Remembering Lydd’s dead
Lydd church, known as the “cathedral of the marsh”, contains a wide and impressive range of memorials that date from the medieval period to the present day. These commemorative and dedicatory items, including tombs, plaques and brasses, have been the subject of a recently completed research project funded by the Romney Marsh Research Trust.
A new survey of the monuments has updated and expanded the previous records made by Leland L. Duncan, Thomas Cobb and Bryan Faussett, and includes full transcriptions, photographs, and surname lists, as well as monuments now probably lost. My full report has been made available online at www.rmrt.org.uk. One of the Appendices (VI) lists 104 monuments of various kinds not recorded by Duncan, Cobb and Faussett. There is also a link to this website from the KAS’s own research pages under Lydd Church Monumental Inscriptions.
From the 13th century the Godfrey family formed part of the social elite in the towns of the Cinque Ports confederation, their increased prosperity and social standing manifest in the memorials commissioned to praise their dead and still-living family members in Lydd church from c. 1430. Several of their monuments have survived. Along with testamentary and other manuscript records these memorials have formed the basis for a paper, co-authored with Dr Gill Draper, in which the commemorative culture of the late medieval and early modern period is examined. The full article, “My bodye shall lye with my name Engraven on it’: remembering the Godfrey family of Lydd”, can be found in Romney Marsh: Persistence and Change in a Coastal Lowland (eds. M. Waller, E. Edwards and L. Barber), Romney Marsh Research Trust, 2010, 117-40.
Source: KAS Newsletter - www.kentarchaeology.org.uk