Anne Odyngsale

Date of Brass:

1523

Place:

Compton Verney

County:

Warwickshire

Country:

Number:

I

Style:

Coventry 3

Description

March 2025

As the inscription on her brass tells us, Anne, daughter of Richard Verney, married Edward Odyngsale of Long Itchington. The Verneys lived at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, and Long Itchington is in the same county, less than ten miles to the north-east. Also discernible from the inscription and from Anne’s figure is that the brass was made in Coventry. It belongs to the Coventry 3 style. Anne died in 1523. The capital letters E in her description differ from those in later inscriptions in the same style that use a Roman capital E. It is possible that Edward Odyngsale’s own brass at Long Itchington was an earlier example of the style but it has disappeared since it was noticed in the mid-seventeenth-century by William Dugdale, who recorded the inscription:

Upon a Marble Gravestone this Inscription in a plate of brass.

Of your charite pray for the soule of Edward Odingsell late o Long-Ichington in the County of Warwick esquier, Gentleman-Usher to King Henry the seventh who died in the year of our Lord M. D. xxii.

Edward was the son of Gerard Odingsell, who had died by 1494, when his wife Margaret entered membership of the Gild of Knowle, followed in the next year by Edward himself and his wife Anne and in 1514 by their son Edward. The date of Edward’s death explains why Anne is shown as a widow. The suspiciously regular shape of the missing top right corner of her inscription raises the question of how long that corner has been missing and whether Dugdale saw it so but supplied the missing text as ‘wife’ rather than ‘widow’. Otherwise Anne is dressed like her mother, also Anne, on her parents’ brass close by. The hem of her dress is hitched up under her arrm, as is the case with almost all brasses of ladies in this style and the way their draperies fall is seemingly heavily influenced by German woodcuts of the period. Her father Richard made reference to the new chapel on the north side of the church at Compton Verney in his will of 1526 and it may be that his daughter was the first member of the family to be buried there. The Verney monuments are today located in Lancelot Brown’s new chapel of 1770. Anne’s inscription is set a short distance below her figure and this detachment is characteristic of Coventry figure brasses of the sixteenth-century. The slab in which her brass is set appears to be of the same type of Lincolnshire marble as that of her parents although the characteristic white sea urchin fossils are not apparent on her slab. Her inscription reads:

Off yeor charyte pray for the sole off Anne Odyngsal[e, the wife]

off mayster Edwarde Odyngsale of Longe Ygyngeton, and

dogter of ḿ Richard Verney, Esquyer, ye whyche deptyde

ye yere of ō Lord MCCCCCXXIII; ō whose sole Jhu have mcy

The concluding phrase shows that she was a devotee of the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus, as were so many of her contemporaries.

Copyright: Jon Bayliss (text and photographs)