People in pre-industrial Britain saw themselves as living always in ‘the valley of the shadow of death’. Life was dominated by the prospect of death. Disease was rampant; malnutrition general, accidents frequent, and the expectation of life short.1 Nowhere was this expressed more powerfully that in medieval iconography and illustration. And, since the only examples that most people were ever likely to see, at least before the later sixteenth century, were to be found in their local parish churches, it is to wall-paintings and stained glass that we must turn in the first instance. They all display a restricted number of motifs. Window-glass was made and the designs composed in urban workshops, but wall-paintings were spread over the rendered interior walls of churches by craftsmen who travelled from parish to parish with their limited repertoire of motifs which they repeated with little modification from one church to another.

Representations of mortality

These motifs were redolent of death. The wheel of fortune was a symbolic representation of the ages of human life, ending with death.