Graveslab (present location), Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
A fragment of sandstone, barely half a metre wide and just seven centimetres thick, carries more social history per square centimetre than many larger monuments.
What survives is only the central portion of a once-complete rectangular graveslab, its edges long gone, yet the inscription it preserves is remarkably intact: a roll call from the parish of Clonmel dated Anno Domini 1686, naming a vicar, a merchant, and a skinner serving as churchwarden. The stone is now held at Tipperary South Riding County Museum, having begun its life in the graveyard of St. Mary's Church in Clonmel before being separated from its original context entirely.
The three men named, Jonathan Brownsworth as vicar, Henry Chearnley identified as a merchant, and Richard Moore as a skinner (that is, a tradesman who prepared and dealt in animal hides), represent a cross-section of late seventeenth-century parish life in a busy Munster town. The date, 1686, places the slab in the decades following the Cromwellian upheavals and just before the Williamite wars, a period when civic and ecclesiastical life in Irish Protestant communities was being carefully reconstructed. That the inscription records both a clergyman and two tradespeople functioning as churchwardens reflects the lay governance structures common to Church of Ireland parishes of the period, where merchants and craftsmen held formal civic-religious roles alongside the clergy. The stone itself is sandstone, a material widely used in the region, and the lettering suggests it was commissioned with care, even if only a portion now remains.
One detail complicates the object's history in an oddly domestic way. Between the words "church" and "warden", there is a rough circular hole cut through the stone, consistent with its having been repurposed at some point as a spudstone, a flat stone with a hole used to prop open a door or gate. The inscription, then, was either ignored or simply not recognised when someone put the slab to work in a more practical capacity. It is a small reminder that grave markers have frequently led double lives, valued for their material weight long after their commemorative function was forgotten.