Susan Parker

Date of Brass:

1604

Place:

Ipswich, St Nicholas

County:

Suffolk

Country:

Number:

IV

Style:

Description

November 2024

Before the Reformation, inscriptions on brasses occasionally featured decoration, either at the ends of lines as a filler or, on marginal inscriptions, between words, often in the form of animals or rebuses. From the late 1530s onwards the dissolution of the monasteries meant that huge quantities of brass plate became available both to the marblers producing monumental brasses and to the founders for melting down alongside candlesticks, brass lecterns and other plate. This led to a decrease in metal prices. The laws against exporting particular metals brought in by Henry VIII and strengthened under Edward VI may not have been as effective as intended, but much brass stayed within England. The manufacture of brass within England under Elizabeth I eventually ensured a domestic supply, making brass plate much cheaper than before the Reformation.

Decorative borders start to appear on brass inscriptions in the later 16th century. A well-lettered non-monumental brass inscription at Shipton, Shropshire that records the rebuilding of the chancel by John Lutwich in 1589 has a border of strapwork. This style of decoration began in the Low Countries in the 1530s and became very popular, spreading throughout northen Europe as Flemish artists dispersed from the Spanish Netherlands in the 1560s.

The brass of George Schrader, died 1605, in St Olave Hart Street in London has two inscription plates with decorative borders. One is the type known as ‘twisted rope’, which occurs on brasses from the 1570s to the late 1610s. The other is of strapwork. Precisely the same strapwork border occurs on two white marble inscriptions to Peter and Ralph Scrivener, died 1604 and 1605 respectively, in a slab at Badley, Suffolk.

Another brass inscription with a decorative border was formerly in the church of St Mary Quay in Ipswich but is now in Ipswich Museum. It commemorates Augustine Parker, who died on 12^th March 1590/1. The inscription is of flattened oval shape, and the border consists of strapwork. By that date this type of decoration was well established and remained popular well into the next century. Parker was a merchant, one of a succession of men of the same name in Ipswich.

The brass commemorating Susan, wife of another Augustine Parker (probably the son of the man above) is in the church of St Nicholas, Ipswich. She died aged only 24 on 13^th August 1604. Her inscription occupies an oval in the centre of a quadrangular plate. The oval is surrounded by strapwork, which unusually impinges onto the oval at top and bottom. The inscription is is Latin and each word is separated by a stop that looks a little like a comma. The lettering differs in detail from that on the 1590/1 brass, which had probably been engraved in a workshop in Southwark. This workshop had ceased production a year or two later. Did the younger Augustine Parker seek to commemorate his wife with a similar style of brass to the one for his father? Did he go to the Netherlands for it? The lettering does not seem to match any of the Roman capital scripts from the Southwark workshops. The treatment of the two shields, with the arms of the Merchant Adventurers and the Grocers' Company in strapwork surrounds, is also unusual.

Susan Parker’s brass appears to have been removed from its slab and put on the wall by 1938, and the floor covered. The church was made redundant in the 1980s, and later became a diocesan centre, but was put up for sale in 2022. It has since reopened as a conference and meeting centre.

Copyright: Jon Bayliss