Mill Stephenson’s List of Monumental Brasses in the British Isles, the centenary of the publication of which falls in 2026, is a landmark work and has long been recognised as such. Stephenson’s friend, Montague Giuseppi, was to describe it as his ‘magnum opus’ and the result of ‘many years’ study’, while to Richard Busby it was ‘a classic’.Footnote ¹

The main strengths of the List are to be found in the clarity and comprehensiveness of its coverage and its sheer scholarly authority. Not only did Stephenson ensure that no surviving pre-Gothic Revival figure brass was overlooked, he also extended the definition of what constituted a brass to take in the, until then, largely neglected categories of inscriptions and coats of arms with inscriptions. A few earlier writers of textbooks on brasses had included county lists, the pioneer in this respect as in so many others being Herbert Haines, whose Manual had been the most remarkable product of the nineteenth-century revival in study of the subject. Haines, as Stephenson was to do later, detailed the person or persons commemorated, the date of the brass, its current condition and its location in the church. His lists, however, as he himself admitted, were incomplete, representing a work in progress and consisting principally of catalogues of figure brasses.Footnote ² Of the late Victorian and early twentieth-century writers who followed in Haines’s wake, only one was to follow his example in including lists, and that was Herbert Macklin, author of the widely read textbook, Monumental Brasses; and his lists were rudimentary.Footnote ³ Stephenson’s achievement was to compile a list that brought together in a standard abbreviated form all the essential pieces of information about a brass that would enable a reader to picture it in their mind’s eye. Such was his authority that the List was to become a standard work of reference; and when, half-a-century later, the need was finally felt to update it in the light of subsequent discoveries and losses, the enterprise was generally referred to in the Monumental Brass Society as ‘Mill Stephenson Revision’.

Only in the last thirty years, with the launch of the new County Series volumes produced by Martin Stuchfield, FSA and his collaborators, has the ‘Mill Stephenson’ moniker been abandoned. Even in these volumes, however, the brasses are described in broadly the same way and taken in the same chronological order as Stephenson had taken them, the numbering amended only to take account of new discoveries and the additions made in Giuseppi and Griffins’s Appendix to the List.Footnote ⁴ Such is the importance of Stephenson’s work, and such is the scale of his achievement, that it seems fitting to reflect on what he did and, in particular, to consider how and why he compiled the List and what may be considered the book’s main strengths and weaknesses. It might also be worth pausing to consider how far modern approaches to listing, in particular those represented by the County Series volumes, both build on the foundations laid by Stephenson and yet branch out in new directions to take account of today’s more inter-disciplinary approach to the study of brasses.

The obituaries published on Stephenson’s death in 1937, focusing as they do largely on his scholarship, tell us disappointingly little about the man himself. As several writers pointed out, Stephenson was fortunate in being possessed of independent means and in a position therefore to devote himself almost exclusively to antiquarian pursuits. Whether for this reason or as a result of the mannered formality that governed the writing of obituaries a century ago, the tributes concentrate almost entirely on the antiquarian side of his life and his contributions to the societies he was involved in. Admittedly, his personality is nicely captured by Montague Giuseppi in one of the longer and more informative pieces, and mention is invariably made of his warmth and his generosity of spirit.Footnote ⁵ He comes across, however, as someone whose social world centred principally on the companionship of his fellow antiquaries and archaeologists. In none of the tributes are we told anything about where he lived, whether or not he was married and had a family: nothing at all about the more intimate side of his life. Today, however, with census information and marriage and probate records all easily accessible, it is possible to lift the veil on Stephenson the man and to capture something of that side of his character undisclosed in the obituaries.

MILL STEPHENSON

Stephenson was born on 20 October 1857 at Sculcoates, an affluent suburb of Hull, the youngest child of a well-to-do newspaper and directories proprietor, William Stephenson (1805–66), and his second wife, Caroline (née Taylor), fifteen years her husband’s junior.Footnote ⁶ At the age of fourteen he was sent to Richmond School, in the North Riding, where thirty years earlier Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known to history as Lewis Carroll, had likewise been a pupil. In 1876 he went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, graduating in 1880 with the degree of BA and later in the same year he was admitted to the Middle Temple.Footnote ⁷ He pursued the well-worn path to becoming a London barrister and was called to the Bar on 17 June 1885. He does not appear ever to have practised, however, for already the future direction of his interests was becoming clear. At school he had developed an early passion for brass rubbing – not altogether, so he was to admit later, with the wholehearted approval of his headmaster. By 1881, having moved to London, and being under no pressure to work for a living, he was able to take his interests further. He made regular visits to the British Museum, a stone’s throw from where he lived in the parish of St George’s, Bloomsbury, and there he began to explore the great collections of Roman and medieval antiquities built up by a man whose work was to be a decisive influence on his own: Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, the museum’s keeper of medieval antiquities. Franks had himself long been interested in brasses: at Cambridge he had been a member of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and a founder member of the Cambridge Architectural Society; and as an undergraduate he had published an account of a palimpsest brass at Burwell (Cambs) and a paper on the de Frevilles, a family well known for their brasses at Little Shelford (Cambs).Footnote ⁸ Over the years, he had built up a substantial and important collection of some 3,000 rubbings for the museum, which, after his death in 1897, were to pass to the Society of Antiquaries and to form the basis of the Society’s own collection. It was on the evidence provided by these rubbings that Stephenson was to rely heavily when, in the next century, he began work on his List.

In 1882, the year after he had left Cambridge for London, and when he was aged twenty-five, Stephenson married. His bride was one Helen Scott, then resident in London, who was likewise twenty-five and the daughter of Charles Scott, a surgeon by this time deceased.Footnote ⁹ The wedding took place at St George’s, Hanover Square, a fashionable church in the West End.Footnote ¹⁰ Where and in what circumstances the couple met, and what interests drew them together, are matters entirely shrouded in mystery, as Helen is never once referred to in the obituaries. The couple lived in some comfort at Tooting in south London, initially at 14 Ritherdon Rd and later, from 1905, at a much grander villa, number 38 in the same road (fig 1). Like many well-to-do middle-class couples in the pre-War and inter-War eras, they employed a maid to attend to their domestic needs.Footnote ¹¹

Fig 1.

