Towards a National Census of Funeral Monuments: A Pilot Study of East and West Sussex

This two-year project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, was intended to develop a methodology for recording, storing and making available the details of the many hundreds of funeral monuments preserved in British churches from the period 1560-1820. To this end the interdisciplinary research team has been concerned to integrate textual and visual information in a readily accessible research tool that will meet the requirements of the academic community and the general public. The database is currently being created with records of some 500 monuments located in a sample of eighty Sussex churches. It is intended to expand this initial coverage during February-May 2002 with the assistance of locally-recruited volunteers, in order to assess the potential for widening the survey to a national basis. It is expected that this stage of the project will result in a doubling of the number of churches covered, with a commensurate increase in the number of monuments included in the database.