Bath Abbey's Monuments E-Book

Oliver Taylor

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 629

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Bath Abbey contains the largest collection of monuments in any UK church or cathedral. But how did the ruined Abbey of 1539 become a Georgian 'gallery of sculpture', where the latest works of art by famous sculptors could be seen? And why are their appearances today so different from their original designs? Long before the city's now-celebrated museums and galleries were established, the Abbey's monuments were one of Bath's newsworthy tourist attractions. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material on the Abbey's history, this book tells the story of its monuments for the first time – how they helped the Abbey rise from the aftermath of the Dissolution to give it a new identity, a unique floor, and walls that tell the social history of Bath.

Leseprobe

About the Author

Oliver Taylor is Head of Interpretation at Bath Abbey. He received his Ph.D. from Durham University in 2008 and has published widely on literary and local history.

This book is dedicated to my grandparents, whosechildren are living monuments of their enduring love.

First published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Oliver Taylor, 2023

The right of Oliver Taylor to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9490 1

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to the following people who have helped the formation of the book in various ways: Pete Jones, Jeremy Key-Pugh, and Anna Riggs for reading drafts of the chapters; David Stubbs for informing me of John Buckler’s drawings of the monuments to Erasmus Philipps and Martin Madan in the British Library (Add MS 36379); Dr Julian Litten for informing me of the manuscript AC/Unlisted/box 32c at Bristol Record Office; Archivists at Bristol Record Office, The Somerset Heritage Centre, and The Society of Antiquaries; Kim Jordan for making his research on Bath’s monumental masons available to me; Rich Howman for days of patient photography to show the monuments in their best lights; David Littlefield, Fergus Connolly, Andrew Wardrope, Sam, Tim, and Matt from Sally Strachey Historic Conservation, and the late Mark Hudson for their sensitive thinking about and work on the ledgerstones. Finally, thanks and love are due to my family for the love and time that has enabled this book to be written.

Bath Abbey looking east from the west end showing the Tudor arcades and monuments in the Nave. © Bath Abbey.

CONTENTS

LIST OF COLOUR PLATES

LIST OF FIGURES

INTRODUCTION

1. CREATION:‘What else doth arise by breaking Ground for Burial Places, and for Monuments’, 1569–1712

2. IDENTITY:‘As much Speculation as can be met with, perhaps, in any Parochial Church’, 1712–1807

3. RENOVATION:‘Such undistinguishing accumulations of sepulchral trifling’, 1807–1885

4. CONSERVATION:‘To restore those which have historic interest or artistic merit’, 1895–2021

CONCLUSION

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF COLOUR PLATES

Colour Plate A: Monument to Bartholomew Barnes (d. 1606) located on the south side of the Sanctuary. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate B:Page 17 of Bath Abbey’s Benefactors’ Book (compiled 1618–25) listing some of the benefactors to the paving of the church 1614–15, including Bishop James Montagu’s contribution of £43 6s 8d which completed the paving of the Nave and the church. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate C: Tomb of Bishop James Montagu (d. 1618) in the North Nave of Bath Abbey. In the background, Sir George Gilbert Scott’s arrangement of the tablets on the walls of the Nave can be seen. Bath Abbey Archives. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate D: Detail of the effigy of Bishop James Montagu (d. 1618), from his tomb located in the North Nave of Bath Abbey, executed by Nicholas Johnson. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate D (ii): Silhouette of the tomb of Bishop James Montagu (d. 1618). The window installed in 1951 comprised of the arms and some of the glass given by other seventeenth-century benefactors to the Abbey can be seen in the background. © Bath Abbey

Colour Plate E: Tomb of Lady Jane Waller (d. 1633) on the south wall of the South Transept of Bath Abbey. In English Church Monuments (1946), Katherine Esdaile ‘unhesitatingly’ ascribed the tomb to Epiphanius Evesham. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate F: Detail of the effigies of Lady Jane and Sir William Waller from the tomb of Lady Jane Waller (d. 1633). Sir William’s vandalised sword hand and ‘broken face’ described by Samuel Pepys in 1668 can be seen. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate F (ii): Detail of the pediment of Lady Jane Waller’s tomb (d. 1633) attributed to Epiphanius Evesham. The paint dates to April 1948 when the restorer Pearl Blencowe carried out her ‘experiment in cleaning’ the monument. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate G:A Service at Bath Abbey (1788) by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm. The watercolour shows the Nave looking west from the elevated perspective of the organ. Monuments can be seen on the pillars and walls in line with and above the string course of the windows, allowing worshippers to use the benches for prayer. © British Library.

Colour Plate H:A Perspective View of the Abbey-Church of St. Peter and Paul at Bath (1750) by James Vertue. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate I: Mid-seventeenth-century ledgerstone commemorating three generations of the Wakeman family in the North Aisle of the Nave. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate J: Ledgerstone to Mrs Anna Peirce (d. 1688) and Mary A. Court (nee Peirce) (d. 1679). The quotation from Psalm 39 – ‘And now Lord what is our hope / truly our hope is even in thee’ – is carved at the bottom of the ledgerstone. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate K: Monument to Elizabeth Peirce (d. 1671) and her brothers Robert and Charles. The ‘verses’ on the monument were ‘found in her Closet after her decease’. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate L:Page 44 of Bath Abbey’s Benefactors’ Book (compiled 1618–25) which records the Christmas gift of ‘Two Velvet Palls, and Two Black cloath Palls’ from John Baber to the Abbey in 1705. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate M: Early eighteenth-century ledgerstone to John William Teshmaker (d. 1713) at the west end of the Nave. Like many monuments in the Abbey, it addresses the reader, asking them to ‘Have one Good thought when thus on Graves you tread’. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate N: Monument to Jacob Bosanquet (d. 1767) by Thomas Carter the Younger, centre, in its present location on the east wall of the South Transept. The large monuments to Josiah Thomas (d. 1820), by Gahagan, and Joseph Sill (d. 1824) can be seen on the right and left, respectively. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate O: Inscription tablet to C.M. (Catherine Malone) (d. 1765) in the North Aisle. It is all that remains on the Abbey’s walls of the larger monument that was erected to her in the North Aisle c. 1765–67. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate P: Relief carving from Catherine Malone’s monument (c. 1765–67). It depicts ‘a boy sleeping by an urn, with a branch of cypress in his left hand, resting his head on an hour-glass’. The carving was removed in the nineteenth century and discovered by archaeologists beneath the Abbey floor in 2020. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate Q: Monument to Leonard (d. 1761) and Elizabeth Coward (d. 1759) erected in 1764. It was probably carved by a Bath sculptor and is similar in design to Catherine Malone’s, erected in the Abbey c. 1765–67 (shown on Colour Plate P). © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate R: Monument to James Quin (d. 1766) created by Thomas King between April 1766 and April 1769. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate S: Detail of the figures of Liberality (left) and Genius (right) either side of the ‘Batheaston Vase’ and a medallion portrait of Lady Anna Miller (d. 1781) from her monument created by John Bacon. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate T: Monument to Richard ‘Beau’ Nash (d. 1761) by John Ford. It was erected in 1791 after Dr Henry Harington invited subscriptions from the Bath public. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate U: Group of ledgerstones to members of the Harvey family of sculptors, including ‘The Very Ingenious’ John Harvey (d. 1742) and his sisters, Sarah (d. 1691/2) and Ann (d. 1696) to the left of it. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate V: Tablet to botanist Dr John Sibthorp (d. 1796), centre, by John Flaxman. Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca introduced the plants of Greece to British readers. Consequently, Flaxman’s monument alludes to Greek mythology, depicting Sibthorp crossing the River Styx, stepping from Charon’s ferry into the underworld. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate W: Detail of monument to Colonel Alexander Champion (d. 1793) by Joseph Nollekens showing ‘Fame on a pedestal, with her trumpet inverted, holding a medallion of the deceased. A coat of mail, cannon, battle-axe, & warlike trophies, surround the pedestal’. © The author.

