Following the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, in which between a third and a half of Europe’s population died, there emerged a growing obsession with death, which was reflected in the art and literature of the period, and gave rise to such stories as the Dance of Death and The Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Although in some ways similar there is a difference in emphasis between the Dance and the Legend. In the former the skeleton is meant to personify death itself, whereas in the latter the skeletons or corpses represents the actual bodies of the deceased who have risen from the grave to warn those who are living that death awaits them also.
As well as carvings and paintings, the Legend manifested itself, in the later middle ages, in tomb sculpture in the form of cadaver monuments. These were a variation on the effigal tombs of the same period, for rather than showing the deceased recumbent though represented as in the prime of life, the cadaver portrayed the dead as rotting corpses, covered in worms and frogs etc. The inspiration for this may have come from the Apocrypha and the 11th verse of Ecclesiasticus chapter 10, which states, ‘For when a man is dead he shall inherit creeping things, beasts and worms.’ The earliest cadaver monument is reckoned to be that to Francis de la Salla, died 1362, whose tomb in La Sarraz, Switzerland, features his decaying body covered in worms and toads.
The Dance of Death manifested itself in the form of artwork on church walls or the enclosing walls of graveyards as at the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris, which dated to 1425 is probably the earliest version. From these murals many of the symbols later to be found on Ulster memorials can be identified. Woodcuts of the Dance were also made in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and one set of these, that by Hans Holbein the younger from c.1425 can be used to illustrate the symbols used in the Dance.
His woodcut of the ‘Priest’ shows Death, represented throughout as a skeleton, leading a priest through the streets. In his right hand Death carries a lantern while his left hand rings a bell. The woodcut of the ‘Astrologer’ shows the astrologer at work at his table while Death mockingly holds out to him a skull. His woodcuts show most of the symbols of death found on the seventeenth-century gravestones in Ulster with the exclusion of the coffin and spade which are found on other engravings of the ‘Dance.’
In the later middle ages little printed books, known as artes moriendi- ‘arts of dying’ - began to circulate in Europe among a wide ranging public. Their purpose was to prepare people for death, and these, together with other printed works which touched on death, such as the aforesaid woodcuts, would have spread the iconography of death across Europe. Books on architecture, such as de Keyser’s Architectura Moderna of 1631, were also in circulation, and included engravings of funerary monuments displaying the iconography of death.
Developments in anatomy from the late sixteenth century onwards also encouraged the use of the skeleton on monumental sculpture so that once it had emerged from scientific illustrations the skeleton enjoyed an incredible popularity in baroque iconography, much more so than the cadaver. The Counter-Reformation has also been seen as deprecating the triumphal tombs of the Renaissance and encouraging the use of mortality symbols on sepulchral monuments, with the skull on these memorials representing piety.
In trying to find the more immediate origins of the mortality symbols on gravestones in Ulster a number of avenues can be explored. Firstly, monuments and gravestones in the rest of Ireland will be examined while, secondly, the same will be done with regard to memorials from Britain.
Once the cadaver went out of fashion in England in the mid-seventeenth century the skeleton became relegated to only secondary importance on the tomb. Symbols representing death were rather limited in variety and occurrence, with the hourglass, for example, seldom being used on monuments to men of any status. While the skull and crossed bones do occur occasionally the bell and coffin do not. The most frequently met with symbols consist of cherubs and emblems relating to the Resurrection. This would also seem to be the case with Welsh gravestones in the seventeenth-century. However, considerable work has been done on Scottish gravestones and it is here that the gravestones have the greatest affinity with those in Ulster.
A number of early sixteenth-century gravestones in the churchyard at St. Andrews feature crosses with stepped bases within which are skulls and bones. However, these are not in the context of mortality symbols.4 The above gravestones are pre-reformation while the use of mortality symbols on Scottish gravestones would appear to be very much a post-reformation phenomenon. It is not until towards the end of the sixteenth century that representations of death begin to appear on gravestones. A gravestone dating from 1598 at Creich, Sutherland, features a cross similar to the above stones from St. Andrews, although rather than a skull and bones within the stepped base, above each of the arms of the cross is a skull apparently clenching a bone in its teeth.5 This would appear to be a variation on a theme for at Spynie, Moray, there is a gravestone to a Robert Leslie of Findrassy, died 1588, which features a skull with no lower jaw but in its place a simple bone. However, it is with the commencement of the seventeenth-century that an explosion occurs in Scotland in terms of the numbers of gravestones and in the variety of their decoration.
The most beautiful of all seventeenth-century monuments to the dead in Scotland can be found in the graveyard at Greyfriars, Edinburgh. One of the finest examples is the monument of 1617 to James Harlay who had been Writer to the Signet and Keeper of His Majesty's Privy Seal. The centrepiece of the decoration consists of an heraldic shield; to the left of the shield is a hand ringing a bell and below this are an hourglass and two coffins in saltire. To the right of the shield is a skull below which are crossed bones. Above the skull are the tools of the sexton, including mattocks. Around the symbols, an elegiac in Latin to the deceased has been carved in false relief. The standard of the masonry is high with the skull in particular being very sound anatomically. The above monument, along with a number of others in Greyfriars, can be regarded as the zenith of monumental sculpture in Scotland in the seventeenth-century and contain all the symbols of mortality found on seventeenth-century memorials in Ulster.
