I 



THE CHURCH OF NORBURY. 9 1 



to the bar in 1511, knighted in 1516, and made one of the 

 Justices of the Common Pleas in 1522. He died in 1538. 



The monument to Sir Anthony, a large blue stone with brasses, 

 used to be in the gangway of the nave, but was moved into 

 the chancel in 1842. In the centre are effigies of Sir Anthony 

 and his second wife, but the head of the judge is missing. In 

 additi(jn to shields of arms there is a group of five girls below 

 the dame, with their names at their feet — " Dorothe & dame 

 dorothe, Elyzabethe, Alys, & Katheryn.' The first and fourth 

 of these daughters died in childhood, and they are represented 

 of smaller stature than their three other sisters. The indent 

 for the figures of five sons below the father remains, but the 

 brass is missing. Dorothy Willoughby, the judge's first wife, 

 does not appear on this memorial ; there is an inscription to 

 her memory in Middleton church, Warwickshire. The lady by 

 the judge's side is Maud Cotton, his second wife, by whom he 

 had ten children. Below the figures is a Latin epitaph in four- 

 teen lines of Elegiac verse. The composition was originally 

 completed by a marginal inscription, with the evangelistic sym- 

 bols at the angles. Of this inscription only a few fragments 

 remain, but the whole can be recovered from Le Neve's collec- 

 tions.* This remarkable brass was perfect in all its parts until 

 it was removed during the unhappy and destructive restoration 

 of 1842. At that time several of the brasses got loose, and 

 the figure of Sir Anthony and the plate with the Elegiac verses 

 were for a long time lying neglected at the rectory;! and other 

 smaller pieces got stolen. In 1871 I made the discovery that 

 some of the then loose pieces were " palimpsests '' or re-used 

 fragments of older brasses. These prove to be portions of 

 brasses of fourteenth and fifteenth century date that had been 

 despoiled from other churches, one of them being the epitaph 

 of one Thomas, the prior of some religious house. The spoiling 



* It is not necessary to give copies of these inscriptions, or to describe 

 the heraldry and the iialimpsests, as this was done thoroughly bv Mr. St. 

 John Hope' in U. & N. H. S. Journal, iv., 48-56. 



t A distinguished lady writer, niece of the then rector, has told me 

 how she used to play with them. 