Colour Plate X: Monument to Sir William Baker (d. 1770), centre, by John Francis Moore, erected in the Abbey at the end of August 1776. Its form was altered in the nineteenth century. Notably, the original black marble pyramid has been removed from the background and its pedestal. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate Y: John Francis Moore’s original design for the monument to Sir William Baker (d. 1770). In the top right of the watercolour is written ‘Erected in Walcot Church at Bath’. It seems that it was ultimately decided that Bath Abbey was a more fitting location for the monument. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Colour Plate Z: South wall of the Gethsemane Chapel, South-East Choir. What remains of the monuments with busts to Mary Frampton (d. 1698) and Dorothy Hobart (d. 1722), left and centre, respectively, after the nineteenth-century works. The inscription to Elizabeth Winkley (d. 1756) sits between Frampton and Hobart, her portrait to the right of Hobart. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate Z (ii): Inscription tablet from the monument to Mary Frampton (d. 1698) where the text “by Mr. Dryden” appeared before it was printed as the poem “The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady”. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate Z (iii): Details of the monument and bust of Dorothy Hobart (d. 1722) by the “Very Ingenious” Bath sculptor Mr John Harvey. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AA: Photogrammetric survey of the Abbey floor after the removal of the Victorian furniture in 2018. It shows the arrangement of the ledgerstones and heating grates after George Gilbert Scott’s work 1864–74. Small white marbles can be seen inset into the floor, concentrated in the Nave. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AB: Monument to Henry Harington (d. 1816) by Thomas King (centre). Beneath is the tablet to his daughter-in-law Esther Harington (d. 1829), the only tablet beneath the bench seating in the Choir. This helps to illustrate the different approaches to the Victorian rearrangement of the tablets in the Nave and Choir. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AC:Interior of the Abbey by J. C. Nattes (1805) showing the Choir looking west. On the left, buildings south of the Abbey block light from the windows. The size, arrangement and placement of monuments under the organ gallery before 1835 can all be seen. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AD: ‘Index Plan of the Grave-Stones upon the Floor of the Abbey Church, Bath’ by Charles P. Russell (1872). The blank area on the right, in the North-East Choir, was found to have been paved with many marble backing stones from wall monuments when the Corporation Stalls were removed in 2018. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AE: The floor of the North-East Choir paved with marble backing stones removed from wall tablets 1868–72. The outlines of urns, foliage and oval-shaped marbles keyed to receive carvings which originally comprised the tablets can be seen and compared with the designs on the wall behind. © The author.

Colour Plate AF: Arrangement of monuments in the middle bay of the North Nave Aisle. The tablet to Robert Walsh (d. 1788) can be seen in the centre of the bay, with its black marble backing intact, around which the others, which have had their backings removed, have been arranged symmetrically. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AG: Brass plaque to Mary Reeve (d. 1664) and four of her sons, possibly executed by her husband George Reeve, Bath’s city goldsmith. It is all that remains of a larger monument originally erected on a pillar on the south side of the Nave. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AH: Monument to the painter William Hoare (d. 1792). Francis Chantrey was commissioned to make it in 1828 by his son Prince Hoare, who directed that it be ‘cleaned with pure water only’ annually. This appears to have lapsed. It was specially cleaned in 1902. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AI: Tablets of similar design to Anne Wylde (d. 1764) and Mary Belford (d. 1800). Mary Belford’s tablet was one of six to be ‘left dirty, in order to show what some of the monuments were like before the cleaning and conservation work in 1997’. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AJ 1,2,3,4: Ledgerstone to Christiana Susanna Lucus (d. 1781) showing it: (1) prior to conservation missing pieces and stained by oak tannins; (2) during conservation work with the alternative inscription showing on the back of the stone; (3) with the aramid fibre applied to the back; (4) after conservation work. © Bath Abbey / The author.

Colour Plate AK: Photogrammetric survey of the Abbey floor in 2021. The image shows the new positions of the ledgerstones and of the heating grates, which may be compared with the arrangement of them in the photogrammetric survey of the 1872 arrangement in Colour Plate AA. © Bath Abbey.

Colour Plate AK (ii): Bath Abbey looking east from the west end showing the ledgerstones in the Nave. © Bath Abbey.

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1: Tablet to James Bassett (d. 1819) in the north-east porch, Bath Abbey. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 2: Tablet to Sir Erasmus Philipps (d. 1743) in the north-east porch, Bath Abbey. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 3: Monument to Richard and William Chapman probably created after the death of the latter c.1627. The date of Richard’s death on the monument (1572) should probably read 1579. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 4: Ground plan of The Abbey Church, Bath, engraved by Richd. Roffe from a drawing by R. Cattermole (1816), published in Britton’s history of Bath Abbey 1825. The tombs of John Bellingham (d. 1576) and Margaret Lichfield (d. 1579) are marked at l and n, respectively, in the South Choir. © The author.