Graveyards throughout Scotland contain seventeenth-century gravestones featuring the death symbols which can be regarded as modifications and generally vastly inferior versions of the above. The quality of the carvings on these stones was very much dependent on the ability of the local mason. One thing that emerges from the study of Scottish gravestones of the seventeenth-century is that they do not appear to have been the product of collective schools of masonry. Instead it would seem that each gravestone was the product of the particular style of mason in that locality.
Symbols of trades and professions also feature prominently on seventeenth-century Scottish gravestones. At the beginning of the 1600s the trade incorporations in Scotland were strong, having just broken the monopoly of the merchants in local government. By carving the symbols of their professions on their gravestones the tradesmen were denoting their new found sense of status. In west Ulster only one seventeenth-century gravestone was found which contained emblems that could be interpreted as representing a trade. This was undoubtedly due to the fact that west Ulster was overwhelmingly rural with few towns of any consequence and the numbers of tradesmen were small.
The chief cause of the early origin and richer development of gravestones in Scotland was the strength of the reformation there which had a greater impact on the people there than in England. The stern, austere character of Protestantism in Scotland, together with the gloomy history of the country gave rise to the popularity of the mortality symbols. The egalitarian nature of Scottish Presbyterianism resulted in the belief that everyone was entitled to a gravestone. This goes a long way to explaining the distribution of seventeenth-century memorials in Ulster since they tend to be found in areas of strongest Scottish settlement.
The earliest instance in Ulster of the full complement of mortality symbols - skull, crossed bones, bell, hourglass and coffin (though in this case not the spade) - is on the slab built into the north wall of Enniskillen cathedral which commemorates the Cole family and is dated to 1627. The fact that this family was very much English may appear to discredit the suggestion that the Scottish influence was paramount in Ulster funerary symbolism. However, it is clear from architectural features on Enniskillen castle that Scottish masons were employed in the town in the early seventeenth-century. It is quite possible that one of them was responsible for the aforesaid memorial. Other gravestones which feature the full complement of mortality symbols include the gravestones to the Galbraiths at Aghalurcher and the memorials to the Sinclairs at Old Leckpatrick, both of these families being Scottish.
Where mortality symbols are combined with heraldic devices, a common feature on Scottish gravestones, these are nearly twice as likely to be commemorating Scots as English. The lack of prominence on English gravestones of symbols representing death may explain why on only one gravestone in Clogher cathedral churchyard is an emblem representing mortality, and that a lone coffin. The barony of Clogher was originally granted to English undertakers and although considerable numbers of Scots were later to settle here it is possible to argue that the masons were of English background, being originally brought over by the undertakers to build their castles and bawns.6 Consequently when employed to carve gravestones they neglected to decorate them with mortality symbols since this was not in their tradition. Towards the end of the century the full complement of mortality symbols, sometimes in combination with heraldry, may be seen on memorials to English settlers, e.g. the Edwards monument in St. Columbs Cathedral, Derry, and the Dovey stone at Castlederg. This probably indicates that either Scottish masons were at work or that the Scottish practice was being copied by English masons.
The one complete anomaly to all this is the gravestone in the parish churchyard in Carndonagh, County Donegal, to Torlagh Doharty, died 1636, which features a skull, crossed bones, bell and hourglass. The combination of the symbols, the early date and the nationality of the deceased is intriguing. Links between Scotland and the north of Ireland had been going on for centuries and Scottish influences may be seen on medieval funeral sculpture in Donegal in the form of four grave-slabs which, like their counterparts in the western highlands, were intended to be lain over graves. Two of these are to be found in Inishowen at Clonca and Clonmany. It could be suggested that the decoration on the Doharty stone was a result of continuing close links between north Donegal and Scotland.
Mortality symbols continued to be used on memorials long after the seventeenth century. Their distribution in Ulster was wide ranging with several early eighteenth-century examples noted on Inishkeel island off the west coast of Donegal. They are especially common on eighteenth-century headstones in counties Fermanagh and Monaghan. Finbar McCormick has suggested that the symbols on these memorials derived their immediate origins from the seventeenth-century gravestones bearing the emblems of death such as the Galbraith stones at Aghalurcher and the Forster stone at Tydavnet. The most recent use of the mortality symbols is on a gravestone in the cathedral churchyard in Enniskillen which bears the date 1841. However, the decoration does look older than the inscription.
To sum up then, the use of mortality symbols on memorials to the dead is ultimately derived from the obsession with death that arose in a Europe traumatised by the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. This gave rise to representations of death in the art and literature of the period that were later to find their way on to sepulchral monuments of the later middle ages. While individual mortality symbols, as opposed to the cadaver, are to be found on Irish tombs from the mid-sixteenth century it is from Scotland that mortality symbols on gravestones in west Ulster owe their more immediate origins. Given the considerable migration of settlers from Scotland to Ulster in the seventeenth-century it is hardly surprising that the Scottish tradition should be so dominant.