Etchingham Brasses

[poliphilo]

The Church of the Assumption and St Nicholas at Etchingham (the village next door to Kipling's Burwash) was built by William de Etchingham- who established a college of priests there to pray for his soul. His brass occupies the prime position in front of the high altar. Sadly, someone has made off with his head.



Members of the next generation- mother father and son- lie behind him. The English nobility of the mid-14th century didn't bother with portraits- and whoever commissioned the monument must have asked the craftsman for "one female figure and two male ones- all in the latest fashions of course" and clearly didn't mind that the two men turned out as similar as Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee. I've looked for differences and the only one I can find is in the design of the piece of plate armour that guards the crook of the elbow. Were brasses made to order or bought off the peg? I don't suppose anyone knows.







The third brass is a puzzle. We've moved on a generation and these are Elizabeth Echyngham and Agnes Oxenbridge.



Why the difference in height? Why are two women who don't appear to be related buried together? At this point I hand over to whoever wrote the notes about them on the Sussex Churches Website...

"The relationship between the two has been extensively discussed in recent studies (see 2 and 3), which cast much interesting though necessarily speculative light on late mediaeval sexuality. Agnes, though she died much later may be the older, for Elizabeth’s hair is shown loose and Agnes’s effigy is considerably larger. However, both are thought to have been born in the 1420s. Unusually they are shown half-turned and looking into each other’s eyes. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it is striking that Agnes is commemorated at Etchingham and not at Brede church in the Oxenbridge chapel, as might have been expected. It is also an indication of a perhaps unexpectedly tolerant society that such a memorial should have been carried out by Agnes’s executors."

Comments

[cmcmck]

Stunning!

Armour could be bought off the peg or custom made;

It's known as the upper canon of the vambrace (the lower arm guard).

[poliphilo]

Thanks.

I knew somebody (and probably you) would know the correct term. :)

[oakmouse]

My understanding from my art history training is that brasses generally depicted stylized, stereotyped images rather than personalized portraits. You did find some moderately personalized ones, especially with correct details of armor or other accountrements, but as often as not it was a stock image churned out much like stock photos today.

Pity about his head. Some people need kicking.

[poliphilo]

Old buildings- churches especially- are full of the work of anonymous craftspeople. It would be good to know more about them- who they were and how they ran their businesses.

[oakmouse]

True! I know we know a bit about some of them, due to monastic records and diaries and other such survivals, but not much and not about many. It's a shame, really, how much we don't know about historical periods that predate our own by more than a couple of centuries. We may have monastic chronicles and the like, but a lot of day-to-day information has been lost, or was never saved in the first place.

[poliphilo]

At the time everybody would have known what was involved in commissioning a memorial brass so nobody wrote it down. It's only quite recently that we've developed this mania for recording every little detail of our lives.

[oakmouse]

True. Sometimes the details were preserved by a clerk who wrote them down as part of the household or business accounts or something of the kind, but that was the exception.

[athenais]

These are so great. And what a mystery about the two women at the end!

[poliphilo]

The Etchyngham/Oxenbridge memorial is the oddest brass I've ever come across. I'd love to know more.

[cmcmck]

Loose hair usually designates someone who died a maiden so that may be a clue.