What makes it worth pausing over is the combination of elements carved into its surface, a central relief of the Christogram 'IHS' alongside a cross, and running around the edge, a Latin inscription rendered in Black Letter, the angular, dense script that was falling out of fashion across Europe even as this stone was being laid down. Floor slabs of this kind were set into the ground of a church or its immediate environs so that the deceased, commemorated in stone beneath the feet of the congregation, remained in some sense present within the sacred space.

The Augustinian Priory at Inistioge was a house of Augustinian canons, and its graveyard continued to serve the local community well beyond the dissolution of the religious houses in the sixteenth century. The slab, dated to around 1600, sits at the point where the old monastic order had collapsed but the site retained its function as a place of burial and, for many families, of memory. The Joyces and the Tobins were both established Hiberno-Norman families in Leinster and Munster, and the commissioning of a carved Latin slab with formal Black Letter lettering at this date suggests a household with both the means and the inclination to mark their dead in a distinctly traditional, even deliberately conservative, manner.