Martindale has called the intrusion of the laity into
the sacred spaces of their churches.10
Parishes benefited from the fees that aristocratic women paid for the
location of their tombs and chantries, the services of their chantry priests,
and the ornaments and vestments they donated to the high altar, but whether
their neighbors regarded the exchange as advantageous was irrelevant.
Aristocratic women acted as senior members of families that owned most
of the land in their community, were its largest employers, and the most
effective source of patronage for its inhabitants. They or their families were
also often patrons of the church itself, appointing the rector or vicar when
the benefice fell vacant. For example, Dame Anne Bigod exercised this
right at Settrington, Yorkshire, in 1475; Dame Agnes Cheyne at Chenies,
Buckinghamshire, in 1485; and Dame Anne Danvers at Dauntsey, Wiltshire,
in 1528.11 In such circumstances, women encountered few if any obstacles
when they undertook the commissions discussed in this book. Looking
toward both heaven and earth, they sought to benefit their and their families’

10 Martindale, “Patrons and Minders,” 143-78. Martindale ascribed this intrusion to an earlier
period and actually claimed that it declined after the thirteenth century. However, most of his
evidence came from cathedrals rather than parish churches, where more and more of the gentry
and nobility were buried in the Later Middle Ages. On the latter point, Saul, “The Gentry and
the Parish,” 247-249.
11 Testamenta Eboracensia, A Selection of Wills from the Registry at York, III, #78, 226n for Bigod;
BL, Add’l Ms, 5840, f. 24 for Cheyne; and Macnamara, Memorials of the Danvers Family, 262 for
Danvers.
Introduc tion 21

souls and to memorialize their high rank. In the process, they transformed
the churches they patronized and contributed to one of the most fertile
periods in English religious architecture.
Finally, focusing on the scale and timing of aristocratic women’s religious
patronage contributes to the ongoing debate about the origins of the English
Reformation. Most historians of the period—myself included—accept the
revisionist argument that widespread, often active, support for the Church
and the religious status quo existed in the generation or two before Henry
VIII’s break with Rome. Although the evidence about epitaphs and chantries
presented here supports that interpretation, it also suggests the need for a
more nuanced interpretation of the significance of their patronage. Revision-
ist scholars have cited the ongoing building, expansion, and beautification of
parishes all over England as evidence of their position that the laity continued
to accept the theology of Purgatory in particular and the structure and
theology of the Church in general.12 However, as English Aristocratic Women
and the Fabric of Piety demonstrates, the tombs and buildings aristocratic
women constructed were not only statements of religious belief; they were
equally important as symbols of and memorials to their status, lineage and
wealth. In fact, many noble and knightly families took a proprietary attitude
toward their parish churches and turned them into family mausoleums.13
While historians and art historians have long recognized the interpenetration
of spiritual and secular concerns evident in the monuments and chapels that
women and men built, their assessment has not led revisionists to articulate
a more complex interpretation of the motives that fueled their activity.14
English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety is based on contem-
porary documents such as wills probated in the Prerogative Courts of
Canterbury and York, cases in the Courts of Requests, Star Chamber and
Chancery, royal grants, statutes, private bills, letters collected in the State
Papers, and the Cotton and Harleian Collections at the British Library. In
smaller numbers, it also includes marriage contracts, household and estate

12 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 131-32; Haigh, English Reformations, ch. 1. For a dissenting
view, see Finch, Church Monuments in Norfolk Before 1850, 69-77.
13 M. G. Vale, “Piety, Charity and Literacy among the Yorkshire Gentry 1370-1480,” 9-10; Saul,
“Religious Sympathies of the Gentry in Gloucestershire 1200-1500,” 103-104; Mark Knight, Piety
and Devotion among the Warwickshire Gentry, 1485-1547, Dugdale Occasional Papers, No. 32;
Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England, 112-16; 125-27.
14 Among scholars focusing on particular monuments, see, for example, Saul, Death, Art, and
Memory in Medieval England, 8-9; Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England,
15, 274; Norris, “Later Medieval Monumental Brasses,” 184. Among historians of religion, Peter
Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 33-34, 286-293; Brown, Popular Piety, 254.
22  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Pie t y, 1450 -1550

