Date: 17th August, 2024
Venue : Wanlockhead Community Centre Free Admission
Time: 3 – 4pm
Speaker: Dr Julian Litten FSA
Lead has paid an important part in high-status burials in England since Roman times. In the seventeenth-century, when the landed gentry took advantage of lax faculty jurisdiction to create burial vaults beneath parish churches, the funeral furnishing trade turned to lead as a means of providing sanitation for the dead. At the other end of the social scale the trade also used lead for cheap coffin furniture. Many examples of such from the period 1600-1900 survive, as this talk will illustrate.
Image: Anthropoid lead coffins in the Harvey Vault at Hempstead, Essex c.1665-70.
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