MARVELS OF THE MINSTER: Local historian DAVID MORGAN has got his Brasso out and has polished up some traces of Croydon’s fashionable medieval, Tudor and Stuart past
High church: Sylvester Gabriel’s memorial illustrates how medieval clerics were dressed
Croydon Minster is, of course, a House of Prayer. Less well-known is that it has also been a House of Historical Fashion.
If all the Minster’s many brass monuments had survived the years, then students of historic fashion might have been regularly wending their way down Church Street for visits.
Lace ruffs, buckled shoes, doublets and knee-breeches would have been the attractions. Sadly, the disastrous fire of 1867 together with light-fingered workmen involved in the 1859 church restoration means that only one large brass figure still exists today.
Now attached to the south wall of the chancel, this brass is a memorial to Sylvester Gabriel, who died on October 4, 1512, just three years into the reign of Henry VIII. It seems that Gabriel’s brass memorial survived not only the great fire in Croydon Parish Church, but also the destruction of King Henry’s Reformation.
Gabriel had been a Rector at Wyberton in Lincolnshire and Folkington in Sussex, and was also a Canon at Chichester Cathedral and one of the first Masters of Clare College, Cambridge.
The brass would have originally covered the cleric’s grave. It may have survived the worst effects of the fire 150 years ago because the tomb will have been in the church crypt. It is not known when the brass was moved to its current position in the Minster.
It is fascinating in its detail. The brass figure is tonsured with long hair on the sides of his head. He is wearing a cassock, surplice, almuce and cope. An almuce is a shoulder cape while a cope is the full-length cloak, made with a semi-circular piece of cloth. Ornamental embroidery strips around the edge of the cope, called orphreys, contain quatrefoil motifs.
The clasp holding the cope together at the chest is of a shell design and is called a morse.
An academic clerk in holy orders, the monument shows the sort of attire that Gabriel would have worn in the later years of his life. Continue reading →
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