Portfolio of Brasses
Each month we feature an article about a brass of particular interest.
If you would like to submit an article for this feature please contact:
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William and Margaret Att Wode
County: Gloucestershire
Date: 1529
July 2020
William Att Wode seems to have left little impression on the records of the time. Years later, during the reign of Elizabeth, William Atwood of Beach in Gloucestershire brought a legal action in Chancery against Sir John Tracy and Henry Izard. This claimed that Sir John's great-great-grandfather William, who held the manor of Doynton, had demised the park there to Atwood's grandfather William and his sons Edward and John for the terms of their lives, around 14 Henry VIII (1522-3). Sir John had since granted a lease of the park to Henry Izard and Izard had sought to eject William...
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Thomas & Elizabeth Burgoyn
County: Bedfordshire
Date: 1516
June 2020
Before the Black Death of 1349 cross brasses were quite numerous. They were the successors and contemporaries of cross slabs. The latter dated back to the twelfth century but continued as relatively low-cost grave covers up to the Reformation and even beyond. In contrast, the popularity of the cross brass fell away dramatically. Although there were London-made examples after the Black Death, most of the few early sixteenth-century examples were made in provincial workshops, and most were quite small.
An exception is the cross brass commemorating Thomas Burgoyn and his wife Elizabeth in All Saints' church at Sutton in Bedfordshire.
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Richard de Hakebourne
County: Oxfordshire
Date: 1322
May 2020
The brass of Richard de Hakebourne has often been illustrated. It is an important and early brass. The chapel of Merton College had a number of floriated cross brasses of the fourteenth century but some of them have disappeared, so the survival of the figurative element of the Hakebourne memorial is very welcome. It is now the earliest monument in the chapel.
Hakebourne was a fellow of the college by 1296 and later served several times as sub-warden. He was the owner of a book now in the college library and donated two others. The inscription around the verge of...
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Edmund West
County: Buckinghamshire
Date: 1618
April 2020
The sculptor Epiphanius Evesham came to the attention of the public in the early 1930s after his signature was noted by Ralph Griffin on a monument in Kent. Griffin communicated the discovery to Mrs Esdaile, the leading authority on post-reformation British sculpture. The article she subsequently published in The Times led to a...
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Anne a Wode
County: Norfolk
Date: 1512
March 2020
Anne a Wode was the second wife of Thomas Asteley of Melton Constable. The church of St Peter at Melton Constable lies outside the village and in the grounds of the impressive hall built by a later Asteley and is rich in Asteley monuments. However none of them dates fromthe period in which both Anne and Alice Asteley, lived. Alice was the wife of John Calthorpe, who died in 1503
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Thomas, son of Thomas Pye
County: Sussex
Date: 1592
February 2020
Brasses commemorating children were far more common than sculpted monuments until James I and VI commemorated two small daughters early in the seventeenth century. Thereafter monumental sculpture memorialising children became much more frequent.
A late sixteenth-century brass to a child can be found in Brightling church in Sussex. It commemorates Thomas, only son of Thomas Pye, Doctor of Sacred Theology, whose surname was appropriately latinised to Pius.
Young Thomas kneels on a cushion in prayer. He wears a gown that indicates he was very young, as at that time both male and female children wore the same clothing for...
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Christopher Peyton and Sir Robert Peyton
County: Cambridgeshire
Date: 1507 1518
January 2020
This month's contribution highlights the contrast between the present condition of two brasses at Isleham with that of many others in Cambridgeshire.
On 28 August 1643 Parliament passed an ordinance stating that 'all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry should be removed and abolished'. These were to include 'images and pictures of saints or superstitious inscriptions'. Churchwardens were to carry out this work, or Justices of the Peace if they failed to do so, and it was to be done before 1 November 1643. On 19 December 1643 the Earl of Manchester issued a warrant to William Dowsing to carry out...
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John Goose
County: Norfolk
Date: 1503
December 2019
On the south side of the chancel of the church of St Nicholas in Dereham is a brass shield set on an older Purbeck slab. In Blomefield's History of Norfolk, this is associated with an inscription, thus:
On a brass this imperfect epitaph, in memory of ____ Aquila.
Alta petens Aquila istac jam conditur aula :
Qui manet precibus justorum gaudia lucis,
Hic rexit ter
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William and Alice Water
County: Cambridgeshire
Date: 1521
November 2019
The iconoclast William Dowsing visited four Cambridgeshire villages on Wednesday 3 January 1643/4. He had spent his time in late December and the very beginning of January visiting Cambridge college chapels and churches, resulting in a great deal of destruction of images and words in these building although a surprising amount of the material that would have caused him offence remains to this day, some of it perhaps removed in advance and thus unavailable for inspection. Brasses in King's College Chapel were deliberately damaged but their more inoffensive components were allowed to remain. Dowsing's diary can be frustratingly sparse...
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Abbot Heribert von Lülsdorf
County: Nordrhein-Westfalen
Date: 1481
October 2019
This month’s brass commemorates Abbot Heribert von Lülsdorf (1481) from
Kornelimünster, in Nordrhein-Westfalen GermanyTransactions (vol.X (1965), pt.3, pp.173-4) contains an article entitled “Brasses in
Germany & the Low Countries” by Messrs. Belonje & Greenhill, which features the above brass from the parish church of St Kornelius Kornelimünster, formerly a Benedictine Abbey founded in the 9th century.An illustration opposite page 173 from a work by L. von Fisenne (1880) shows
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the brass after its first restoration in the 19th century. It comprises a central plate with a demi figure of the abbot under a canopy, and...
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Ann Paston
County: Norfolk
Date: c.1490
August 2019
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It is not often that brasses make the news around the world but the simple inscription commemorating Ann or Anna, daughter of Sir John Paston, did so in the second week of June 2019. An archaeologist, Matt Champion, working on the Paston Footprints 600 project on the church at Oxnead had happened to notice her inscription and that it recorded a member of the family previously unknown to historians. The story was then taken up by the media.
The Paston family of Norfolk has attracted a great deal of attention over the past 250 years. The...
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Henry Dove
County: Wiltshire
Date: 1616
September 2019
The 'Recovery of an Ancient Brass at Salisbury' was reported in a short article of the same name by C[lifford] W[yndham] Holgate in the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine published in 1894.1 It was the brass of Henry Dove and the church was that of St Edmund. He described it as copper rather than brass and thought it had probably been taken from the vault under the church where Dove had been buried and appeared once to have been inserted in stone. It was in the possession of someone living near Andover who had informed a museum director...
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Nicholas Byldysdon and wife Kateryn
County: Lincolnshire
Date: 1489
July 2019
The 1480s were a time of rapid change in the ruling circle of Stamford. The town was governed by twenty-five men, with an alderman at their head and two groups of twelve burgesses, the first and second twelve. Christopher Browne, a nephew of William Browne, founder of Browne's Hospital, and grandson of John Browne, merchant of the staple, was a member of the family that dominated fifteenth-century Stamford. He was made free in 1482, made a member of the first twelve without having served in the second twelve and became alderman at the end of the year, a very...
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Nicholas Parker
County: Norfolk
Date: 1496/7
June 2019
'Nicholas Parker' has recently been identified as the owner of an illustrated missal in Cambridge University Library. Research into his life is currently being undertaken by Professor Carole Rawcliffe and Dr John Alban.
Living in Honing, close to Bromholm Priory, where the elder Sir John Paston was buried in 1466, Nicholas Parker might be expected to feature in the contemporary letters of the Paston family; yet the man of the same name who does was a notary public of the diocese of Norwich and was buried in the Greyfriars in London in 1484. He was a gentleman and held a...
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Sir Humfrey Stafford and wife Margaret
County: Northamptonshire
Date: 1548
May 2019
The Stafford family of Blatherwyck had their origins with the Staffords of Grafton. Their is a profusion of heads of the family named Humfrey that makes identifying any particular Humfrey a task that needs care. Like his father, who died little more than a dozen years before his son did, the particular Humfrey represented on the brass was a knight. He is referred to on occasion as as Sir Humfrey Stafford junior, as when he was on service on the Continent in Henry VIII's army in the early 1540s. At other times, as when he wrote to Thomas Cromwell...
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Sir Laurence Pabenham and wives Elizabeth and Joan
County: Huntingdonshire
Date: c.1440
April 2019
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The church of St Peter at Offord Darcy lies outside the main village but close to the manor house. It is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. While the brass depicting the kneeling rector William Taylard lies in its original Lincolnshire marble slab, that of Sir Laurence Pabenham and his two wives has been relaid in a piece of Purbeck marble large enough to contain the remnants of the three figures and the inscription, but considerably smaller than the original, now lost, last recorded as being in the tower.
Sir Laurence was...
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John and Jane Corbet
County: Norfolk
Date: 1559
March 2019
John Corbet, born by 1514, was the son of John Corbet of nearby Spixworth, gentleman, who died in the early 1540s after a career as a brazier in Norwich, where he rose to be sheriff. The Corbet family came from Morton Corbet, Shropshire, as evidenced by their arms, Or, a raven proper, although the Norfolk branch used a different crest, a squirrel sejant, cracking a nut, proper. The Jermy family granted the manor of Mounteney in Sprowston to John Corbet, esquire, around the time of his father's death. The family retained it for nearly a hundred years, Sir Thomas...
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John Beton
County: Derbyshire
Date: 1570
January 2017
Although his month's brass was mentioned in many guidebooks in the century before the First World War it has since received rather less attention but relates directly to one of the major problems faced by Elizabeth I during her reign.
On 2nd May 1568 Mary Queen of Scots escaped from imprisonment in Castle Leven, set on an island in Loch Leven. She had been forced to abdicate in favour of her ten month old son, James VI, on 24th July the previous year following the murder of her second husband and her marriage to the man many believed to be...
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Francis Saunders & wives Elizabeth, Eleanor and Frances
County: Northamptonshire
Date: 1585
December 2009
It is quite unusual to find a brass combined with an alabaster tablet; usually alabaster tablets have inscription panels of slate or black marble, some of which also have incised figures. An alabaster tablet at West Malling, Kent, to Jane, Lady Fitzjames, who died in 1594, has a large brass inscription panel set in an alabaster tablet attributable to Giles de Witte, a sculptor from Bruges who arrived in England in 1585. The alabaster tablet to Francis Saunders at Welford in Northamptonshire goes one step further and has a plate with kneeling effigies of Francis, his three wives and...
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Sir Ralph Pudsay, his third wife Edwina & his son William
County: Yorkshire
Date: 1507
January 2010
The brass this month is affixed in a most unusual position.
The church of Bolton-by-Bowland (Yorkshire) boasts a large and imposing octagonal font of Egglestone marble. There are a number of such fonts in Yorkshire and Durham in particular, but this one is distinctive due to the inscription engraved on pairs of brass strips on four of the concave panels of the bowl.
The inscriptions run from the southernmost panel to the northernmost in sequential order. They read ‘Orate p[ro] a[n]i[m]ab[u]s / d[omin]i Radul / phi Pudsay / milit[is] & de / Edinie uxor[is]...
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