A blog written by Museum Remote Volunteer Amanda Ciccone.

The topic of this blog was inspired by a recent discovery in the Museum archives, as part of their Review, Rationalise and Recycle project, of several brass rubbings; the ones that have been identified are of Epping Forest District monumental brasses.

It’s useful from the beginning to clearly define monumental brass and brass rubbing, As while they are two distinct practices, they depict the same image, and so it is easy to mix the two when learning about them: A monumental brass is an inscribed memorial installed in the floor or wall, often in a church, and a brass rubbing is the reproduction of the monumental brass on a sheet of paper.

Brass rubbing is a pastime and artform dating back to the Victorian period.  The technique is in fact very similar to the coin-rubbing over paper activities you might have enjoyed as a child. Paper, wax usually (or graphite or chalk), dusting and cleaning tools are needed. In brief, you must first clean your surface, lay and affix the paper over the monumental brass, then “colour” the paper with your wax crayon from top to bottom. The product is a black and white recreation – or whatever colour the wax is – of the monumental brass.

While brass rubbing remains legal, much precaution is exercised towards the monumental brasses themselves, and reasonably so. Communication and coordination with the church where the monumental brass is kept is an essential preliminary step. Furthermore, if a facsimile of a brass exists, the preference is to make the facsimile the brass rubbing subject instead. The Monumental Brass Society is an excellent resource for those who would like to learn more about the practice and should be referred to.

Monumental brasses emerged in the 13^th century in Western Europe and became the preferred choice of memorial type over wooden and stone effigies, due to their high durability, brass being an alloy of copper and zinc, and because they do not take up any volume, being embedded in a floor or wall. Although we see several types of professions depicted in monumental brasses, a person certainly had to have money to arrange for a brass of themselves done.

Monumental brasses saw considerable destruction during the Reformation, re-emerged slightly under Elizabeth I’s rule, and met another sharp decline upon the Civil War. Though there have been periods of resurgence in the centuries since, the 13^th to 16^th centuries is regarded as the high period of memorial brass making.

England is considered to have the greatest number of monumental brasses today, many of which are in the eastern counties. One brass rubbing at EFD Museum is of a highly regarded brass, that of Archbishop of York Samuel Harsnett (1561-1631), which is located at St Mary’s Church in Chigwell, just near the Chigwell School that he founded in 1629. The quality of brasses is said to have declined by the 17^th century in the post-Reformation period, but Archbishop Harsnett’s stands out as particularly well made.

The subjects in brasses are often not famous, yet they tell a compelling story all the same.

One brass rubbing found at the museum is of a monumental brass from Stanford Rivers, Anne Napper, who passed in 1584. In her brass, she kneels at a pew with an open book in front of her, faces diagonally to her right, and 6 boys kneel behind her. In the inscription, she is described as the late wife of William Napper and daughter to William Shelton.

In researching for this article, a brass rubbing of a William Napper’s monumental brass was discovered on the V&A Museum Collections website. Anne Shelton from Ongar, her father William Shelton, and 6 sons are referenced on his inscription. We do not know the year of his death, as it is left partially blank; people sometimes commissioned brasses before their death, and the final inscription never got attended to. Nevertheless, we can reasonably say that these inscriptions, that of Anne Napper’s and William Napper’s, reference the same people and are not coincidental.

The catch? William Napper’s monumental brass is in Dorset.

Further research revealed that at least one son, and other Napper – sometimes spelled Napier – descendants were also buried in Dorset, indicating a family relocation to another county.

Perhaps a husband and wife being buried this far apart in early to mid-1600s England is in fact nothing highly unusual. The mobility here is eye-catching to modern eyes, nonetheless. Did work obligations take William Napper and their sons away from Essex, heartbreak, something else entirely? History has not preserved more details, though these are highly personal reasons in any case. If anything, it is rather amazing to this article’s author to have accidently connected two monumental brasses of a husband and wife separated by this distance, and what this mobility could reflect about family life in this period.

The potential for learning, discovery and storytelling is vast in both monumental brasses and brass rubbings, two different disciplines, but which are inextricably linked. They are subjects easily recommended to any history lover.

