All Souls Day is on November 2, following All Saints Day. It is a day given to praying for our dead who are members of the “communion of saints.” The Manual of Indulgences (Enchiridion Indulgentiarum) details an indulgence for visiting a church on All Souls Day and another for November 1 through 8 for visiting a cemetery and praying for the dead. (Here’s information about them on EWTN’s website.)

It need not be a Catholic cemetery. For a number of years, my wife and I would visit a cemetery adjacent to our parish. It was the gravesite for William Watters (1751–1827), the first Methodist minister ordained in the United States, his family, and several dozen others. Later, the closest cemetery was a Baptist one. Our current parish has a columbarium, not a graveyard. When I was a college student, I would visit a cemetery for Holy Cross priests and brothers, and I would also visit a cemetery for Holy Cross sisters. The latter was remarkable in that, walking in one direction one would see their religious names and walking in the other direction their baptismal names, the names they had as young women before they joined the Order.

In addition to praying for the deceased, All Souls Day and any visit to a cemetery should involve a meditation on our own salvation, on death, judgment, heaven, and hell. These last four topics are traditionally called “the Four Last Things.” One aid in this meditation could be what are called “memorial brasses” or “monument brasses.”

Gothic revivalist Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852), designer of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, six cathedrals, and more, sought to revive the medieval decorative art of memorial brasses. [I wrote about Pugin on these pages, in this two-part series (Part 1) and this four-part series (Part 1).] Why was Pugin interested in promoting memorial brasses, and why should we be interested in commissioning them and in seeing them? Pugin, a Catholic convert, found it striking that, while Protestants don’t believe in Purgatory and don’t pray for the dead because they believe the dead are in heaven (or in hell where prayer won’t help them), nonetheless they “assail” Catholics who canonize a few dead. In an essay he continued, “I cannot refrain from urging the Catholics of this land…to derive a useful lesson from the simple inscriptions on these ancient tombs, which, while they breath[e] that humility which our holy religion so strongly inculcates, are a forcible illustration of our faith [namely, not to presume the deceased are in heaven], and an incitement to the good work of praying for the repose of the departed souls…” (“Monumental Brasses of the Fifteenth Century,” London and Dublin Orthodox Journal of Useful Knowledge, vol. VI, pp. 289-92, May 12, 1838)

Memorial brasses are placed in various locations. Some are on top of an outdoor or indoor tomb. Some are embedded in, or placed on, walls or floors. They vary a great deal in size. Their features vary, all dictated by the choices made by the person commissioning Pugin to design the memorial brass. These features are as follows:

• They typically include a cross or crucifix, and Pugin’s crosses were frequently “floriated,” that is, having flowers at the ends of the vertical and horizontal beams. The symbolism of this is described here.
• Pugin may include a canopy, sometimes two.
• He typically included an Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), that is, a lamb. You can find numerous examples of this in religious art.
• There may be a border or more than one border.
• Pugin often included symbols of the four evangelists: a winged man for Matthew, a winged lion for Mark, a winged ox for Luke, and an eagle for John.
• He may include an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary and/or one or more angels.
• He may have a figure of the deceased, which may or may not resemble the actual person.
• Some figures of the deceased show the deceased with members of his or her surviving family.
• The figure of the deceased may show his or her hands folded in prayer. At least one has the deceased holding a missal and rosary.
• There is often some symbol related to the family line of the deceased: a coat of arms, family crest, family motto, shield; or monogram of the first letter of the surname.
• Inscriptions routinely state “Pray for [name].” The inscriptions can be found in various places: at the base, on the border, and in scrolls. Scrolls are used like our modern cartoon bubbles above the head of the figure of the deceased, as though they are his or her words, such as “Holy Mary, pray for me.”

Pugin’s interest in this field started early. He was age 20 when he included contrasted sephulchral monuments in an 1832 letter. (The letter is reprinted in my 2025 article, The Impact of Medieval Wells on Pugin.) As mentioned, he wrote an essay about memorial brasses six years later. In the 1841 second edition of his 1836 path-breaking book Contrasts or a Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste, his Plate 16 contrasted “Sepulchral Monuments.”

Here are links, all but one to the British Museum, so you can see eight medieval brasses of the type Pugin sought to emulate. They are, in chronological order:

• unidentified bishop or abbot, ca. 1345-1350, in Stephen Freeth, “A List of Brasses in the British Museum,” in Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, Vol. XVI, Part 4, 2000-2001, p. 40
• Sir John and Lady Harsick, 1384
• Richard Manfeld, his Sister and Son, 1465 and John Barnard and Wife, 1451
• Sir Anthoney Grey, 1480
• Hugh Starkey, c. 1526
• Nicholas le Brun, ca. 1547, in Freeth
• John Day and his wife, 1584, in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1832
• Anne, Duchess of Exeter, and her husband, Thomas St. Leger, 1667

On October 29, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on a new exhibit at the Frick Collection in New York City, “Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450-1500.” It included a remarkably detailed image of the “tombstone for the Bishop of Grosseto (c. 1452), a life-size, low-relief reclining figure by Donatello, normally in the Siena cathedral, still expressive despite the effect of centuries of footsteps on its floor-level surface.”

