Portfolio of Brasses
Each month we feature an article about a brass of particular interest.
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Susan Parker
County: Suffolk
Date: 1604
November 2024
Before the Reformation, inscriptions on brasses occasionally featured decoration, either at the end of lines as a filler or between words, often in the form of animals or rebuses, on marginal inscriptions. The decrease in metal prices resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries from the late 1530s onwards meant that huge quantities of brass plate became available both to the marblers producing monumental brasses and to the founders for melting down alongside candleticks, brass lecterns and other plate. The laws against exporting particular metals brought in by Henry VIII and strengthened under Edward VI may not have been...
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Nicholas Purefey
County: Leicestershire
Date: 1545
October 2024
F A Greenhill's The Incised Slabs of Leicestershire and Rutland (1958) includes, as well as a gazetteer of the slabs of these two counties, a 'Brief Manual of Incised Slabs’ and an appendix listing slabs with incised effigies in England, Scotland and Wales, arranged by county. Greenhill recognised that the bulk of the earlier slabs were likely to have originated at or close to Chellaston in Derbyshire, while the later ones were the work of Burton-upon-Trent engravers. The latter were much more likely to have acquired their alabaster from Staffordshire quarries, such as that at Fauld.
Greenhill attempted to group slabs with...
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Alice Joyner
County: Suffolk
Date: 1558
September 2024
T M Felgate was the author of three books on Suffolk brasses. Ladies on Suffolk Brasses (1989) covered forty effigial brasses, illustrating only the female effigies, and ignoring husbands and children if present. Not all of his research has stood the test of time, but that on the lady at Ellough appears accurate. He gives the wording of the missing inscription:
Here lyeth buryed Alyce Joyner sometyme wife of Paul Sydnor esquier and after of John Berney of Reedham Esq. w’h dyed the first day of May in the yeere of our Lorde God 1558 on whose soule Jesu have...
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Elizabeth Beresford
County: Lincolnshire
Date: 1624
August 2024
Peter le Neve, Norroy King of Arms, collected an enormous amount of antiquarian information during his lifetime. However his methods of organising this material left a lot to be desired. He possessed two particularly valuable anonymous manuscripts, The Chorography of Norfolk and The Chorography of Suffolk, both compiled in the very early years of the seventeenth century. Le Neve cut much of the Suffolk volume into small strips, arranged into his desired order, and had his amanuensis copy the content of these strips. He died before he could do the same to the Norfolk volume, which survived to be...
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Robert Hacombleyn
County: Cambridgeshire
Date: 1528
July 2024
Few visitors to King’s College chapel notice Robert Hacombleyn’s brass, which for many years has been missing the foot inscription that would have contained his name. The brass is on the floor of Hacombleyn’s chantry chapel on the south side of the college chapel.
His brass was produced locally by a Cambridge marbler and now consists of a figure in a furred almuce; a scroll issuing from his hands with the words Vulnera Christe tua michi dulcis sint medicina ('May your wounds, O Christ, be sweet medicine to me'); a marginal inscription with a text from the Office of the Dead,...
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Simon and Merrial Coates
County: Oxfordshire
Date: 1644
June 2024
From around the 1620s to the middle of the seventeenth century a number of memorial slabs substituted white marble inlays for brass, set in in black marble. Although quite a number of white marble inscriptions survive, there are few white marble figures. The prime example of the latter is the slab for Elizabeth Havers, died February 1633/4, at Stockerston, Leicestershire. Here the rectangular inlay with her figure takes up most of the slab and has a further white marble foot inscription plus two armorial shields. There are further inscriptions on the black marble to either side of the figure.
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John Maunsell
County: Buckinghamshire
Date: 1605/6
May 2024
John Maunsell was born on 22 September 1539, the second son of Richard Maunsell and his wife Margery Fairfax. His will, proved in March 1605/6, a few weeks after his death, shows him to have been a man of considerable means. He left five hundred marks to each of his five younger sons, Tobias, John, Ralph, Thomas and Francis when they reached twenty-four years (or twenty-five in John’s case), and another five hundred marks to his daughter Mary on her marriage. He had previously at the request of his wife given six hundred marks to his daughter Dorothy on her...
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Richard de la Pole
County: Suffolk
Date: 1403
April 2024
The collegiate church at Wingfield in Suffolk has indents of a good number of fine former brasses, representing the clerical staff of the college and the family of the founders, but only one still contains any brass. This is a Purbeck marble stone on the floor of the tower, with an the inscription commemorating Richard de la Pole, son of Michael, 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 slab.
Wingfield College was founded in 1362 under...
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Julyen Deryng
County: Kent
Date: 1526/7
March 2024
Not all the brasses of the Dering family in the church of St Nicholas at Pluckley in Kent are quite what they seem. During the seventeenth century Sir Edward Dering, 1st baronet, local landowner and MP, had additional brasses engraved commemorating a number of his ancestors in an antique style. There is some evidence to suggest that their engraver was Edward Marshall.
Sir Edward’s second wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Ashburnham, died on 13 April 1628. After her death, Sir Edward made alterations to Pluckley church and to the Dering chapel within it, laying or relaying ten brasses to...
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Anonymous appropriated indents
County: Cambridgeshire
Date: C.1450-1540
February 2024
The large church of St Peter and St Paul in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, stands in the centre of the town, not far from the South Brink of the River Nene. There was once a castle to the west of the church and the single medieval brass that remains in the church is that of a former constable of the castle, Thomas de Braunstone, d.1401. His very large figure in armour is still impressive, despite being worn and having lost all of its canopy and parts of its marginal inscription. This brass was made in London, and is set in a...
