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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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... 
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Agnes & Jane Hopper
County: Oxfordshire
Date: 1625
February 2011
This brass has not been seen for many years, since it was entirely covered by a fixed carpet and a platform for a nave altar some time in the 1970s. The church is now closed, and in the process of being converted into an archive store for Balliol College. On a recent visit the brass was covered with protective boarding, while serious restoration work proceeded above it, but it will probably be uncovered and visible again once work is finished. It is not yet clear to what extent there will be public access to...
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The Brass Lease
County: Warwickshire
Date: 1568
January 2011
In addition to the thousands of monumental brasses in England and Wales that have survived the ravages of time, there are a small number of non-
monumental brasses. How many survive is not clear, as they were not listed by Mill Stephenson in A list of monumental brasses in the British Isles precisely because they were not monumental. Some can be found, often on the outside of the buildings, recording the foundation of schools and almshouses. Others are in churches, such as the one in Goldcliff church near Newport, Monmouthshire, recording the level of...
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Robert Kitchin
County: Gloucestershire
Date: 1594
December 2020
On the wall of St Stepeh's church in Bristol is a monument commemorating Robert Kitchin, alderman, who died in 1594. At first glance it appears to be a brass in a stone frame but on closer examination, the figures of Kitchin and his wife, kneeling at prayer desks, and the thirteen line inscription below, are cut in stone and coloured to look like brass. The 1938 Appendix to Mill Stephenson's A List of Monumental Brasses in the British Isles and Nikolaus Pevsner's 1958 North Somerset and Bristol (The Buildings of England) both list it as a brass but Lack,...
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Friedrich the Wise
County: Sachsen Anhalt
Date: 1525
November 2020
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Friedrich III and his brother Johann the Steadfast, both Prince-Electors, were from the Ernestine Line of the House of Wettin, as opposed to the Albertines, whose mausoleum is in Freiberg cathedral in Saxony. The Wettin dynasty divided in two at the Treaty of Leipzig in 1485 with the Ernestines the more prominent, and who played a key role in the Reformation.
The brothers are buried in a sealed crypt below their two brasses in front of the altar at the largely rebuilt Schlosskirche which Friedrich founded, and which was built between 1496 & 1509.1 This replaced the...
Sir Hamon l'Estrange
County: Norfolk
Date: 1654
October 2020
The church at Hunstanton is well known for the large and elaborate brass of Sir Roger l'Estrange who died in 1506 but other members of the family are remebered by two other brasses and an indent. The brass commemorating Sir Hamon l'Estrange who died in 1654 memorialises a man closely connected with the one major incident that took place in the county of Norfolk during the English Civil Wars, the siege of King's Lynn.
Sir Hamon's namesake who died early in the fourteenth-century was commemorated by a slab with a marginal inscription of separately inlaid brass letters and shows that...
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Canon Johannes (Jan) Craghe
County: Zeeland
Date: 1524
April 2013
This month’s brass is an indent of a lost brass to a canon at Sint Maartensdijk, a small town in the Dutch coastal province of Zeeland. In a foundation charter of 23 June 1428 the local church of St Martin was made a collegiate church by the nobleman Frank van Borssele, fourth husband of Jacqueline, Countess of Holland (the repudiated wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester). The chapter was to consist of a dean and ten canons: it was abolished in 1577 at the Reformation.An inscription along the edge of the surviving stone slab commemorates Canon Johannes (or...
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Cyriac and Florence Petit
County: Kent
Date: 1591
September 2020
The late-Elizabethan brasses at Boughton under Blean in Kent form an interesting group. The inscription on Thomas Hawkins's brass of 1587 emphasises his age, 101, and his service to Henry VIII. The inscription of the Petit brass of 1591 is more concerned with family. The inscription for Elizabeth Driland, d.1591, records her marriage to John Driland of Faversham, gentleman. There are also family links between them. Thomas Hawkins' son Thomas married Anne, one of the daughters of Cyriac Petit, and Elizabeth Driland was another daughter. Her figure is lost but her inscription now appears beneath her parents' figures after a...
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Eel Buttry
County: Norfolk
Date: c.1405 and 1546
August 2020
Elizabeth Buttry became prioress of Campsey Ash in 1526. The priory was one of Austin nuns, founded around 1195 by Theobald de Valoignes, who gave his two sisters, Joan and Agnes, land in the parish on which to build it. They were successively the first two prioresses. Over the next few hundred year the priory benefited from further gifts of land. In the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 that preceded the Dissolution of the monasteries, Campsey was valued at a little over £182, short of the £200 that would have saved it from suppression in 1536 but only because a chantry...
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William and Margaret Att Wode
County: Gloucestershire
Date: 1529
July 2020
William Att Wode seems to have left little impression on the records of the time. Years later, during the reign of Elizabeth, William Atwood of Beach in Gloucestershire brought a legal action in Chancery against Sir John Tracy and Henry Izard. This claimed that Sir John's great-great-grandfather William, who held the manor of Doynton, had demised the park there to Atwood's grandfather William and his sons Edward and John for the terms of their lives, around 14 Henry VIII (1522-3). Sir John had since granted a lease of the park to Henry Izard and Izard had sought to eject William...
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Thomas & Elizabeth Burgoyn
County: Bedfordshire
Date: 1516
June 2020
Before the Black Death of 1349 cross brasses were quite numerous. They were the successors and contemporaries of cross slabs. The latter dated back to the twelfth century but continued as relatively low-cost grave covers up to the Reformation and even beyond. In contrast, the popularity of the cross brass fell away dramatically. Although there were London-made examples after the Black Death, most of the few early sixteenth-century examples were made in provincial workshops, and most were quite small.
An exception is the cross brass commemorating Thomas Burgoyn and his wife Elizabeth in All Saints' church at Sutton in Bedfordshire.
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