Pugin was so good at replicating the medieval designs of memorial brasses that, in 1848, experts mistakenly included a Pugin brass of 1842 in a collection of 450 medieval ones. (Herbert Haines, A Manual for the Study of Monumental Brasses, Rev. Edward Peach, No. 32, p. 15. There is more information on the Peach brass below.)

Three years before the Victoria & Albert Museum’s 1994 major exhibition on Pugin, consisting of over 400 objects, which resulted in the commencement of Pugin interdisciplinary studies, British Anglican Father David Meara (b. 1947) wrote a detailed book on Pugin and his memorial brasses: A.W.N. Pugin and the Revival of Memorial Brasses (1991). [Fr. Meara also authored Victorian Memorial Brasses (1983) and Modern Memorial Brasses (2008).] The catalogue that accompanied the V&A exhibit, Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright, eds. Pugin: A Gothic Passion (1994), included a chapter by Meara with 21 illustrations, many of them in color.

The illustrations in Meara’s 1991 book, however, were all in black-and-white which prevents us from seeing the bronze color. They included six medieval ones (pp. 12, 23-29). He also identified books in Pugin’s library that included material on memorial brasses (pp. 21-22). I list them here in chronological order, and I add what Meara could not do technologically in 1991: links so you can see what Pugin saw and acquaint yourself with the brasses:

• John Stow (or Stowe), Survey of London (1598)
• William Dugdale, History of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1658)
• William Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire (2d ed. 1730)
• Richard Gough, Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain (1786-99) (5 vols.; here is vol. 1, pt. 1; you can find more online)
• John Sell Cotman, Engravings of the Brasses in Norfolk (1819) (here is 1839 ed.)
• Edward Blore, Monumental Remains (1826)
• John Mason Neal, ed., Illustrations of the Monumental Brasses of Great Britain (six parts, 1840-1846; 24 illus.; here)

In addition, Pugin subscribed to the journal J.G. and L.A.B. Waller, Series of Monumental Brasses from the 13^th to the 16^th Century (1842-1864) per Meara, p. 29.

Meara’s 1991 book contains a comprehensive listing (a “catalogue”) of every Pugin memorial brass he designed and which were executed (pp. 82-99). Meara identified a whopping 246 from 1841 to Pugin’s death in 1852. Meara then selected 44 of these for more detailed treatment. He included images of each of these 44. (These are in his “Gazeteer,” pp. 100-191.) Of the 246, or the smaller subset of 44, very few of Pugin’s memorial brasses can be accessed online, but here are four I have found for you, three from 1842 and one from 1851:

Lady Gertrude FitzPatrick (d. 1841), 1842

Image in Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Pointed or Christian Architecture in England (1843; Plate VI between pp. 36-37; Meara, Fig. 31, p. 101); 2’4’ by 6’ 8”

Inscription: “Near unto this place in the hope of a joyful resurrection lieth the body of the Right honorable / and virtuous lady Gertrude Fitz Patrick of Farming Woods in this county, daughter of John Earl of Upper Ossory she departed this life the XXX of Sep’r / in the Year of our Lord God MDCCCXLI in the LXV of her age. / In memory of whom / Richard Wilson Fitz Patrick Esq’r with pious reverence hath laid this graven slab.”
With Mercie to the poor her breast did flow
The fruits of Mercie may her soul now know. Amen

Dame Margaretta Sarah Morris (d. 1842), 1842

Image in same plate as Lady FitzPatrick’s.

Inscription on the borders: “Dame Margaretta Sarah Morris, Widow of the Sir James Nicoll Morris, A Knight Commander of the Bath, Daughter of Thomas Somers Cocks and Anne His Wife, Daughter of Alexander Thistlethwayte”

Inscription at the base (as best as I can decipher): “In the memory of a beloved sister, Catharine Gladell Vernon hath placed this slab whose deeds of piety and charity among the poor, while here she lived, which now after death does follow her and ask His mercy on her soul.”

Edward Peach (d. 1839), 1842

Image here

Inscription (translation of Latin): “Here lies Edward Peach, formerly Rector of this church, who died on the day of the Nativity of the Holy Virgin Mary, in the Year of our Lord 1839. On whose soul may God have mercy. Amen.”

Marie Bernhard, Pugin’s paternal aunt (d. 1851), 1851

Image in Feb. 2017 bulletin of Monumental Brass Society; Fig. 1, p. 665

The bronze consists of only an inscription: “Pray for Marie Bernhard Pugin who departed this life at Paris 1851 aged 77 years. She was the last aunt of the founder of this church [Pugin].”

Dear readers, when we see memorial brasses with inscriptions like these, we meditate on “the last things” and we are inspired to pray for the dead. Praying for the dead is one of the seven Spiritual Works of Mercy.