Screen of Chantry Chapel, Dennington, Suffolk.
It seems desirable to repeat here that some of the domestic chapels were founded as chantry chapels, or had a chantry subsequently founded within them; as the domestic chapel at the Vyne, Hants. There were two chantries in the chapel of Pontefract Castle; one in the chapel of the manor house at Topcliff, Yorkshire, and at Cransford, Dorset, and in the Bishop of Durham’s manor house at Darlington. Very probably the service in a domestic chapel always included some commemoration of the departed members of the family.
It was only well-to-do people who could afford to found and endow a perpetual chantry; there were many less costly ways in which men showed their solicitude for their own well-being, and their affection for their belongings, by making such provision for mortuary prayers and masses as their means allowed. Sometimes provision is made for a chantry to last for a limited number of years. Thus—
John Cotes, of Tevelby, Canon of Lincoln in 1433, left for a chaplain to sing every day for twenty years, “to have £4 13s. 4d. per ann., and 3s. 4d. for wine, wax, and candles, and to engage in no other duty, spiritual or temporal, under pain of my anathema.”
Robert Astbroke, of Chepyng Wycombe, 1533, leaves money for “a priest to sing for my soul in Wicomb Church, at Ihus altar for x years, and I desire that there be no prieste admytted to the said servys but that can sing at least his playn song substancyally.”[519]
Thomas Booth, in Eccles Church in Lancashire, leaves 100 marks to two chaplains for ten years in two chapels—five marks a year each.[520]
Robert Johnson,[520] Alderman of York, leaves, “to the exhibition of an honest prest to synge at the alter of Our Lady daily by the space of vij yeres xxxvli. And I will that what prest that shall serve it every day, when that he hath saide masse, shall stand affore my grave [which was ‘affore the mydste of the alter’] in his albe, and ther to say the psalme of De Profundis, with the collettes, and then caste holy water upon my grave.”[521]
So, we have bequests of money to provide one or two chaplains for two years; still more frequently one or two chaplains for one year; frequently for a trental of masses, and an obit, that is for masses for thirty days after death, and after that a mass on the anniversary of death; most frequently of all, for mass on the first, third, seventh, and thirtieth day, and on the years’ day.[522] In most cases there was a sum left for wax tapers and other funeral expenses, and for a donation to every clerk, or layman, attending the funeral mass and the obit. In the case of the poorest, the parish priest said a mass for the dead, and committed the body, with the proper prayers, to the grave.[523]
