Thomas Elyngbrigge

Date of Brass:

1497

Place:

Carshalton

County:

Surrey

Country:

Number:

IV

Style:

London D

Description

October 2026

Brasses have been lost over the centuries in various ways. The religious changes of the years after the Reformation was a major cause but the high value of the metal used resulted in much re-use as plates were turned over and cut up leaving jigsaws of re-used pieces spread between different churches in different places that are still coming to light. Earlier than that some religious establishments closed for various reasons or cleared old slabs from their floors to make room for new ones. The period of the Civil War and the Commonwealth resulted in the removal of brasses and the destruction of ‘objectionable’ brasses, both in part or completely, where the Reformation had missed them. With the development in the Elizabethan period of a native industry making the metal from ores mined in England, brass had become much less valuable and some of the fragments of metal removed in the 1640s were simply thrown away without being removed far from the church. The eighteenth-century was a period of neglect, resulting in further losses as church buildings deteriorated.

The nineteenth-century saw neglect replaced with interest and rebuilding but lack of supervision during building work often led to further losses. A case in point is the brass of Thomas Elyngbrigge at Carshalton. His brass was largely complete when it was rubbed by J G Waller on 30 July 1837, missing the lower parts of the canopy, two groups of children (three sons and two daughters), a shield and most of its foot inscription. More, if not all, of the inscription was recorded by D T Powell in 1806 but the fullest transcription was by Nicholas Charles, Lancaster Herald, who died in 1613. The losses are believed to have occurred during building work later in 1837, so Waller’s visit was fortuitously well-timed. Those parts of the brass lost at this time are indicated on Mill Stephenson’s illustration, originally published in 1913. The upper half of Thomas’s figure and the fragment of the inscription were only found during the major rebuilding of the church in 1895 and relaid..

Thomas Elyngbrigge esquire died on 22 May 1497. His inscription described him as a justice of the peace for Surrey and a gentleman usher of Cardinal Thomas Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England and named his wife as Elizabeth. She was the daughter of Nicholas and Margaret Gaynesford, whose brass is on the backplate of a Purbeck marble tombchest that once served as a base for the Easter sepulchre. Both Thomas and his wife died within the lifetimes of Elizabeth’s parents Nicholas and Margaret, who had already had their brass made. Thomas wanted to be buried in the church near the place where Elizabeth lay. His executors, his sister Joan and her husband Henry Burton, evidently chose a design by the same London marbler as had designed the Gayneford brass but their effigies are recumbent rather than kneeling. The inscription in three lines read: Hic iacet Thos Elyngbrigge ar’quonda un’ justiciar’ pacis infr com Surr’ ac hostiar’ generos’ cu reverendissimo in xpo patr’ + dno John Morton cardinal’ archiep’o Cantuar’ + cancellar’ Angl’ Nec non Elizabeth ux’ eius qui quidem Thoms obiit xxii die Maii Ao dni m^o cccc^olxxxxii quorum aiabs ppicietuur deus Amen.

The loss of the Trinity from the Gaynesford brass may well have been due to iconoclasm either during the Reformation or the 1640s but, if so, the rarer but equally ‘objectionable’ image of Our Lady of Pity was missed. That on the Ellyngbrigge brass is one of only three surviving, the others both being from brasses of the 1530s, in St Patrick’s cathedral in Dublin and in All Hallows Barking in the city of London.

Copyright: Jon Bayliss (text and photo)