Henry Fazakyrley

Date of Brass:

1531

Place:

Drayton Beauchamp

County:

Buckinghamshire

Country:

Number:

III

Style:

London G

Description

December 2024

The surname Fazakerley derives from a place now part of Liverpool. Much of the early history of the family relates to the area around Liverpool, especially Walton, where a William Fazakerley was buried in 1600. One member of the family was buried in the church of St Mary in Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire in 1531 and was commemorated by a brass. Almost all of the parishes in the county were in the archdeaconry of Buckinghamshire, which was in the diocese of Lincoln at the time of Henry Fazakyrley’s death. He was not a rector of the church. Lipsomb’s 1847 county history, recordscHumphrey Dayrell being installed as rector in 1530 on the death of his predecessor, Thomas Hill, incumbent since 1506. The Cheyne family held Drayton Beauchamp during this period and it seems likely the Fazakyrley was in their employ. The long-lived Sir John Cheyne died in 1468 leaving a young widow, Agnes, who married Edmund Molyneux, esquire. Edmund died in 1484 and was commemorated by a brass at Chenies in the same county, depicting him in armour and Agnes in a mantle. She died in 1494. Henry Molineaux, was presented by Edmund, was rector of Drayton Beachamp in 1472 and is thought to be Edmund’s brother. His family was that whose sixteenth-century brasses are to be found in the church of St Helen, Sefton, Lancashire, a little north of Liverpool, close to the area from which the Fazakerlys came. If Henry Fazakyrley was employed by Edmund Molineux around this time as a domestic chaplain (as James Gloys was for the Paston family of Norfolk), then he had a long life there.

The inscription of the brass is broken across the middle but otherwise complete. It reads:

Of your Charite Pray for ye soull of

s henri fazakyrley prest whyche decessed

ye x day of July ye yere of o lord god m

vcxxxi [on] whos soull god pdon

Something appears to have gone wrong when the marbler was laying out the last line of the inscription. Did he mix up the phrases ‘on whose soul God have mercy’ and ‘whose soul God pardon’ and have to fill in the ‘on’ between the date and ‘whos’, or was the date wrongly engraved and the last two characters have to be filled in? The isolated s before Fazakyrley’s forename was intended to denote ‘sir’, a courtesy title given to medieval priests.

At the time that Lipscomb’s history was written, the metal parts of Fazakyrley’s brass were in the parsonage house, its slab remaining ‘near the steps leading to the rails, on the south side’. They have since been returned to the church but laid in a lozenge of pale stone. Fazakyrley’s figure was headless before its return. It was made in London and belongs to the large group labelled G that replaced London D in the early years of the sixteenth-century. Malcolm Norris, writing in his Monumental Brasses: The Memorials described the effigies of priests in the period 1500-1560 as typically ‘small and crudely engraved’. Fazakyrley’s figure, while conforming to this judgement in some respects, has aspects of its design that should enable it to be grouped with other figures of priests made during the same time.

Copyright: Text and photo: Jon Bayliss

Rubbing: Lack, Stuchfield, Whittemore, The Monumental Brasses of Buckinghamshire