Fig. 5: Replica of a tablet to Peter Chapman (d. 1602) donated in 1998. The original monument was wooden and was removed to the vestry in the nineteenth century. It was then lost. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 6: Undated nineteenth-century print (possibly c.1835) depicting the tomb of Bishop James Montagu (d. 1618) in the Nave. The artist has deliberately drawn the pillars and walls without tablets to emphasise the tomb. © The author.

Fig. 7: Detail of the Tomb of Margaret Lichfield (d. 1579) on the right-hand side of James Storer’s engraving of ‘Prior Bird’s Chapel, Bath Cathedral’. © The author.

Fig. 8: Detail of the monuments to Mary Reeve (on the left-most pillar), the oval monument to Calveley Legh M.D. and Granville Pyper (central pillar). On the far right-hand side can be seen Charles Godfrey’s monument. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 9: Detail of monument to Jacob Bosanquet (d. 1767) as originally installed to the left of the Great West Door at the west of the Nave. British Library, London, UK © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 10: Monument to Dorothy Hobart (d. 1722) in its original form and location on the pillar next to the pulpit in the south of the Nave as depicted by Samuel Grimm in 1788. British Library, London, UK © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 11: Monument to ‘C.M.’ (Catherine Malone; d. 1765) in its original form and location in the North Aisle of the Nave as depicted by Samuel Grimm in 1788. British Library, London, UK © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 12: Quin’s Monument, Bath, drawn by John Nixon, engraved by Sparrow, which appeared as the frontispiece to the European Magazine and London Review in 1792. © The author.

Fig. 13: Plate depicting the monument to Lady Anna Miller (d. 1781) from Collinson’s History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset (1791). © The author.

Fig. 14: Study perhaps for the Monument to the Rt. Hon. William Bingham. Bath Abbey by John Flaxman. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 15: Monument to William Bingham (d. 1804) by John Flaxman. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 16: Monument to Sir Richard Hussey Bickerton (d. 1832) by Sir Francis Chantrey. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 17: Tablet to the Stibbs family, including Captain Bartholomew Stibbs (d. 1735). © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 18: The ‘elegant’ monument to Andrew Barkley (d. 1790) by Thomas King. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 19: Henry Storer’s drawing and the engraving of the ‘S[outh] Transept, Bath Cathedral’ for his father, James Storer’s History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Churches of Great Britain (1814). © The author.

Fig. 20: View, looking S.W. of Nave, &c. (1820) engraved by John Le Keux from a drawing by Frederick Mackenzie, published in John Britton’s History and Antiquities of Bath Abbey Church (1825). © The author.

Fig. 21: James Storer’s etching of the Interior of Bath Cathedral (from Henry Gastineau’s drawing). © The author.

Fig. 22: Plan of the new Choir Screen signed by Edward Blore (c.1835) showing ‘Recesses for Monuments’ marked on the north and south side of its central door. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 23: Marbles removed from wall monuments set into distinctive striated stone c.1835–36 in the south-west Nave. © The author.

Fig. 24: Drawing of Catherine Malone’s (d. 1765) monument by James Cross for James Hayward Markland’s Remarks on English Churches (1843). Cross’s depiction appears intentionally distorted to support Markland’s description of the monument’s ‘unrivalled ugliness’. © The author.

Fig. 25: North Transept, Bath Abbey Church by James Cross for James Hayward Markland’s Remarks on English Churches (1843). © The author.

Fig. 26: George Philipps Manners’s arrangement of the tablets on the South Nave Aisle wall seen in The Illustrated London News, 7 January 1854. © The author.

Fig. 27: Samuel Rogers Jr, mason, Canal Bridge, Widcombe, Bath, c.1864. A cabinet photograph by J. & J. Dutton, photographers, Bath. Samuel Rogers’s firm carved a number of monuments for the Abbey and its cemetery here in the mid-nineteenth century. © Bath & North East Somerset Council.

Fig. 28: Photograph of the North Nave Aisle looking west by Dawson & Dutton, c.1860. © The author.

Fig. 29: Photograph of the Nave looking east by J. Dutton, c.1860. © The author.

Fig. 30: ‘Tablet in the Abbey Church, Bath’ to John Bowles (d. 1819) published on p.305 of the Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1820. © The author.

Fig. 31: Tablet to John Bowles (d. 1819) in the South Aisle today. The tablet has been reduced to its inscription and coat of arms. It is therefore representative of the way in which George Gilbert Scott treated such simple tablets and applied the terms of the 1868 Faculty to his work on them. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 32: ‘Kemble Memorial Screen, Bath Abbey Church’, designed by John Oldrid Scott and executed by Harry Hems, published in The Builder, 24 April 1886. © The author.

Fig. 33: Tablet to Jesse and William Mead by Bath masons Turvey and Perrin erected in 1929. Like the tablet to William Siddons (d. 1808) it was placed above the string course in the South Nave Aisle. The Faculty paperwork shows that the lettering of the Mead tablet was to be ‘like the “Siddons” Tablet’. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 34: Tablet to Captain Aubrey Reilly (d. 1917) by Farmer and Brindley installed above the string course at the east end of the North Nave Aisle. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 35: Tablet to Thomas William Dunn by Thomas Baylis Huxley-Jones erected above the string course on the south wall of the East Choir in 1932, opposite the monument to William Hoare and the memorial to those from Bath College who lost their lives in the First World War. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 36: Tablet to Sarah Fielding (d. 1768) on the north-west wall of the Nave. © Bath Abbey.

Fig. 37: The pieces of the Julian Penny’s (d. 1657) ledgerstone undergoing consolidation and conservation work in June 2019. © The author.

Fig. 38: Ledgerstone to Joseph Philips (d. 1703). The portion on the left (with the crest) was all that remained after George Gilbert Scott’s work in 1872. Charles Russell’s 1872 and Richard Rawlinson’s 1719 records of the ledgerstones were used to newly carve the missing inscription. © The author.

Detail of the arrangement of the tablets on the wall of the South Nave Aisle. The central placement of the large monument to Anne Finch (d. 1713) and the symmetry attempted in the monuments either side of it exemplifies George Gilbert Scott’s approach to the ordering of the tablets in the Nave 1868-71. The tablet to Cecilia Henslow mentioned in the Introduction can be seen in the top-left of the bay. © The author.

