Tomb - chest tomb, Newtown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
A chest tomb, in medieval funerary tradition, was a box-shaped stone monument designed to sit above ground, its flat top slab, known as a mensa, resting on upright panels that formed the sides and front.
What makes the example at the medieval church of Newtown Earley in County Kilkenny particularly interesting is that its components were not found in place but scattered, rediscovered only when a graveyard clean-up in the mid-1980s brought a large number of graveslabs back to light. Four of those slabs, a mensa, a front panel, and two side panels, are thought to belong to the same chest tomb, and they now lie within the interior of the ruined church rather than in any reassembled form.
The evidence for who commissioned the tomb comes from the carved decoration on one of the side panels, a stone measuring 0.61 metres high and 0.78 metres wide. Writing in the Old Kilkenny Review in 1987, researcher R. Harte identified its ornament as the fret of the St. Legers, a heraldic pattern associated with that family, possibly incorporating the letters I.H.S., a Christogram used widely in late medieval and early modern religious carving. The carving is done in relatively shallow relief using clawtooth tooling, a technique that produces fine parallel grooves across the stone surface, and the decorative border around the panel varies noticeably in thickness, running between 0.12 and 0.2 metres. That slight irregularity, together with the shallower cutting compared to the companion panel, gives the stonework an intimate, hand-worked quality that photographs alone struggle to convey.