You are looking at the tomb of one Don Sancho Said de Carillo, dating from 1300. But you are also looking at a custom that lasted from Antiquity well through the Middle Ages but has thankfully been abandoned — the practice of women mourners ripping out their hair.
It was long the domain of women to advertise the severity of a community’s loss with grand displays of grief. Tearing at their faces and wailing were ways that women from Ancient Greece, Rome, and Medieval Europe demonstrated this, but another of the most pronounced means of showing a group’s sadness was for women to let their hair down (only unmarried maidens normally wore their hair unbound) and rip it out. Toxic femininity, indeed.
The Ancient Roman author Tacitus writes that the Germanic peoples thought that it was “proper for women to lament,” i.e, society expected the women to be the ones showing emotion publicly. Hundreds of years later, the Medieval poem _Erec_ describes the heroine “grieving over her wounded husband: ‘she pulled out her hair and avenged herself up in her own body, in the way of women.'” And you can see this happening in the image here, women tearing out their unbound hair.
It was common practice at times to hire women as professional mourners to wail and do the hair thing at the funerals of prominent people — so much so that records of legislation prohibiting excessive funerary ostentation exist (such as from late 13th-century Italy), and churchmen tut-tutted the practice. Why did women do this? It was a sort of deal between them and the community of grievers — the community got to show-off how important the dead person was, and the women got support for fulfilling a role only they could provide.
Source(s): Image wiki Commons. Tome from 1300 is at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona. Pp 53-56 of “Symbolic Meanings of Hair in The Middle Ages,” by Robert Bartlett, Transactions if the Royal Historical Society, vol. 4 (1994).