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Robert and Elizabeth Rugge
County: Norfolk
Date: 1559
January 2024 The large slab at the west end of the church of St John Maddermarket in Norwich that supports the font is the indent of the brass of Robert and Elizabeth Rugge. Most of the brass was remounted in December 1992 on a hardwood board after conservation by the leading brass conservator William Lack, and is now mural on the west wall of the north porch.
Robert Rugge died on 18 February 1558/9 as is recorded on the inscription. His brass is Norwich work (it was described by Lack as 'Norwich 6 variant'), but does not fit comfortably within this...
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Henry Buntyng
County: Norfolk
Date: 1505
December 2023
A simple rubbing of the brass inscription commemorating Henry Buntyng in the church of St Andrew, Framingham Earl, Norfolk, would give no clue as to its setting. The inscription consists of four words only: Hic iacet Henricus Buntyng (Here lies Henry Buntyng). It is set in a small marble stone of the type described in contemporary wills as a "foot marble", but that stone is accompanied by seven others of the same size arranged as a cross in the floor of the nave, the inscription lying at the point where the arms intersect the stem. Neither Francis Blomefield nor Anthony...
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Andrew & Elizabeth Jonis
County: Herefordshire
Date: 1497
November 2023
The crypt below the Lady Chapel in Hereford Cathedral contains a late fifteenth-century alabaster incised slab commemorating Andrew Jonis, a Hereford merchant, and his wife Elizabeth. It was in place, as its inscription tells us, by or soon after the feast of All Saints (November 1st) 1497. It forms the top slab of a low tomb chest, today rather plainer than when Thomas Dingley drew the whole monument during Charles II’s reign for his History from Marble.
In 2004 our member Sally Badham published a short article on this slab in the Society’s Transactions. As she noted, the slab is in...
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John and Sara Cossington
County: Kent
Date: 1426
October 2023
The artist and antiquary Thomas Fisher was born in 1772 in Rochester, Kent. His work encompassed far more than monumental brasses, but his contribution in this field was particularly valuable, especially in regard to the brasses of Bedfordhire and Kent. He worked from dabbings and rubbings that he had made, and in the first third of the nineteenth century recorded many brasses that have since been lost or damaged.
At Aylesford in Kent he first sketched the Cossington brass, as was his custom, showing the whole slab with its brass inlays and the indents of items already missing. He also,...
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Jane Eveas
County: Kent
Date: 1530
September 2023
This month’s brass demonstrates the difficulties involved with identifying exact family relationships in the days before parish registers, especially at the level of esquires and below.
The church of St Mary, Chartham, Kent, is known for the excellent early brass representing Sir Robert de Septvans, one of the cross-legged knights of the first half of the fourteenth century. However it has other brasses too. Sir Robert’s figure lies in the north transept, his head to the north and feet to the south, an obvious repositioning at odds with the east-west axis along which it would originally have been laid. Immediately...
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Paul and Margaret Dayrell
County: Buckinghamshire
Date: 1491
August 2023
In The History of the Dayrells of Lillingstone Dayrell, published in 1885, Eleanora Dayrell wrote that a member of the family accompanied William the Conqueror when he landed in 1066, and that the manor at what became Lillingstone Dayrell was assigned by William to him. She noted that the name was originally d’Ayrell, as in the castle north of St Lô in Normandy. Apart from ten years immediately after 1300 the manor continued in the family, and Eleanora’s husband Captain E Marmaduke Dayrell was the 35th Lord of the Manor. However...
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Michel de Troye
County: Seine-Saint-Denis
Date: 1517
July 2023
In 1711, François Roger de Gaignières sold his entire collection of manuscripts, portraits and printed material to the King of France. The royal genealogist Pierre de Clairambault soon began breaking up the collection, but much of it is today in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and includes drawings of churches, funeral monuments, glass, etc.
Included in one volume are drawings of many of the monuments within the church and cloister of the abbey of Saint-Denis (now 'Saint Denis Basilica Cathedral', as the English language leaflet handed out on entrance to the eastern part of...
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John and Silvester Browne
County: Suffolk
Date: 1593
Just over eleven years ago this feature focused on the remains of the brass of John Browne, 1581, and his wife and sixteen children at Halesworth: https://www.mbs-brasses.co.uk/index-of-brasses/john-browne At that time it was mentioned that Browne’s son John, d.1591, was commemorated by a brass at nearby Spexhall. This month the Browne brasses at Spexhall are the subject.
Like the brass at Halesworth, those at Spexhall have been remounted, but whereas the recovered parts of the Halesworth brass are displayed in a stone set above the original indent, those at Spexhall were set on a new mural stone with no sign of...
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Thomas Cranmar
County: Nottinghamshire
Date: 1501
May 2023
Thomas Cranmar, esquire, was the father of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was his second son, born at Aslocton, Nottinghamshire, on 2 July 1489, and thus in his twelth year when his father died on 27 May 1501. Thomas was married to Agnes Hatfield. She survived him and presumably paid for his incised alabaster slab in the church of St John of Beverley at Whatton. She was able to send her younger sons Thomas and Edmund (born 1491) to Cambridge, Thomas getting his BA in 1511, Edmund in 1513-14. Both had careers in the church, Thomas suffering martyrdom...
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Anonymous priest
County: Huntingdonshire
Date: c.1525
April 2023
The brass effigy of a priest in mass vestments holding a chalice lies in the chancel of St John the Baptist, Somersham, Huntingdonshire (now Cambridgeshire). It dates from around 1525 and a possible attribution to the long-serving Thomas Alcock, vicar between 1488 and his death in 1525 was made in the Victoria County History. That seems to be ruled out by the existence of another slab, once the chancel but now in the south porch, bearing indents for a similarly robed priest and for cocks at each corner. Alcock had willed to be buried in the chancel. Given that...
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