Dengie Church brasses - who are mystery mother and children?

If you haven’t, then I would certainly recommend that you do.

Dedicated to St James, it is one of those off the beaten track places. Standing back from a bend in Keelings Road, fronted by a green and protected by its churchyard wall, it has a real picture postcard look about it.

Its flinty walls have a patina that can only have been formed by centuries of weathering.

Although heavily restored by the Victorians, it is still essentially a 14th Century survival – at least the nave and chancel are. (The bellcote is an 1850 addition, as is the porch, and the vestry is 1910).

Whenever we have called there, the building has always been locked, but when we arrived the other day they were preparing for a service, so we were able to have a look round.

The reredos and sedilia are certainly impressive, as is the east window, but the thing that really caught my eye was a board on the north wall displaying some ancient brasses.

On closer inspection they proved to be effigies of a Tudor woman, with two separate groups of children.

The brasses on the wall of St James' Church, Dengie (Image: Stephen Nunn)

A laminated notice describes them as “Brasses 1520” and includes notes taken from the “Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, Vol 8 part 3”.

I was intrigued so back at home I dug out the relevant edition of the Transactions. Dated 1901, it contains an article about ‘Some Essex Brasses’.

The Dengie example is included and is listed as “Effigies of a Lady (slightly mutilated), five sons and three daughters”.

It goes on to say that the brass is not referred to by “Haines” (that is Rev Herbert Haines in his ‘A Manual of Monumental Brasses’, published in 1861) and that “with scant appreciation of the oldest monument in the church, a stove has been placed on top of it, so that, in order to rub it, one must first remove the ashes…”.

Sure enough, although the stove has gone, on the floor, not far from the hanging board, is a Purbeck slab with indents for the Lady and her two groups of children.

There is also a space under the Lady’s feet for what must have been an inscription. That inscription plate (now sadly lost) was “illegible” by 1887.

So imagining the brasses fixed into their original slab (which in itself is probably not in situ as it may well have initially been in the chancel) what can we say about its origins?

That the Lady was “well to do” is obvious from her dress.

She wears a long, low-necked, tight-fitting gown, with close-fitting, fur-cuffed sleeves. Around her waist is a girdle, fastened in the front by a clasp of three rosettes and with three hanging chains.

The original Purbeck slab on the floor of St James' Church, Dengie (Image: Stephen Nunn)

She has broad-toed shoes and a plain kerchief headdress. That style of headdress often indicates widowhood, which makes added sense with the absence of a male figure and her face being of advanced age.

Her children include one group of five sons and another of three daughters with their hair down their backs, indicating that they were unmarried.

Taken in the round, the style certainly supports a date of about 1520. There is a similar brass of the unnamed wife of a civilian at Saffron Walden, dated to c.1510 and an even closer match at Netteswell (Harlow) in the brass of Alys Laurence, 1522.

Because of the disappearance of the all important inscription plate, all subsequent written accounts have her down as an “unknown”.

Trying to discover who she actually was is certainly problematic. The parish registers (including burials) start in 1550, some 30 years after her estimated death.

Around the time of our Lady, the Manor of Dengie had passed from the Gate family to the Crown, and had been granted, by Henry VII, to the Hospital of the Savoy, in the Strand, London.

The secondary Dengie Manor, ‘Bacons’, was with the Darrell, Bottyll and Jermyn families.

Widow Christian Darrell remarried and became a Bottyll, but she died in 1508, leaving only two daughters – one of whom married a Jermyn.

Close, but not close enough. However, even if our Lady was not related, we can be sure she knew those families.

Search as I might, I can’t find any early written record of the inscription plate. But who knows, one day some clever genealogist might identify a direct match for a Dengie widow who had five sons and three daughters and is still remembered in her parish church more than 500 years later.