Church monuments

As a member of Bootham School Archaeological Society, John Dent developed an interest in medieval church monuments in the early 1960s, when York churches were readily accessible to him.  The society possessed a collection of brass rubbings made by former pupils, but it was through a classmate, John Fieldhouse, that John began to make his own rubbings, venturing out into the surrounding countryside and eventually to other parts of England.  Together, the two Johns hitch-hiked to Elsing in Norfolk on the day they left school to rub the magnificent brass to Sir Hugh Hastings, a notable warrior of the Hundred Years' War.  Brass rubbing led in turn to a wider appreciation of church monuments that has continued and been enhanced through digital photography, although no rubbings have been added to John's collection since 1972.

During the Christmas holidays of 1966 John worked with Brian Hope-Taylor and Gillean Craig in York Minster where an exploratory trench had been opened to examine the condition of the building's fabric and revealed considerable cracking in the foundations of the central tower.  Following this trial pit, areas of the 18th century paving were taken up and some of the stones proved to have been cut down from larger slabs of the medieval pavement. In the process a number indents - the recesses which had once held memorial brasses - were found on the undersides and John was asked by Herman Ramm of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments to record these.  In 2015 John re-discovered his notes and rubbings and these now form the subject of a review, "New light on lost brasses in York Minster", published jointly with leading expert Sally Badham in the Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society XIX (2016), 235-248.

Also in 1967 John and Hugh Bailey made photographic records of two of the windows in the nave of the Minster, the St Katherine Window and the Mauley Window, both of which date from the first decade of the 14th century, though each has undergone varying degrees of repair in the 19th century and since.  Today John finds photography the most useful medium for recording monuments, as the accompanying illustrations attest.