References

• Monumental Brass Society
• Monumental Brasses of England and the Art of Brass Rubbing – Rev Herbert W Macklin
• V&A Museum Collections
• Spurlock Museum of World Cultures Collections

Ellen Buxton came from the large family of social reformers and philanthropists.  Her grandfather was Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton who led the campaign to abolish slavery.  The Buxton family had made their money in the family brewery, based in Spitalfields.  Ellen married a cousin, Robert Barclay, whose family were connected with Barclays bank.

As a young girl growing up in Leytonstone, Ellen had a great deal of time to explore the local area and Epping Forest with her brothers and sisters – she was one of 14 children, although three siblings died in childhood. 

Ellen loved to write in her diary and make sketches of family life, including many of her brothers and sisters playing with their favourite toys.  Her descendants published extracts from her diary and the images in these make a wonderful resource for helping children today find out what toys children played with over 100 years ago.  How many toys do you recognise in this drawing of everyone playing the garden?

There is a china doll in the museum’s collections, which comes from the Buxton family.  It is possible it might be the doll Ellen drew her sisters playing with in this sketch.  They are certainly handling it very carefully.

This blog has been written by one of our remote volunteers, Amanda Ciccone.

Epping Forest District Museum is hosting the Game Plan: Board Games Rediscovered exhibition, on loan from the V&A Museum of Childhood, from 25 September to 24 December. This is a highly interactive exhibition that not only educates, but entertains.

There is so much that can be said about board games and their lasting value, and the exhibition attempts to cover it all. For instance, board games allow us a snapshot into history: Monopoly comes to mind, created in the early 1900s as a sort of cautionary illustration of what happens when private monopolies have ownership of land. Board games are adored as artwork (i.e. Pachisi), and can be thrilling for their level of strategy (cue in Risk). Sometimes we see board games intersect with other mediums: Legos serving as chess pieces, Cluedo being the basis of a movie, tv shows and books, and Star Wars actually becoming a board game. Playing a board game is a social activity and can be used to see what it says about the player; discover what kind of player you are in the exhibition’s What’s your Gameface? section.

Let us look at one game in particular, Snakes and Ladders, a children’s classic, and with a background story that may be unexpected to some. Originating in India in the 2^nd century, called Moksha Patam, it was a morality lesson set against the journey of life, the ladders representing karma, or destiny, and the snakes representing kama, or desire. In England, that morality allegory was preserved, though altered to Christian values and vices, and the name changed to Snakes and Ladders. Later, when Milton Bradley released the game in the 1940s, the snakes were replaced by the tamer image of chutes, or slides, thereby changing the name to Chutes and Ladders in North America. All traces of ethics were stripped from the board itself by then, replaced by a playground, thought to be more appropriate for children.

The object of the game is to land on the finish line by rolling the dice or spinning a spinner. Hope that you land on a ladder, which will allow you to cut ahead on the board, and cross your fingers that you don’t land on a snake…which will take you backwards a few or several spaces. It is a game won and lost purely by luck.

Games exist as an effective vehicle for learning, which has never been more relevant to me than now as being a teacher of English as a second language. I have discovered that a board game is a useful incorporation into a lesson, because the rules are often already familiar to the student, and because the game can be transformed to fit one’s needs. In my version of Battleship, a certain sentence structure will hit your ship, not an “E2” coordinate. In Snakes and Ladders, you must conjugate a verb accordingly, regardless of landing on a snake or a ladder*. [i] In playing a board game, everyone is on the same level, and a common tongue is not particularly essential; a meeple is a word specific to Carcassonne and does not exist outside of the game, for instance.

The moment I realised that these games, which I had known my whole life, were also robust education tools, was an educative moment in itself. When done right, games make you laugh, think, be challenged, and they pass the time with ease. Playing a board game has the potential to create strong bonds and moments, which we all know can be powerfully formative.  In sum, learning is effective when having fun, and I am appreciative of the timeless, universal relevance that board games have.

Game Plan: Board Games Rediscovered is thought provoking, vibrant, and memorable. It was said in the beginning that this exhibition not only educates, but entertains. But it can even be said in the inverse: that this not only entertains, but educates; this depends on your starting point. A good game is often both, in any case.

During these current times that have often been isolating, this exhibition could not have come at a better moment.

[i] * Snakes and Ladders could be used to reinforce vocabulary, though I do not attempt to teach moral ethics!