Portfolio of Brasses
Each month we feature an article about a brass of particular interest.
If you would like to submit an article for this feature please contact:
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Philip & Margery Bosard
County: Norfolk
Date: 1490
July 2021
Philip Bosard is termed a gentleman on the brass at Ditchingham, Norfolk that commemorated him and Margery, his wife, after his death on 16 December 1490 but it was a rank that he had only latterly achieved. Actions in the Court of Common Pleas in 1455 and 1475 called him a yeoman. In the 1460s and 1470s Bosard was John Hopton's farmer of the manor of Pirnhow. Pirnhow manor is in Ditchingham, just north of the town of Bungay in Suffolk on the other side of the River Waveney. John Hopton had come into a large inheritance in 1430...
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John Newdegate
County: Middlesex
Date: 1545
May 2021
The brass of John and Anne Newdegate has been discussed in print by the society's then president, Dr H K Cameron in the early 1960s and more recently by Robert Hutchinson and Bryan Egan. It is situated on the south wall of the chancel at Harefield. The accompanying photographs were taken when the MBS visited the church in March 2010. As they show, the brass is on the back wall of a canopied Purbeck marble monument that also has a chest with shields set in lozenges. On the top of the chest is an indent for a shroud brass.
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Alexander Inglisshe
County: Suffolk
Date: 1520
April 2021
Only one brass remains in the church of Campsea Ash, Suffolk. It commemorates Alexander Inglisshe, the parish priest. It consists of the three components from a much larger composition, namely are the figure, the canopy over it and an inscription beneath it. The side shafts of the canopy and a marginal inscription are lost but some of the pitch used to fix them remains. The latter, at least, remained in place in the very early 1600s when it was recorded by the anonymous author of the Chorography of Suffolk along with two other brasses: a figure of a woman...
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Richard Freston
County: Suffolk
Date: 1616
March 2021
Mendham lies on the south bank of the River Waveney, the boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. In the time of the Norfolk historian Francis Blomefield the parish was a large one and had parts which lay in Norfolk on the north bank of the river, namely the hamlet of Needham and parts of the town of Harleston. For this reason Blomefield included Mendham in his History of Norfolk. Needham had a chapel of ease, now its parish church.
The Freston family was one that benefited from the upheavals of the Reformation. Edward VI granted Wichendons manor in Mendham and all...
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Sir John Russell
County: Worcestershire
Date: 1405
February 2021
The workshops producing monumental brasses established in the years after the devastation of Black Death usually produced brasses that fit neatly into stylistic sequences. This was first demonstrated by JPC Kent in his analysis of military brasses and has been confirmed by later scholars like Robin Emmerson. When London style A ended it was replaced by London style D, as B was later by F. The demand for brasses as memorials meant that other workshops like C and E were able to come in and compete with the established ones. During the period that these workshops operated, when a...
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Karsten Middeldorp
County:
Date: 1561
January 2021
This brass relates to the Lübeck bell & cannon founder Karsten MIddeldorp and his wife Dorothea, engraved in 1562. It measures 95 x 65 cm and is located on the east side of the third of five pillars separating the central and northern aisles of the 3-aisled Brick –Gothic hall church of St Jakobi, in the Koberg district of Lübeck1. Its original location is apparently unknown and there is no evidence of its slab having survived.
It is designed in the early Renaissance classical style, with Corinthian columns topped with an entablature containing foliage motifs on either side of a...
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Richard and Joan Foxwist
County:
Date: 1500
May 2012
Medieval memorial brasses are surprisingly rare in Wales: J. M. Lewis lists seven before 1550, plus one from St Davids which has been lost, a couple of indents and a few brass letters. This is fewer than many English parishes. Those that survive are mostly typical products of the London workshops. There are some idiosyncratic ones, though. Sally Badham has said that one of these, the memorial to Richard and Joan Foxwist in Llanbeblig (the old parish church of Caernarfon), is like nothing else she has ever seen. She suggested that it might...
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Johan von Heringen
County: Thuringia
Date: 1595
April 2012
When the Rev W F Creeny visited Erfurt Cathedral before 1884, he found the brass of Johan von Heringen on the floor outside the chancel gate. In 1900 it was moved to the cloister along with other brasses and slabs. This had the advantage of preserving what was left of the low relief carving on the slab, which Creeny described as 'worn away'. This monument is actually a composite one, showing the upper part of the figure in brass and the lower cut into the slab itself. The main outlines of the portion of the figure on the slab...
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John Browne
County: Suffolk
Date: 1581
March 2012
On 26 May the society will be visiting Suffolk on an excursion. We will be stopping for lunch a Halesworth, a small market town, and examining the brasses there. One of them commemorates John Browne, who according to the inscription, led a quiet life before his death in 1581. The existence of his brass has been rather more eventful. In 1825 according to the modern brass to which the original inscription is joined by a hinge, the remains of his brass were fished out of the River Waveney, which divides Suffolk and Norfolk, at a spot called the 'roaring...
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Thomas Tyard & Philip Tenison
County: Norfolk
Date: 1505/6 & 1660/1
January 2012
We begin the year with two brasses, both set in the same slab in the church of Bawburgh, not far from Norwich.
Thomas Tyard, as his inscription tells us, was a Bachelor of Sacred Theology and sometime vicar of this church. He was a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1478 and became vicar of Bawburgh in 1493. He spent the years between 1484 and 1492 in King's Lynn. In 1484 he was appointed master of the charnel house at Lynn, an establishment also known as the Old Chantry, which was part of St Margaret's church. There are Lynn...
