Flemish Brasses to Civilians in England

Abstract

The earliest brasses of the Tournai school were executed for royalty and for high ranking and local ecclesiastics. With the expansion of overseas trade, particularly by the Hanse, during the fourteenth century the increasingly wealthy merchant class became the principal customers of these Flemish workshops. Their products were in wide demand throughout western and northern Europe. Many of these brasses are now lost and gone but records remain of considerable numbers (Cameron 1970). It is fortunate that we still have in England the five good examples described in this and the previous paper (Cameron 1979). The three here described offer a good insight into the main products of the school, all similar in concept yet varying widely in detail and of significantly different date, providing a comparative study that could not be readily matched elsewhere in Europe.The first of the three, to Alan Fleming, though revolutionary in some of its detail, is representative of the large number of civilian brasses from th...