Smith family

Date of Brass:

1714-1805

Place:

Painswick

County:

Gloucestershire

Country:

Number:

II, IV, VIII, XII, XXII, LXXIII

Style:

Description

May 2026

Monumental brasses in churchyards are by and large rare but there is one area of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds where they are common. Usually they take the form of rectangular plates on gravestones but other shapes also occur, such as hearts, triangles and rectangles with a semi-circle protruding from the top edge in the form found on the clock-faces of grandfather clocks. The latter can be found elsewhere in the country inside churches and likely to represent a sideline of clockmakers like Robert Meller of Calver, maker of a brass in this form commemorating members of the Fynney family at Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire. However, in Gloucestershire more substantial churchyard monuments may also feature brass plates.

In 1714, Sarah, the wife of the Painswick mercer Richard Smith, died, probably in childbirth. She was buried in the churchyard of Painswick and a hexagonal stone monument erected. It has a brass plate in an arched stone frame on each face but not of uniform size: two are narrower with the frame not extending the full width of the rectangular panel in which they are set. These two are on opposite sides of the hexagon. It is likely that Richard Smith was responsible for having the monument made. His own plate, wide like his wife’s, is the left of hers. Their daughter Ann, born in the year of her mother’s death, has the narrower plate to the right of her mother’s, which also commemorates her own daughter Mary. Continuing anti-clockwise is the plate of Giles, son of Richard and Sarah Smith and elder brother of Ann. Beyond their plate is that of Ann, wife of Giles Smith, mercer, and Ann, daughter of Samuel Smith. Between this plate and that of Richard Smith, a narrower ones remembers Richard Butler, husband of Ann, Richard Smith’s daughter, and his daughter Ann Little, buried at Randwick. All the plates, though weathered and corroded, are well-engraved and all have at the top a round-faced cherub with hair like that of a contemporary wig. Wings spread either side of the cherub's face. They are evidently from the same mould and presumably produced at the time the memorial was originally erected around 1715. The earliest plate, that to Sarah Smith, has a short Hebrew text engraved either side of the cherub’s head. It is also the most difficult to read, with floridly engraved italics except for her name and that of her husband in capitals. There are eight lines of funeral verse in lower-case lettering underneath. Richard Smith’s plate has his details clearly although the eight lines of verse in more shallowly engraved Italics are harder to make out. That of his daughter Ann and granddaughter Mary is easy to read and so too is that of his son Giles. Although that of Ann wife of Giles Smith and Ann daughter of Samuel Smith reverts to the florid Italics of Sarah’s plate, it is much easier to read than Sarah's and has four lines of lower-case verse:

    Our mortal Stage is passt, our Lord is come

    and calld we hence to our eternal home.

    Doe thou thus Live, thus watch and pray to be

    In blissful Mansions Fixt with Christ and we.

Richard Butler’s details on the his plate are easy to read and it is clear from the slightly different lettering of his daughter Ann Little’s details that they were added later.

The relationships between those commemorated on five of the six plates are clear but the ages of those on the sixth suggests that Ann, wife of Giles Smith of this town mercer, is likely to have been Richard Smith’s mother, with Ann, daughter of Samuel Smith, likely to have been her granddaughter. Giles and Ann Smith’s indenture of settlement of 1707 led to the founding of the town’s charity school after Ann’s death. Richard Smith was also named as a party in this document. Giles died in 1707 and is buried under a tomb chest adjacent to the hexagonal pedestal with the six brass plates.

Copyright: Jon Bayliss (text and photographs)