Graveslab, Limerick City, Co. Limerick
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Tombs & Memorials
In the Arthur Chapel of St. Mary's Cathedral in Limerick, a fractured piece of stone carries an inscription that is, by any measure, an odd thing to read.
The lettering runs upside down relative to the heraldic shield carved above it, so that the words and the imagery seem to belong to different intentions, or at least to different hands working without quite consulting each other. The slab is fragmentary, worn at the edges, and easy to pass without pausing. But pause, and the Latin resolves itself: Anna Faning, uxor eius, obit 13 Mar, 1634. "His wife. She died 13 March." Brief and final.
The shield, described by FitzGerald in 1910, bears two coats of arms side by side. On the right, a chevron between three birds; on the left, a chevron between three heraldic roses. The initials S, R, and W appear above and to the sides of the shield, almost certainly representing the husband whose name goes otherwise unrecorded in the inscription itself. The pairing of arms on a single stone like this was a common practice on memorial slabs of the period, placing the families of both husband and wife in permanent adjacency, a kind of carved genealogical record. The Urban Survey of Limerick, published by Bradley and colleagues in 1989, records the slab and its inscription, noting the chapel location and the fragmentary condition of the stone. FitzGerald had described the same piece nearly eighty years earlier, suggesting it was already something of a known curiosity among those interested in the cathedral's interior.
St. Mary's Cathedral is open to visitors and sits prominently on the south bank of the Shannon, making it one of the more accessible medieval buildings in the city. The Arthur Chapel is within the cathedral interior, and the slab sits there quietly among other stonework. It rewards close looking rather than a quick glance; the inversion of the inscription relative to the shield is not immediately obvious, and the incised lettering requires decent light to read clearly. Visiting on a bright morning, when natural light is stronger inside, makes the carved detail easier to follow.