By the Rev. G.E. Jeans, M.A., F.S.A.
I propose in this paper to establish the point that Lincolnshire has not hitherto been given sufficient credit among antiquaries in general for its share in the great national treasure of monumental brasses. Brasses are in themselves among the most beautiful and the most durable of monumental records. They can reproduce details of armour and costume with a delicacy which is scarcely possible in the most sumptuous stone or marble monuments. The great majority are of such convenient size that they can be rubbed on a single large sheet of paper; and, unlike altar-tombs, can be studied all at once. And furthermore, for these and other reasons, brasses have long attracted a special body of devotees among antiquaries, some of whom will rub and record a brass with loving zeal, while they will hardly look at the church which contains it, or at any of its other records in tomb or window. Thus it may be that our brasses have been better examined and figured than any other form of monumental effigy.
Nevertheless, I may claim to have shown in my list of Lincolnshire brasses, republished from Lincolnshire Notes and Queries, that a good deal still remained unexplored in this and, therefore, probably in other counties. Brass-lovers (no convenient single name has yet been invented) have naturally turned to the counties where brasses are to be found in almost every church, such as Norfolk, Suffolk, and Kent, or the northern and eastern ring of London; and the best of these have been splendidly illustrated in different forms by J.S. Cotman, the artist (1819), Mr. E.M. Beloe, the Rev. E. Farrer, W.D. Belcher, and others. None but casual single illustrations of the Lincolnshire brasses have been published. But I should think that none of those who saw Mr. William Scorer’s magnificent collection of rubbings of them, at the meeting of the Archæological Institute at Lincoln in July 1909, could doubt the claim of Lincolnshire to a much higher place than has been generally granted hitherto among the counties of brasses. The great long series in Boston Church, and the glorious, though fearfully maltreated, one in Tattershall Church were seen on that occasion in situ, and there is another great display in the county at All Saints’, Stamford, besides the many instances of one noble brass, or sometimes two, as at Spilsby and Gunby St. Peter’s. One of the most learned and accurate brass-lovers I have ever met, the late Rev. C. G. R. Birch, told me that in his opinion Lincolnshire, in the proportion of valuable brasses to the whole number remaining, stood perhaps first among the counties.
I will now place the brasses under different categories to show how well Lincolnshire would come out in a County Championship in almost every class.
First would come the series, say of not less than six, in a single church. These are of course rare everywhere. Even in a county so overflowing with brasses as Norfolk, only about half-a-dozen churches would be able to qualify. Lincolnshire, as I have just said, has three. That in Tattershall Church is beyond all doubt one of the finest series in England, in spite of its heartrending maltreatment. There are seven brasses here, of which no less than four are of the first rank, namely, the great one of Lord Treasurer Cromwell, those of his two nieces—Joan, Lady Cromwell, and Matilda, Lady Willoughby d’Eresby—and the brass of a Provost of the College. Besides these there are two interesting brasses of priests and one of a civilian, 1411. Every brass in this noble set deserves study.
Next comes Boston, which, as being almost the greatest of English ports in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, having a special connection with the Low Countries, and being one of the great centres of merchant guilds, must at one time have been among the richest in England in this kind of memorial. Here there are no less than seventeen brasses, including what are little more than fragments, ten of which are effigies or the remains of figure brasses. Two of these, those of Walter Pescod and his wife and the unnamed priest of about 1400, are of the first rank, and exceedingly valuable for the figures of saints in the canopy shafts of the former and the orphreys of the latter.
All Saints’, Stamford, has eight brasses, six of which are with effigies, one very fine and all interesting.
We turn now to the earliest brasses, which are of course very valuable. The first period in most books is taken to be the reigns of the first two Edwards, 1272-1327; and of this period there are only nineteen or perhaps twenty in all England, of which Lincolnshire has two, at Buslingthorpe and Croft. Everybody knows that the premier brass is Sir John d’Aubernoun’s at Stoke d’Abernon, Surrey, because that is dated 1277. But the extremely interesting half effigy of Sir Richard de Boselyngthorp, unfortunately not dated, is certainly not much later than Sir John d’Aubernoun, and, as I suggested and Mr. Macklin agrees, may be even a little earlier. Buslingthorpe is a very remote church, and there is no rectory house near, so it is to be hoped that some special care is taken about this precious monument. The one at Croft is somewhat similar, but is generally regarded as from ten to twenty years later.
Taking now the classes of people who are represented in effigies, we may regard them as mainly coming under five heads—knights or noblemen in armour, priests, ladies, merchants, or judges. How does the county come out in these?
