Ailesbury Mausoleum

In the early mediaeval era exceptionally wealthy such persons desired to be buried within abbeys or monasteries founded by themselves or their ancestors (usually for the express purpose of funding monks or nuns to pray continually for the rapid transition of their souls and those of their ancestors through the uncertain stage of Purgatory and rapidly onwards to eternal rest in Heaven).

The advowson of Maulden church was acquired in 1635[5] by Thomas Bruce, 1st Earl of Elgin, who had been granted the nearby estate of Houghton by King James I (1603-1625),[6] which he made his seat.

[5] The Ailesbury Mausoleum consisted originally of a subterranean crypt with vaulted ceiling with an elongated octagonal shaped room above at ground level.

[1] The room was lit by oval windows and was linked by a short length of covered passage which led into the north side of the Church, in which was situated the manorial pew occupied by the Bruce family and its household servants.

This original arrangement is illustrated in an early 19th-century watercolour painting now in the nearby Luton Museum and Art Gallery, which also shows the steeply pitched roof with alternating bands of plain and fish-scale clay tiles,[1] surviving today.

The coffins in the crypt below had degenerated within this period to such an extent that in 1769 Thomas Brudenell-Bruce, 2nd Baron Bruce (1729-1814), ordered the construction of 27 loculi[1] to re-house them, and also to house the remains of past and future members of his family.