For the historian of later medieval European art, the idea of the collegiate church is immediately associated with fashionable Gothic architecture and exciting concentrations of funerary monuments. These surviving aspects of collegiate material culture are, mutatis mutandis, common to France, Germany, the Netherlands and Scotland as well as England, and it is in this international context that the material presented here is ultimately situated. Discussion of tombs, both independently and collectively, and their role within late medieval England’s colleges encompasses some of Britain’s most important medieval sculpture and micro-architecture. While a detailed art historical survey of this material is beyond the ambit of this essay, there is scope for investigation of significant issues relating to its function and meaning: the contribution that tombs made to corporate self-identity, how they helped to define, or were defined by, the sacred space in which they were located, and the ways in which they related to their broader artistic contexts. Moreover, the specific consideration of the types and arrangements of tombs contained in the three main constitutional categories of English college proves well worthwhile. Such topics involve both selective discussion of the tombs at specific locations and investigation of trends discernible in the arrangement of monuments in collegiate churches generally. (For lack of broad-based evidence, nothing will be said here about tombs located in collegiate cloisters.) While collegiate tombs are often mentioned in surveys of English medieval art, no general study of their place in wider material and institutional contexts has been attempted. The subject offers many avenues for investigation, and this preliminary analysis is intended to map the most significant of these in as stimulating and useful a way as possible.

The three categories of college to be discussed are the non-chantry or ‘cathedral’ college (but leaving actual cathedrals out), the so-called chantry college, and the academic college. While these divisions are in some respects imperfect (it is difficult to draw meaningful material or semantic distinctions between, for instance, the mausolea of non-chantry colleges such as Newarke and Warwick and those of chantry colleges like Arundel and Tong), they provide the clearest grounds for partitioning a subject that in the interests of clarity cannot be discussed monolithically. The non-chantry college, the most amorphous class, indicates mainly (but not exclusively) those colleges whose endowments were apportioned among their canons.