Crucifixion plaque, Fethard, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
On the front facade of an almshouse in the medieval town of Fethard, a limestone crucifixion plaque sits recessed into the wall, framed within a moulded square surround and a round-headed arch.
The carving, roughly 70 by 67 centimetres, depicts Christ flanked by Our Lady on his right and St John on his left, rendered in false relief, meaning the figures are modelled to suggest depth without being fully three-dimensional. A portion of the lower right side of the panel has broken away. What makes the piece quietly remarkable is not the iconography itself but the Latin inscription carved beneath the figures, which carries an unusually personal explanation of how it came to be there at all.
The inscription records that a woman named Dame Amy Everard, born Roche and widowed from John Everard the younger, arranged for the plaque to be fixed to the building on the tenth of May 1646. The wording is precise about why the task fell to her rather than to the men whose names are associated with the almshouse: the Everard family, founders and patrons of the building, had intended to place these insignia themselves but were, as the inscription puts it, overtaken by death before they could do so. Amy Everard stepped in to fulfil what they had not lived to complete. The Latin text was transcribed by a scholar named Long in the early 1890s, and revisited by Crotty in 2012, whose translation gives the fuller sense of a widow acting on behalf of a family cut short. There is even a small uncertainty embedded in the historical record: Long read the date as the tenth of March, while Crotty reads it as May, a minor discrepancy that has not been resolved. The plaque is set centrally on the facade of the almshouse, which in the Irish context typically refers to a charitable residential building for the poor or elderly, and the combination of devotional imagery with a commemorative and explanatory inscription is characteristic of Counter-Reformation Catholic patronage in seventeenth-century Ireland.