INTRODUCTION

On Wednesday, 7 July 1819, two days of horse racing began at Lansdown Racecourse, north of Bath. Among the revellers attending the meet was James Bassett, a joiner from Widcombe, south of the city. At the break of day, Bassett left his home at 6 Church Street, where Hannah Bassett worked as a Mantua maker, and set off on the five-mile walk up to the racecourse. He and his friends, a party of young men, were in high spirits. To pass the time, they began horsing around. In a ‘frolic’, Bassett attempted ‘to vault over the head of his companion’, John Shepherd, but it went tragically wrong. The two men fell backwards, Shepherd falling back onto Bassett. The ‘violence of the concussion’, the inquest later found, had burst Bassett’s bladder. Although he was ‘immediately taken down to the Casualty hospital, where he received the best surgical advice and attention’, James Bassett died the following morning.1 He was a descendent of the Bassett family who for many years were ‘proprietors of the manor of Claverton’. By the ‘indulgence of the worthy Rector’, Bassett was buried at St Mary’s, Claverton, ‘amongst the remains of his once opulent ancestors’ on Monday, 12 July 1819.

On the evening of Bassett’s burial, ‘a long and melancholy muffled peal was rung’ on the Abbey’s bells. Bassett had been an Abbey bellringer himself and the peal was a mark of ‘respect to their unfortunate young friend’. Bassett’s friend, John Shepherd, was ‘truly miserable’. He was ‘the innocent cause of the fatal event’. Although ‘no blame whatever’ was ‘attributable’ to him, he held his friend ‘in the highest esteem’. Indeed, all who knew Bassett did, according to the newspaper and the marble tablet erected in Bath Abbey after his death (Fig. 1). Its inscription reads:

Sacred to the Memory of JAMES BASSETT,

of the Parish of Lyncombe and Widcombe;

who died July 9th 1819. Aged 40 Years.

Who in the Moment of Social Pleasure,

received a fall, which soon deprived him of Life,

and sent him (in the Blessed hope)

to another and a better World.

His Companions and Friends as a mark of Esteem

and affection; have subscribed and Placed

this Humble Tablet to his Memory.

READER

Think! in the Midst of life we are in death.

Fig.1: Tablet to James Bassett (d. 1819) in the north-east porch, Bath Abbey. © Bath Abbey.

The tablet is presently placed, perhaps where it always has been, in the north-east porch of the Abbey next to the door to the tower Bassett may have used when he rang the Abbey’s bells. There is no record of a fee received by the Abbey for permission to erect the tablet in either the Rector’s, Sexton’s or Churchwardens’ Accounts. Neither is there any record of the tablet’s original location, nor if it was moved during the rearrangements of the monuments in the 1830s and 1860s. This, it seems, was very much a tablet for one of the Abbey’s own: privately subscribed to, privately erected.

In the summer of 1835, Sir Erasmus Philipps’s tablet was removed from the west of the South Aisle, where it had been erected and was drawn by John Buckler on 6 July 1827, and placed opposite Bassett’s in the north-east porch (Fig. 2). Perhaps no monument has been moved further from its original location in the Abbey than Philipps’s. In the process, the sienna marble of the border and pediment were removed along with the cartouche containing Philipps’s coat of arms, leaving only the decorative lintel and the inscription tablet beneath it, which reads:

Sacred

To the Memory of

Sr: ERASMUS PHILIPPS

of Picton Castle in the

County of Pembroke

Bart:, Member of

Parliament for the

Town, and County of

Haverford-west,

who was Unfortunately

Drown’d in the River

Avon, near this City, by

a Fall from his Horse

Octobr: 15th: 1743

Aged 43.

Fig.2: Tablet to Sir Erasmus Philipps (d. 1743) in the north-east porch, Bath Abbey. © Bath Abbey.

Philipps’s death was as accidental as Bassett’s. Returning to Bath from Italy ‘some pigs frightened his horse, which ran back, and threw him into the river’. And so these two tablets, commemorating lives cut short in tragi-comic ways, face each other; the impact of each inscription intensified by its careful placement next to the other.

Bassett’s and Philipps’s memorials are two of 635 tablets on the walls of Bath Abbey. Unsurprisingly, they are not ones previously mentioned by commentators on the Abbey’s monuments. The ones that have attracted comment have traditionally been those by celebrated sculptors whose work has commemorated celebrities of local or national life. But the Abbey’s monuments are not simply monuments to those whose rank or income meant they were buried in Bath rather than Westminster Abbey. True, Bath Abbey contains monuments to some who might have been buried and commemorated in Westminster. However, Bath Abbey’s monuments are also uniquely a collection through which can be read the story of the parish church building itself and the rise of Bath as a spa. They are a sorely underappreciated aspect of the city’s famous Georgian heyday. The Royal Crescent, Circus, Baths, Pump Room, and Assembly Rooms are rightly appreciated as the places frequented by Bath’s fashionable eighteenth-century visitors. However, the Abbey, as the church attended by those visitors, is rarely mentioned, and nowhere is it addressed that during the Georgian period the Abbey was a ‘gallery of sculpture’ that attracted numerous visitors and citizens who wanted to admire the latest works of art by artists working in a serious and respected artform: the English church monument. Certainly monuments to the first rank of politicians, admirals, doctors, philosophers, bishops, soldiers, merchants and others can be found. But so too can those of Bath’s teachers, socialites, cloth merchants, poulterers, booksellers, mayors, sculptors, plumbers and publicans, to name but a few. Hidden in the lines of their monuments is an unwritten social history of Bath.

Until now, writers have largely reduced thinking on the Abbey’s monuments to two quotable but questionable phrases conceived in the early nineteenth century. Henry Harington’s description of the Abbey – ‘These ancient walls, with many a mouldering bust, / But show how well Bath waters lay the dust’2 – and John Britton’s statement that ‘Perhaps there is not a Church in England, not excepting that national mausoleum, Westminster Abbey, so crowded with sepulchral memorials.’3 Britton was right to identify Bath Abbey’s monuments as on a par with those in Westminster Abbey in 1825. Bath Abbey’s over 1,500 monuments are a nationally significant collection. Bath’s 635 wall tablets are comparable in number with the ‘just over 600 tombs and other substantial monuments’4 in Westminster Abbey.5 Add to that number Bath Abbey’s 891 ledgerstones (flat inscribed gravestones), almost three times as many as the ‘more than 300 memorial stones and stained glass windows’6 at Westminster, and one could easily correct Britton’s statement to say that Bath Abbey has the largest collection of monuments of any church in England. However, the combination of the English church monument’s fall out of fashion in the mid-nineteenth century and the extent of the alterations to Bath Abbey’s monuments in the 1830s and 1860s has led them to be all but forgotten. A fact all the more surprising given their importance in Georgian Bath. Whilst the Abbey’s spectacular medieval architecture, rather than its monuments, contributes to the Outstanding Universal Value of the UNESCO World Heritage City of Bath, the importance of the Abbey’s monuments is acknowledged three times in Historic England’s Grade I listing of Bath Abbey. The ‘monument-crammed interior is of very considerable note for its historical interest’ and the ‘exceptionally high concentration of memorial tablets (some 640 in all) from the C17 onwards attests to the church’s central place in Bath society’.7

