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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John Goose
County: Norfolk
Date: 1503
December 2019
On the south side of the chancel of the church of St Nicholas in Dereham is a brass shield set on an older Purbeck slab. In Blomefield's History of Norfolk, this is associated with an inscription, thus:
On a brass this imperfect epitaph, in memory of ____ Aquila.
Alta petens Aquila istac jam conditur aula :
Qui manet precibus justorum gaudia lucis,
Hic rexit ter
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William and Alice Water
County: Cambridgeshire
Date: 1521
November 2019
The iconoclast William Dowsing visited four Cambridgeshire villages on Wednesday 3 January 1643/4. He had spent his time in late December and the very beginning of January visiting Cambridge college chapels and churches, resulting in a great deal of destruction of images and words in these building although a surprising amount of the material that would have caused him offence remains to this day, some of it perhaps removed in advance and thus unavailable for inspection. Brasses in King's College Chapel were deliberately damaged but their more inoffensive components were allowed to remain. Dowsing's diary can be frustratingly sparse...
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Abbot Heribert von Lülsdorf
County: Nordrhein-Westfalen
Date: 1481
October 2019
This month’s brass commemorates Abbot Heribert von Lülsdorf (1481) from
Kornelimünster, in Nordrhein-Westfalen GermanyTransactions (vol.X (1965), pt.3, pp.173-4) contains an article entitled “Brasses in
Germany & the Low Countries” by Messrs. Belonje & Greenhill, which features the above brass from the parish church of St Kornelius Kornelimünster, formerly a Benedictine Abbey founded in the 9th century.An illustration opposite page 173 from a work by L. von Fisenne (1880) shows
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the brass after its first restoration in the 19th century. It comprises a central plate with a demi figure of the abbot under a canopy, and... -
Ann Paston
County: Norfolk
Date: c.1490
August 2019
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It is not often that brasses make the news around the world but the simple inscription commemorating Ann or Anna, daughter of Sir John Paston, did so in the second week of June 2019. An archaeologist, Matt Champion, working on the Paston Footprints 600 project on the church at Oxnead had happened to notice her inscription and that it recorded a member of the family previously unknown to historians. The story was then taken up by the media.
The Paston family of Norfolk has attracted a great deal of attention over the past 250 years. The... -
Henry Dove
County: Wiltshire
Date: 1616
September 2019
The 'Recovery of an Ancient Brass at Salisbury' was reported in a short article of the same name by C[lifford] W[yndham] Holgate in the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine published in 1894.1 It was the brass of Henry Dove and the church was that of St Edmund. He described it as copper rather than brass and thought it had probably been taken from the vault under the church where Dove had been buried and appeared once to have been inserted in stone. It was in the possession of someone living near Andover who had informed a museum director...
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Nicholas Byldysdon and wife Kateryn
County: Lincolnshire
Date: 1489
July 2019
The 1480s were a time of rapid change in the ruling circle of Stamford. The town was governed by twenty-five men, with an alderman at their head and two groups of twelve burgesses, the first and second twelve. Christopher Browne, a nephew of William Browne, founder of Browne's Hospital, and grandson of John Browne, merchant of the staple, was a member of the family that dominated fifteenth-century Stamford. He was made free in 1482, made a member of the first twelve without having served in the second twelve and became alderman at the end of the year, a very...
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Nicholas Parker
County: Norfolk
Date: 1496/7
June 2019
'Nicholas Parker' has recently been identified as the owner of an illustrated missal in Cambridge University Library. Research into his life is currently being undertaken by Professor Carole Rawcliffe and Dr John Alban.
Living in Honing, close to Bromholm Priory, where the elder Sir John Paston was buried in 1466, Nicholas Parker might be expected to feature in the contemporary letters of the Paston family; yet the man of the same name who does was a notary public of the diocese of Norwich and was buried in the Greyfriars in London in 1484. He was a gentleman and held a...
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Sir Humfrey Stafford and wife Margaret
County: Northamptonshire
Date: 1548
May 2019
The Stafford family of Blatherwyck had their origins with the Staffords of Grafton. Their is a profusion of heads of the family named Humfrey that makes identifying any particular Humfrey a task that needs care. Like his father, who died little more than a dozen years before his son did, the particular Humfrey represented on the brass was a knight. He is referred to on occasion as as Sir Humfrey Stafford junior, as when he was on service on the Continent in Henry VIII's army in the early 1540s. At other times, as when he wrote to Thomas Cromwell...
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Sir Laurence Pabenham and wives Elizabeth and Joan
County: Huntingdonshire
Date: c.1440
April 2019
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The church of St Peter at Offord Darcy lies outside the main village but close to the manor house. It is now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust. While the brass depicting the kneeling rector William Taylard lies in its original Lincolnshire marble slab, that of Sir Laurence Pabenham and his two wives has been relaid in a piece of Purbeck marble large enough to contain the remnants of the three figures and the inscription, but considerably smaller than the original, now lost, last recorded as being in the tower.
Sir Laurence was... -
John and Jane Corbet
County: Norfolk
Date: 1559
March 2019
John Corbet, born by 1514, was the son of John Corbet of nearby Spixworth, gentleman, who died in the early 1540s after a career as a brazier in Norwich, where he rose to be sheriff. The Corbet family came from Morton Corbet, Shropshire, as evidenced by their arms, Or, a raven proper, although the Norfolk branch used a different crest, a squirrel sejant, cracking a nut, proper. The Jermy family granted the manor of Mounteney in Sprowston to John Corbet, esquire, around the time of his father's death. The family retained it for nearly a hundred years, Sir Thomas...