38 Ritherdon Rd, Balham, London, where Mill Stephenson and his wife lived from 1905. Image: author.

The marriage was to be childless; yet, what the sources for their later years reveal is that there was in fact someone younger than themselves to whom they were both greatly devoted. This was a lady by the name of Inez Ethel Price. In October 1936, when he drew up his will, Stephenson named Inez Ethel as his principal legatee, while five years earlier, when Helen had died, it is Inez who had acted as one of her executors.Footnote ¹² The precise identity of Inez Ethel is something of a mystery. It was in companionship with her, however, that Stephenson chose to spend the final years of his life. Within a few months of Helen’s death in 1931, he had left the family home at Ritherdon Rd, to move in with her, she herself being by now widowed, and with her daughter, Gladys, at their house at 149 Nightingale Lane, Wandsworth; and there he was to remain for the next six years.Footnote ¹³ In 1936, the year before his death, after a brief residence in Granard Rd, he and Inez, without Gladys, made their final move to an apartment in Du Cane Court, a grand new art deco block in Balham High Road, the completion of which they had probably been awaiting (fig 2).Footnote ¹⁴ Within a few months they had been joined there by Beatrice Roberta Price, perhaps Inez’s sister-in-law.

Fig 2.

Du Cane Court, Balham High Rd, where Mill Stephenson spent the last year of his life. Image: author.

A couple of hypotheses can be advanced to account for the relationship between Inez Ethel and Helen and Mill Stephenson. One is that she was Stephenson’s step-daughter. The trail of evidence that points in this direction begins with the record of Inez’s baptism on 3 May 1874 at Christ Church, Albany St, London. On the baptismal certificate, the girl’s mother is identified as one Helen Ethel Vernon and the place of her abode as 48 Gloucester Crescent, near Regent’s Park; the name of the father is not given.Footnote ¹⁵ The young Inez was to have a somewhat rootless early existence. By 1881 she was living not with her mother but at the Camden Arms, Pembury, near Sevenoaks, probably with friends or relatives.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1895, however, she is recorded as marrying Frederick Thomas Whittaker Price, some eleven years her senior, and the couple took up residence at Honey Lane, Waltham Abbey, where they appear to have run a small hotel as co-proprietors. They shortly began a family.Footnote ¹⁷ To this point there is no evidence conclusively to connect Inez Ethel with the person of the same name who figures in the Stephensons’ wills. With the returns to the census of 1921, however, we may be afforded the crucial link in the chain. On the day of the census, Helen, described as Helen Stephenson, was recorded as staying with Inez Ethel, her husband Frederick, here identified as the head of the household, and their family, who were all by now residing at the Amherst Arms at Riverhead, near Sevenoaks; and Helen is described as mother-in-law of the head of the household.Footnote ¹⁸ On the day of the same census Stephenson himself was recorded as being alone at the couple’s home at 38 Ritherdon Rd.Footnote ¹⁹ On this evidence, it seems at least allowable that Helen Scott is to be identified with Helen Ethel Vernon; that Helen had a child by a previous relationship and that the name Vernon which she adopted for the baptism record was the father’s name.

One serious difficulty, however, stands in the way of accepting this hypothesis; and it is that, although Inez can be connected with Helen Vernon, there is no definitive evidence to connect Helen Vernon with Helen Scott: the two women might be entirely different. It may well be significant in this connection that Helen Vernon bore the middle name Ethel, whereas Helen Stephenson never appears in the registers with a middle name at all. With this in mind, we might perhaps allow for an entirely different possibility, namely that Inez Ethel was in fact an adopted daughter. We have already seen that the Stephensons were childless, and it might be reckoned an entirely natural desire on their part to adopt a child to take the place of the child they never had. In support of this hypothesis it is worth recalling the evidence already cited that Inez had a somewhat unsettled early existence, at the age of seven being sent to board. If this second hypothesis is accepted, then the phrase ‘mother-in-law’ employed in the 1921 census might be interpreted in the broader sense in which it is sometimes used by those who choose to adopt a child. Between the two hypotheses, on the present evidence, it is difficult to choose, and in the end the precise relationship between Inez Ethel and the Stephensons must remain uncertain.

Stephenson and Inez, both by now elderly, were to reside in the splendour of Du Cane Court for only a few months. Stephenson died on 29 July 1937 aged 79, leaving his estate to Inez, and his remains were cremated at West Norwood Cemetery; the ashes were scattered on the flower beds there, presumably at Inez’s request.Footnote ²⁰ Probate was granted to Inez, and the estate was valued at the considerable sum of £18,505 9s 9d.Footnote ²¹ Inez herself was to die only three years later, aged 66, in July 1940 while staying at Hove. Her own estate, swelled by her inheritance, was valued at £21,631 7s 4d.Footnote ²²

Despite being married and having a step-daughter or adopted daughter to whom he became close – both of these being aspects of his life hitherto entirely concealed from view – Stephenson’s social world comes across as a predominantly male one. Such was probably the case with most of the leading antiquaries and archaeologists of the time; yet, Helen Stephenson was known to some at least of her husband’s antiquary friends. The Essex ecclesiologist and student of brasses, Miller Christy, with whom her husband corresponded regularly, was one such. On 20 August 1903 Stephenson, replying to a letter from Christy, rounded off with the words ‘Kind regards, in which Mrs S joins’, while eight years later in 1911 Christy was to end a letter saying: ‘I hope Mrs Mill Stephenson has now recovered from the illness she was suffering from when I last heard from you; and with kind regards to her and yourself.’Footnote ²³ It is natural to suppose that Christy must have visited the Stephensons at Ritherdon Road and perhaps on occasion had stayed with them. Until his later years, however, by which time his involvement in the Monumental Brass Society had ended owing to the Society’s demise and his visits to the Antiquaries had become fewer, the greater part of Stephenson’s life centred on a world that accorded little or no recognition to women, least of all to spouses who were not themselves in some way of scholarly distinction. Stephenson is unlikely ever to have questioned the body of assumptions he had grown up with; yet, it is worth noting that in his lifetime attitudes were already beginning to change, even if we lack the evidence to judge his own response to them. In 1920, as a consequence of the passing of the Sex Disqualification Removal Act, women were admitted for the first time to the Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries.Footnote ²⁴

One of Stephenson’s oldest and closest friends was Montague S Giuseppi, likewise a Fellow of the Society and a leading light in the Surrey Archaeological Society, in which Stephenson was himself active. Giuseppi, who had been born in 1869, was a clerk and later an assistant keeper in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, and in 1923 published what was for long to be the standard Guide to the Manuscripts in the Public Record Office.Footnote ²⁵ He enjoyed a distinguished career both as an editor and as a compiler of calendars of manuscripts collections, contributing several volumes of the Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Salisbury preserved at Hatfield House and editing the first volume of the Chertsey Cartularies.Footnote ²⁶ In 1897 he followed Stephenson as secretary of the Surrey Archaeological Society, serving in that capacity for thirteen years, and he was later to be founder of the Surrey Record Society.Footnote ²⁷ Early in the new century he and his wife, Emilie, are recorded as living in Lewin Rd, Streatham, not far from Stephenson’s house in Tooting, although later they were to move to Burlington Avenue, Kew.Footnote ²⁸ Giuseppi’s son John was to follow in his father’s footsteps both as a Fellow of the Antiquaries and a member of the Surrey Archaeological Society, and was to write the authoritative history of the Bank of England.Footnote ²⁹ Giuseppi senior was to write obituaries of Stephenson for both The Antiquaries Journal and the Surrey Archaeological Collections, his piece in the former ably summing up Stephenson’s strengths and weaknesses as a scholar. The two men are shown seated together and clearly enjoying each other’s company in a photograph of about 1930 (fig 3). Stephenson was to leave Giuseppi a bequest of £100 in his will.Footnote ³⁰

Fig 3.

Mill Stephenson (left) and his friend, Montague Giuseppi (right) in a photograph of about 1930. Image: H Martin Stuchfield.

Another close friend of Stephenson’s and a collaborator of his in compiling the List was Ralph Hare Griffin, likewise a Fellow of the Society, its Secretary (1921–9) and an antiquary and genealogist of note. Born in 1854 at Ospringe, Kent, the son of the Rev W N Griffin, vicar of Ospringe and a founder member of the Cambridge Camden Society, he was educated at Tonbridge School and St John’s College, Cambridge. In 1881 he was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, and he practised intermittently until 1890, when he was appointed registrar of designs and trade marks at the Patent Office, a post in which he was to serve until his retirement in 1920.Footnote ³¹ For most of his working years he lived, as Stephenson did, in south London, in his case at 7 Tresillian Rd, Brockley, although in retirement he was to move to Circus Rd in St John’s Wood.Footnote ³² Throughout his life he published extensively on brasses, particularly those of his native Kent, and he collaborated with Stephenson on the List of Monumental Brasses Remaining in the County of Kent in 1922 – with Stephenson, on Griffin’s admission, writing most of the text and Griffin himself concentrating on the fieldwork.Footnote ³³ Stephenson had long been of assistance to Griffin in his searches of Kent churches, and as early as 1909 he had told Miller Christy that he had been ‘gathering material for a paper on some Sidney tombs and brasses which Ralph Griffin is preparing for the Transactions’.Footnote ³⁴ Sharing something of Stephenson’s enthusiasm for sorting and cataloguing collections of rubbings, Griffin took a particular interest in cataloguing the collection of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, largely completing the coverage of brasses in Britain and assembling by the end some 6,000 rubbings of the high standard he always sought.Footnote ³⁵

Stephenson found many other of his friends and associates in the ranks of the newly founded Monumental Brass Society, a body originally established in 1887 as the Cambridge University Association of Brass Collectors and in the next decade relaunched under its later name as a national body. He had joined the society on or shortly after its foundation, and he was to become successively a member of its council, editor of the Transactions and honorary secretary and treasurer.Footnote ³⁶ At its convivial meetings in Sackville St, Piccadilly, Stephenson would have encountered such significant figures as Rev W F Creeny, the first president of the society and an authority on Continental brasses, Rev Herbert Macklin, who followed Creeny as president, and Harold Sanderson, a Bedford schoolmaster who made a significant study of the brasses of Lincoln Cathedral, all of them men either already engaged in identifying and recording brasses or gaining their apprenticeship in so doing.Footnote ³⁷ By 1900 Stephenson was rapidly gaining respect as an authority on brasses in his own right, and he was to be active in the running of the society until the years of its demise in the First World War.

At the same time, however, Stephenson was also gaining a reputation for his considerable expertise in the field of Roman and medieval antiquities, and in archaeology more generally. In 1888, when he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, it was for, as his Blue Paper put it, his ‘general knowledge of medieval antiquities especially of monumental remains and heraldry’. Among his sponsors were Harold Dillon (later Viscount Dillon, a future President of the Society and an authority on armour), Henry Farnham Burke (a herald and expert on genealogy), J G Waller (a designer and restorer of brasses), J T Micklethwait (surveyor of the fabric of Westminster Abbey) and Rev W F Creeny.Footnote ³⁸

At the time of his election, however, the organisation in which he was probably most heavily involved was the Surrey Archaeological Society, a body whose affairs were then run largely from an office at Danes Inn, Strand, under Stephenson’s aegis as honorary secretary. For some time, it had been the society’s ambition to move to more conveniently located rooms in Castle Arch, Guildford, and it was thanks largely to Stevenson’s work that this was finally achieved in 1898, the year after his resignation.Footnote ³⁹ Of all the society’s officers, it was probably Stephenson – who proved himself an able administrator – who did most to keep the society afloat in this difficult period. Although he was to remain active in the society, both leading the excavation of a Roman villa at Compton in 1914 and serving as a vice-president from 1930, he was keen to reduce his commitment because he was already at this time becoming more involved in the Society of Antiquaries.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here too his business acumen and sound administrative sense were both quickly appreciated, and he was elected to the Society’s Council seven times between 1894 and 1908; he also served on the Research Committee and intermittently on both the Executive and the Library committees. It was in recognition of his administrative capacity as well as his knowledge of Roman antiquities that in 1890 he was appointed superintendent of the Society’s excavations at Roman Silchester, which began that year. He quickly elicited admiration for his administrative competence, his invariable good humour in directing the workmen and even, in one season, his willingness to act as his own foreman. It was characteristic of him, however, that not once did he seek either credit or recognition for his work. His modesty was a quality much commented on by his friends and associates. Throughout the twenty years in which he was in day-to-day charge at Silchester, it was only in the reports of the last four seasons that he allowed his name to be mentioned.Footnote ⁴¹

Another quality of Stephenson’s that elicited the admiration of his contemporaries was his industry. Alongside his involvement in the excavations at Silchester, he was also developing an increasing interest in the Antiquaries’ extensive collections of manuscripts, antiquities and objets d’art; and typically, after attending meetings in the morning, he would take his seat in the Inner Library, a room that came to be known as ‘Mill’s parlour’, and there immerse himself in these treasures. He took a particular interest in the collections of rolls of arms, and, with his friend Ralph Griffin, co-authored a paper on the roll of c 1540 that the two were to publish in Archaeologia.Footnote ⁴² Stephenson was a regular visitor to the Library right through to the mid-1930s, and at the time of his death he was involved in cataloguing and arranging its folders of Roland Paul drawings.

PREPARING FOR AND LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR THE LIST

Of all the Society’s collections, however, the one in which he was to immerse himself most deeply was its collection of brass rubbings, the largest such in the country, and the one of greatest historic value. At its core, then as now, was a collection of some 3,000 rubbings that Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks had left to the Society at his death, which consisted not only of Franks’s own rubbings but also those made by such luminaries as Herbert Haines, J G Nichols, Albert Way and, in East Anglia, Edmund Farrer, all of whose collections Franks had acquired. In addition to the rubbings, there was also a selection of ‘dabbings’ – that is to say, reproductions made using a wash leather and graphite – which were the work of such late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pioneers as Thomas Fisher and William Alexander. Stephenson sorted and catalogued both the rubbings and the dabbings, arranging them by county, and within county by alphabetical order, and storing them in the big blue portfolios in which they are still kept today.Footnote ⁴³ In a letter to Miller Christy written in 1906, Stephenson described himself as ‘guardian angel’ of the collection.Footnote ⁴⁴ Whenever he spotted gaps in its coverage, he took action to fill these either by making and donating rubbings of his own or by eliciting rubbings from friends and acquaintances, among these Herbert Macklin, W H Knowles, W J Kaye, W Wade Porteous, Miller Christy, Ralph Griffin and J Challenor Smith.Footnote ⁴⁵ He even, on at least one occasion and then unsuccessfully, tried to persuade the Society to buy rubbings.Footnote ⁴⁶

Although he was much preoccupied by his work at the Antiquaries, whether attending meetings or cataloguing its collections, Stephenson was also often out and about, identifying and inspecting brasses himself, noting the heraldry on them and recording their condition and location.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the fortunate possession of ample means that he had inherited from his father, he was able to devote himself full-time to the task of recording. Enjoying formidable powers of memory and having a sharp eye for detail, he was someone ideally suited to undertake this sort of work. He took a particular interest in the recording of palimpsests – brasses that had been taken up, turned over and reused. In the 1890s he compiled a catalogue of all the palimpsest brasses in Britain by then identified, which was published in parts in the Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society between 1900 and 1903, and in 1903 conveniently reissued in book form.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the matter of brasses more generally, his first published piece was a short article in the Surrey Archaeological Collections on the brass commemorating Ann Norbury at Stoke d’Abernon.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was to be followed between 1912 and 1920 in the same journal by a fully illustrated catalogue of the brasses of Surrey, a series of articles that displayed to the full his powers of precise observation, careful description and accurate recording of heraldry. The articles, which were later brought together in book form, also bore witness to his interest in genealogy and his willingness to delve into wills as sources for the lives of those commemorated.Footnote ⁵⁰ Before his Surrey work was completed, Stephenson also undertook comprehensive surveys of two other counties – Shropshire, whose brasses he wrote up in two articles in 1895, and his native Yorkshire, which he made the subject of three articles in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal.Footnote ⁵¹

These early works show clearly that it was in the related areas of listing and collating that Stephenson’s greatest strengths were to lie. He was never a man much given to speculative thought, and he freely admitted that he lacked the imagination to take in any of the more recent or adventurous developments in his fields: as Giuseppi was to write in his obituary, his preference was always for the practical, not the reflective, side of things.Footnote ⁵² For this reason, he never attempted to write a big synoptic study of brasses of the kind that Haines had written so successfully in the mid-nineteenth century and of which Macklin was to essay a smaller version in 1890. In some ways he was a man extraordinarily well qualified to undertake such a task: his mastery of his field was unrivalled, and his ability to recall the details of the date and location of brasses was second to none. But he lacked the capacity to stand back, conceptualise and evaluate, and he was rarely tempted into reflecting on the meaning and interpretation of the memorials he was looking at. He was happy to carry on as he had started in the 1880s, engaged in the tasks of listing, collating and cataloguing.

Exactly when and in what circumstances he first conceived the idea of compiling a full national list of brasses is now very difficult to say. To judge from his correspondence with Miller Christy, in the 1890s and early 1900s he was still heavily involved in his work on palimpsests; on one occasion he told his correspondent: ‘I … want anything palimpsest for my palimp[sest] paper. Essex comes next into the list.’Footnote ⁵³ Yet at the same time there are hints of a possible change of direction and the nurturing of an ambition to revise Haines. In December 1899 he wrote to Christy: ‘I am labouring away at a Norfolk list for my new Haines, it is a tough job, 1142 entries and a few notes on lost ones.’ A decade later, he was to tell Christy that he was by now on what he called ‘the final revision’ of Haines’s lists for Norfolk, which would shortly be ready for the printer. How exactly he was producing this Norfolk list, whether it ever reached the printer and whether he was simultaneously working on other counties are questions that cannot now be properly answered. Within a couple of years, however, his thoughts on how to proceed were evidently developing along different lines. On 27 July 1913 he wrote to Christy telling him that he was ‘engaged on a card catalogue of brasses arranged chronologically and [had] just finished Essex. It is based upon existing examples and known rubbings of lost things. I have also extracted all details which may be useful in the way of canopies, merchants’ marks and such like things’. There are hints here of the methodology that he was to adopt in the List: that is to say, of providing full information about canopies, devices or symbols, and other accessories. But any notion that he may have had of a chronological approach was soon to be abandoned. The List, as it was published in 1926, was based, as Haines’s had been, topographically, first by county and then alphabetically within counties. In the years to the First World War Stephenson was constantly experimenting and trying out first one approach and then another; yet, informing all his changes of mind was the evident ambition to produce a full national list to replace Haines’s.