accounts, and inventories, many of which are preserved in family archives

and local record offices.
Throughout the text, but particularly in chapters one and two on tombs
and chantries, wills, both women’s and men’s, provide the bulk of the
evidence for women’s patronage. Where the data come from men’s wills,
I have depended almost exclusively on testaments in which husbands ap-
pointed their widows as their sole executors and that contained specific
directions that they should build or complete their monuments or chantries.
One hundred and sixty (26 percent) of 618 men with surviving wives who
appointed their executors chose their widows as their sole executors. I have
also used wills in which men appointed co-executors, but singled out their
widows as their “principal” or “chief” executor, or instances in which the
women probated their husbands’ wills alone. Evidence also comes from
women’s wills which state clearly that the testators had begun or finished
the construction of their and/or their husbands’ monuments or chantries.
Where they had undertaken but not completed these projects, they often
directed their executors to do so. Finally, many inscriptions on the tombs
themselves, on tablets mounted on the wall, on the walls of their chantry
chapels, or on nearby stained-glass windows testify to women’s patronage.
With the exception of these cases, I have not assumed that women included
among their husbands’ co-executors commissioned or completed their tombs.
About half of the tombs mentioned in this book no longer exist, but
antiquarians and local historians who visited churches in the period kept
records of their existence. They reported important details about many
monuments that have since disappeared or been severely damaged. The
Cole Collection in the Additional Manuscripts at the British Library is
particularly useful in this respect. Reference works such as the Victoria
County Histories of England, the publications of the Royal Commission on
Historical Monuments, and the exhaustive county surveys of the buildings
of England begun by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and continued by his colleagues
supplement this information.
I have used numbers and percentages to give readers some idea of the
frequency with which a particular phenomenon occurred. These figures are
not intended as statistics in a contemporary sense. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-
century sources are far too varied, even when they are of the same type, to
support such claims. The purpose of these numbers is to support the overall
argument by suggesting orders of magnitude or the significance of specific
examples cited. Readers should understand them as such..
For the purposes of this study, I have def ined ‘aristocratic women’
as the daughters, wives, and widows of noblemen and knights. Because
Introduc tion 23

primogeniture governed the descent of land and titles, the younger sons of
noblemen were knights, not members of the nobility. On an economic level,
the richest knights and poorest barons enjoyed a similar level of wealth. In
political terms, knights and noblemen held the leading positions in central
government, were the king’s companions and foremost servants at court, and
cooperated in governing the counties for the Crown. Knights were also more
likely to serve as MPs than other members of the upper gentry. As a result,
the daughters of noblemen and knights were more likely to marry knights
or the heirs of knights than noblemen or their heirs, but the movement
was not all in one direction. Some knights’ daughters married noblemen or
their heirs, some noblemen’s daughters married knights or knights’ heirs.
All of them belonged to the aristocracy as defined here. While the wealth
and status of the majority of their fathers and husbands came from land, a
small number of the women’s husbands or fathers were merchants and Lord
Mayors of London who rose into the aristocracy through their marriages and
purchases of land. Thus, of the 230 women whose patronage is discussed in
this book, fifteen had husbands or fathers who were merchants and Lord
Mayors. They represent one path of upward mobility in the period.
The majority, though not all, of the aristocratic women who commissioned
the art and architecture and made the donations discussed in this book
were widows in the final stage of familial and managerial careers that had
begun when they married for the first time. They commissioned their own,
their spouses’, and their joint tombs, chapels, stained-glass windows, and
other additions to their churches to elicit prayers for their souls and those of
their close relatives and to preserve their memory. As patrons, they initiated
projects that either they or their deceased spouses had envisaged before
they died, playing more or less active roles in designing them or making
decisions about particular details. Some finished projects their husbands had
begun before they died and followed the men’s directions. When they failed
to complete them before their own deaths, they directed their executors to
do so. All of these possibilities will be documented in the text that follows.
The longevity of aristocratic widows meant that they had ample time to
plan—and often to oversee the completion of—the projects they patronized:
in a group of 351 couples where the death dates of both the male testators and
their widows are known, 63 percent outlived their first husbands by more
than ten years; 37 percent, by more than twenty.15 These long widowhoods
gave them the time and the opportunity to accumulate the large incomes

