MONUMENTAL INSCRIPTIONS
IN BRASSINGTON CHURCHYARD
BRASSINGTON CHURCH MEMORIALS 1674 -
(RON SLACK, 1988, corrected 2001)
INTRODUCTION
This is a record of the five hundred and one memorials in Brassington church and outside, in the churchyard. There is an index to the men, women and children commemorated or otherwise named on them. The memorials are numbered and the four numbers which end with an "A" indicate that this is a difficult churchyard - they were late discoveries among the long grass or shrubbery. There are other oddities in the numbering for the same reason .
The earliest memorial, dated 1674, is in the church and is the only reminder of the Buxton family, prominent in the village for several centuries, who became gentry and lords of the manor in the seventeenth and eighteenth. This commemorates Ann Buxton's gift of twenty shillings per annum to the "poor of Brassington". An earlier Buxton, dying in 1632, had directed that his body be buried in Brassington church "where my ancestors were buried", and the fact that Ann's is the only Buxton memorial illustrates that it was only in the seventeenth century that memorials became common. There are many to the Buxtons at Bradbourne, their home during the eighteenth century and later. There are two other seventeenth century stones at Brassington. The earlier, dated 1675, is a small, crudely shaped and carved limestone with the ini tials SB and MB (number 428) . The other now serves as a paving stone outside the church door. The carving is crude and haphazard. It commemorates Ralph Marple, who died in 1695. A fourth seventeenth century memorial is a brass plate on the north wall of the chancel, placed there in memory of a certain Michael Adams. It describes, in Latin, how he fell ill while travelling from Manchester during a winter storm, and died at Brassington in 1680 (number 487).
These four, plus the seventy-eight from the eighteenth century, means that Brassington church and churchyard has examples from the whole of the period when ordinary people have thought it a normal thing to place a carved stone over the grave of their dead husband, wife, child, father or mother. There are about a thousand people remembered on these gravestones, clearly a very small proportion of the people who have died in the village during the last three hundred years - most families could not afford a gravestone. However , most of the families are represented. There are the Kirks, in Brassington at least as early as the seventeenth century. One of this family, Richard, a grocer and early convert to Primitive Methodism, was so moved by his religion that the tears ran down his cheeks as he sang in the chapel which he and his neighbours had built on Hillside. This story is from his obituary in the Primitive Methodist Magazine. It also tells that as he lay dying his wife asked him whether he felt the Lord's presence. Richard's reply had a distinctly Derbyshire ring to it - "It would be poor doing without him now" . His stone (number 227) has a long Bible quotation. There are the Wilcocks and Toplises. Both of these names are among the list of annually-elected reeves, or village headmen, during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. The Wilcocks had been in the village in the fourteenth century .The last of their name, Robert Wilcock and his son William have a memorial in the church (number 486), a sure sign of eminence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the nineteenth century Toplises in the village was George, who died in 1835 (number 394). He was a big enough man among the gentleman farmers of Derbyshire for John Farey to seek and quote his views in his general view of the agriculture and minerals of Derbyshire (1811). Farey describes George Toplis's herds of short-horn and "old long-horn" cattle and his method of curing bacon. For lead-mining knowledge Farey turned to William Fearn , miner mine-owner and mine-agent, one of a family who for a century or more did well out of Brassington's little "grooves". It is probably William's two daughters, Margaret Ann and Mary, who are commemorated in the churchyard with a stone (number 74) which tries to extract some comfort from the tragedy of their early deaths -"We both liv'd through a state of innocence/ And dy'd before we gave our God offence". There are Torr, Allsop, Jackson, Slack, Johnson, Knowles, Wright, Wayne, Bacon, Rippon, Briddon, Walker, Barton, Tomlinson, Scattergood, Hardy, Spencer, Watson, Flint and Walton, all to be found on a list of village householders in 1663. Some of these families had been there for two hundred years by then, and a few still have members in Brassington. From the list of reeves at the beginning of the sixteenth century the names of Knifton, Knowles, Allsop and Buxton are on memorials inside and outside the church . A century earlier a rental, or list of the tenants of Brassington manor, included John Taylor, and there are gravestones for eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century Taylors. One is in memory of Joshua Barnsley Taylor, a successor as Methodist preacher to Richard Kirk (number 294 ). When he was buried on December the twenty-ninth 1895, according to the magazine, there were one hundred mourners in his procession "besides a large concourse of inhabitants, who lined the streets and thronged the churchyard, giving an unmistakeable evidence of the esteem in which he was held". The earliest mention of a family whose name appears on a gravestone is a reference in a record of a meeting of the manor court early in the fourteenth century. The reference is to William de Ballidon and to his wife Agnes, keeper of one of the village alehouses. By the end of the century the name had become simple Ballidon and four hundred years later another William Ballidon was buried with his wife Dorothy to the west of the church, their grave marked by a stone engraved in the forthright style of the eighteenth century -"William Ballidon died February the 28th 1782 aged 80 years Dorothy Ballidon died April the 20 1781 aged 80 years" (number 73).
