Alice Joyner

Date of Brass:

1558

Place:

Ellough

County:

Suffolk

Country:

Number:

III

Style:

Norwich 4

Description

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 mercy. Amen.

This information must have been derived from The Chorography of Suffolk, a very early seventeenth-century source published in 1976 after painstaking re-assembly of the contents by its editor, Diarmaid MacCulloch.

As Felgate notes, the last phrase of the inscription would have sufficed to cause its disappearance when William Dowsing visited the church on 6^th April 1644.

The sydnor.org website (fifth generation) gives more details of Alice's birth and marriages. She had married her first husband by 1529 and had two daughters by the time her father Robert Jenour died in 1534. Alice was his only surviving child. Paul Sydnor had property in Kent, some of it awarded by Henry VIII when he served as the King's agent in Spain around 1539. He also served as a commissioner under the Chantries Act in early 1546, and as escheator for Kent and Middlesex under Edward VI. He died at Gray’s Inn in late 1551, leaving Alice with four daughters and a son.

She then married John Berney of Reedham, Norfolk, who died in July 1553. Berney’s daughter Ursula married Alice’s son William Sydnor in 1558, the same year that Alice herself died. The marriage licence was granted on 7^th May, only six days after Alice’s death. Alice had been living at the time in Willingham, Suffolk. Her father had left properties in various Suffolk parishes including Willinghan St Mary and Willingham All Saints, the latter better known as Ellough. Here Alice was buried.

The only element of Alice’s brass to survive is her effigy. A shield and the inscription are now represented by indents on the slab. Alice’s figure was on the wall in Felgate's time, but was returned to the slab by Bryan Egan.

The figure is not of the late 1550s but of an earlier vintage, appropriated to serve as Alice’s effigy. It looks to date from around 1520. Sally Badham has classified it as Suffolk school Series 2. In describing this series, she commented on its similarities with Norwich 4 brasses. Indeed this figure's location at Ellough would fit more easily into a Norwich distribution than one based on Bury St Edmunds.

There is no close match to the clothing of Alice's figure among existing examples of either S.2 or N.4, yet the facial features indicate it is one or the other. The figure has a pomander on a long chain depending from the buckle of the belt, a purse and a rosary. Tied bows hold the two halves of her gown together, more loosely at the top. This is not a 1520s fashion but one of the late 1550s, when Alice died, indicating that additional engraving was done to bring the clothing up-to-date. New engraving also turned a square neckline into a more fashionable round one but could not help leaving a trace of the former one. The gable headdress with its long lappets was long out-of-date but too prominent to disguise, although the surface may have been cut away so it no longer resembles that worn by any other S.2 or N.4 lady. The edging of the gown (not fur, according to Felgate) also appears to be an addition that approximates to a later fashion.

The figure of Alice Joyner is the best remaining brass at Ellough, escaping the bat droppings that disfigure the later and rather strange figure of Margaret Chewt. The brass to Ursula Berney who married Alice’s son William Sydnor and died in 1568 has disappeared entirely, although its stone is probably one of the indents in the tower.

Copyright (text & photos): Jon Bayliss