Lessons in "hopping": the Dance of Death and the Chester mystery cycle

Comparative Drama, Fall-Wntr, 2002 by Sophie Oosterwijk

Moreover, by the sixteenth century the danse macabre had also made an impact on tomb iconography. (43) The first known example of a tomb monument with a danse macabre motif occurs at Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, in the brass of John Rudyng, archdeacon of Bedford (d. 1481), which shows Death armed with an array of spears beside the lost figure of the deceased (fig. 4, 5). Significant also is the epitaph, which contains a dialogue in Latin verse between the reader and Mors, who is clearly labeled as such in the left margin, below the actual figure of Death. In this dialogue, the reader reproaches Mors for depriving humankind of the admirable John Rudyng, but Mors defends himself at some length:

[FIGURE 4-5 OMITTED]

   Horrida tela fero morsu . necis vrgeo seclum
   Nec vulgo nec hero . parcens traho singula mecum
   Quid valet altus honos . rex . dux . princeps * .que sacerdos
   Hanc subeunt sortem . nequeunt precurrere mortem....

   (I carry grim weapons, I harrass the world hard with the bite of
   violent death.
   Sparing neither the masses nor the master, I carry them off one by
   one.
   What use is high honor then? King, duke, prince, and priest,
   they all suffer this fate, they cannot outrun Death.) (44)

A rather different type of memorial survives in the church at Stanford-on-Avon in Northamptonshire, where the local vicar Henry Williams had indicated in his will of 5 April 1500 his desire to be commemorated in "smalle quarells" of glass showing "my ymage knelying in ytt and the ymage of deth shotyng at me." (45) The little scene is reminiscent of Lazarus's words in the N-Town play: "Whan deth on me hath shet his dart ..." (25.63). Death also could once be observed stabbing Thomas Annott with his arrow on the lost 1577 brass at Lowestoft, Suffolk, as recorded in an 1817 engraving by John Sell Cotman. (46) Park-keeper James Gray's 1591 brass at Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, depicts a morbidly ironic scene of Death striking a double blow with his arrows at both deer and hunter. A late-sixteenth-century monument to a member of the Foljambe family at Chesterfield is interesting in featuring not only Death armed with a spade and a large arrow but also two figures representing infancy and old age on either side of him. (47) The popularity of this danse macabre iconography in tomb sculpture continued well after the sixteenth century and culminated in Roubiliac's 1761 monument to Lady Elizabeth Nightingale at Westminster Abbey.

Whereas Williams and others adhered to the image of Death using arrows to shoot or stab his victims, Rudyng's Death is unmistakably armed with an array of spears. Medieval iconography can be confusing, with artists seemingly uncertain as to whether Death should despatch his victims by shooting at them with arrows or transfixing them with a spear; it is not uncommon to find Death using an over-large arrow as a stabbing weapon. Admittedly, Continental artists tended to show Death with an often over-large dart or arrow, yet this could sometimes be mistaken for a spear; French medieval murals may show one or more of the Three Dead wielding an elongated dart or a spear against the Three Living. (48) In English medieval wall paintings of the Seven Deadly Sins, Death sometimes uses a spear against the allegorical figure of Pride; for example, a fifteenth-century mural between the spandrels of the arches of the north wall of the nave at Raunds Church, Northamptonshire, shows the skeletal figure of Death immediately above the arch on the left where he is piercing the tall female figure of Pride with a very long spear. (49) Death also wields a spear in the deathbed scene in the early-fifteenth-century Pricke of Conscience window in All Saints North Street in York (fig. 6) and in an illuminated English manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 322, fol. [19.sup.v]) of the mid-fifteenth century that contains a collection of religious verse and prose, including two texts by Lydgate and a treatise on "the crafte of Dying" (fig. 7). (50) Here Death in the accompanying dialogue text Orilogium sapientie exhorts the reader: