May 2007: Methwold, Norfolk M.S.I, Sir Adam de Clyfton, 1367
May's brass of the month very narrowly escaped the melting pot.
Entering Methwold church and looking across to the north aisle, the impression is
that Sir Adam de Clifton's figure, remounted on a wooden board against the wall,
is complete. Closer inspection shows that the missing pieces have been reproduced
in paint on the board.
Sir Adam was born in 1306 at Denver in Norfolk, the son of Roger de Clifton, who
had married Margery, daughter of Adam de Cailly and his wife Emma, daughter and co-heir
of Robert de Tateshall, whose estates were very substantial. In 1327 he petitioned
Edward III to be allowed to be chief butler at the forthcoming coronation, a role
which his inheritance of the castle of Buckenham brought with it, although he was
still underage. In 1340 he was serving overseas with the king when armed men stole
15 horses and 20 cows and assaulted his men and servants at Buckenham castle. Sixteen
years later his manor of Hilborough suffered a similar attack resulting in the loss
of 200 sheep. Sir Adam outlived his eldest son Constantine, and, at his death in
1367, Constantine's 13 year old son John was his heir. His brass must have been laid
down shortly after his death as the only portions of the marginal inscription surviving
in the seventeenth century included the year, and the style of the brass, a London
B, is consistent with the date.
Around 1680, the Sir Adam's brass was sold by the clerk of the parish to a tinker
and broken into pieces ready to be melted. Somehow, the pieces were rescued and spent
the next 180 years in the church chest. Blomefield, the county historian, described
them as 'only insignificant pieces of his armour, part of the head of the lion that
was couchant at his feet; most of them are rim pieces that ornamented the stone,
and have quarter-foils on them'. However, in 1860 at the instigation of Rev. C R
Manning, the pieces were assembled and attached to a board in the church. They proved
to be much more complete, with most of the figure and much of the canopy surviving.
The main losses that the figure has suffered are its right arm and side and its waist.
These losses predate 1680. Blomefield quotes a description of the brass made when
it was still in its stone in the chancel of the church. It was taken from a loose
paper in the collection of Peter le Neve and was said to be in the handwriting of
Guybon Goddard, whose brass coffin plate at Brampton gives his date of death as 1671:
'a man in complete arms, a surcoat of Warren or Clyfton, (quære)for the place where
the bend might be, and the direct place for the bend is broken out, four places for
escutcheons, 3 defaced, one left, a fess between two chevrons, and a file with three
labels'.
Blomefield describes the indent, now lost or permanently covered, as 'a large marble
grave-stone about 10 feet in length, and four in breadth, on this has been the portraiture
or effigies of the person here interred; in complete armour, with a canopy of brass
work over his head, and four shields, one at each corner, also two rims or plates
of brass running about the whole marble'. He also noted that the tradition in Methwold
was that the figure commemorated one of the Earls Warren, who were lords of the town
of Methwold, but he disagreed with this. He knew that the Warren family had been
buried at the Abbey of Lewes in Sussex and that the last Earl Warren had died around
1348. He continued 'the only difference and way of knowing the arms of Warren, from
those of Clifton, (when engraven and not painted) is by the bend in the arms of Clifton:
but this we are told, was broken out, most likely on purpose to induce persons to
believe it to be the arms of Warren'. He concluded that the shield described by Goddard
represented the arms of Baynard and that this further proved the brass to be to the
memory of Sir Adam de Clifton. Rev. C R Manning examined the engraved squares on
the figure's jupon and found traces of red in them, confirming that the arms were
or and gules and thus Clifton.
I have been unable to find any connection between Sir Adam and Methwold and wonder
whether the brass in its stone was brought from elsewhere, perhaps at the Reformation.
Two possibilities are that this monument was originally either in Wymondham Priory
(later Abbey), of which the Cliftons were patrons, or in Buckenham Priory, to which
Sir Adam gave land. Sir John Clifton, who died in 1446, was buried at Wymondham but
Sir Robert Clifton, his cousin, who died about the same time, was buried at Buckenham.
If Sir Adam's figure was deliberately mutilated to make it appear that the monument
was to someone else, as Blomefield believed, it must count as a palimpsest by appropriation.
The failure of the inscription to survive may support that view.
