Remembering Fr Jerome Bertram

Fr Hunwicke posted the other day about the late and much lamented Fr Jerome Bertram C.O., who died in 2019, on the anniversary of his priestly ordination. The post draws upon some of the symbolic symmetries of his life and can be seen at Bastille Day

I knew Fr Jerome and asked him to receive me into the Catholic Church, which he did in 2005.

Fr Jerome was indeed as Fr Hunwicke recalls him but I would augment what he says in respect of just how important was his scholarly contribution to the study of monumental brasses. Very much a pursuit of the traditional antiquary Jerome Bertram published his first book on the subject whilst still a sixth-former. It is one of the best introductions to the subject yet written. He went on not metely to rub and write up brasses across Britain and northern Europe all the way to the Baltic States, but to completely reorientate the study of the subject as part of an extensive business of monuments as well as the cult of the departed. As a priest he understood why such monuments were created, and that they were far more than memorial slabs. Looking at a brass with him one was transported to the London or wherever workshop in which it was engraved and to which school and type it belonged. I half expected him to say that the brass had been made on a wet Tuesday afternoon in London in March 1392 ….

There was something definitely dignum et justum est that the very last brass rubbing he did only a couple of months or so before he died was of the almost inaccessible monumental brass of Bishop John Waltham in St Edward’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey. A spectacular figure of the bishop from the 1390s it was a fitting conclusion to his career. He showed it to me and, though he observed sadly that though he thought it was not quite as good as he would have been capable of doing previously, still with a very proper pride in what he had achieved, and we had a lively discussion about the arms of the diocese of Salisbury.

So thank you to Fr Jerome for the prayer and guidance, for the scholarship and the fun, and to Fr Hunwicke for prompting these reflections.