15 The figures in this paragraph are based on original research published in Harris, English
Aristocratic Women, 15-16,127-29.
24  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Pie t y, 1450 -1550

and huge amount of luxury goods that enabled them to undertake the
building and make the donations of vestments and ritual objects that form
the subject of this book. In addition to their jointures and dowers, 466
(75.4 percent) of 618 knights and noblemen who predeceased their wives
left them considerable additional income and goods, regardless of whether
they appointed them as their executors. While only a minority included
additional land among these extra bequests, they left their widows money,
clothing, jewels, and plate, often in enormous quantities, as well as household
goods and livestock. Women also collected income from land their husbands
designated to support their younger sons and provide dowries for their
daughters. Although most of this land and the land they held as jointures
or dowers descended to their husbands’ heirs when they died, widows could
usually bequeath much, if not all, of their movable property in their wills.
Wealthy, independent, and long-lived aristocratic women were thus able
to play an important role in the expensive and wide-ranging investment in
English churches that peaked in the first decade of the sixteenth century.16
English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety is divided into seven
chapters. The first four chapters discuss the monuments, chapels and other
structures, sculptures, and stained glass that aristocratic women com-
missioned for their favorite churches. With a few exceptions, their parish
churches were the recipients of this largesse. The fifth chapter discusses
women’s endowment and building of hospitals, almshouses and schools,
most of which were located in and benefited their parishes. Although the
charters for these institutions almost always contained provisions for prayers
for their souls, they represented a broader vision of the women’s responsibil-
ity to do good works for their communities. Chapter six focuses on the
multiple ways in which aristocratic women used their religious patronage
to define themselves for posterity, revealing the complexity of their motives
and synthesizing material from previous chapters. Throughout the book,
this analysis makes clear that aristocratic women saw their religious and
secular impulses as compatible and mutually reinforcing, rather than as
dichotomous. English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety ends with
an epilogue that traces the fate of the buildings and art aristocratic women
commissioned, revealing patterns of both survival and loss.

16 For example, Haigh, English Reformations, 29, 34-35; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 131-34;
Duffy, The Voices of Morebath, 77; Finch, Church Monuments in Norfolk, 69.
1 Tombs: Honoring the Dead

Before Sir Thomas Barnardiston of Kedington, Suffolk and Great Cotes,

Lincolnshire, died in 1503, he named his wife Elizabeth his sole executor
and assigned her responsibility for arranging his funeral and building
his tomb. Since the will itself has not survived and we know these facts
from a subsequent Chancery case, we do not know where Sir Thomas
asked to be buried.1 Nonetheless, Elizabeth was probably following his
directions when she chose Great Cotes, Lincolnshire, where they had
lived until around 1500, for his final resting place, rather than Kedington,
Suffolk, to which they had recently moved. His tomb there was marked by
a large brass showing a picture of the Resurrection, portraits of Sir Thomas
and Elizabeth with inscription scrolls coming out of their mouths, and
representations of their fifteen children.2 Sir Thomas’s scroll read, “Jesus,
have pity on me”; and Elizabeth’s, “Your will be done.”3 The inscription
under the picture begged viewers for to pray for them: “In the worship of
the Resurrection of Our Lord and the Blessed Sepulcher and for the soul
of Sir Thomas Bernardiston Knight and Dame Elisabeth his wife and of
your charity, say a Pater Noster [and] six credos. Ye shall have a hundred
days of pardon to your name…”4 A second inscription around the margins
of the brass also asked for prayers.5 The brass was exceptionally elaborate.
Relatively few brasses contained images in addition to the effigies being
commemorated or had scrolls with prayers coming from the mouths of
the deceased. Nor did they usually beg for specific prayers from onlookers
and promise a specif ic reduction in the time the latter would spend in
Purgatory in return.
When Elizabeth Barnardiston herself died in 1526, she asked to be buried
at Walsingham Priory and appointed the prior as her sole executor. In the
event, however, she was interred at Kedington. A stone tomb chest there
has effigies of her and her husband. A tablet facing the monument states

1 TNA, C1/279/44 (1504-1509).

2 Almack, “Kedington alias Ketton, and the Barnardiston Family,” 131 and note; Pevsner and
Harris, Lincolnshire. Buildings, 254; Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments (London: T. Harper,
1631), 733; Handbook for Travellers in Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, 154.
3 Lincolnshire Notes and Queries, 287. The notes described the brass as being located on the
pavement in the chancel, partly covered by the altar, and much damaged. There is no indication
as to when the damage occurred.
4 HEH, Esdaile Papers, Box 17, Turnbull, SS Peter and Paul Kedington.
5 Lincolnshire Notes and Queries, 287.
26  English Aristocr atic Women and the Fabric of Pie t y, 1450 -1550

Figure 1 Monument of Sir Thomas Barnardiston (1503) and his widow, Dame
Elizabeth (d. 1526). Church at Kedington, Suffolk. Photograph by the
author, 2003.
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