This book tells the story of the monuments for the first time. How did a ruined Tudor abbey come to have the largest collection of church monuments in the country by 1845? How has this nationally significant collection been seen by those who have visited the Abbey over the centuries, and how has it been cared for and added to by the generations who have looked after the Abbey? What do we encounter today when we look around the Abbey, walk across its floor, and read the monuments? This book argues that the monuments played an important role in the rebuilding of the Abbey as a parish church in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, helped to create a new identity for it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that what we encounter of them today is the result of major renovation and conservation work in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, respectively. All of which is illustrative of the way in which the Abbey has invited, benefited from, cared for, and managed its monuments for over 400 years.

Having been rebuilt in the early sixteenth century in the perpendicular Gothic style, from 1539 the Abbey Church of St Peter and St Paul (what is now called Bath Abbey) was ruined, its monastery closed, everything of value in its building sold or stolen. The late rebuilding of the church meant that whilst Leland noticed a couple of tombs in the 1540s, the interior was simultaneously like a cathedral and comparatively clear of the large tombs that could be found in medieval cathedrals. The close relationship between the laity and the Abbey, and the Abbey’s location at the heart of the city, meant that some local families had been burying and commemorating their ancestors in the church before the Dissolution. The desire to rebuild the church must therefore have been motivated partly by a desire to honour their places of rest and preserve any monuments to them, as well as to see the church building and place of worship restored to its former glory. It is telling that two of the earliest monuments to be erected in the late sixteenth-century Abbey to ‘strangers’ (that is, visitors to the city) – to John Bellyngham (Bellingham) (d. 1576) and Mrs Margarett Lytchfylde (Lichfield) (d. 1579) – were erected in the South Choir, where the building was sound. These two tombs can be seen to the left of the door to the vestry, in the background of Henry Storer’s drawing and engraving of the ‘S[outh] Transept, Bath Cathedral’ for his father, James Storer’s History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Churches of Great Britain (1814) later in this book (Fig. 19). Early seventeenth-century benefactors to the rebuilding of the church, such as Bartholomew Barnes (d. 1606), were ‘richly entombed therein’, in Barnes’s case on the south side of the Sanctuary in 1607.

The major benefaction of Bishop James Montagu (d. 1618) made the Nave fit for worship. Ordinarily services were held in the Choir, but large civic services were held in the Nave. The completion of the Nave and Montagu’s desire to be entombed conspicuously there in order that his tomb might ‘stirr up some more benefactors’8 to the Abbey had the additional benefits of connecting giving to the church in life with being commemorated in the church after it, and providing a new space, unadorned by monuments, in which executors might take their pick of a place for a monument to their loved ones.

The completion of the post-Dissolution rebuilding of the Abbey in the early seventeenth century and its consequent capacity to be used for burial and house monuments coincided with the rise in importance of Bath as a health resort. Queen Elizabeth I conceived the rebuilt church as one for the city and one that could be used by the ‘nobilitie’ and others when visiting the city. The Abbey was certainly frequented by this class in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although St James’s was sometimes preferred because its service times allowed them to get to the Pump Rooms earlier). As a doctor himself, Henry Harington would have known, as well as anyone, the link between the illusory cure of the waters and the raising of monuments in the church. By the end of the nineteenth century, the class of person buried in the Abbey was not only a commonplace, thanks to Harington, but the subject of further and more prolonged satire in the journal established by Charles Dickens, All the Year Round:

In this noble abbey repose knights and beaux, George the Third doctors and barons of Tudor times. Under the well-trodden floor repose the masqueraders of all centuries, waiting for the last trumpet – abbots and fine ladies, friends of Dr. Johnson and Garrick, and stern monks, who opposed kings and beat down the sword with the crozier. Dainty misses, who swam about the baths with floating trays for nosegay and snuff-box, and demure nuns of the early English period; gentlemen who were not admitted to the new assembly-rooms in boots; and young misses who were not allowed to dance minuets without lappets or in aprons, lie beside early English barons and lady prioresses – ‘Dust to dust’ and ‘All is vanity; written largely on many a tomb.’9

By then, the Abbey’s reputation for monuments was such that even tablets not erected there were being misattributed to it.10 However, the Abbey certainly was a place where the ‘great and the good’ were buried and had monuments erected to their memory. But this is only part of a picture that has been obscured by nineteenth-century perspectives on the monuments which have been followed unquestioningly by later writers. Monuments to the class of person Harington and All Year Round had in mind certainly made the newspaper and were often those that were executed by celebrated London sculptors. However, monuments to the newly affluent and influential middle classes – merchants, artisans, and their families and children – of parishioners, and of Bath’s citizens executed by the city’s sculptors, are more numerous. Indeed, by 1814, James Storer felt the Abbey’s collection of monuments would have been much more ‘becoming’ had the ‘urnal tablets to infants’ given way to ‘monuments of divines, philosophers, statesmen, or heroes’. Perhaps this is why such tablets have been pointedly ignored since 1814. But for the city and the Abbey, such monuments were important. Insofar as memorials were concerned, the Abbey became the centre for the city to mourn, to raise monuments to its citizens, to celebrate the city’s achievements and values, from the eighteenth century to the two most recent floor stones to the Ropers (2016) and the Brownswords (2020), two major benefactors to the Abbey and the city, which commemorate their gifts but not their burials. Large monuments, such as those to Sir William Baker by John Francis Moore or Herman Katencamp by John Bacon Jr, were good for the revenue of the church (and the smaller sums that could be taken from visitors wishing to view these artworks) but the monuments to Nash, Harington, Josiah Thomas and others show it was equally important for the church to be a place where citizens’ monuments could have pride of place.

