Sunday, November 30, 2008
From the Brazils
This is one of the figures on the monument of Edmund Harman, barber-surgeon to Henry VIII, in Burford parish church. Harman became a prominent Burford resident in the 1540s, when he was one of the beneficiaries of his boss’s dissolution of the country’s monasteries. He and his wife were granted Burford Priory.
Like many a big cheese before and since, he made sure his monument was made well before he died. Dating from 1569, it also commemorates Agnes, ‘his only and most faithful wife’ and their 16 children, only two of whom survived their parents. Quite why the wall plaque is surrounded by figures like this one, whose feathered headdresses seem a long way from standard Oxfordshire attire, is not known. The best guess as to their identity – though there’s been a lot of scholarly argument about it – is that they hail from the banks of the Amazon. They may have been copied from illustrations in a Flemish book that appeared a few years earlier.
But why are they in Burford, on this particular monument? Apparently Agnes Harman’s family included merchant adventurers and perhaps it was her connexion with people who had sailed across the Atlantic that inspired these unlikely carvings, creating in the process one of the many pleasant surprises in this beautiful church on the edge of the Cotswolds.