ABSTRACT
The alliterative poem Three Dead Kings is the only known textual version of The Three Living and The Three Dead to survive in Middle English. In England, fifty-eight churches were known to have been decorated with The Three Living and The Three Dead, of which twenty-nine dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries still survive. It is in this space and form, painted upon the walls of the local parish church, that the majority of the population would have encountered the tale. The parish church was at the center of the late medieval community. Miriam Gill has likewise explored the utility of parish church wall-paintings as accompaniments to late medieval English sermons. In the paintings at both Wickhampton and Raunds speech is portrayed through the animated gestures of the third Dead figure, the corpse's hand in the mural at St Andrew's crossing the tree which separates him from the Living.