One of the misconceptions in almost all discussion of the monuments is that they are the product of the deceased’s desire to be commemorated.11 Although some people occasionally specified how they would like to be commemorated in their wills (usually in the seventeenth century), the vast majority of the Abbey’s monuments originated from a spouse’s, child’s, friend’s, executor’s or community’s desire to honour the deceased, perpetuate their memory, and celebrate their virtues. Whilst some executors could pay for them outright, the cost of a marble tablet was a significant investment. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Bathonian sculptor Thomas King advertised his ‘neat’ (a euphemism for small, simple and generic) monuments for sale at between 8 to 50 guineas each. With the fees the Abbey charged for permission to erect monuments on its walls or pillars (more costly in the Choir than the Nave), the minimum sum required to create and erect such a monument was approximately £20 (about four months’ wages for a skilled tradesman). For the larger, bespoke monuments by London sculptors, commissioners could expect to pay at least ten times that sum. Some of the monuments one encounters in the Abbey, especially those from the nineteenth century, were therefore funded by subscription schemes that brought together friends (Bassett), citizens (Harington, Nash), parishioners (Lea), or colleagues (Dunn, Manley Power). Bath Abbey’s fees for permission to erect these monuments were occasionally waived and, regardless, were only a few pounds, often less than 10 per cent of the total cost of the monuments. In comparison, by the end of the nineteenth century, at Westminster Abbey the ‘fee’ alone ‘for private monuments’ varied ‘from £200 for a bust upwards, according to the size of the monument’.12 The fees went ‘entirely to the maintenance of the fabric, and not to the private emolument of the Dean or any other member of the Chapter’. The revenue from burial and monuments also went towards the maintenance of the fabric of Bath Abbey, although, as we will see, the fees for monuments and the hire of funeral silks also helped to supplement what was regarded as an insufficient income for the rector’s living. Bath was therefore comparatively affordable to Westminster, and if one could pay there is no record of any other objections (on grounds of class or worth) to being buried or raising a monument in Bath Abbey. The Dean of Westminster Abbey pointed out that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘space in the Abbey’ was ‘very limited, the honour of a monument being very much coveted, the disfigurement occasioned by disproportionate monuments very incongruous, and the expense of the fabric of the Abbey very great’. In that, Westminster and Bath Abbeys had much in common. Finally, it should be remembered that the cost and supply of marble and the time it took to agree a design, carve a tablet, and even make good any mistakes, meant that, with the exception of ledgerstones (which could be laid directly onto graves within days of a death), tablets were erected months or even years after the death of the person they commemorate.

This book addresses two different types of monuments in Bath Abbey. The first are called ledgerstones. These are flat gravestones inscribed with the details of the deceased and layed into the church floor. All but a handful of these mark burials in the Abbey. However, as we will see, they were occasionally used as cenotaphs to commemorate those buried elsewhere. By the nineteenth century, ledgerstones were usually simple and plain, the letter cutting less flourished and elaborate, the coats of arms seen at the top of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stones omitted. However, the beautiful carving and craftsmanship on earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ledgerstones, such as those to John William Teshmaker (d. 1713) or the Harvey family, are arresting when one walks across the Abbey floor, as was surely their intention, judging from how these and many other stones’ inscriptions address the reader directly.

There are a number of different-sized ledgerstones on the Abbey floor. By the nineteenth century, a large-sized ledgerstone for the Abbey floor was standardized at 6ft x 2ft 6in (with the option of a small-sized stones, especially used for children). The earliest ledgerstone still presently in the Abbey floor is dated 1623. Anthony Wood’s 1676 survey suggests that there were many other, and perhaps earlier, ledgerstones in the floor. However, by the late seventeenth century their inscriptions had been eroded. From around 1620, ledgerstones became increasingly desirable in the Abbey, owing to the facts that all the roofs had been repaired by 1612 and the floor itself repaired 1614–15. The approximately 6,500 burials that took place in the Abbey from around 1576 until 1845 have resulted in a unique, and uniquely large, collection of ledgerstones. Eight hundred and ninety-one ledgerstones were counted prior to the Footprint Project conservation works to the floor between 2018–21, accounting for over a third of the approximately 2,400 stones that comprise the entire Abbey floor.13 Approximately 8 per cent of all burials in the Abbey are commemorated by a ledgerstone. The different types of stone – blue lias limestone, Welsh pennant, white marble, and others – and the ages of the ledgerstones (covering the period 1623–1845) have given a beautiful texture to the Abbey floor.

This kind of beautiful patina given to a church floor by ledgerstones forms part of George Herbert’s poem ‘The Church-floor’, which was part of his major work The Temple (1633):

Mark you the floor? that square and speckled stone,

Which looks so firm and strong,

Is Patience:

And th’ other black and grave, wherewith each one

is checker’d all along,

Humility:

The gentle rising, which on either hand

Leads to the Choir above,

Is Confidence:

But the sweet cement, which is one sure band

Ties the whole frame, is Love

And Charity.

Hither sometimes Sin steals, and stains

The marbles’ neat and curious veins:

But all is cleansed when the marble weeps.

Sometimes Death, puffing at the door,

Blows all the dust about the floor:

But while he thinks to spoil the room, he sweeps.

Blest be the Architect, whose art

Could build so strong in a weak heart.

Herbert’s descriptions of the ledgerstones and floor are emblematic of Christian qualities, from those italicised in the first half of the poem, to the stained marble and marble weeping with condensation allegorical of sin and tears of repentance in the second half. Epitaphs on the Abbey’s ledgerstones (especially those pre-dating the more simple designs of the nineteenth century) also convey the Christian qualities of the deceased in their epitaphs and often follow conventions in their letter cutting alluded to in the type of Herbert’s poem, such as emphasising those qualities, locations, names, and dates through the emphasis of italic lettering. Like Herbert’s opening line, they also occasionally address the reader.

The second type of monument is the marble tablets now on the walls of the Abbey: 635 at the last count. The book will also discuss the tombs of Bishop James Montagu (d. 1618) and Lady Jane Waller (d. 1633), but not the Chantry Chapel of Prior Birde (d. 1525). The earliest date that appears to be carved on a mural tablet is 1572 (although taking this date as the year in which the monument was created is problematic, as will be discussed in Chapter 1). After burial ceased within the Abbey in 1845, a small number of tablets were erected as cenotaphs (commemorating burial elsewhere), the latest being dated 1972. As we will see, the tablets’ forms and locations were changed radically between 1835–36 and 1868–71. This fact makes the full assessment of them individually problematic in many ways.