PRODUCING THE LIST

In the world of antiquarian studies the idea of revising and eventually replacing Haines’s work was one with a long history behind it. The first such attempt had been made in the 1840s, while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, by the keen young antiquary, Charles Robert Manning, later rector of Diss and canon of Norwich. His was a free-standing volume, published in London, and extended to ninety-four pages.Footnote ⁵⁴ A pioneering work, it displayed all the strengths and weaknesses of these early efforts, bringing together a great deal of information but giving it in minimal form, arranged in columns and suffering inevitably from many omissions. For all its shortcomings, it was yet a work on which Herbert Haines was to draw in the 1850s when he embarked on his own list, which was included as the second part of his Manual of Monumental Brasses, published in 1861.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the first edition of his work, which had appeared in 1848, Haines had confined himself to listing only the brasses of which he could find rubbings in the Oxford Architectural Society’s collection.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the second and expanded edition, however, he went further, drawing on a much wider range of sources. To understand the relationship between Stephenson’s work and Haines’s, and to appreciate both Haines’s achievement and the ways in which Stephenson built on it, it is useful to compare just one example of the two men’s practices in recording. Let us look at their treatment of the brasses at Shere in Surrey, beginning with what Haines wrote:

Stephenson’s treatment of the same is as follows:

In each instance, the entry conveys in concise form: details of the identity of the person commemorated; his or her date of death and the date of engraving should this be different from date of death; the components of which the brass is made up; its condition and its location in the church; and details of where an illustration might be found.Footnote ⁵⁹ The four main respects in which Stephenson improves on Haines’s work are these: first, he is more comprehensive and records brasses overlooked by Haines; second, his entry takes in inscriptions unaccompanied by figures; third, he indicates the attire of the male figures; and, fourth, he updates the bibliographical information supplied. Haines had anticipated questions of attire in a note at the beginning of his list, in which he explained that, unless otherwise indicated, it should be assumed that pre-1550 knights, esquires and gentlemen were shown in armour and those after that in civilian attire: a generalisation not actually valid either before or after his rather arbitrarily chosen date. Haines’s main sources of information, other than Charles Manning’s earlier List and his own wide knowledge of the subject preserved in his large collection of rubbings, were Sir Augustus Franks, himself a keen student of brasses and collector of rubbings, Charles Boutell, whose Monumental Brasses of England had appeared in 1849, J B Nichols, publisher and antiquary, and H N Evans, an old family friend.Footnote ⁶⁰ Haines was more than aware of the inadequacies of his list, and in his introductory note drew attention to some of its shortcomings. He explained that he was using an asterisk to indicate where he was reliant on information from others and a dagger sign to highlight where the accuracy of his information was open to question. A number of his readers were likewise aware of the inadequacies of the list, and as early as 1882 notes of amendments to it began appearing in the Antiquary. In the second volume of the newly founded Monumental Brass Society’s Transactions, a couple of sets of revisions were published by Harold Sanderson.Footnote ⁶¹ At the same time, members of the Society began speaking of what they saw as the need for a completely new list. In the 1880s Wade Porteous, a collaborator of Miller Christy’s, began compiling his own list of additions and amendments to Haines’s list of Essex brasses.Footnote ⁶² In the run-up to the First World War, however, not one enthusiast rose to the challenge of producing a full national list. When Macklin’s best-selling Monumental Brasses was published in 1890, it was rounded off by no more than brief county by county and century by century overviews of churches with good selections of brasses.Footnote ⁶³ Only when the book was revised and reissued for its sixth edition in 1913 was this overview expanded to take in a listing of every church with a figure brass and brief details of the brasses themselves: whether an armoured figure was represented or a civilian; whether the figure was shown kneeling; and whether or not there were accessories such as a canopy.Footnote ⁶⁴ No information was offered about either the person or persons commemorated or the location of the brass in the church. Nor were any fresh searches of churches undertaken. The field was clear for a scholar with an aptitude for collecting and collating to begin afresh; and that scholar was to be Mill Stephenson.

Some idea of how Stephenson set about his task can be gained from his notes and working papers in the Society of Antiquaries. The key resource on which he based himself was the great collection of rubbings in the Society’s Library. He knew the collection intimately and he had long been involved in its cataloguing.Footnote ⁶⁵ He also drew on his knowledge of the brasses in the ownership of the British Museum and other museums and learned societies to build on Haines’s listing of these important non-church collections; moreover, by virtue of his friendship with so many other antiquaries and fellow enthusiasts, he was able to add a category that Haines had not included, that of brasses in private possession.Footnote ⁶⁶

By the time he began work, he was much aided in his labours by the appearance of a number of books of varying quality by local antiquaries on the brasses of their particular counties. He was able to draw, for example, on Dunkin’s excellent study of the brasses of Cornwall, Belcher’s rather erratic study of those of Kent and Hudson’s and Thornely’s altogether more mediocre surveys of those of Northamptonshire and Lancashire respectively.Footnote ⁶⁷ Stephenson could also draw extensively on the numerous articles on brasses published in local historical and archaeological periodicals. It is clear, too, that where appropriate he drew freely on relevant material in the big seventeenth- and eighteenth-county histories such as those of Dugdale on Warwickshire and Nichols on Leicestershire.Footnote ⁶⁸ He himself, as we have seen, had personally surveyed the brasses of three counties, those of Shropshire, Surrey and Yorkshire. He continued regularly to journey around inspecting brasses and making rubbings, especially in the Home Counties, in particular in the years to the outbreak of the First World War.Footnote ⁶⁹

If the foundation of his work was provided by the Antiquaries’ collections and the many printed works at his disposal, increasingly, as he went on, he became aware of the gaps in recording that were to be filled in. To make good these omissions and to obtain information that he was otherwise lacking, he enlisted a willing army of collaborators to whom he deputed a host of tasks. His oldest and most trusted helper was the indefatigable Ralph Griffin, whom, from his desk in the Inner Library, he despatched on innumerable trips by car to often distant churches to make rubbings of brasses. Another regular assistant was W J Kaye, a Monumental Brass Society member resident in Harrogate, who kept Stephenson supplied with rubbings from Lincolnshire and the north of England.Footnote ⁷⁰ Other helpers again were A B Connor, who assisted with Somerset, and C J P Cave, who supplied Stephenson with information about Hampshire.Footnote ⁷¹ Stephenson was a prolific correspondent and he bombarded friends and acquaintances with enquiries about and requests for rubbings of the brasses in their areas.Footnote ⁷² In May 1913, for example, he wrote to Vyvyan Hope, then an undergraduate at Oxford, requesting that he make ‘rubbings of the stone (16 × 23) and the remains of the two English verses’ in the church of St Peter-in-the-East in that city.Footnote ⁷³ Once he had seen rubbings and had gathered all the information that he needed about the brasses in a church, in his characteristic copperplate handwriting he would compose a draft entry on loose-leaf unlined sheets of quarto size paper, using one sheet per brass (fig 4).Footnote ⁷⁴ Bringing the information on these sheets together county by county, he gradually built up his book. Broadly speaking, as we have seen, Stephenson followed Haines’s conventions for the presentation of his material: that is to say, he gave in abbreviated form full details of the person or persons commemorated, those persons’ attire, the date of the brass and whether the brass was large or small; he even followed Haines’s practice of printing the date of death of the commemorated in bold. In addition, however, he added more information about the components of the memorial, its condition and its location in the church and, if he had such information, something about the status or occupation of the persons commemorated. He might also make a note of kinship between persons commemorated.Footnote ⁷⁵ Stephenson’s gift was to alight on a form of presentation that was both uniform and concise and that told the reader all the information that he or she might need in order to form an impression of the brass in their mind’s eye.

Fig 4.

Stephenson’s draft of his List entry for the brass of Laurence Pygot and his wife, 1450, at Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Image: author, reproduced with permission of Society of Antiquaries of London.

STEPHENSON’S ACHIEVEMENT

Probably because the List was published not by a commercial publisher but by the Society of Antiquaries, it attracted far less contemporary attention than might be supposed. It lacked even the resources of the Monumental Brass Society to assist with promotion because the Society was at that time in abeyance. The List was nonetheless to be regarded as a landmark work, an essential reference book for all with an interest in brasses.

Its strengths were many. Above all, it extended and settled the definition of what a brass actually was. Haines in his earlier compilation had confined his attention almost entirely to figure brasses and only rarely took note of inscriptions alone. Stephenson broke new ground with his decision to include every inscription and every coat of arms accompanied by an inscription. Bearing in mind the scale of the searching involved, remarkably few brasses escaped his attention and that of his assistants. If a broken and despoiled Purbeck marble slab had just one or two separate inlay letters remaining, it was included.Footnote ⁷⁶ As Ralph Griffin was later to write: ‘To the problem “when is a brass not a brass?”, Stephenson gave a clear and emphatic answer: “a brass is a brass and that was the end of it”.’Footnote ⁷⁷ It was this breadth and satisfying comprehensiveness that gave the List its authority. Stephenson’s inventory of the brasses of Norfolk, a county especially rich in small inscription plates, was to be more than double the length of Haines’s. Stephenson, unlike Haines, did not include Gothic Revival brasses, but from the period before his chosen cut-off point in the late eighteenth century there was scarcely a brass that slipped through his net.Footnote ⁷⁸

Another strength of the List was the attention that it gave to palimpsests: that is to say, to brasses that had been reused. Many of the better-quality post Reformation brasses fell into this category as spoil from monasteries that had been closed down and cleared. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of palimpsests, of which he had been compiling lists for many years, Stephenson made a point of noting if a brass was of this sort, and, if it was and if it had been lifted and its reverse recorded, it was his practice to give a full account of the reverse. A good example of his recording technique here is afforded by this description of a brass at Binfield in Berkshire:

From this description the reader can deduce that the component parts of the brass were engraved on the reverse of at least two different plates, one probably from a dissolved monastery and the other most likely from a cleared or demolished church in London. In many other of his entries on palimpsests, Stephenson indicated whether, as was often the case in the sixteenth century, the reused brass came from a Continental church, in most such instances a dissolved monastery or war-wrecked parish church in the Low Countries.

Alert to what he saw and blessed with a retentive memory, Stephenson also had a sharp eye for what might be termed oddities in the design of brasses. As he realised, in certain parts of the country there were brasses – sometimes lots of brasses – that stood out as different in look: they might handle the drapery in their own distinctive way, they might display eccentricities in the representation of armour or the placement of children, or they might have their own particular conventions for the representation of facial features. Haines, seventy years earlier, had himself been sensitive to these local variations in the way the human figure was represented. When he spotted a figure that stood out as different, he recorded it in his list as ‘peculiar’ or of ‘peculiar style’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Stephenson, rejecting Haines’s term, opted instead for another word: ‘local’. His choice was significant because it demonstrated his appreciation of the crucial point that these brasses were generally not products of the London workshops, as most brasses were; they were of provincial origin. In some parts of England, in Norfolk for example, it was precisely brasses of this sort that came to dominate the market, and in Stephenson’s List they are all duly recorded as ‘local’. Stephenson was equally appreciative of the fact that it was locally based workshops that were responsible for the huge output of small inscription plates in the eastern counties; and, noting the distinctive way in which these represented letter forms, he duly recorded these too as ‘local’.Footnote ⁸¹ It was not only in East Anglia, however, that in the late Middle Ages local workshops were operative; it was also in other parts of the country. Stephenson was generally more appreciative than Haines of these other non-London sources of output. In Warwickshire, for example, he recognised that the brasses at Aston, Coleshill, Compton Verney, Coughton, Middleton and Whatcote were all ‘local’ products; Haines, with less adequate and comprehensive information at his disposal, had picked up only the first, second and fifth of these.Footnote ⁸² Stephenson was generally quick also to pick up close similarities between brasses where these existed. He noticed, for example, the similarity between the early fifteenth-century armed figures at Little Shelford in Cambridgeshire and Great Tew in Oxfordshire, and in Kent the likeness between the small cross brasses at Hever and Penshurst. He alighted as well on the curiosity of the tall, puffed hats on the civilian figures at Rodmarton, Gloucestershire, and St Peter’s, Chester – the hats of apprentices at law as we now recognise them.Footnote ⁸³ Sometimes he was apt to slip into error when deciding between local and mainstream work. Thus he wrongly identified as ‘local’ a handful of early sixteenth-century brasses that are now regarded as products of the prolific London workshop known as style F: examples are afforded by the brasses of a kneeling lady with her children at Diddington, Huntingdonshire, a lady with groups of children at Burnham Westgate, Norfolk, and an armed figure at Nettlestead, Suffolk.Footnote ⁸⁴ Such slips are understandable in the case of brasses that are sometimes marked by shoddy execution and inadequate managerial oversight. Stephenson’s biggest failing, however, was not so much the occasional misattribution as a distinct lack of curiosity about the design of brasses and how brasses of like appearance and design might be grouped together in series to indicate workshop origin. Crucially, he failed to make the important breakthrough, which J P C Kent was to make some thirty years later, in thinking about ‘style’ or workshop as a means to the classification of brasses.Footnote ⁸⁵

In this respect, Stephenson’s strength as a cataloguer and collator was also simultaneously his greatest weakness: he stuck rigidly – perhaps all too rigidly – to his brief of recording brasses; he noted what he saw, and he did this extremely well, but he never gave any thought to how the study of brasses might be fitted into the broader history of funerary commemoration. It was this narrowness of vision that was principally responsible for what in hindsight may seem perhaps the biggest weakness of his List; and that is the inconsistency in its recording of indents. Many more brasses were laid down in churches in the medieval and early modern periods than have come down to us today. Some were ripped up in the Edwardian Reformation, their religious imagery giving offence, others were destroyed in the Civil War and Interregnum because their requests for prayers for the soul were objected to by the Puritans, while others again simply fell victim to wear and tear. Yet in a great many cases the stones in which these brasses were once laid have survived and from the outlines or ‘indents’ in them an impression can be formed of the lost memorial. Stephenson, although alert to indents and often drawing attention to them in correspondence, was inconsistent in his practice in recording them.Footnote ⁸⁶ For a handful of, mainly southern, counties he appended quite lengthy lists at the end of the catalogue of brasses for each county, generally in such cases showing his reliance on local sources of information. The list for Essex, for example, which extends to over a page, is heavily indebted to the searches undertaken locally for him by the Essex antiquary, Miller Christy. The list for Kent was reliant in a similar way on the searches of his friend and collaborator, Ralph Griffin, who knew the churches of Kent intimately. For many other counties, however, the listing of indents was both more patchy and more erratic. If Stephenson happened to be compiling an entry for a church with extant brasses, he might well record an indent or indents if such were known to him. In his entry for Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, for example, he noted that, in addition to the single remaining figure and three inscription brasses, there was also an indent for a chalice and inscription in the south aisle.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the case of Burton Pedwardine, Lincolnshire, he noted that, in addition to the single figure brass of 1631, there was also a fine early fourteenth-century indent of a lady commemorating the wife of the rebuilder of the church.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet for as many or more churches with brasses in respect of which he did record indents, there were churches likewise endowed in respect of which he did not. In the case of Chichester Cathedral, for example, where he recorded the four remaining brasses, all of them small and late, he yet overlooked the fine series of well-preserved clerical indents at the east end of the nave.Footnote ⁸⁹ In the case of his long entry for Boston, Lincolnshire, where he recorded no fewer than seventeen brasses, many of them simple inscriptions, he yet ignored the magnificent collection of slabs, one of the finest such in the country.Footnote ⁹⁰ In instances such as these it seems likely that he was relying on information fed to him by local informants whose own practice in the recording of indents was inconsistent. Where he was not compiling an entry for a church with brasses, it was generally his practice to record such indents as he knew of in a section at the end of each county list. Thus at the end of his catalogue for Cambridgeshire, he noted the following few indents: two at Cherry Hinton and Rampton for cross brasses, a large one of a priest under a canopy at Bottisham, one at Pampisford of a chalice brass, and a couple at Swaffham Bulbeck of civilians and their wives.Footnote ⁹¹ Stephenson’s uncertainty in his recording and collating of indents is hard to explain, when his correspondence reveals him to have been more than aware of the importance of these despoiled stones. It is possible that he was motivated by a concern to save space and reduce his task to manageable proportions. It is understandable in this connection that in the case of churches where the slabs had already been recorded and published, he should refer the reader to that published work. Such was his practice in dealing with the extensive series of indents in the cathedrals of Ely, Lincoln and Rochester.Footnote ⁹² All the same, his overall inconsistency of treatment is the more surprising in the light of the fact that there were rubbings or dabbings of indents to be found in the Antiquaries’ own collections. In one of the Antiquaries’ portfolios, for example, there is a rubbing of the indent of a magnificent canopied brass at Tattershall, Lincolnshire, yet no indents at all at Tattershall are recorded in Stephenson’s catalogue entry for that church.Footnote ⁹³ Stephenson’s conception of his task, which limited him to recording brasses and brasses alone, blinded him to the importance of indents as a source for a wider understanding of the history of commemoration by two-dimensional latten memorials.

Within its own narrowly defined terms of reference, however, Stephenson’s List set entirely new standards for the recording of brasses, figural and non-figural. As Ralph Griffin was to write later: ‘it exhibited in the highest degree the painstaking accuracy which made him a scholar as worthy … as any in his time.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Stephenson, however, in his later years was by no means inclined to rest on his laurels. He regarded the recording of brasses as a process not an end, so, as and when new information came to him, he entered it in an interleaved copy of the List that he deposited in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries, where it remains.Footnote ⁹⁵ After his death Ralph Griffin brought together these annotations, along with various errata and corrigenda that Stephenson had noted on his text, within the covers of a small book that was privately printed and distributed by him and Montague Giuseppi.Footnote ⁹⁶

It was not until nearly forty years later that any further systematic work was done on the searching out and recording of brasses. In the wake of the great brass rubbing boom of the 1960s and in the light of new discoveries and the growing practice of recording indents, the need was felt for a complete revision of Stephenson’s work. In 1968 the Council of the Monumental Brass Society set up a Mill Stephenson Revision Committee under the chairmanship of John Page-Phillips, and fieldwork was begun under the supervision of regional controllers. This time, in a significant departure from Stephenson’s practice, the chronological coverage was extended beyond the traditional cut-off point of the mid-eighteenth century to take in brasses of the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century. Brasses now lost but recorded by antiquaries were also to be included ‘where practicable’. After a brisk start, work on the new project faltered, however, and by 1977 no more than a single volume of revisions had been published, that for Warwickshire. In the early 1980s it was decided to make a fresh start under the direction of Fr Jerome Bertram and J Roger Greenwood, and the goal was set, for a trial period of two years, of issuing up to fifty sheets of revision to the Society’s members as part of their subscription. Once again, however, the project proved over-ambitious and, as the brass rubbing boom went into decline, so the process again faltered. After a decade of desultory endeavour, very little had been achieved.Footnote ⁹⁷

When the process of revision was next set in motion, in the 1990s, it was to be in very different hands and in an initiative entirely independent of the Monumental Brass Society. It came in the form of a plan for a series of completely new county-by-county listings, one volume per county, under the overall direction of Martin Stuchfield, William Lack and Philip Whittemore, FSA. The plan was that Stuchfield would do the bulk of the recording, Whittemore would comb the antiquarian sources for references to lost brasses and Lack would actually produce the volumes. The co-editors’ intention was greatly to extend Stephenson’s range by both taking in all brasses, whether figural or inscriptions, right down to the present day and at the same time making good Stephenson’s key omission, that of indents and fragments of indents. Above all, in an age with high expectation of illustrations, the new books would feature illustrations of every one of the figure brasses listed. The project was an ambitious one, but, backed by Martin Stuchfield’s energy and determination, it succeeded. The first volume, on Bedfordshire, was published in 1992 and to date a total of eighteen have appeared; several more, on the eastern counties, are to appear shortly.Footnote ⁹⁸ Such is the popularity of these volumes that the costs of production are largely, although not entirely, offset by income from sales. The County Series, as it has come to be known, is one of the great recording enterprises of our time.

How are we to evaluate its achievement? Although it implicitly acknowledges Stephenson’s inspiration, follows his system of numbering and adopts much of his method of presentation, it actually constitutes a substantially new approach to recording. Typically, an entry for a church consists of four main parts: a list of all the brasses that Stephenson himself recorded, but this time adding information about workshop or ‘style’; a list of additions to Stephenson’s list, principally those consisting of inscriptions alone; a note of any indents in the church and also of brasses no longer extant but known about; and, finally, a summary of the antiquarian sources for that church’s brasses. As in Stephenson’s List, there is a record of all the works in which a brass has been illustrated.

Mention has already been made of the greatest advance that the County Series makes on Stephenson’s List, and that is to illustrate every extant figure brass, in the earlier volumes exclusively from rubbings and in the later ones, where helpful, from direct photographs too. This adds immeasurably to the value of the books, bringing many lesser known brasses to notice for the first time and often rendering it unnecessary for an interested reader to make a personal visit to a church. The sheer comprehensiveness of the information provided has made the County Series volumes essential research tools for any scholar seeking to gain an overall picture of funerary commemoration down to the sixteenth century. With indents now systematically recorded, moreover, and antiquarian sources thoroughly trawled, it is possible for the first time both to gain a clearer picture of the national distribution of brasses and to get a sense of the scale of loss over time. As coverage by the series is gradually extended and the brass-rich counties of eastern England are taken in, so the value of these books will increase still further.

One characteristic of the volumes that has been much commented on is their increasing size. The first volume, on Bedfordshire, extended to just 114 pages, while that on Hertfordshire, a relatively recent addition to the series, runs to no fewer than 758.Footnote ⁹⁹ Both counties are brass-rich, and Hertfordshire contains the treasure-house of St Albans Abbey; yet even so, considering their approximate parity of size, the contrast is huge. There are two main reasons for this huge expansion: first, the decision to include and illustrate all modern effigial brasses – that is to say, effigial brasses dating from and after the revival of brass engraving in the nineteenth century, a category omitted by Stephenson – and, second, and connected with this, the gradual extension of recording to take in all modern, as well as pre-modern, inscription plates regardless of whether they are found on floor, wall, bench, lectern or door. The result is to include a large number of entries that will be of little or no interest to students of pre-modern commemoration, who probably constitute the main users of the volumes, but may still be of value to genealogists and family historians. The methodology of the series takes to extremes Ralph Griffin’s dictum of ‘a brass is a brass, and that is the end of the matter’. It raises important questions, however, about the intellectual basis of the separate recording of brasses – the recording of brasses to the exclusion of other forms of monument.

The modern study of brasses as a commemorative medium can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century when brass rubbing first began as a popular pursuit among the ecclesiologically minded middle classes of the day. It gained traction in the wake of the Catholic revival in the Church of England as interest grew in the Middle Ages and an awareness developed of the value of brasses for the study of such subjects as armour, civilian costume and heraldry. The publication of books of engravings of brasses both attested to the considerable popularity of brasses among the historically minded public and encouraged yet further interest by making illustrations of the best examples more widely available. Substantial collections of rubbings were built up by such scholars as Herbert Haines and Sir A W Franks.

The effect of the popularity of brass rubbing and the boost that it gave to the study of brasses was to have an unfortunate side-effect, however, in the separation of brass recording from the wider study of funerary sculpture in the sense of sculpture in the round.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ No major scholarly work on sculpted tomb monuments in England was to appear until the publication in 1912 of Prior and Gardner’s important, yet modestly entitled, monograph, An Account of Medieval Sculpture in England.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The success of that work and the recognition that it received was to have the consequence of encouraging the absorption of the study of sculpted tomb effigies into the field of art history, so reinforcing its separation from the study of brasses. There is no evidence that such active antiquaries as Mill Stephenson and Ralph Griffin took any serious interest at all in the sculpted monuments that formed the market counterparts of the brasses which they were so assiduously recording. The unfortunate result was that a delay of half-a-century was to occur before the kind of art historical methodology then being applied to the study of sculpted monuments was carried over into the study of brasses, and then a further delay before its insights were fully absorbed by those most keenly interested in brasses.

The idea of the separate recording of brasses on a county-by-county basis, therefore, is an approach that has its origins in nineteenth-century developments in the subject which were largely unfortunate in their wider consequences and which are only today being overcome. To highlight this limitation is not in any way to deny or depreciate the scholarly value of the County Series, which is enormous, but rather to draw attention to the need for a recording enterprise of similar ambition directed to other forms of funerary commemoration. As increasing numbers of churches are declared redundant, and as wear and tear mounts in those which remain open, so the danger steadily increases that tomb monuments will be either lost or moved before they are properly photographed and recorded. It is all too easy to this background to think principally of monuments sculpted in the round, as these are usually the most eye-catching of the genre. Sight should not be lost, however, of incised slabs, which are so often treated as the poor relations of brasses, and which have been the subject of little systematic attention in the half-century since Frank Greenhill’s pioneering studies in the field.Footnote ¹⁰² The enduring quality of Mill Stephenson’s work a century ago in the recording of brasses should act both as a spur and an inspiration to the undertaking of similar activity today directed to a wider programme of recording these other forms of monument.