ABSTRACT
For centuries visitors to the parish church of Burford, Oxfordshire have taken note of its many unusual funeral monuments. In what was once a guild chapel an unusual series of tombs avoids effigial imagery. Following the pattern of the tomb of Edmund Silvester (d. 1568), these monuments instead rely on architectural frames and merchants’ marks to memorialise their occupants. More striking, however, is the monument in the north aisle of the church to Silvester’s son-in-law Edmund Harman (d. 1577), bearing the date 1569. The central inscription panel is surrounded by a grotesque border incorporating strapwork, fruit, baskets and four naked figures, variously described by twentieth-century scholars as ‘Red Indians’, ‘Americans’, ‘Brazilians’, ‘Amazonians’, ‘Tupinamba’, even ‘cannibals’.1 The Harman monument is claimed by some as the earliest representation of indigenous Americans in Britain, and the first three-dimensional image of this kind in Europe.2
