Anne Odyngsale

Date of Brass:

1523

Place:

Compton Verney

County:

Warwickshire

Country:

Number:

I

Style:

Coventry 3

Description

March 2025

 

The inscription on her brass tells us that Anne, daughter of Richard Verney, married Edward Odyngsale of Long Itchington. She died in 1523. The Verneys lived at Compton Verney. Long Itchington is less than ten miles away in the same county.

The style of the inscription and of Anne’s figure shows that the brass was made in Coventry. It belongs to the Coventry 3 style. The capital letters E in her inscription differ from those in later inscriptions in the same style, which use a Roman capital E.

Edward Odyngsale died in 1522, so Anne is shown as a 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 arm, as is the case with almost all brasses of ladies in this style. (The way their draperies fall seems heavily influenced by German woodcuts of the period.)

Her father Richard Verney in his will of 1526 mentions the new chapel on the north side of the church at Compton Verney, and Anne may have been the first member of the family to be buried there. The Verney monuments today are located in Lancelot Brown’s new chapel of 1770.

Anne’s inscription is set a short distance below her figure. This 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 as follows, expanded. The top right corner is missing:

 

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

off mayster Edwarde Odyngsale of Longe Ygyngeton, [and]

dogter of mayster Rycharde Verney Esquyer, ye whyche departyde

ye yere of our lorde M^o CCCCCXXIII; on whose sole Jhu have mercy

 

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.

Edward Odyngsale had his own brass at Long Itchington, and it is possible that this too was made in Coventry. However it has disappeared since it was noticed in the mid seventeenth-century by William Dugdale. He 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 of 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. Gerard was dead before 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.

 

Copyright: Jon Bayliss (text and photographs)