At all times before the most recent years many, and perhaps most of the villagers died young. The evidence of childhood death is everywhere in the churchyard, on stones erected in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. one of the saddest is the simple list of the names and dates of birth and death of the five children of Frederick and Julia Hall who died between 1892 and 1913 (number 471). This couple's tragedy was completed when a sixth child. their son Frederick, was killed in the war of 1914-1918. This war killed fifteen men, an enormous number when there were probably fewer than a hundred and fifty men of fighting age in Brassington . The earliest stones in the churchyard are generally small -Ralph Marple's is unusually large for 1695 -and invariably roughly shaped and carved. Inscriptions consisting only of initials and dates are common among the early-eighteenth century stones, though by the middle of that century the village possessed a mason who produced inscriptions carved in a clean version of the printing style of the time, and with individuality. Examples of this anonymous craftsman's work_are numbers 185 and 225. The inscriptions at this time have a mixture of capitals and lower-case letters, as on the stone for Ralph Marple's grandson Job, farmer and owner of the pub now called the Tudor House (number 442). By the second half of the eighteenth century the stones had assumed the modern size and the styles of lettering were becoming more uniform and standardised. At different periods the lettering included copperplate, as on John Johnson's gravestone (number 157), a version of roman capitals as on most stones after the middle of the nineteenth century , lines carved in relief for a brief period around 1860 (number 311), and metal in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were always variations however, and the work of a father and son, Robert and Job Slack, who operated in the village, has its own character. The single example of the father's work is number 25 and Job carved numbers 12, 80 and 269. Brassington has always been a workaday village and its churchyard has no large memorials to rich citizens. There are three railed burials, of members of the James (number 39), Allsop (56) and Seal (135) families and one walled area for members of the Toplis family (numbers 396 and 397). Alexander Dean James, a "druggist" from Wirksworth, married George Toplis's daughter and settled in Brassington in the early nineteenth century, adding fields to his wife's inheri tance as they came on the market. There is a single example of a "chest tomb" , standing unevenly by the main path (number 253) and bearing a standard verse carved in the rough early-eighteenth century style, wi th no name or date .
The inscriptions developed from the extreme brevity of initials and dates in the earliest to the direct, matter-of-fact statements characteristic of the eighteenth century -Isabella Toplis/ dyed Anno Doml 1707 I TT RT (number 393). The later inscriptions in that century give full dates and ages at death - Here lies/ the body/ of Thomas Flint/ who died Sep y 20th/ 1759 aged 27 (number 239) - but it was not until the nineteenth century that they began to include the preamble "In memory of" or "Sacred to the memory of" or, during the more sentimental Victorian period, "In loving memory of". There are verses from the middle of the eighteenth century, usually warning of the shortness of life and the imminence of death -"Young maids prepare yourselfs to die/ for life is short and death is nigh/ repent in time make no delay/ I in my prime was called away". This verse is repeated, with variations, on a number of the stones and its sentiment was clearly close to the villagers' existences. Similarly with one which expresses what must have been the end of most of them at a time when medical help consisted more of a comforting bedside manner than curing illness or relieving pain - "Affliction sore long time I bore/ physicians were in vain/ till God did please to give me ease/ and free me from my pain". The coming of the Methodist revival among the village people can be seen by the popularity , from about 1830, of biblical quotations, the most frequently used being verse fourteen of chapter four of Saint Paul's Epistle to the Thessalonians , which reads "But if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him". Victorian verses, characteristically speaking of attaining peace after struggle, often have a sentimentality long out of fashion "No mighty rage can reach/the peaceful sleeper here/ while angels watch his soft repose" (number 251). It is not, surprising that the Victorian villagers chose the most sentimental verses for their dead children -"These lovely buds so young and fair/ called hence by early doom/ just came to show how sweet a flower/ in Paradise would bloom" (number 264 ) . Perhaps the most poignant comment is the one found at the end of many a catalogue of tragedy , the Christian resignation of "Thy will be done" . In the transcriptions which follow the line endings are marked by " /", and there is a note after the inscription where the memorial consists of something different from, or more than a headstone. There are also notes giving the locations of headstones leaning against the church and of the inscriptions inside the church, and indicating those headstones which have been reset in contact with each other, hiding inscriptions.