As well as covering the walls, before 1835 the Abbey’s pillars were covered with marble tablets; some pillars may have had as many as twelve tablets on them. The majority appear to have been generic tablets created by Bath sculptors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two early tombs – that of Bishop James Montagu erected in 1619, and that of Lady Jane Waller probably erected before 1635 – survive; however others, such as those to John Bellingham and Margaret Litchfield, were removed from the South Choir Aisle in the nineteenth century. A handful of tablets created by notable eighteenth-and nineteenth-century sculptors from London are part of the collection. These tend to be the larger tablets that have survived the nineteenth-century works relatively intact, although Carter’s tablet to Jacob Bosanquet has been cut down. Westminster Abbey unquestionably has more works by well-known London-based sculptors, especially those by John Bacon (1740–99), John Bacon Jr (1777–1859) and Joseph Nollekens (1737–1823). Bath Abbey has no signed monuments by Henry Cheere (1703–81), Louis-Francois Roubiliac (1702–62), John Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770) or Peter Scheemakers (1691–1781). However, Bath and Westminster do have similar numbers of tablets by Sebastian Gahagan (1779–1838), Francis Leggatt Chantrey (1781–1841), John Flaxman (1755–1826) and John Francis Moore (1745–1809).14

Today the concentration of the tablets gathered together on the walls of Bath Abbey, mostly beneath the string course, is arresting in itself. But they have largely been reduced to their inscriptions and coats of arms, what George Herbert would call their ‘dusty heraldry and lines’ in his poem ‘Church Monuments’. To understand the impact these tablets had when their original designs and decorations were present, it is necessary to consider the depictions of the Abbey interior in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is also necessary to imagine the Abbey interior as it was before George Gilbert Scott’s renovations to it in the 1860s and 1870s. Prior to Scott’s works, the organ-screen divided the Nave from the Choir, the vista to the east window could not have attracted the visitor’s gaze as it now does; no stained glass filled that window and the majority of the windows were plain rather than stained glass; fan vaulting only formed the ceiling in the Choir and that and the rest of the stonework was blackened by decades of candle, gas and coal smoke; no pews covered the Nave floor and the Mayor’s seat and monuments disfigured the Birde Chantry Chapel. The whiteness, colours and gilding, as well as the modern artistry and sculptural designs, of newly installed marble tablets would have stood out brightly to visitors and worshippers alike. The monuments were the tourist attraction for those walking in or through the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries after ‘church time’ and the newspaper advertised new works when they could be seen. Throughout the book the words ‘monuments’ and ‘tablets’ are used interchangeably to refer to those on the wall (although the former is occasionally used to refer to the entire collection of ledgerstones and tablets; the usage should always be obvious from the context in which it is used). Where ‘ledgerstones’ or ‘tablets’ are referred to, the words are used to designate those distinct forms.

Whilst small generic tablets in white (‘statuary’) marble made by Bath sculptors could be afforded by some of middle classes, as Nicholas Penny has pointed out, bespoke marble monuments ‘were luxuries of expensive imported materials made only for the wealthy few who wore Indian muslin, sat on chairs of West Indian mahogany and drank port, claret, and hock’.15 The rise in popularity of the English church monument coincided with the rise of the British Empire. Consequently, numerous monuments in churches and cathedrals across the country commemorate those involved in colonisation and enslavement. Bath Abbey is no exception. Indeed, in 1950, the Director of Bath’s Municipal Libraries and Abbey historian, Reginald Wright, described the Abbey as ‘a shrine of the British Empire’.16 Approximately 20 per cent of the monuments erected in the Abbey commemorate individuals who helped to govern, administrate, expand and protect the British Empire: investors, employees and directors of the East India Company; members of the government of Jamaica, Barbados and other colonies; plantation owners; and many others. The inscriptions and iconography of their monuments often unquestioningly and patriotically dignify, glorify and idealise the empire and their roles and conduct within it. But not always. The tablet to Captain Bartholomew Stibbs (discussed in Chapter 2) demonstrates that sometimes behind the plainest monuments lie grave histories of enslavement and exploitation.

Bath Abbey benefited from the British Empire in as much as it accepted payments for permission to erect monuments from the families of those involved in it. The fees for erecting monuments in different periods are discussed throughout the book. Such fees were only a fraction (often less than a tenth) of what it would have cost to commission a sculptor to carve the monuments themselves. Whilst there are some instances of fees being waived for both burial and the erection of monuments (as in the case of James Bassett above), they are rare and infrequent. Conversely, if one could pay for a monument, no questions appear to have been asked about Christian denomination, class or where the money came from. For example, Edward Henslow’s monument to his wife (Cecilia Maria) and daughter (Cecilia Mary Ann), who died at ‘nine Months and three Weeks’, cannot help but elicit the reader’s immediate empathy for him. However, it would appear that the way in which Edward ‘made use of the King’s stores’ for his own purposes whilst ‘Storekeeper of His Majesty’s Dock-Yard Chatham’ – taking sails, canvas, ‘an aviary and beehives, five deliveries of candles – including three boxes each weighing a hundredweight, and five deliveries of hogs lard, each of five pounds’, not to mention the ‘yard boat’, ‘a mast, sprit, sculls and oar for her’, firewood, lead which was made into ‘a water trough and beer coolers’, signal colours and ‘worn bunting’17 – would have helped him to put money by to afford the costs of a monument to his loved ones.

Unlike in Westminster Abbey, no serious steps appear to have been taken to curb the number of monuments in Bath Abbey in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, either by the fees that were charged for permission to erect a monument, or in regulation by the rector or churchwardens. Overcrowding in Westminster Abbey ‘eventually brought a government decision that, so far as possible, those soldiers and sailors killed during the Napoleonic Wars would be commemorated in St. Paul’s’.18 St Paul’s became ‘the chosen location for more than thirty official monuments to men who fought, and usually died, in the wars [c.1793–1815]’.19 In comparison, the Royal Navy monuments in Bath Abbey are often to those who served but later retired to Bath, such as Admiral Sir Richard Hussey Bickerton (d. 1832) or Admiral Sir William Hargood (d. 1839). An indication of the jingoistic use of such monuments in Bath Abbey may be judged by the fact that the annual tradition of draping the Union Jack over Admiral Sir William Hargood’s monument on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar was still being celebrated in the twentieth century. In St Paul’s, monuments were ‘proposed by the Houses of Parliament, approved by the monarch and paid for by the state, which then entered into contracts with the artists, initially overseen by the Royal Academy and subsequently under the so-called “Committee of Taste” a body composed chiefly of connoisseurs’.20 A committee of taste was just what Bath Abbey needed, according to John Britton in 1825, to stop what he regarded as the indiscriminate erection of monuments in Bath by those whose ‘fancies’ were unchecked.

