A Monumental Brass in Maidstone Museum

RESEARCHES AND DISCOVERIES IN KENT A MONUMENTAL BRASS IN MAIDSTONE MUSEUM Maidstone Museum contains several fragments of monumental brasses. One of these is the upper part of a man with long hair and wearing civil dress (Fig. 4). The bottom part of the figure is broken away, leaving a jagged edge just above the knee, and the fragment now measures 11 ½ in. long by 6½ in. wide. The angle at which the man's gown streams out behind him makes it clear that he was originally portrayed in a kneeling position. The brass is at present fastened to a modern oak board, and contains two apparently original rivet-holes. The upper one of these is above and to the right of the man's ear, and contains what is almost certainly its original rivet. The lower one is not far from the broken bottom edge of the figure. It now contains a modern screw, used to fasten the figure to the board, and appears to have been countersunk. The metal of the brass is in excellent condition, although very shiny, perhaps the result of chemical cleaning at some stage. 245 RESEARCHES AND DISCOVERIES IN KENT Fig. 4. Part of a Brass Figure of a Man in civil dress, c. 1485. Height 1 t ½ inches. (Probably from Warehorne, Kent. Maidstone Museum.) 246 RESEARCHES AND DISCOVERIES IN KENT The brass was presented to the Museum in the latter part of 1974 by L.R.A. Grove. He was given it by his friend R.W. Hounor, who had acquired it from a dealer who had bought the effects of T.H. Oyler, F.S.A., on his death - at which time it was already shiny and fastened to the oak board. Oyler had had the brass for many years, and probably acquired it through gift or purchase. (The oak board and shiny metal are indeed strongly suggestive of the antiques trade.) The brass was listed under his name in the 'Private Possession' section of Mill Stephenson's major work, A List of Monumental Brasses in the British Isles, published in 1926 (p. 585); and the important collection of rubbings belonging to the Society of Antiquaries of London at Burlington House contains one of this brass inscribed in Stephenson's own hand, 'Private Possession. T.H. Oyler, 12 Tonbridge Road, Maidstone, July 1921'. The style of the figure is of the late fifteenth century. Stephenson in his List gave it as 'c. 1480'; recent stylistic analysis of brasses by Norris and Emmerson, among others, puts it perhaps five years later, c. 1485, near the end of the life of the prolific London workshop known as 'Series D', active c. 1420-1500. 1 The designers of 'Series D' must ·have known what they were about, for even in its present mutilated state this figure is well proportioned and vigorous. The writer made a rubbing of this brass in June 1974, by kind permission of Mr Grove. He subsequently noticed how similar its outline was to that of the man's figure on an indent of a lost brass at Warehome, as published by R.H. D'Elboux in Arch. Cant., !xiv (1951), 124-5. D'Elboux's illustration did not correspond exactly with the outline of the brass, but this was not necessarily significant: the illustration was clearly derived from a rubbing, a most unsatisfactory method of recording indents afflicted with any degree of wear or decay. According to D'Elboux, the slab in question lay against the north wall of the chancel, outside the communion rails, and was for a man in civil dress and his wife, both kneeling, with inscription immediately below. Further down the slab were the indents of two groups of children (which he interpreted as three boys below the father's figure and one girl below the mother), and in the bottom corners of the slab were two shields. He dated the monument as c. 1500, by comparison with the brass of 1499 at Boughton Malherbe to Nicholas Wotton. D'Elboux was unable to find any mention of the slab in the records left by the antiquaries of the eighteenth and earlier centuries, except 11 See in particular Malcolm Norris, Monumemal Brasses-The Memorials (1977), I. chapters 8 and 11; and Robin Emmerson, 'Monumental Brasses: London Design c. 1420-85', J.B.A.A., cxxxi (1978), 50-78 247 RESEARCHES AND DISCOVERIES IN KENT for a possible reference in Hasted, who in about 1790 saw a stone at Warehorne 'on which were the figures of a man and four children, the brasses of which are gone excepting part of a man'. 