Graveslab, Callan, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
Set into the floor of the chancel of St Mary's church in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, a large limestone graveslab lies almost level with the surrounding flags, easy to walk past and easier still to walk over.
It measures nearly two metres in length and just over a metre across, and its surface is carved in raised relief with considerable ambition: a seven-armed segmented cross-head with fleur-de-lys terminals, a flower set within each quadrant of the cross-head, a circular knop below it, and a cross-shaft rising from a stepped base. On either side of the shaft hang shields. One bears a heraldic charge described as a chief indented, a horizontal band across the upper portion of the field with a notched lower edge; the other is blank, carrying no armorial bearings at all. Above the shields, the monogram IHS and the word 'Maria' appear, representing Christ and Mary. The top of the slab has been cut away deliberately, removing perhaps fifteen centimetres of stone, and one of the decorative borders is lost entirely, which gives the whole object a quietly truncated quality, as though someone once had a use for the missing piece.
Running along the surviving borders in raised Black Letter script, the formal Gothic lettering used across much of late medieval Europe, is a Latin inscription that names the people buried beneath. The historian William Carrigan transcribed and translated it in 1905: it records James Throdyi, formerly a burgess of the town of Callan, along with a woman named Calfe, identified as his wife, and three of their sons, William, Robert, and John. A burgess was a full citizen of a medieval town, with trading rights and civic standing, so James Throdyi was a man of some local consequence. The date of his death is partially obscured by damage to the stone, leaving only the century legible. His son William's death is recorded more precisely: the 1552 entry is clear enough, though Carrigan himself later revised details of both dates in an unpublished 1921 amendment, shifting James's death from the 23rd to the 3rd of May and changing the month of William's death from November to October. That revision, noted by Ó Fearghail in 1996, has never been definitively resolved, leaving the inscription in a state of productive uncertainty, a family history written in stone that still resists full clarity after five centuries.