Portfolio of Brasses
Each month we feature an article about a brass of particular interest.
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Hans Hundt von Wenkheim
County: Sachsen - Anhalt
Date: 1504
March 2023
Prince – Elector Friedrich der Weise (Friedrich 111) von Sachsen from the Ernestine line of the House of Wettin was responsible for the reconstruction of Wittenberg Castle and its Church. The latter was consecrated as All Saints in 1503. By that time Friedrich had already founded the University of Wittenberg in 1502 which was to establish a formidable academic reputation. From 1507 All Saints church was put at the disposal of the University, for lectures and services. In 1508 Martin Luther, a monk from the Augustinian Friary in Erfurt, arrived for the first time to teach...
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Thomas and Alice Flete
County: Lincolnshire
Date: 1450
The floor of St Botolph’s church in Boston, Lincolnshire, preserves to an exceptional extent, the incised slabs and the monumental brasses (or in most cases their indents). All were written up and illustrated in an excellent publication by Sally Badham and Paul Cockerham in 2012 but recent research has uncovered more details of Thomas Flete, who died in 1450.
The exact social status of Thomas Flete was not clear in 2012, the best estimate then being that he was possibly an attorney. Evidence from the Court of Common Pleas suggests that he was a merchant: in 1430...
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Thomas Cheyne
County: Buckinghamshire
Date: 1368/9
The Black Death that ravaged Europe towards the end of the 1340s stopped production of monumental brasses in England for a number of years. By 1360 the two main streams of London monumental brass design that ran in parallel for the rest of the century had been established. Designated Series A and Series B in J P C Kent’s pioneering stylistic analysis of military brasses published in 1949, the persons who were most probably behind the initial designs of these memorials were John de Ramsey and Richard Lakenham respectively. Each was described as a marberer, as the memorials they produced...
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Thomazine Playters
County: Suffolk
Date: 1578
The cult of the Holy Name of Jesus became increasingly widespread in England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The cult had begun in southern Europe rather earlier and spread to the north. In Tudor England it was promoted by Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, who received papal sanction in 1494 for a feast on 7 August she had established to be celebrated throughout the country some years before. A look at any book illustrating brasses belonging to this period will reveal inscriptions terminating in prayer clauses that substitute the name of Jesus for that of God.
We might...
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Sir John Tregonwell
County: Dorset
Date: 1566
November 2022
This brass at Milton Abbey, Dorset introduces us to a man who played a significant role in the Reformation in England. As a lawyer, John Tregonwell had been heavily involved with the divorce by Henry VIII of Katherine of Aragon. He was appointed one of the visitors of the religious houses worth under £200 in 1535-6, helping to implement a process that led directly to the Dissolution of the Monasteries. However, he was not only knighted on the occasion of the coronation of Mary I but under Elizabeth made a will that clearly signals that he remained a Catholic.
John...
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Charles and Evelyn Sutton
County: Norfolk
Date: 1893
October 2022
The attractive Victorian brass commemorating Charles Sutton and one of his three sons is to be found in the church of St Mary in what had been, until it was evacuated in 1944, the village of West Tofts in the Norfolk Brecklands. The land was needed for training the troops who were to invade Normandy later that year, and remains a battle area to this day, the Stanford Training Area (STANTA). West Tofts and the other villages that lay within in it are wholly deserted. The church has been brought back into occasional use.
West Tofts Hall and its estate was...
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Elizabeth Furlong
County: Devon
Date: 1641
September 2022
The brass of Elizbeth Furlong at Stoke-in-Teignhead, Devon, provokes more than a couple of questions. Why is the inscription in French? Was it part of a larger group of related memorials? Why did the designer or engraver place a comma after every word? Why is the plate heart-shaped but apparently does represent a heart burial? Who are the people mentioned in the inscription?
Icy avssi et mettre le corps
de Elizabeth Fvrlong la
fille de Thomas Tawley de...
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Two anonymous priests
County:
Date: C15
August 2022
Indents of two chalice brasses lie side by side on the north side of the St Basiliuskerk (St Basil's church) 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
Many brasses survive at Ewelme, Oxfordshire, from the mid fifteenth century to the early seventeenth. That of Catherine, wife of Thomas Palmer, shows her kneeling with her husband. Behind him are six sons; behind her is just one daughter. Catherine died on 26 June 1599 in childbed at the age of 34. We learn this from the four lines of English at the base of the inscription, but of him they reveal only his name. The rest of the inscription plate is taken up by ten lines of Latin verse.
The heraldic achievement on a plate above the figures bears...
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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 illustrates the losses of brasses that occurred in the eighteenth-century. 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 five brasses in the 1740s but by the time that Rev. T S Talbot 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 at the eastern end of Colegate. It is in the care of the Norwich Historic Churches Trust. After it...
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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 side shafts rose as high as the crockets above the centre of the canopy. His inscription is simple:
Hic iacet Andreas Louttrell miles d[omi]n[u]s de Irnh[a]m qui obijt vjt°die Septe[m]br[is] a[nn]° d[omi]ni . mill[esim]o .
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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. She was originally depicted with three husbands but the effigy of one is lost. Her husbands were John Laurence, 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) in the singular. It is genitive plural, the abbreviation marks showing that the full word is armigerorum. Thorneley's misreading helped him conclude that Alice, the...
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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 was not only tolerated, but stood a chance of supplanting Roman Catholicism as the main religion of the country. The brass is now in a glass case in the town hall museum in Poznań.
The Ridt family were successful merchants, the richest family in Poznań in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were also present in Gdańsk. They dealt in draperies, silk, canvas and furs and had extensive trading links with German cities such as Nuremberg and Leipzig.
Zacharias...
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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. However after her death Sir John was made a baron in 1470 and Duke of Norfolk in 1483. His and Katherine's only son, Thomas, was 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, but eventually became one of Henry VII's most trusted advisers and his title of Earl of Surrey was restored.
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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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