Julyen Deryng

Date of Brass:

1526/7

Place:

County:

Kent

Country:

Number:

V

Style:

London F (figure), Canterbury (inscription)

Description

March 2024

Not all the brasses of the Dering family in the church of St Nicholas at Pluckley in Kent are quite what they seem. During the seventeenth century Sir Edward Dering, 1st baronet, local landowner and MP, had additional brasses engraved commemorating a number of his ancestors in an antique style. There is some evidence to suggest that their engraver was Edward Marshall.

Sir Edward’s second wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Ashburnham, died on 13 April 1628. After her death, Sir Edward made alterations to Pluckley church and to the Dering chapel within it, laying or relaying ten brasses to the family, some in pre-existing indents. It may be that his mind had turned to this project the previous year, when he gave a shilling to both Edward Marshall ‘ye tombe cutter’ and Marshall’s boy on 22 December, followed by £2 to Marshall for ‘tombe worke in brasse’ in March 1627/8. However Sir Edward is known to have laid brasses to other members of his family elsewhere in Kent at Sevington and Dover Castle, so the payments to Marshall cannot be definitely connected to the brasses at Pluckley.

The surviving book of accounts in which these payments are recorded only covers the years 1617-28. The next volume must have recorded more payments to Marshall as the work on the brasses continued.

Sir Edward’s aim was to embellish his family’s pedigree, and he provided John Weever with drawings of the ‘earliest’ Dering brasses at Pluckley commemorating John Deryng, died 1425 and his son Richard Deryng, with two wives, but with one wife and the inscription shown as indents. These were duly engraved in wood and printed in 1631 in Ancient Funerall Monuments, pages 292 and 293. The latter brass has since disappeared. The arms of the family on their brasses were spuriously shown as Or, a saltire sable, Sir Edward altering rolls of arms to make these arms seem to be those formerly held by the family.

One brass figure to a Dering at Pluckley that is genuinely of its period is that commemorating Julyen Deryng, 'gentylwoman', who died in February 1526/7. It belongs with the products at the latter end of the London F series. The artistic standard of the figures had deteriorated badly to the point where the soubriquet ‘F Crude’ has been minted to refer to them. However the lettering of the inscription does not fit the style of the figure. Was the inscription engraved by Marshall in the 1620s? Marshall cut quite a number of brasses with antiqued lettering, but the lettering on Julyen’s inscription does not correspond. Instead it looks more like the product of a workshop in Canterbury that produced a number of brasses in the 1520s and 30s. That would make the inscription to Julyen genuine, but throws doubt on whether the figure, although contemporary, was originally hers. The inscription also reveals Julyen to have been a follower of the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus. The concluding prayer asks Jesus to have mercy on her soul.

Who was Julyen? The inscription calls her a gentlewoman without specifying her relationship to any other Dering. It seems that she was the widow of John Deryng, gentleman, whose will was proved on 14 October 1517. She was the daughter of William Darell esquire of Cadehill. John and Julyen’s son Nicholas Deryng, gentleman, whose will was proved the same day as his father’s, had a daughter of the same name but she survived to marry a William Kerkby. These details come from the heraldic visitation of Kent undertaken in 1619, the Dering pedigree being signed off by Anthony Deryng, Sir Edward’s father.

Copyright: Jon Bayliss (text and photograph)

References

Oliver D. Harris, ‘Lines of Descent: Appropriations of Ancestry in Stone and Parchment’ in The arts of remembrance in early modern England: memorial cultures of the post-Reformation, edited by Andrew Gordon and Thomas Rist (2013).

Laetitia Yeandle, ‘Sir Edward Dering of Surrenden Dering and his "Booke of Expences, 1617-1628" ’, Archaeologia Cantiana 125 (2005), 323-344.