Lawrence Butler and the ‘minor’ monument: a tribute

Readers of the Society for Church Archaeology’s Newsletter will have seen the sad news reported there of Lawrence Butler’s death just before Christmas 2014. By way of tribute to SCA’s former President (Fig 1), the editor of this journal thought it appropriate to commission a short piece about one aspect of Lawrence’s work in particular. As readers will know, he was an important figure in many fields of medieval and post-medieval archaeology, and he undertook significant excavations on many classes of medieval monument, but these more general works have, perhaps, occluded his contribution to a more specific field of study, which Lawrence almost re-invented for the modern era: ‘minor’ monumental sculpture of the medieval period. This was the topic that first engaged him in archaeology, and it consumed him for a period of at least 15 years between the early 1950s and the mid 1960s. Following his period of intense work on the topic, not only was it more clearly defined, but Lawrence had begun a process of cataloguing these minor sculptures that has subsequently been taken up by other scholars in various areas of the country. This tribute attempts to locate Lawrence’s work in this field by first examining his predecessors, and thereby to put his own achievement into some context. A final section notes the work of a few of his ‘continuators’ and suggests that this topic still has much to offer as an important source of information about the upper echelons of medieval society.