Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

A single graveslab on the floor of the cathedral choir on the Rock of Cashel carries an inscription that scholars have never been able to fully decode.

Most of it is legible enough, some of it is damaged beyond recovery, and one small fragment, two Latin words that may or may not name a three-year-old child, sits unresolved at the edge of meaning. That combination, a partly readable text recording real people, with a detail that refuses to yield, gives this stone an unusual quality among medieval funerary monuments.

The slab is rectangular, measuring just over two metres in length and just over half a metre wide, with a chamfered, or angled, edge running along its sides and base. Its surface carries a relief cross with elaborate multi-foiled terminals, the decorative ends of each arm shaped into layered, petal-like forms. The arms radiate from a lozenge-shaped centre divided into four triangular segments around a circular one, and the shaft ends in a carefully carved pillar-base. The stone is weathered and cracked in several places, one of the cracks having destroyed part of the lower right arm of the cross entirely. Running along the edges of the slab and continuing down either side of the shaft is an inscription in Black Letter script, transcribed by Fitzgerald in 1903. It commemorates Honoria Hackett, wife of one David Hackett, who died in 1524, and Robertus Hackett, Archdeacon of Cashel, who died intestate on the tenth of December, possibly in 1510. A phrase in the Latin, "Sepeliunt Pretis Collegialibus", is thought to refer to a common fund or guild that may have financed Honoria's funeral arrangements, which would make the inscription a rare glimpse into the practical economics of medieval burial. The closing lines remain largely unintelligible, but the words "erat ater trimos" may be a corruption of "erat pater trimus", meaning "he was father" to a child of three years old, possibly a son or daughter who outlived Robert Hackett. The uncertainty is genuine and has not been resolved.

The slab lies in the choir of the cathedral, which is part of the wider complex of ecclesiastical buildings on the Rock of Cashel. Visitors walking through the roofless cathedral can look for it underfoot in that eastern section, though weathering and the cracks across the upper portion mean the inscription requires some patience to follow.

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