On 7 February 1500, John Smyth, the elder, made his will at Cratfield in northeast Suffolk. He asked that the Hawe Wood should stand three years after his decease and then it was to be sold. The money raised was to purchase a silver censer ‘to be geven to the church of Cratfield for a Remembraunce for me and my friends'. To men like John Smyth, bound as he was to the established religion of the time, his last wishes implied more than a personal gift to his parish church. To be remembered in the prayers of family and friends, priest and parishioner, the rich and particularly the poor, was vital in the late Middle Ages because it was believed that prayers would expedite the souls of the faithful departed through the trials of Purgatory. Smyth's gift of a censer was a spur to remembrance; and the more prayers that were said, the more frequently repeated, the more people who prayed, the more the censer was used, the swifter would be the passage of Smyth's soul, on and up to Paradise.

In today's society, death and remembrance have becomedistanced,for death is regarded as final. A grave and its stone appear tobethemost obvious, perhaps the only, type of remembrance in commonuse.Parishioners are now discouraged from exhibiting individuality in the churchyard. Funerary sculpture is banned, kerb-stones prohibited and the type of stone to be used is advised by a committee. Within thechurch,facultiesforwall tablets are almost impossible to obtain, and countless men and women will never be held in the community's memory, remembrance being erasedat source. In many instances even the grave is discounted as more people find cremation an acceptable alternative. Memorial slabs arereducedtosmall tiles, flesh and bones to ashes rather than dust, both setinimpersonal gardens of remembrance commemorating those who livedandworkedin areas far removed from the urban crematoria.

In the late Middle Ages, this was not so. Death was perceived as the next stage of the soul's journey, and remembrance, which was closely interwoven in the whole ethos of living and dying, was possible for men such as John Smyth to ensure, and for those left behind to initiate.