Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

At present we have considered only the different modes of burial during the Middle Ages, but we may now proceed to speak of the coffin and the tomb. No work of art is more curious, or fuller of historical and picturesque information, than the funeral monuments of all ages. But it must be remembered that there is a marked distinction between the coffin and the tomb, one being the receptacle of the dead, the other only a monument raised to mark the spot of ground in which the coffin has been interred.

At all periods Christians have used coffins cut out of stone; and this custom only ceased in the thirteenth century, to make way for the use of lead coffins. The stone sarcophagi were only for persons of a certain rank. Soldiers, townsmen, and country people were buried in coffins made of wood. The Franks gave the name of off or noff to these coffins, which are alluded to in the Salic law. Gregory of Tours, speaking of the plague which desolated Auvergne in 571, says, “The mortality was so great at Clermont that it was found necessary to inter as many as ten bodies in the same grave, because there was a dearth of wooden and stone coffins.”

These ancient stone sarcophagi are met with in great numbers in those localities which were the ordinary places of burial. They have been found by thousands in certain towns and villages, such as Alichamps, Drevant, and Grou, in the department of the Cher, as well as at Meunes and Naveil, in the department of the Loir-et-Cher. The most ancient coffins are easily to be recognised by their large dimensions, their thickness, and their regular shape (Figs. 352 and 353). They are, so to speak, chests with a massive stone cover, two metres and twenty centimetres (about seven feet two inches) long, and in some cases more. They are square, and resemble a rectangular trough. The lid, sloping in the shape of a roof, is quite free of all decoration.

Fig. 352.—Stone Coffin discovered during excavations made in the Rue de la Cossonnerie, Paris. In the Cluny Museum.

Fig. 353.—Stone Coffin of Gallo-Roman origin, in the Cluny Museum.

In the sixth and seventh centuries the dimensions of the sarcophagi began to decrease, being rarely more than two metres (six feet seven inches) in length. Another distinctive mark of that period was that the coffin, narrower at the foot than at the head, was covered with a large stone, hewn like that of the antique coffins. Moreover, it was often a trifle less deep at the foot than at the head; but this is the special characteristic of the coffins of the eighth century. After this period, coffins narrower at the foot than at the head, but of the same elevation on both sides, again came into use.

In the eighth century, many coffins were found to contain a small cell cut into the stone for holding the head of the corpse. This cell was generally square, but sometimes round.

The further we get into the Middle Ages the more difficult it becomes to ascertain the antiquity of a coffin. After the eleventh and twelfth centuries, if not the tenth, the lids are ornamented with roughly-executed sculpture work, crosses in bas-relief, triangular facets, indistinct tracery work which have a distinct resemblance to the Roman sarcophagi.