Church Monuments Society

All Saints Carshalton (London Borough of Sutton), where the CMS will be holding its 2026 AGM on Saturday 3^rd October, is largely a Victorian church with sumptuous decoration by Bodley and Garner, and Comper, but preserving a medieval core which may stretch back into the Saxon period. The collapse of a burial vault under the North aisle east bay of the old church was the catalyst for the rebuilding in 1891-3 when many monuments were moved around, including the beautiful mid-eighteenth urn carved by Thomas Carter commemorating Sir George Amyand, of Carshalton House (d.1766, possibly designed by the great architect Sir Robert Taylor). The huge plinth and obelisk commemorating Amyand’s predecessor at Carshalton House, Sir John Fellowes of the South Sea Company (d.1724) keeps it company at the west end of the old South Aisle where it directly faces that of Sir William Scawen of the Bank of England (d.1722) with whom in financial and local matters he crossed swords.  All told there is a goodish display of church monuments and churchyard grave sculpture at Carshalton, giving a cross-section of Carshalton society from the 16^th to the 20^th centuries.

This offering – perhaps the most important of the monuments All Saints has – spotlights the monument to Nicholas and Margaret Gaynesford and their children that sits in a pre-eminent position to the north of the altar in the original chancel, now Lady Chapel. This spot is often found occupied in churches by the most significant personages within local society, and in Carshalton Gaynesford certainly was that; apart from employment at the Royal Court he was Lord of the Manor of Stone Court, the principal manorial holding within Carshalton. This property passed down to his descendants; his great-great-granddaughter Frances Slyfield, who is commemorated at Great Bookham (Surrey), was daughter of Walter Lambarde of Stone Court and Margaret Gaynesford.  When described in county histories at the beginning of the 19^th century Stone Court was also called ‘Gaynesford Place’, although the Gaynesfords themselves would not have recognised the late 17^th century red brick building of that time.

A younger son of John Gaynesford of Crowhurst, near the Kent border, Nicholas was a long-lived and high-ranking official, having served as an MP several times from the 1450s, and Sherriff of Surrey and Sussex likewise after 1460.  As the dates suggest, his career spanned the Yorkist Plantagenets and their ultimate foes and successors the Lancastrian Tudors; he was an esquire to both Edward IV and Henry VII.  He died in 1497. Margaret his wife, who died in 1503, was a gentlewoman to the spouses of both these Kings and herself came from a noble family, the Sidney’s of Penshurst Place – her great-great nephew was Sir Philip Sidney, poet and soldier.  Together, Nicholas and Margaret were in attendance at the Coronation of Elizabeth of York, Queen of Henry VII, in November 1487.

In the 1980s the monument was found to be deteriorating rapidly due to the poor state of the mediaeval and Victorian wall behind it, coupled with earlier damage from a fire in the Lady Chapel and a leaky roof.  In 1986 Derrick Chivers first reported that the plates on the Gaynesford tomb were corroded and green with Bronze disease; on further inspection other brasses in the Lady Chapel were discovered to require attention and all were repaired in 1987. In 1989 the brasses were removed by conservationist Bryan Egan prior to major remedial works to the fabric of the building. This included the stripping of plaster, dismantling and removal of the monuments affected (two post-medieval monuments above the Gaynesford were also cleaned) and the drying out of the walls after removal of damaged masonry, all undertaken by the Kelhams, conservators. Archaeological recording was voluntarily undertaken by Andrew Skelton at the invitation of Southwark DAC, and published in a short report in Surrey Archaeological Collections in 1995.  After the walls were rebuilt, the repaired and cleaned monuments were re-erected and the brasses set back into their matrixes in September 1992 by Bryan and Derrick after cleaning by conservators at the British Museum.

The brasses themselves deserve close study. Bareheaded, Nicholas kneels in armour on one knee, facing the altar, upon a mound of grass and flowers; behind him his widow and children kneel on chequered floors. The front panel of the prayer desk at which Margaret kneels is decorated with a daisy or ‘Marguerite’ alluding to her name; she wears a collar of pearls separated with the Yorkist emblems of suns and roses.  The desk, and her head and shoulders show signs of original gilding, her gown is enamelled red and her hair is strained back into an ornamental caul, enclosed within a veil of fine material stretched out on wires to create a butterfly effect.

While Nicholas has his four sons dutifully kneeling behind him, Margaret has lost the brass of her four daughters, which fortunately survived into the late 18th century to be illustrated by Daniel Lysons in his ‘Environs of London. . . ‘ (1792, see image), although they were already damaged by then. There are three shields above the main brass and a further three set into the front of the tomb chest, representing the union of Gaynesford and Sidney. A final missing part of the commemorative sequence was a brass representation of the Trinity, ripped away from the backplate; this imagery was specially anathema to Puritans and their like, and would be a target for iconoclasts.

The dismantling of the monument was an opportunity to find out how it was put together in the first place, and what was behind it. Removal of the backplate showed that Gaynesford had enough clout to insist his monument cover up an early 13^th century functional aumbry or small cupboard built into the wall, used to store the Host; the bottom half of this cupboard still survived, bricked up (see photograph) and still does today.

The tomb chest is constructed with Purbeck ‘marble’, which is actually a fossiliferous limestone that becomes ‘marble’ when polished up for architectural work, revealing its beautiful greyish/black colour. There are three side panels (one replaced) supporting a table-top slab and back wall-plate. The side panels are some three to four inches thick, and were secured together with lead staples poured into cut mortice holes and channels. The external bases of these panels were decoratively moulded but had been buried by the raising of the floor around it by several inches over the centuries. Their internal, unexposed faces were only roughly finished (see photograph), and stood on roughly cut Purbeck marble blocks deeply set into the ground – how deep we never determined!  Inside, the rectangular void was filled with building debris from the Victorian period (see photograph); there was no sign of any skeletal remains from a burial.

The three panels support a similarly-polished Purbeck marble table-top slab with ornately moulded edges, and a plain back wall slab (weighing in at approximately 500lb in old money) into which the brasses were set.

The Gaynesford tomb chest and brass commemorative plate are of excellent quality; perhaps the most significant feature is the application of enamel and gilding to Margaret’s figure, constituting a high sophistication of technical ability. In this, this brass is almost unique in the country, and is perhaps the most highly valuable and important possession of All Saints.

Andrew C Skelton