12 This description does not at first sound like the slab in question, but would fit if, say, one side of the slab had been covered at Hasted's visit. Such a theory would indeed also go some way towards explaining the silence of earlier antiquaries about the slab. It is also unlikely for other reasons that Hasted was referring to any other slab than this one: Warehorne church was left almost entirely untouched by the Victorian restorers, 13 and the present church floor is very probably that upon which Hasted trod as he made his notes about the church for his History. His description of the few monuments in the church will be found to tally exactly with the situation today if we identify his stone, bearing part of the brass figure of a man, with the slab published by D'Elboux. The 'part of the man' that Hasted saw had unfortunately disappeared by 1861, when William J. Lightfoot, later Curator of Maidstone Museum, composed some impressionistic 'Notes' on Warehorne church.14 The writer and a friend (now Mrs. Freeth) examined the slab at Warehorne in some detail on 18 August, 1974. It was soon apparent that D'Elboux had completely failed to notice the existence of two further indents of shields, in the top two corners of the slab. These are hidden by the floor of a pew which covers the top few inches of the slab, but can easily be felt with the fingers beneath the pew. It was also clear that the indents for the man's figure, sons and shields were far better preserved than those for the wife, daughter and inscription, suggesting that the former had only lost their brass plates comparatively recently. In addition, and as suspected, D'Elboux's published illustration was found not to be a precise portrayal of the indents visible in the slab.15 Thus, although Mr Grove's brass did not fit the outline of the man's indent in the published illustration; it - or rather a rubbing of it - did fit perfectly with the actual indent. The outlines 12 History of Kent, 1st edition, III (1790), 483, note (s). 13 'The church . . . is without and within most enjoyably unrestored.' - John Newman, The Buildings of England: West Kent and the Weald (1969), 566. 14 Arch. Cant., iv (1861), 97-112. On page 101, Lightfoot refers to this slab as having lost all its brass plates. He then goes on to suggest that further indents for brasses had been buried under the chancel floor when it was raised 'some years' before. This sounds to me like mere hearsay. 1􀂍 The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the illustration of the slab in A.G. Sadler, The Indents of Lost Monumental Brasses in Kent- Part II (1976), 75. This illustration is derived from a dabbing of the indents. It also, like D'Elboux, omits the two shields under the pew. 248 RESEARCHES AND DISCOVERIES IN KENT of brass and indent corresponded exactly; while the rivet-holes in the brass matched exactly the positions of the fixings in the slab. Finally, the remains of the fixings in the slab matched with the state of the rivet-holes in the plate. The upper rivet-hole in the brass still contains what seems to be its original rivet; all that is left in the slab at this point is a socket, from which a rivet has been torn away. The lower rivet-hole in the brass is now filled by a modern screw; the slab at this point contains a broken fragment of rivet, suggesting either that the rest of the rivet disintegrated, leaving the rivet-hole clear, or that what was left in the plate was but a fragment of a rivet, and perhaps ugly or sharp as well, which subsequently fell or was removed from the rivet-hole. There was thus a strong case for believing that the brass figure was indeed from the slab in the chancel at Warehorne, and these findings were communicated to Mr Grove, who in turn passed them on when he presented the brass itself to the Museum later in the same year. Certainty is, of course, impossible, unless and until an ancient rubbing is discovered labelled 'Warehorne', showing the 'part of the man' that Hasted saw. Nor should we forget that the 'D' series was one of the most prolific that the London workshops ever produced, and that it contained many near-identical memorials, derived from standard designs or patterns, which were then dispatched to customers all over England. Nevertheless, the writer is quite convinced that we need look no further to identify this brass, and he was pleased and flattered recently to see the brass on display in the Museum, labelled 'from Warehorne'. 16 I am most grateful to L.R.A. Grove for reading a draft of this paper and suggesting several improvements and corrections. STEPHEN FREETH 16 A preliminary report of these findings appeared in AG, Sadler, The lndems of Lost Monumetllal Brasses in Southern England-Appendix ill & Index ( 1986), 53-5. It is now superseded. 249