Later medieval art is usually discussed in terms of categories like architecture, sculpture, manuscript illumination, stained glass etc. While these categories have historical roots, medieval viewers naturally tended to conflate rather than anatomise what they saw: Chaucer’s testimony to the Court of Chivalry suggests this. Academic taxonomies of art are nevertheless valuable to scholars, even if the terminology of style associated with them is largely modern. Our understanding of later medieval art is clouded by vast material losses, although documents such as the inventories of Pleshy Castle (1397) and the abbot’s chapel at Bury St Edmunds (1429) offer some compensation. These reveal that taste for types of object and imagery was not generally conditioned by social status (e.g. lay or clerical). At the level of the common person, parish churches were major sites of display. Again, documents like the archdeacons’ inventories for the diocese of Norwich (1368) help fill in the gaps created by loss. Sepulchral monuments and architecture enjoy higher rates of survival and thus give a more concrete idea of the look, purpose and function of art.

Maurice Keen has given such an accessible introduction to the business of the medieval Court of Chivalry that it is unnecessary to explain the institution to anyone who may pursue this book for the current chapter alone. It will suffice to say that material objects were variously and extensively brought to bear as evidence in just one branch of the court's work: that is, cases in which rights to bear given coats of arms were tried. Of these cases, substantial records survive for just three: Scrope v. Grosvenor, Lovell v. Morley (both initiated in 1385) and Grey v. Hastings (initiated in 1400). Currently, only the first of these is available in print. Keen called the references to objects in the surviving documents ‘iconographical evidence’, which he distinguished from ‘autobiographical evidence’ about people, their actions, situations and so on. In art history, the word ‘iconography’ has technical meanings relating to subject-matter in representational imagery and formal and symbolic paradigms in architecture, so Keen's usage, while perfectly reasonable, will be set aside here. However, his appreciation of the value of material evidence was clear-sighted, and he has written more about it than practically anyone else to date.

Notwithstanding Keen's publications, the surviving documentation from the Court of Chivalry's cases is valuable to art historians and others directly engaged with material objects, for reasons which until now have mainly been noticed only incidentally: in order to support arguments about the sociopolitical functions of heraldry. Although this value is manifold, and ultimately depends on the individual scholar's aims, it has two dominant aspects. The first is that the documents record many objects, in various media, which no longer exist. Moreover, they record them in situ in interiors and landscapes which have themselves vanished.6 For anyone not acquainted with it, this data is bound to enrich knowledge of both specific classes of object and the contexts of these objects’ use.

WHILE the University of St Andrews has lost almost all of its medieval paraphernalia, the deliberate preservation of three fifteenth-century ceremonial maces is a redeeming counterexample to what have been branded past ‘acts of non-custodianship’. One of these maces was made for the faculty of Arts between 1416 and 1419, another for the faculty of Canon Law (or Decreets) at an unknown date and the third for the College of St Salvator in 1461. That of the Arts faculty also appears to have served, at least occasionally, as a rector's mace and to have represented the authority of the university in common. With the exception of the regalia and plate of the bishops of Winchester now at Oxford, this is the most coherent and artistically important set of ceremonial metalwork to survive from a medieval British institution (see figure 14.1).

There can be no doubt that from an early date the maces have benefited from special care. In 1544, during the period of the so-called ‘Rough Wooing’, two of them were looked after privately by trusted masters of Arts, and all three were being stored for safekeeping in St Andrews Castle around 1559. But even allowing for the respect shown them as symbols of corporate worth, their preservation in such good condition is extraordinary. While the early maces of the university of Aberdeen were destroyed, and that of Glasgow was at different times robbed of its imagery and sent to France for safekeeping, the St Andrews maces have not only survived but have also kept the images of saints considered so objectionable in other settings without, apparently, ever having left north-east Fife. That they were used in ‘frequent attendance on common and daily funerals’ in the town in the eighteenth century suggests these images were painted or varnished over at some stage, as to bury the dead in open view of the Virgin Mary and other saints would have represented an unconscionable affront to prevailing ideology. Moreover, the maces’ materials alone must have proved tempting when, as often, cash was short, and the fact that they escaped the melting pot that claimed all of the other ecclesiastical silver from medieval St Andrews can be attributed to good luck as well as good management.

For 350 years, the monument said to contain the bones of King Arthur and Queen Guenevere was an exceptional feature of Glastonbury abbey’s rich topography. Arthur may have been only the 106th ruler in a line of succession from Brutus, but he was the earliest to have a recognized tomb in a realm and a culture obsessed with monarchy and monarchs’ restingplaces. The monument’s presence at the heart of a thriving, often militant institution suggests its enduring value for monastic esprit de corps, over and above the occasional forensic use made of it by kings, historians and polemicists. This value was essentially temporal in nature: Arthur may have consorted with saints – the monks could show their guests a crystal cross given him by the Virgin Mary – but it seems exceedingly unlikely that anybody ever prayed to him or his consort for intercession. Remains of both were set aside after the tomb was opened in 1278 ‘propter populi deuocionem’, but this is no imputation of holiness, and must anyway be reckoned against the absence of relics of either figure from the abbey’s highly detailed relic-lists, and also the intrinsic improbability that such a beacon of religion as Glastonbury would confuse the categories of secular hero and saint. All of the kings buried at Glastonbury are named in the extensive fourteenth-century list of saints’ resting places in England contained in London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 99 (at fol. 194v). But their inclusion in this list, which was not made at Glastonbury, reflects only the fact that they were considered a remarkable ensemble: none is called ‘sanctus’, as the other male saints in the list are. (Guenevere is omitted.) Arthur’s main value for the monks was that of a championgiant perpetually in their midst, who, if not actually the first founder of their monastery, was nevertheless understood as a founder in the extended sense of the term used in the later Middle Ages. His presence, and that of Guenevere, lent non-specific but conspicuous weight to claims to property, privilege and a matchless antiquity.

The tomb made for the remains of Arthur and Guenevere after their exhumation in 1191, from which they must have been expected to rise at the Last Judgement, was relocated within the abbey church two or three times.