Introduction

Abstract

In the rural parish churches of England and Wales lie some hundreds of men like Sir Edmund Fettiplace: marmorealised gentlemen stiffly paraded to the public view, often accompanied by their equally rigid wives and small trails of offspring. Although their knightly predecessors were sometimes commemorated in stone, and their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors hung their formal tablets on church walls, it is the gentlemen of Tudor and Stuart England who most assertively demand our attention. If no other evidence had survived about the social structure of early modern England, the tombs would inform us that these men claimed power and influence in their communities and displayed that power proudly in a public context.

Read and record rare Edmund Fetiplace

A knight right worthy of his rank and race

Whose prudent maneage in two happie raignes

Whose publique service and whose private paines

Whose zeale to God, and towards ill severitie,

Whose temperance, whose iustice, whose sinceritie

Whose native myldnes towards great and small

Whose faith and love to frends, wife, children all

In life and death made him beloved and deer

To God and menn and ever famous heer

Blessed in soule, in bodie, goods and name

In plenteous plants by a most vertuous dame

Who with his heire as to his worth still debtor

Built him this tomb, but in her heart a better.

Tomb of Sir Edmund Fettiplace, d.1613, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire