There are plenty of similar Early English texts that cast a cold eye on life and death. Reading them, it is all too easy to assume that what we find here is a kind of fatalism, bred in the bone for people who expect life to be harsh and brief. There is much more than weary pessimism here, however. Passages like this, as well as prayers and liturgies, were written to take a long view of life and death; to set them in context. Death was not understood as the end of life; it was, rather, one more moment of crisis and determination in fashioning the existence of a Christian soul. Preachers and teachers wanted their audience to think about life and death and submit them both to the judgement of God. They knew that the manner of your death and the nature of your memorial was a fundamental element in fashioning your identity.

Henry V died and was buried, here in the Abbey, in a religious and material culture that thought that a funeral and burial was more than mere memorial. Here was an opportunity to say something about faith and hope. To say it in stone, metal and iconography in a place where liturgy would be sung and said. Here, in the chantry chapel above his tomb, prayer would be sustained. His burial, his effigy, the design of the chapel and the achievements that were on display were a commentary on monarchy, dynasty and belief. They were placed here to be read and understood. They were always intended to be an act of witness.

The deep learning that informs the scholarship in this book commands respect and tells a story that we must not lose. It is always the job of the Abbey to make faith and history speak. Philip Larkin, writing about the Arundel tomb, chose to see it as a closed book that could not be read in an ‘unarmorial age’. Here was, he thought, ‘a trough of smoke’. He wrote a wonderful poem, but we must not accept his pessimism. It is the wonder of this book to help us see and understand.

David Hoyle

Dean of Westminster