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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Nicholas Toke and his three daughters
County: Kent
Date: 1680
June 2010
The last man to be depicted in armour on brass in England before the Victorian era was Nicholas Toke. He died at the age of 92 and so may have been younger than some of those shown in armour on brasses of the 1630s and 1640s. Having married on five previous occasions, he is said to have died while on a visit to London to find a sixth. He had served in the Navy in his younger days and was heavily involved with his local militia, often being referred to as Captain Nicholas Toke. In view of...
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John Kyngeston and wife Susan
County: Berkshire
Date: 1514
February 2010
This month's brass has been chosen by our president, the Venerable David Meara.
The brass of John Kyngeston, who died in 1514, and his wife, Susan Fetyplace, whose date of death was never filled in on their inscription, is one of the three to have a plate of the Holy Trinity. It has lost two shields and parts of each of the two mouth scrolls. On the back of the Trinity and one of the remaining shields are two parts of the figure of a lady very similar to Susan's figure. Although there is...
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Anne Bedingfield
County: Suffolk
Date: 1641
March 2010
The outline of Anne Bedingfield's life can be found in Eva Griffiths' biography of her in the Dictionary of National Biography and a précis of the DNB entry by John Blatchly was published in the MBS Bulletin, illustrated by Suckling's lithograph of her brass. It recounted how her father had died in 1576 and left her the leasehold of property in Clerkenwell that was part of the bequest of freehold land by Thomas Seckford that supported his almshouses at Woodbridge. When her mother dismissed a clerk from the family brewing business, he took her to court. Her defence was...
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Ambroise de Villiers
County: Seine et Oise
Date: 1503
April 2010
In 1890, the text of a contract for an incised slab was published in France by Albert des Méloizes in Bulletin monumental. Contracts for monuments are much less rare in France than in Britain, as they were officially recorded as legal documents and some of those records survive. In this case it is the original contract rather than the official record of it that survived. While very large numbers of incised slabs survived both the wars of religion and the French revolution, not to mention church renovations and rebuildings, many others did not. Amongst their number was...
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Christopher Playters
County: Suffolk
Date: 1547 (C17 engraving)
May 2010
In the seventeenth century in various places around England, brasses were laid down that purported to represent people who had died in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In some cases this was done to repair and replace earlier brasses; in other instances it was to help establish spurious pedigrees. The best-known instance of the latter is the series of brasses at Pluckley in Kent, supposedly representing the ancestors of Sir Edward Dering. Another example is at Rugeley in Staffordshire.
The most extensive example of repair and replacement is at Stopham in Sussex, but two...
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Duchess Zedena
County: Saxony
Date: 1510
July 2010
This month’s brass seems to have a significance that has perhaps escaped notice. At the close of the 15th century monumental brasses in Europe were characteristically Gothic memorials – either in the elegant Flemish style of Branca da Vilhana [1] or in the rather overloaded ‘High Gothic’ of Duke Frederick the Good of Saxony.[2] But when in 1510 the distinguished Vischer workshop in Nuremberg was asked to produce a brass for another member of Duke Frederick’s family, they seem, not unnaturally, to have turned to a fellow townsman, Albrecht Dürer, who had done...
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Ann Butts
County: Suffolk
Date: 1609
August 2010
The brass to Ann Butts is one of the finest of the early seventeenth century. It can be found in the chancel of the splendid church of St Mary at Redgrave, now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, which works in co-operation with the Redgrave Church Heritage Trust to care for the church.
Ann Butts died over eighty years after her father, Henry Bures, whose brass can be found at Acton, also in Suffolk. Henry died in 1528 and was commemorated by a brass made in Suffolk, at Bury St Edmunds. While Henry's effigy is a good size...
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Thomas Shernborne and wife Jamon
County: Norfolk
Date: 1458/9
September 2010
Today nothing remains to show the identity of the two figures on this brass; the inscription, the shields and the crest on the man's helmet are all lost. When Weever was writing in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, it was only the crest, 'a Vulture splaid', that enabled him to identify the man as a member of the Shernborne family. About two hundred years later Cotman was able to quote the inscription as Thomas Sherneborne camerar. d'ne Margarete regine Anglie et Jamine uxoris ejus quondam domincellarie ejusd' regine (Thomas Sherneborne, chamberlain to the lady Margaret, queen of...
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John Repps & wives Margaret & Thomasene
County: Norfolk
Date: 1561
November 2009
Mill Stephenson describes this brass thus: M.S.I. Inscription John Repps, esq; 1561, and 2 ws., (1) Margaret., eldest daughter and co-heir of Henry Smyth by whom one son Henry and seven daughters., (2) Thomasen, daughter of Thomas Derham, by whom Ele and John, local, on a board loose.
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This unusual brass has had a chequered history. It is of an unusual, probably unique, design, consisting of six shields, four achievements a central inscription and a most unusual marginal inscription. All may be seen as the top slab on an altar tomb. It was almost complete when Charles Parkin,...
Reginald de Assche
County: Kent
Date: c.1380
October 2009
An unrecorded rebus in Ash Church
Research is now underway for the forthcoming County Series volume, The Monumental Brasses of Kent by William Lack, H. Martin Stuchfield and Philip Whittemore. After several forays into the county it is already becoming apparent that there are many errors, omissions and discrepancies between Mill Stephenson’s List of Monumental Brasses in the British Isles (published in 1926 with an appendix 1938) and our current findings.
On a recent visit to Ash-
read morenext- Wrotham, it was noted that there was a major omission from the entry... 
Ralph de Hengham
County: Middlesex
Date: 1311
September 2009
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I have recently been reading, and admiring with great pleasure, the new Shire publication Monumental Brasses by Sally Badham with Martin Stuchfield. Drawing on the rich collection of 3,000 surviving brasses in the U.K., this new book also reminds us of the loss of monumental brasses which took place, especially through iconoclasm and destruction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (2) My choice for this month’s ‘Brass of the Month’ is one such lost brass, that of Ralph Hengham, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and later of the Common Bench, (d. 1311) formerly in St Paul’s Cathedral,...
Incised slabs to lepers
County: France
Date: 1475-1584
August 2009
F.A. Greenhill, in his magisterial work Incised Effigial Slabs, notes the presence of a slab to a leper in the Musée Archéologique, Dijon, to one Jehan Martin, ‘dit le Scot’, who was a royal serjeant at Dijon and died from leprosy there in 1583 (Vol. I, p.229; Vol. II, pl.128b). Poignantly, the slab shows the afflicted Jehan without any ears and wearing a bell at his waist to warn people of his supposed contagion. With his usual sensitivity, Greenhill ends his short account with the comment that this slab is ‘perhaps the one surviving monument to show the lugubrious...
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Gabriel Pluyette
County: Val-d'Oise
Date: 1634
July 2009
Most of Charles de Gaulle airport north-east of Paris is in the commune of Roissy-en-France, and both airport and commune are usually called just Roissy. The qualifying 'en-France' indicates Roissy's location in the Ile-de-France rather than the country as a whole. The church has a splendid Renaissance chancel and retains a number of incised slabs. The four remaining effigial slabs now line the walls of the chancel. Among them is that commemorating Gabriel Pluyette, a member of a family whose monuments can be found elsewhere in the area, at Le Mesnil-Aubry and Fontenay-sous-Louvres. Ferdinard de Guilhermy chose to illustrate...
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Sir John de Wyngefeld
County: Suffolk
Date: 1389
June 2009The prominence given to the two great periods of destruction that monumental brasses suffered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often masks the further losses that came about through neglect in the eighteenth century and church restorations in the nineteenth. As illustrations of the latter two periods of loss, Suffolk has examples of the loss of life size early fourteenth century figures from Letheringham and Oulton. The effigy of the rector Sir Adam de Bacon at Oulton, stolen in 1857, survived long enough to be rubbed, so that a modern replica has taken its place, but that of...
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Willingale Doe
County: Essex
Date: 1613
May 2009
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Dorothy Brewster was the daughter of Sir Thomas Jocelyn of Willingale Doe. She was in her mid-twenties when she died on 27 June 1613 and was buried some three weeks later at Willingale Doe amongst her Jocelyn relations. Her husband was Thomas Brewster of the Middle Temple. When Thomas was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1603, he was described as Mr. Thomas Brewster, late of New Inn, gent., son and heir-apparent of John Brewster of the Middle Temple, esquire. He was bound to his father and Humfrey Brewster, the latter being the second son of Humfrey Brewster,...
Gotthard and Margaretha von Höveln
County:
Date: 1571
April 2009On Palm Sunday 1942 the historic centre of Lübeck was devastated by RAF bombers. The three most prominent churches – the Cathedral, the Marienkirche and the Petrikirche – were extensively damaged and numerous art works were lost. At the Petrikirche the important Flemish brass of Johann Clingenberg (d. 1356) was reduced to a few scraps. Among the many treasures lost at the Marienkirche were the Dance of Death paintings by Bernt Notke, virtually all the choir screen, both of the historic organs used by Buxtehude, and a multitude of funerary monuments. The Flemish brass of Tydeman Berck was...
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Lady Sydney Wynne
County: Denbighshire
Date: 1632
March 2009
In 1965 I was between jobs, and was re-training in Bangor to become a teacher. Wales is not rich in brasses, but when my closest friend from university days, Malcolm Norris, heard where I was going, he asked if I could try to get him rubbings of some of the half-dozen brasses at Llanrwst in what then was still Denbighshire. So we made that village our destination for a family outing. The sexton was friendly, but said I might find it difficult to rub the brasses as several were now mounted in wooden frames on the wall. Sure enough,...
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John Alnwik
County: Norfolk
Date: 1460
February 2009
February’s brass shows a figure in academic dress.
Surlingham is on the south bank of the River Yare, a few miles east of Norwich. It formerly had two churches. That dedicated to St Saviour was treated as a chapel even though it should have enjoyed full parish status. It was abandoned in the early eighteenth in favour of St Mary’s.
John Alnwik was nominated as vicar of St Mary’s by his kinsman, William Alnwik, bishop of Norwich from 1426 to 1436. John was a fellow of New College, Oxford, by 1426 and bursar of the college in 1427-8. He was presumably...
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Unknown civilian
County: Huntingdonshire
Date: c.1520
January 2009
January’s brass is one of many now anonymous memorials.
Not all brasses are large and magnificent memorials representing the rich and powerful. Many are relatively small and apparently insignificant but represent a cross section of middle-class England; the small trader, yeoman, craftsmen and so on. Sometimes even their identity does not remain in either the brass or in other records.
One such is this unknown civilian, now mounted on a block of Iroko wood and bolted to the North Wall of St Mary¹s Church, Godmanchester, Huntingdonshire. It is one of relatively few brasses remaining in the county of Cromwell.
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The...
Margaret Bacon
County: Northamptonshire
Date: 1626/7
December 2008
December’s brass is one members saw during the excursion to the Nene Valley earlier this year.
The Bacon family is usually associated with East Anglia but a branch was established in Northamptonshire by Edward Bacon, who was descended from the Bacons of Hessett in Suffolk, in the early seventeenth century. Edward's eldest son, Thomas, was recorded in the heralds' visitation of Northamptonshire in 1618 as seventeen years old. Eight years later, he had a monument with a brass erected to his wife, who died on 29 January 1626 (or 1627 by modern reckoning). The brass is evidently of London manufacture,...
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