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, and the early history of the family relates to the Liverpool area, especially Walton, where a William Fazakerley was buried in 1600. However one member of the family was buried in 1531 in the church of St Mary at Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire and was commemorated by a brass.

Henry Fazakyrley was not a rector of the church. Lipscomb’s 1847 county history records Humphrey 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 that Henry Fazakyrley was in their employ. The long-lived Sir John Cheyne died in 1468, leaving a young widow, Agnes. She remarried to 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.) Henry Molineaux, presented by Edmund, was rector of Drayton Beachamp in 1472 and is thought to have been Edmund’s brother. The Molineux family has sixteenth-century brasses in the church of St Helen, Sefton, Lancashire, a little north of Liverpool, close to the area from which the Fazakerleys came. Perhaps Henry Fazakyrley was employed by Edmund Molineux as a domestic chaplain (as James Gloys was for the Paston family of Norfolk). If so, he had a long life.

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

Of your Charite Pray for ye soull of

s(ir) henri fazakyrley prest wyche decessed

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

v^c xxxi whos soull god p(ar)don

Something went wrong when the marbler was laying out the last line of the inscription. It looks as if he mixed up the phrases ‘on whose soul God have mercy’ and ‘whose soul God pardon’, and had to fill in (erase) the word ‘on’. The isolated 's' before Fazakyrley’s forename has an abbreviation mark, and denotes the word ‘sir’, a courtesy title of medieval priests.

At the time of Lipscomb’s history 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 'G' that replaced 'London D' in the early years of the sixteenth century. Malcolm Norris, 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