Just north of Packwood House, the church of St Giles nestles snugly among a patchwork of fields. Entering on a cold winter’s day, it takes a while for your eyes to adjust in the gloom, but when they do you can faintly discern the remains of 15th century medieval wall paintings above the chancel arch. Three elegantly dressed men wearing crowns and standing on scrolls are depicted to the left of the arch. The bearded man in the middle is possibly wearing gloves and holding something in his right hand. He has his left hand raised in the air, palm outwards. It’s hard to tell if the one on the right is pointing to his left (our right), but if we imagine he is and look over to the opposite side of the arch, we can faintly discern another three figures.
But these ones are not finely dressed.
In fact, they are three skeletons or corpses – distinctive enough in shape, but now only visible by their outline. Enough remains however to identify the two sets of three figures as a pictorial representation of the tale of ‘The Three Living and the Three Dead’, alternatively known as De Tribus Regibus Mortuis or ‘The Three Dead Kings’.
The tale
The story goes that three young kings or noblemen were out hunting or hawking one day, dressed in fine clothes and followed by a bevy of retainers – the epitome of power, privilege, and worldly goods. Finding they had become separated from their retainers, the three kings suddenly encountered three terrifying walking and talking corpse counterparts.
The three corpses admonished the kings, saying that unless they reformed their worldly ways and passions, they would suffer in the afterlife: ‘What you are, we were, and what we are, you will be!’. It’s a trope not unreasonably reminiscent of Scrooge’s encounter of Marley’s ghost in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. And, like Scrooge, the young kings duly took heed of the warning, reformed their ways and thereby saved their souls from a ghastly fate.
Origins
Manuscript evidence dates back to at least 1280 when Baudoin de Condé (a minstrel at the court of Margaret II, Countess of Flanders) penned a tale entitled Dit des trois morts et des trois vifs. Slightly different versions of the tale appear in England and France, as well as Scandinavia and Switerzland, but the crux of the tale was always the same. The only surviving English poetic retelling has been attributed to a Shropshire priest, John Audelay of Haughmond Abbey, and is a rare survival of alliterative verse. Now at the Bodleian Library, the manuscript was probably compiled in 1426 and interestingly has an erased ownership inscription by William Vyott, ‘a mynstrall yn Coventr’, bringing the written tale geographically close to the pictorial representation at Packwood.1
The tale was a popular form of ‘memento mori’, a reminder that earthly rank and riches are merely transitory and that death comes to all, in both the art and literature of medieval Europe. It appeared in wall paintings in churches which would be seen by common folk as well as in illustrations in richly illuminated manuscripts [https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/01/the-three-living-and-the-three-dead.html] such as Books of Hours which were usually only the preserve of the very rich.
Parish church wall paintings
There are said to be about 30 known examples of wall paintings, in various states of preservation, depicting the tale in parish churches in England. The kings are usually shown as hunting on foot though there are odd examples of them on horseback. The living and the dead are typically shown in two groups in conversation with one another. Speech scrolls – like those on the wall at Packwood, though no writing is longer visible – were often included to help exemplify the tale.
1 Religious poems and legends by ‘Jon Awdelay’, Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS. Douce 302.
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