Margaret Tresham

Date of Brass:

1604

Place:

Geddington

County:

Northamptonshire

Country:

Number:

II (Newton-by-Geddington)

Style:

Cure

Description

October 2025

The church of St Faith in Newton by Geddington (or Newton-in-the-Willows) was noted as disused and derelict in 1972 when the Northamptonshire volume of Pevsner’s Buildings of England was being revised by Bridget Cherry for its 1973 second edition. It has since become a private house and the brasses and incised slab listed in it were transferred to Geddington.

One of the brasses from Newton, that commemorating John Mulsho, 1400, and his wife Joan is well-known and has been illustrated widely. Unlike the Mulsho brass and the incised slab, both positioned in the floor of the north aisle, the brass of Margaret Tresham is on the north wall of the ringing chamber in the tower, mounted on a wooden board. Mill Stephenson described her effigy as being on a rectangular plate with inscription. A third part of the composition, evidently mislaid or covered at the time of Stephenson’s List, is a shield displaying the arms of Tresham impaling Tanfield within a strapwork border. Margaret was the daughter of Francis and Bridget Tanfield of Gayton, Northamptonshire and was born in about 1538. She is depicted among their daughters on their incised slab at Gayton, a work of Richard Royley of Burton upon Trent, where her diminutive effigy is shown below her parents’ feet with the latter M engraved beneath. The sons are shown at their father’s feet, with chrisoms in their shrouds amongst them and the daughters below their mother’s feet. Assuming sons and daughters were born in the order they are shown within their respective genders, Margaret was the fourth of ten daughters, four of her sisters dying as infants. Margaret married Maurice Tresham esquire of Newton, about eight years her senior. She was his second wife according the heraldic visitation He is believed to have had the enormous dovecote at Newton built that bears his name.

Margaret’s own monument is one designed by the Cure workshop in Southwark but not necessarily engravedd in-house. While almost all female figures in this style are in semi-profile, Margaret’s figure faces forward, like the figures of Elizabeth and Mary, wives of Michael Hare, died 1611, at Bruisyard in Suffolk. However, while those at Bruisyard are cut out figures, Margaret’s effigy is on a rectangular plate. Thre three figures are differentiated by the detail of the upper parts of their costume, although Margaret also has an open sleeveless gown that falls to her feet and a pomander hanging from her girdle. She has a mouth scroll but nothing beneath her feet. In these two details, she is like the figure of Jane Bell, died 1591, at Hartlepool, although Jane is a figure in semi profile. Otherwise, rectangular brasses in the Cure style have two or more figures, often family groups. Compared with the plate at Hartlepool, Margaret’s has considerably more blank space.

The shields of arms above the figure has a border of strapwork with a backgraound of vertical engraved lines, while some of the tinctures of the arms themselves have horizontal broken lines. How much this is an merely attempt to differentiate between different tinctures rather than to represent the particular tinctures in the manner of Zangrius’s forerunner of Petra Sancta’s system that seems to be the aim of some of the heraldry on Cure-style brasses at the time is unclear.

Copyright, photo and text: Jon Bayliss