For most of us, owning a medieval portrait would be quite out of the question. Such treasures usually belong to noble descendants occupying the great ancestral homes of England. Basically, this means taking an impression from a copy of an authentic medieval brass engraving, the originals of which can still be seen in ancient English churches. To avoid wear and tear on ancient originals, even Westminster Abbey now provides facsimiles for its visitors to rub. The brass rubbing process entails covering the facsimile with paper, then rubbing the engraved area with colored wax until the character of your choice literally comes to life by your own-hand.
Brass rubbing is enjoyed by tens of thousands of people as a hobby or occasional pursuit.
Few other ancient art forms hold as much fascination today for so great a variety of people as the church memorial brass. The appeal for most brass rubbers is the chance to do something with their own hands and produce an attractive result, easily, quickly, with-out mess and without hours of practice or artistic predisposition. Brass rubbing enables us to reproduce the design on paper of an art form reaching back in time to the thirteenth century. Brasses are a unique source of information. As memorials they show us real people, the citizens of towns and villages across the land, generation after generation , in an age when portraiture was virtually limited to royalty and practically all art was religious.