That detail alone sets it apart from the ordinary run of memorial stones: forty years of continuous service in a single institution is remarkable by any measure, and the court in question, the Court of Star Chamber, was no routine legal body. It operated without a jury, met in secret, and was used by the Crown to pursue cases beyond the reach of common law, making its clerks figures of some consequence in the administration of power.

The inscription was transcribed by the antiquary Thomas Dineley, and recorded later by Ball in 1913, and it reads with the directness typical of seventeenth-century memorial Latin: Anthony Stoughton, Esquire, of the city of Dublin, sometime clerk of His Majesty's High Court of Chancery Star Chamber in this kingdom, died on the 5th of September 1626 at the age of eighty-two. His wife, Margaret Stoughton, followed him seven years later, dying on the 17th of May 1633, aged sixty-seven. The slab was erected in her memory as much as his, the inscription careful to name her as his dear and loving wife. The pairing of dates gives the stone a quiet human weight: he died first, at a great age, and she outlived him by nearly a decade before the monument was finally set down.

St James' Parish Church sits on James's Street, a thoroughfare with deep roots in medieval Dublin, and the church itself has seen considerable change over the centuries. The graveslab is an interior feature, so a visit depends on the church being open, which is worth checking in advance. The inscription, filtered through Dineley's transcription and Ball's later publication, uses the bracketed interpolations that editors add when filling gaps in damaged or difficult text, so the name Anthony and the figure of forty years both carry that slight scholarly uncertainty. Anyone with an interest in the legal history of early modern Ireland, or in the texture of how ordinary professional lives were commemorated, will find the stone worth seeking out.