Portfolio of Brasses
Each month we feature an article about a brass of particular interest.
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Two annonymous priests
County:
Date: C15
August 2022
There are indents of two chalice brasses lying side by side on the north side of the St Basiliuskerk in Bruges. The building is two-storied, with the later Heilig Bloedbasiliek (Holy Blood basilica) occupying the upper floor. The two indents take the same form, so common in that area of Belgium, in having marginal inscriptions with quadrilobes at each corner but differ in that one has these incised whereas the other formerly had these in brass, of which the indents remain. Both slabs are of Belgian black marble. Nicholas Rogers thought that the one with the incised inscription beginning...
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Catherine, wife of Thomas Palmer
County: Oxfordshire
Date: 1599
July 2022
There are many brasses surviving at Ewelme, Oxfordshire, from the mid-fifteenth century up into the early seventeenth. That of Catherine, wife of Thomas Palmer, shows her kneeling with her husband. Behind him are six sons, behind her just one daughter. Catherine died 26 June 1599 in childbed at the age of 34. What we learn of her is from the four lines of English at the base of the inscription but that reveals of him only his name. The rest of the inscription plate is taken up by ten lines of Latin verse. The heraldic...
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Alexander Cokburn
County: East Lothian
Date: 1564
June 2022
Scotland retains very few monumental brasses from the medieval and early=modern periods. Before the Reformation of 1560, brasses were imported from the Low Countries, some of them rectangular plates in Tournai marble indents but some separately inlaid figures. The reverse of a post-Reformation brass was made from a plate from the middle of a rectangular brass of around 1495. It has the figures of a man called Thomas in civilian clothes with his wife and the two sections of the Scots inscription. It may be that imported to commemorate the merchant Thomas Yar and his wife. Shipped in November...
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Margaret Pettwode
County: Norfolk
Date: 1514
February 2019
This month's brass helps illustrate the losses of brasses that occurred in the eighteenth-century as it is the only survivor of five drawn by the Norwich historian, John Kirkpatrick, who died in 1728.
Francis Blomefield recorded the inscriptions of the same brasses in the 1740s but by the time that Rev. T S Talbot's made drawings in the 1790s all but two had gone and when Cotman drew Margaret Pettwode's brass in 1815, all the others were lost. The church of St Clement stands the eastern end of Colegate. It is in the care of the Norwich Historic Churches Trust,...
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Electress Sophia
County: Saxony
Date: 1622
January 2019
This month’s Brass is another from the mausoleum in Freiberg Cathedral Saxony, set aside for members of the Albertine Line of the House of Wettin. It commemorates Electress Sophia of Saxony, born Duchess of Brandenburg, who died on 7th December 1622. (HKC 7)
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It is located on the north side of the choir, towards its western end, with the brass of her husband Elector Christian 1 opposite on the south side. It comprises two plates with overall dimensions of 2632 x 1483mm.
Centrally positioned is a portrait of Sophia as an older person with a fuller figure and somewhat...
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Thomas Hodges
County: Somerset
Date: c. 1630
December 2018
This month’s contribution is a rare example of a heart monument in brass, the tribute of his devoted wife, Agatha. Brass heart monuments are extremely unusual, although more survive carved in stone. They take many iconographic forms, the most common being a mural canopied niche with some form of heart imagery within. The example at Wedmore is mounted on the north wall of the north aisle. It comprises an elaborate scroll bearing the inscription topped by a heart surrounded by a wreath of bay with the motto ‘Wounded not Vanquished’ and...
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Hermann and Siegfried von Oertzen
County: Mecklenburg
Date: 1449
November 2018
This month’s contribution is an incised slab of Gotland stone commemorating Hermann von Oertzen 11 d. 1386 and Siegfried von Oertzen 1 d. 1449. It is located on the south wall of the south ambulatory of the former Cistercian Abbey of Doberan Minster in Mecklenburg, in what was the von Oertzen chapel until the mid- 1970’s. This chapel contains another slab to “Frau Helena” c. 1400 also considered to be a von Oertzen. All of the incised slabs in the Minster have been conserved and desalinated, and stand proud of the walls on metal stanchions with the slabs held...
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Sir Andrew Luttrell
County: Lincolnshire
Date: 1390
December 2012
The brass of Sir Andrew Luttrell lies towards the east end of the north aisle of the church of St Andrew at Irnham in the south-west corner of Lincolnshire. He has a London B effigy in armour. The canopy is no longer complete but the rivet pattern on the original slab, which rests against the nearby north wall, shows that the terminal of the side shafts rose as high as the crocket above the centre of the canopy. His inscription is straightforward:
Hic iacet Andreas Louttrell miles domi]n[u]s de Irnh[a]m qui obijt vjt°
die Septe[m]br[is] a[nn]° d[omi]ni.mill[esim]o.CCC.Nonagesimo. cui[us] a[n]i[m]e p[ro]piciet deus
Here...
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Alice Laurence
County: Lancashire
Date: 1531
November 2012
Alice Laurence was the second daughter of Sir Richard Assheton and Isabel Talbot, who are commemorated by the earliest brass at Middleton, a man in armour and a lady of c.1510, made in London. She was originally depicted with three husbands but the effigy of one is lost. Her husbands were John Lawrence, Richard Radclyffe of Towre and Thomas Bothe of Hakensall [Haconsall]. All three were esquires, as indicated in Mill Stephenson's List, contrary to James Thorneley's reading of the word after Hakensall as armiger (esquire). It is plural, the mark over the final 'r' indicating the abbreviation. Thorneley's...
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Zacharias Ridt
County:
Date: 1586
October 2012
The brass to Zacharias Ridt is a reminder of an era of Polish history when the reformed religion of the sixteenth-century were not only tolerated in Poland but stood a chance of supplanting Roman Catholicism as the main religion of the country, a chance that disappeared in the seventeenth-century amidst dissension between the main strands of Protestantism. The brass is now in a glass case in the town hall museum in Poznań.