Nevertheless, since the late seventeenth century, antiquarians, journalists, writers and tourists have given the sense that Bath Abbey’s monuments are a special collection of artworks, a spectacle worth seeing. What they have felt about that spectacle has naturally changed with different generations’ aesthetic, religious and political persuasions. Of course, there have been many vociferous opinions about individual monuments, the aesthetics of the collection of monuments as a whole, and the interior of the Abbey over the years. Yet, there has been no history to contextualise these changing perspectives or explain the monuments’ changing importance, place in, and value for the Abbey over four centuries. In the twentieth century, there were calls for such a book, at least on the monuments to those who served in the Royal Navy, but no such book was written, perhaps because the records in the Abbey’s archive that shed light on the history of the parish church were not well understood or valued as they should have been. To an extent, the story of the Abbey’s monuments follows the fortunes of church monuments in general, rising in popularity in the late sixteenth century in the spaces left in churches stripped during the Dissolution, and falling out of fashion in the nineteenth century with the end of intramural burial in 1852 and the rising popularity of stained glass. However, the story of monuments in Bath Abbey is unique. The size and grandeur of the cathedral-like interior to attract and accommodate monuments, its tradition of being the place well-to-do laity of the city were buried before the Dissolution, its status as the city’s parish church for visiting nobility from the Elizabethan period, the rise of Bath as a spa bringing the rich and dying, the lack of extra-mural burial ground around the Abbey, and the number of skilled and sought-after sculptors working in the city all combined to create the potential for the Abbey to fill its interior with monuments that would help the church rise from the ashes.

This book is the first history of the Abbey’s monuments, and tells the story of this unique collection. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, it explains why and how Bath’s central parish church came to have such a large collection of monuments, how they have been depicted by artists and writers, and how they have come to be positioned where they are in the forms they are today. In so doing, it gets beneath the surface of the prevailing narrative that the Abbey was simply a place of burial and commemoration for ‘the great and the good’. In addressing the collection of monuments, the book inevitably does not aim to interpret many individual monuments nor biographies of those commemorated in the Abbey. The reader may consult any number of nineteenth- or twentieth-century guidebooks and histories of Bath and the Abbey that have approached individual monuments and their subjects. A number of monuments, such as Bassett’s above, have been selected and discussed at greater length. The purpose of their selection has been to illustrate themes and arguments presented by the book that relate to trends in the Abbey’s monuments in general. Naturally some, such as Bishop James Montagu’s tomb or William Bingham’s and Catherine Malone’s monuments, have been chosen because of the richness of the documentary sources relating to them. More could be said about all of these monuments and others and no attempt at exhaustive criticism of individual monuments has been attempted. Rather, the book attempts to provide an historical framework and context for those approaching the Abbey’s monuments individually or in thematic groups.

The major architectural changes to Bath Abbey’s interior are read in relation to the monuments and there is much new material for those interested in the Abbey in general to enjoy. However, the book is confined to a consideration of the church monuments per se, that is, two- and three-dimensional objects in stone. Consequently, regimental colours, memorial windows, the font, lectern, pulpit, and many other aspects of the church that were given ‘in memory of’, have fallen outside the scope of the book, as have monumental brasses. The rebuilding of the Abbey as we know it today between 1480–1518 and the ruination of the church at the monastery’s dissolution in 1539 means that there are no medieval monuments or brasses in the church. The installation of monuments in the Abbey from 1576 coincides with a period in which church brasses were falling out of fashion. From the period of 1600 onwards, ‘the introduction of tombstones and epitaphs, sounded the death-knell of the brass’.21 Whilst a number of brasses were installed in the Abbey in the seventeenth century (the majority in the mid-to-late century) only a few survive, notably those to Sir George Ivy (d. 1639) and Mary Reeve (d. 1664). These seventeenth-century brasses, and those installed in the nineteenth century when brasses came back into fashion, would make for interesting thematic studies in themselves.

Obviously, in terms of the role of commemoration within the church and the Abbey’s central role for the city in this, these aspects are inseparable from the monuments. In terms of the aesthetic and revenue of the church, the donations of heraldic glass to the windows in the first two decades of the seventeenth century certainly functioned like the book argues the monuments did afterwards. However, a detailed history of commemorative windows has been beyond the scope of the book and the windows are only considered insofar as they relate to the monuments (and how they often obscured the light from the windows). Likewise, the book is not a history of burial within the Abbey, neither does it address the Abbey cemetery created by John Claudius Loudon, as important as this is. For a history of burial in Bath, readers would do well to consult the Bath Burial Index.22 Intramural burial in the Abbey is discussed to the extent that it is helpful to understand the context and placement of the monuments, the relative costs of burial and commemoration, and the extent to which monuments contributed to the Abbey’s revenue, and the role of the Abbey’s sextons.

The monuments played a key role in the Abbey’s aesthetics and income from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, and the two were interlinked from the beginning: the revenue from monuments supplemented the income of the Abbey and contributed to its repair,23 securing its future so it did not fall into ruin (as it had) and cementing its identity as a reformed and later fashionable parish church, fulfilling its Elizabethan raison d’etre to be a place to receive nobility for divine service in life, and their bodies, monuments, and the fees for them, in death. Each of the book’s four chapters outlines a distinct phase in the Abbey’s history and how monuments contributed to it.

Chapter 1 looks at the creation of the parish church and its role in becoming the premier place of rest and commemoration in the city. It argues that the opportunity to erect monuments in a cathedral-like church helped the rebuilding of the Abbey, to establish the new Protestant identity as well as new revenues for the reformed parish church. It shows how the completion of the second phase of repairs in 1606 (effectively the completion of the Choir, tower and transepts) coincided with the final burial in the nearby Church of St Mary de Stall, and the formal articulation of fees for burial at the Abbey. From this date a number of important seventeenth-century monuments – such as that to Bartholomew Barnes (d. 1606) – were erected in the Abbey. The completion of the Nave by Bishop James Montagu (d. 1618) and his desire to be buried and memorialised in it in order to ‘stir up some more benefactors’ encouraged others to follow his suit, thus benefiting and beautifying an interior which was empty of medieval monuments and in which executors could consequently take their pick of a location for them. At the end of the century, the Abbey revised its fees and improved the interior of the church. The revenue from burial services and the hire of palls helped to enable these repairs to the church, which, in turn, would have made the interior all the more attractive to those wanting to erect a monument.

Chapter 2