Secular and religious landscapes of commemoration in England and Wales were deeply interconnected and used a variety of techniques to advance the memory of the individual. Lay communities were very conscious of perpetuating the memory of their own community, as well as their familial or collective memory. Local magnates were particularly eager to establish, promote, and perpetuate the memory of their family. This helped to bind the local community to the lordship and vice versa, while at the same time helping to cement their place in the spiritual memory of religious institutions. The importance of memory for the early Tudor elite is substantiated by the multitude of ways that a family or individual might attempt to commemorate themselves. Visible means of commemoration and remembrance took the form of architectural features such as heraldry in and around the castle and effigies and tombs in the local parish churches, as well as financial donations towards the fabric of religious institutions and, arguably, the building of the castle itself. Being remembered, and attempting to be remembered, functioned in various ways to tie communities to the leading families in the region.

There is, however, another layer to commemoration: the desire to receive salvation. The soteriological economy of late medieval Europe dictated that an individual's sin outweighed the power of prayer. In such an economy, the route to Heaven was bound up in the ability of an individual to request prayers from the community of which they were a part. One of the most common forms of religious exchange in late medieval Europe was the purchase of posthumous prayers and masses said by religious communities. In this way, memory was intimately connected to salvation, as the ability of an individual or family to remind the living to pray for their soul with financial incentives would quicken their purgatorial suffering.

The prayer economy during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was material in nature, in that money exchanged hands for spiritual goods. Prayers could be bought and sold. Parishioners could, for example, pay to have a special mass said in memory of a deceased loved one or themselves, or they could purchase an indulgence to shorten their time, or someone else's time, in purgatory.