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 end of lines as a filler or between words, often in the form of animals or rebuses, on marginal inscriptions. The decrease in metal prices resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries from the late 1530s onwards meant that huge quantities of brass plate became available both to the marblers producing monumental brasses and to the founders for melting down alongside candleticks, brass lecterns and other plate. 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 of the metal stayed within England. Decorative borders around some inscriptions were introduced although most brass inscription remained unadorned. The domestic production of brass under Elizabeth I eventually ensured a domestic supply of brass, making brass plate a much cheaper commodity than it had been before the Reformation.

A well-lettered non-monumental brass inscription from Shipton in Shropshire that records the rebuilding on the chancel by John Lutwich in 1589 has a border of strapwork, a style of decoration begun in the Low Countries in the 1530s that became very popular and spread throughout northen Europe as Flemish artists as they dispersed from the Spanish Netherlands in the 1560s. The brass of George Shrader, died 1605, in St Olave Hart street in London has two inscription plates with decorative borders, one the border that Mill Stephenson described as ‘twisted rope’ that occurs on brasses from the 1570s to the late 1610s and the other of strapwork. Precisely the same strapwork border occurs on two white marble inscriptions to Peter and Ralph Scrivener, died 1604 and 1605 respectively, let into a slab at Badley, Suffolk. Another brass inscription with a decorative border is that of flattened oval shape formerly in the church of St Mary at Quay in Ipswich but now in Ipswich Museum. The border consists of strapwork. By the time of Augustine Parker’s death on 12^th March 1590/1 this type of decoration was well-established and remained popular well into the next century. Parker was a merchant and one of a succession of men of the same name in Ipswich. It is probable that he was the father of Augustine, another Ipswich merchant, who was dead by 1614. The brass commemorating the latter’s wife Susan was laid down in the church of St Nicholas in the town to commemorate her early death at the age of 24 on 13^th Augustine 1604. Her inscription occupies an oval in the centre of a quadrangular plate. The oval is again surrounded by Flemish strapwork. Unlike the earlier brass the strapwork 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 brass that had probably been engraved in a workshop in Southwark that ceased production a year or two later. If it was the younger Augustine Parker who had commemorated his father, he must have looked for a similar style of brass to commemorate his wife. Did he go to the Netherlands for it? It doesn’t seem to match any of the Roman capital scripts from Southwark workshops, nor does the treatment of the shields with the arms of the Merchant Adventurers and the Grocers in strapwork surrounds. Susan’s brass appears to have been removed from its slab and put on the wall by1938 and the floor covered. The church was made redundant in the 1980s, then became a diocesan centre some years later but was put up for sale in 2022, since reopening as a conference and meeting centre.

Copyright: Jon Bayliss