Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Lying flat on the ground between the outer walls of the north transept and nave of Fethard's Augustinian abbey, a large medieval graveslab records the death of a man named Peter Butler on the eleventh day of January 1571.

The lower portion of the stone is gone, but what remains, measuring 1.75 metres in length and just over a metre wide, is detailed enough to reward close attention. Carved in relief, a seven-armed segmental-headed cross dominates the surface, its terminals shaped into fleur-de-lis and its cross-head filled with floral motifs in each of the four central sections. A three-barred knop, a decorative boss-like feature, sits at the base of the cross-head. Running along the top and right-hand border, an inscription in Black Letter script, the angular Gothic lettering common to late medieval stonework, carries a Latin text that has survived the centuries in fragmentary form.

The inscription, as transcribed by Maher in 1997, reads in part: HIC JACET PETRUS BU(TLER)... QUI ME FIERI FECIT. A translation published by Knowles in 1903 renders this as recording the burial of Peter Butler and Norah O'Quinn, sometimes given as O'Kenny, with the further note that it was they who commissioned the monument. The phrase qui me fieri fecit, meaning roughly "who caused me to be made", appears on a number of Irish medieval grave slabs and suggests the stone was ordered during the lifetime of at least one of the named individuals. The Butler family were among the most prominent Anglo-Norman dynasties in Tipperary, and a graveslab of this quality, with its careful ornamental programme, reflects the status such a commission would have carried in a late sixteenth-century Munster market town.

The slab sits within the graveyard of the Augustinian friary, a substantial medieval complex in Fethard that retains much of its fabric. It is accessible in the open air, though its position flat on the ground, tucked against the abbey walls, means it is easily overlooked by anyone moving quickly through the site. The missing lower portion leaves the inscription incomplete, so some names and details will likely never be fully recovered, but the carved surface that remains gives a precise and quietly eloquent account of two people who wanted to be remembered.

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Pete F
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