BURIAL has long been seen by historians and archaeologists as a telling indicator of personal and collective identity.1 How individuals in the late Middle Ages saw death in relation to a personal life story, a family and affinity network, the local community, organised religion and God, has been investigated primarily through last wills and testaments, with additional insight gained from the material evidence of some high-class burial monuments: effigies, grave slabs, brasses and chantry chapels.2 Collective ideas about the afterlife and more worldly concerns for commemoration and ‘memorialisation’ have also been investigated by aggregating this material...
