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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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 visit Suffolk on an excursion. We will stop for lunch at Halesworth, a small market town, and examine the brasses there. One of these commemorates John Browne, who according to his inscription led a 'quiet life' before his death in 1581.
The history of his brass has been rather more eventful. According to the modern brass plate to which the original inscription is now joined by a hinge, in 1825 the remains of his brass were fished out of the River Waveney, which divides Suffolk from Norfolk, at a spot called the 'roaring arch'...
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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... 
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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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