Richard de la Pole

Date of Brass:

1403

Place:

Wingfield

County:

Suffolk

Country:

Number:

I

Style:

London B

Description

April 2024

The collegiate church at Wingfield in Suffolk has indents of a good number of fine brasses, representing the clerical staff of the college and the family of the founders but only one contains any brass. This is the inscription commemorating Richard de la Pole, son of Michael, the first earl of Suffolk, and his countess, Katherine Wingfield. Richard’s figure and the shields at the corners of the slab have long since disappeared but their shapes are clear on the Purbeck marble stone on the floor of the tower, surrounded by minor indents, some of them of locally-made inscription brasses.

Wingfield College was founded in 1362 under the terms of the will of Sir John de Wingfield, who had died the previous year. Sir John had been a successful soldier in the campaigns in Scotland in the 1330s, in France in the 1340s and 1350s and a very able administrator of the lands of the Black Prince, namely the Duchies of Cornwall and Cheshire. He had acquired lands in Suffolk and elsewhere by marriage, purchase and grants to add to his modest inheritance. In the late 1350s his daughter Katherine married Sir Michael, son of the wealthy Hull wool merchant William de la Pole. After the death of Eleanor, Sir John de Wingfield’s widow, in 1375, patronage of the college came to Sir Michael. In 1383 Sir Michael was appointed lord chancellor of England but four years later he fled abroad to avoid being tried for treason, dying in Paris in 1389. His remains were buried in the Charterhouse monastery in Hull. His title and estates were forfeited. His eldest son Michael had remained in England and regained many of his father’s estates and in 1398 his title, becoming second earl of Suffolk and managing to retain his position after Henry IV seized the throne.

Richard de la Pole was one of this Michael’s younger brothers. His inscription reads:

 

Hic iacet Ricardus de la Pole filius dni Mich[ael]is

de la Pole nup[er] Comitis Suff[olchiae] qui obijt xviij

die Dececembr [is] Ao dni MCCCCoiijo cui[us] a[n]i[m]e p[ro]picet[ur} d[eu]s

 

It translates as:

Here lies Richard de la Pole son of Michael

de le Pole late earl of Suffolk who died 18

day of December in the year of our Lord 1403 on whose soul God have mercy

 

Little is known of the life. He was possibly born around 1367. At his death, he held the manors of Marsh, Buckinghamshire and Grafton, Northamptonshire, plus the advowsons of the churches of Bugbrook and Grafton. He had no male heirs of his body and his younger brother Thomas inherited both manors. The lettering of his brass inscription, as Sally Badham has written, can be identified as belonging to the London B style. The shape of the indent of his armed figure also fits within this style. When his eldest brother Michael, earl of Suffolk, died of dysentry at the siege of Harfleur in 1415, his will specified that if he died in northern England and was buried in the Hull Charterhouse, he was to have only a flat stone over him, presumably a brass. Was it he who paid for Richard’s brass? There is one unexplained issue with Richard’s brass. Richard Gough visited Wingfield in 1764 and found a number of brasses in the church chest. He later wrote ‘Richard Delapole, son of Michael Delapole, earl of Suffolk, who died 1403, had a figure of a monk with roses in quatrefoils on his habit, and B or K in a rondeau, with a rose in a square on his breaft.
This, with many other brasses of the younger branches of that noble family buried at Wingfield, I saw in the church chest, 1764; and am since told they have gone the way of many more sepulchral brasses’. He seems to be describing a clerical brass. Did he place a brass figure and Richard’s inscription in indents in the church to come to this conclusion? Presumably the inscription was not in its present slab in 1764 but in the chest.

 

Copyright, Jon Bayliss

 

 

References

Sally Badham, ‘Medieval Monuments to the de la Pole and Wingfield Families’, 135-176 in Peter Bloore and ‎Edward A. Martin (eds), Wingfield College and its Patrons (2015).

 

Richard Gough, Sepulchral Monuments, vol 2, part 2 (1796), 14