The Ridt family was well-established in Poznań at that time and were successful merchants, the richest family in Poznań in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were also...
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Katherine Howard
County: Suffolk
Date: c.1535
September 2012
When Katherine Howard died in 1465 she was the wife of Sir John Howard of Tendring Hall in the parish of Stoke by Nayland. Sir John was made a baron in 1470 and Duke of Norfolk in 1483, his and Katherine's only son, Thomas, being created Earl of Surrey at the same time. The duke was killed at Bosworth Field in 1485. The earl was wounded there, taken prisoner and later attainted, losing title and lands. He was eventually one of Henry VII's most trusted advisors and his title of Earl of Surrey was restored. In 1514 Henry VIII...
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William Styrlay
County: Lincolnshire
Date: 1536
August 2012
As the inscription of his brass tells us, William Styrlay was sometime vicar of Rauceby and a canon of Shelford. At the time of his death on the fourth of December 1536, Shelford Priory in Nottinghamshire no longer existed, having been suppressed earlier that year. It was a priory of Austin canons and owned a moiety of the Rectory of Rauceby and were thus able to appoint Styrlay as vicar. Stylay made considerable improvements to the church of Rauceby, which is in North Rauceby but serves both North and South Rauceby. He rebuilt the chancel and added the clerestory.
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Anne, wife of Edward Bulwer
County: Norfolk
Date: 1604/5
July 2012
Incised effigial slabs are rare in East Anglia, so it is most unusual to find two in the same church. They commemorate husband and wife. Anne Bulwer died first, on 27 January 1604 (1605 by modern reckoning). Her husband Edward died over twenty years late, on 6 April 1626. Anne was the daughter of William Becke of Southrepps, a few miles north-east of Guestwick. The Bulwer family had previously been settled in neighbouring Wood Dalling, where there are a number of brasses still remaining to them, if somewhat fewer than in the eighteenth century. Simon Bulwer, died 1504, who...
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Member of the Bacon family
County: Suffolk
Date: Early C14
June 2012
The identity of the only remaining brass in St Andrew's church at Gorleston has been the subject of controversy for years. It has a shield bearing arms that belong unmistakeably to the Bacon family and the figure formerly rested his feet on a boar, the crest of the family. What is clear is that the lost indent of Sabine, mother of John Bacon, recorded in the church in between 1561 and the late eighteenth century, which was once the slab next to the brass, must have been moved into the church after the Reformation, when the Augustinian Friars' church...
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John Draycote
County: Staffordshire
Date: 1463
May 2022
John Draycote, who died in 1463, is an obscure figure. He may have been a younger son of the Draycotes of Painsley, Draycott-in-the-Moors, Staffordshire, but he proves difficult to locate in the accessible records of the period. His brass in the church of St Nicholas, Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire, shows him from a little below his hips upwards, set in an alabaster slab above a three-line inscription. It asks for prayers for his soul, calls him a burgess of Bromley Abbots, mentions his wife Joan and asks God to have mercy on their souls. It was apparently once on the...
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Robert and Agnes Staunton
County: Leicestershire
Date: 1458
Robert Staunton’s brass, laid down after the death of his first wife, Agnes Lathbury, on 18 July 1458, is the first military effigies in the London D style to show armour with large elbow defences. This is referred to by Tobias Capwell in his recent book Armour of the English Knight 1450-1500 as introducing ‘a different vambrace typology that first appears in English art during the late 1450s’. Both of the other two examples two which he refers (at Barham, Kent, and Sherborne, Norfolk) are in the London B style and neither has elbow defences on the sheer scale that...
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John and Frances Castle
County: Norfolk
Date: 1614/5
March 2022
When John and Frances Castell were commemorated at Raveningham, Norfolk, the brass laid down was a rectangular plate with their arms and an inscription. The brass seems to have its arms delineated in such a way as to distinguish the heraldic tinctures from each other without the use of paint. This was done in a manner
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John Gordon
County: Wiltshire
Date: 1619
February 2022
The mural brass of John Gordon, Dean of Salisbury, is lost, probably disappearing during the drastic restoration of the cathedral by Wyatt in 1789. It was survived by a freestone ledger recording only:
D. Jo. Gordonus Scotus
Decanus Sarum
Qui obiit 3 Sept.
1619.
[Dr John Gordon, Scot, Dean of Salisbury, who died 3 September 1619.]
The ledger originally no doubt covered the dean’s burial in the choir, which his will requested be by his seat there, but it was presumably moved to the north-east transept in 1684 along with the brasses of Bishop Wyvill and Bishop Gest when the...
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William and George Dalison
County: Lincolnshire
Date:
January 2022
In the church of All Saints at Laughton, near Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, is the brass of a man in the armour of the early part of the fifteenth-century. It lies on a tomb-chest of the middle of the following century and the original foot inscription has been replaced by a larger one commemorating not one but two men of the Dalison family. It has been suggested that it originally represented an earlier member of the that family but is more likely to have commemorated someone else entirely. A date in the 1550s for the appropriation points heavily to this.
In 1546...
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Mary Howard
County: Sussex
Date: 1638
December 2021
In the mid sixteenth-century, the making of monumental brasses in London was still in the hands of native English craftsmen, members of the Marblers Company but in the latter third of that century control of the design, if not always the execution, of brasses had passed to immigrants from the Low Countries or their English-born sons. This was still the case during the first 15-20 years of the next century but in years following craftsmen with English backgrounds were designing and making brasses, as evidenced by the signatures of Edward Marshall, Francis Grigs and Epiphanius Evesham on a very...
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