Carved in Roman capitals using false relief, a technique where the lettering is raised against a recessed background rather than cut into the stone, it was commissioned by a man named Edmond Brine and his wife Johanny in memory of his parents, Dermot Brine and More Cullon, who died in 1624. The lower portion of the slab closes with a verse familiar from medieval memento mori tradition: "For as you are, so have they been, and as they are you shall be seen." The date given there is 1635, and the name Patrich Brine appears, suggesting the slab may have passed through more than one set of hands before it was finished.

The slab originated in the chancel of the medieval church at Moone, Co. Kildare, a site better known for its early Christian high cross than for its post-medieval burials. By the late nineteenth century the "Brine slab", as it was called, was already lying broken on the north side of the ruined abbey. A transcription of the inscription was published in the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead of Ireland in 1892, at which point the fragments were pieced together and set in cement on a masonry foundation, an early conservation measure that nonetheless could not prevent further damage. By 1986, when Bradley and colleagues examined it, the slab had broken into three pieces. Two of those pieces are now in Kilkenny. Taken together they reconstruct a slab at least 1.665 metres long and 0.65 metres wide, substantial enough to have been a prominent feature of any church floor.