Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages / Third Edition

by Edward Lewes Cutts

The next is an interesting figure, though far inferior in artistic merit and beauty to those which have gone before. The name here again is lost, but a fragment remaining of the inscription gives the date MCCCC., with a blank for the completion of the date; the same is the case with the date of his wife’s death, so that both effigies may have been executed in the lifetime of the persons. The date is probably a little later than 1400. The face is so different from the previous ones that it may not be unnecessary to say that great pains have been taken to make it an accurate copy of the original, and it has been drawn and engraved by the same hand as the others. The manifest endeavour to indicate that the deceased was an elderly man, induces us to suspect that some of its peculiarity may arise from its being not a mere conventional brass, such as the monumental brass artists doubtless “kept to order,” but one specially executed with a desire to make it more nearly resemble the features of the deceased. If, as we have conjectured, it was executed in his lifetime, this, perhaps, may account for its differing from the conventional type. His dress is the gown worn by civilians at the period, with a gypcire, or purse, hung at one side of his girdle, and his rosary at the other.

Wool Merchants from Northleach Church.

Lastly, we give the effigy of another nameless wool-merchant of Northleach, who is habited in a gown of rather stiffer material than the robes of his predecessors, trimmed with fur at the neck and feet and wrists. The inscription recording his name and date of death is lost, but a curious epitaph, also engraved on the brass, remains, as follows:—

“Farewell my frends, the tyde abideth no man,
I am departed from hence, and so shall ye;
But in this passage the best songe that I can
Is requiem eternam. Now then graunte it me,
When I have ended all myn adversitie,
Graunte me in Puradise to have a mansion,
That shed thy blode for my redemption.”

The mention of fur in these effigies suggests the restrictions in this matter imposed by the sumptuary laws by which the king and his advisers sought from time to time to restrain the extravagance of the lieges. By the most important of these acts, passed in 1362, the Lord Mayor of London and his wife were respectively allowed to wear the array of knights bachelors and their wives; the aldermen and recorder of London, and the mayors of other cities and towns, that of esquires and gentlemen having property to the yearly value of £40. No man having less than this, or his wife or daughter, shall wear any fur of martrons (martin’s?) letuse, pure grey, or pure miniver. Merchants, citizens, and burgesses, artificers and people of handicraft, as well within the City of London as elsewhere, having goods and chattels of the clear value of £500, are allowed to dress like esquires and gentlemen of £100 a year; and those possessing property to the amount of £1,000, like landed proprietors of £200 a year.

There are some further features in these monumental brasses worth notice. Knightly effigies often have represented at their feet lions, the symbols of their martial courage. Some of our wool-merchants have a sheep at their feet, as the symbol of their calling: one is given in the woodcut accompanying. In another, in the same church, the merchant has one foot on a sheep and the other on a wool-pack; here the two significant symbols are combined—the sheep stands on the wool-pack. In both examples the wool-pack has a mark upon it; in the former case it is something like the usual “merchant’s mark,” in the latter it is two shepherds’ crooks, which seem to be his badge, for another crook is laid beside the wool-pack. At the feet of the effigy of John Fortey, p. 523, is also his merchant’s mark enclosed in an elegant wreath, here represented. The initials I and F are the initials of his name; the remainder of the device is his trade-mark. We give two other merchants’ marks of the two last of our series of effigies. If the reader cares to see other examples of these marks, and to learn all the little that is known about them, he may refer to a paper by Mr. Ewing, in vol. iii. of “Norfolk Archæology.”

We have in a former chapter (p. 498) given from his monumental brass a figure of Alderman Field, of the date 1574, habited in a tunic edged with fur, girded at the waist, with a gypcire and rosary at the girdle, and over all an alderman’s gown. In St. Paul’s Church, Bedford, is another brass of Sir William Harper, Knight, Alderman, and Lord Mayor of London,[417] who died in A.D. 1573; he wears a suit of armour of that date, with an alderman’s robe forming a drapery about the figure, but thrown back so as to conceal as little of the figure as possible. In the Abbey Church at Shrewsbury is an effigy of a mayor of that town in armour, with a mayor’s gown of still more modern shape. The brasses of Sir M. Rowe, Lord Mayor of London, 1567, and Sir H. Rowe, Lord Mayor 1607, both kneeling figures, formerly in Hackney Church, are engraved in Robinson’s history of that parish. And in many of the churches in and about London, and other of the great commercial towns of the Middle Ages, monumental effigies exist, with which, were it necessary, we might extend these notes of illustrations of civic costume.