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Stillborn Son of the Elector Johann-Georg I of Saxony
County: Saxony
Date: 1608
December 2011
Brasses are normally monuments to named people. This month’s brass is perhaps unique in elaborately commemorating someone who was never christened, and indeed never lived – except in an anti-abortionist sense. Elsewhere1 I have mentioned a visit to East Germany, which our late President, Malcolm Norris, succeeded in arranging in the mid-1950s. I went along too, as his German/English interpreter. Malcolm was far too kind to say what he really thought of my efforts to rub brasses, so he always explained apologetically that he’d...
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Sir William Burgate
County: Suffolk
Date: 1409
November 2011
St Mary’s, Burgate, is the quintessential Suffolk church with a great medieval tower, in an ordinary village surrounded by hedgerows and barley fields. Entering the church, the eye is led inexorably towards the fine tomb chest, with a brass as its cover, which is set immediately in front of the altar and dominates the chancel. This is the monument of Sir William Burgate, lord of the manor (d. 1409), and his wife, Eleanor, who survived him by at least...
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Susanna Gartside
County: Lancashire
Date: 1688
October 2011
In the first volume of the Victorian novel Scarsdale, the author, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, has Barnabas Collier go into the parish church during the Rochdale Rushbearing for a few moments of quiet meditation and read the lines at the end of the inscription of the Gartside brass:
“Lilia cum spinis florent, post funera virtus,
Nam bene viventi vita beata manet.”
This, in Barnabas's mood, was an inscription to detain him in long reverie.
The inscription on the brass translates thus:
Here lies buried Susanna Gartside, wife of Gabriel Gartside of Rochdale and daughter of James Gartside of Oakenrod,...
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Joost van Amstel van Mijnden
County:
Date: 1554
September 2011
The memorial brass showing Joost van Amstel van Mijnden and his family (Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht) is one of a handful of memorial brasses from the Northern Netherlands to have survived.i The brass was made shortly after Joost van Amstel van Mijnden’s death in 1554. At first sight the image seems conventional for the Northern Netherlands. Many memorial paintings and sculptures featured donor portraits of a family, and this brass depicts a couple with their...
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Thomas Cawarden
County: Staffordshire
Date: 1592/3
August 2011
The decoration of the north aisle of Mavesyn Ridware parish church, which contains Thomas Cawarden's monument, is most extraordinary. This aisle was the burial place of the lords of the manor over several centuries and contained a number of monuments. Stebbing Shaw's History and Antiquities of Staffordshire (1798-1801) has a great deal to say about the successive lords, and has an engraving of the aisle viewed from the west and another looking north from the east, illustrating the Cawarden tomb in its setting in the centre of the east end and showing other slabs on the floor. Stebbing Shaw also...
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Catherine Verney
County: Warwickshire
Date: 1657
July 2011
The period of the Commonwealth saw the end of any coherent production of figure brasses in England until the Victorian revival. The production of brasses during the latter half of the seventeenth century was very patchy. Inscription brasses continued to be produced in some numbers in the north and west of the country by engravers such as the Mann brothers, Thomas and Joshua, in York, and there were occasionally quite ambitious compositions, such as the inscription and achievement to Martha Bright, 1663, set under a large arch, in Sheffield Cathedral. However, in the east and south-east, the black 'marble'...
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Bishop Johann II von Schleinitz
County:
Date: 1434
June 2011
The collegiate church of Zeitz is within the walls of the schloss, an unusual situation for a major church. Johannes II von Schleinitz was bishop of nearby Naumberg and two other brasses in the church at Zeitz likewise commemorate bishops of Naumberg. After studying for his doctorate at the University of Leipzig, he was dean of Bautzen, canon of Meissen, dean of Zeitz and in 1422 Bishop of Naumberg. When he died in 1434, he was succeeded as bishop by his cousin, Peter non Schleinitz, the subject of another brass at in the choir. Malcolm...
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Geoffrey Boleyn
County: Norfolk
Date: 1440
May 2011
This month we feature the brass to Geoffrey Boleyn (d. 1440) and his wife Alice. It originally also had tiny figures representing their 5 sons and 4 daughters, but the inlay is lost. The brass is at Salle, Norfolk. This exceptionally fine church boasts a large collection of surviving brasses, along with empty indents which have had the brass plates stolen from them. Amongst them is a brass to another member of the family, a priest, Simon Boleyn (d. 1482); others were commemorated at nearby Blickling, including Cecily Boleyn (d. 1458, age 10).
The...
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Arthur Dericote
County: Middlesex
Date: 1563
April 2011
The brass of Arthur Dericote is set in a Purbeck marble panel of a type much used in the second half of the sixteenth century for wall-mounted brasses. The alabaster shield appears to be a later replacement of a brass one. Although he is depicted in armour, Dericote was a London draper. He was received a grant of arms five years before his death. He had started life as the son of Humphrey Dericote, a Worcester dyer, who died in 1524, and was presumably apprenticed to a London draper, gaining the freedom of the City of London and membership...
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Ralph Blenerhaysett
County: Norfolk
Date: 1675
March 2011
The earliest identifiable series of Norwich-
read moremade brasses began around 1450. While the effigies of men in civilian dress, ladies and priests produced by this workshop are close to the then current London styles, the effigies in armour differ very considerably from those made in the London workshops. However, although this Norwich workshop lasted for around thirty years, it is strange that the few surviving armoured effigies it produced all seem to come from the last ten years. One that is now lost, to Sir Henry Grey at Ketteringham, survived long enough to be illustrated by... 