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John Beton
County: Derbyshire
Date: 1570
January 2017
Although his month's brass was mentioned in many guidebooks in the century before the First World War it has since received rather less attention but relates directly to one of the major problems faced by Elizabeth I during her reign.
On 2nd May 1568 Mary Queen of Scots escaped from imprisonment in Castle Leven, set on an island in Loch Leven. She had been forced to abdicate in favour of her ten month old son, James VI, on 24th July the previous year following the murder of her second husband and her marriage to the man many believed to be...
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Francis Saunders & wives Elizabeth, Eleanor and Frances
County: Northamptonshire
Date: 1585
December 2009
It is quite unusual to find a brass combined with an alabaster tablet; usually alabaster tablets have inscription panels of slate or black marble, some of which also have incised figures. An alabaster tablet at West Malling, Kent, to Jane, Lady Fitzjames, who died in 1594, has a large brass inscription panel set in an alabaster tablet attributable to Giles de Witte, a sculptor from Bruges who arrived in England in 1585. The alabaster tablet to Francis Saunders at Welford in Northamptonshire goes one step further and has a plate with kneeling effigies of Francis, his three wives and...
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Sir Ralph Pudsay, his third wife Edwina & his son William
County: Yorkshire
Date: 1507
January 2010
The brass this month is affixed in a most unusual position.
The church of Bolton-by-Bowland (Yorkshire) boasts a large and imposing octagonal font of Egglestone marble. There are a number of such fonts in Yorkshire and Durham in particular, but this one is distinctive due to the inscription engraved on pairs of brass strips on four of the concave panels of the bowl.
The inscriptions run from the southernmost panel to the northernmost in sequential order. They read ‘Orate p[ro] a[n]i[m]ab[u]s / d[omin]i Radul / phi Pudsay / milit[is] & de / Edinie uxor[is]...
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Nicholas Toke and his three daughters
County: Kent
Date: 1680
June 2010
The last man to be depicted in armour on brass in England before the Victorian era was Nicholas Toke. He died at the age of 92 and so may have been younger than some of those shown in armour on brasses of the 1630s and 1640s. Having married on five previous occasions, he is said to have died while on a visit to London to find a sixth. He had served in the Navy in his younger days and was heavily involved with his local militia, often being referred to as Captain Nicholas Toke. In view of...
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John Kyngeston and wife Susan
County: Berkshire
Date: 1514
February 2010
This month's brass has been chosen by our president, the Venerable David Meara.
The brass of John Kyngeston, who died in 1514, and his wife, Susan Fetyplace, whose date of death was never filled in on their inscription, is one of the three to have a plate of the Holy Trinity. It has lost two shields and parts of each of the two mouth scrolls. On the back of the Trinity and one of the remaining shields are two parts of the figure of a lady very similar to Susan's figure. Although there is...
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Anne Bedingfield
County: Suffolk
Date: 1641
March 2010
The outline of Anne Bedingfield's life can be found in Eva Griffiths' biography of her in the Dictionary of National Biography and a précis of the DNB entry by John Blatchly was published in the MBS Bulletin, illustrated by Suckling's lithograph of her brass. It recounted how her father had died in 1576 and left her the leasehold of property in Clerkenwell that was part of the bequest of freehold land by Thomas Seckford that supported his almshouses at Woodbridge. When her mother dismissed a clerk from the family brewing business, he took her to court. Her defence was...
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Ambroise de Villiers
County: Seine et Oise
Date: 1503
April 2010
In 1890, the text of a contract for an incised slab was published in France by Albert des Méloizes in Bulletin monumental. Contracts for monuments are much less rare in France than in Britain, as they were officially recorded as legal documents and some of those records survive. In this case it is the original contract rather than the official record of it that survived. While very large numbers of incised slabs survived both the wars of religion and the French revolution, not to mention church renovations and rebuildings, many others did not. Amongst their number was...
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Christopher Playters
County: Suffolk
Date: 1547 (C17 engraving)
May 2010
In the seventeenth century in various places around England, brasses were laid down that purported to represent people who had died in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In some cases this was done to repair and replace earlier brasses; in other instances it was to help establish spurious pedigrees. The best-known instance of the latter is the series of brasses at Pluckley in Kent, supposedly representing the ancestors of Sir Edward Dering. Another example is at Rugeley in Staffordshire.
The most extensive example of repair and replacement is at Stopham in Sussex, but two...
read moreDuchess Zedena
County: Saxony
Date: 1510
July 2010
This month’s brass seems to have a significance that has perhaps escaped notice. At the close of the 15th century monumental brasses in Europe were characteristically Gothic memorials – either in the elegant Flemish style of Branca da Vilhana [1] or in the rather overloaded ‘High Gothic’ of Duke Frederick the Good of Saxony.[2] But when in 1510 the distinguished Vischer workshop in Nuremberg was asked to produce a brass for another member of Duke Frederick’s family, they seem, not unnaturally, to have turned to a fellow townsman, Albrecht Dürer, who had done...
read moreAnn Butts
County: Suffolk
Date: 1609
August 2010
The brass to Ann Butts is one of the finest of the early seventeenth century. It can be found in the chancel of the splendid church of St Mary at Redgrave, now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, which works in co-operation with the Redgrave Church Heritage Trust to care for the church.
Ann Butts died over eighty years after her father, Henry Bures, whose brass can be found at Acton, also in Suffolk. Henry died in 1528 and was commemorated by a brass made in Suffolk, at Bury St Edmunds. While Henry's effigy is a good size...
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