Tomb - effigial, Gardens, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
A single slab of fossiliferous limestone carries two figures lying side by side, their heads resting on cushions, their long gowns falling in sharp, angular folds that the stone has held for the better part of seven centuries.
This is the double effigy of William and Margaret Goer, a mid-to-late fourteenth-century tomb monument that once lay in the churchyard of St Mary's parish church in Kilkenny, though that outdoor position was almost certainly not where it was first placed. The Latin inscription running along the slab, in Lombardic lettering, a rounded, decorative script associated with medieval stonework, once read HIC JACET WILLS GOER ET MARGARITA UXOR EIUS, meaning roughly "here lies William Goer and Margaret his wife." Weathering has since taken most of it.
The art historian John Hunt, writing in 1974, gave the monument a close and somewhat critical reading. He noted that the carving shows what he called a "degeneracy of treatment," by which he meant a drift away from fully three-dimensional sculpted form toward something flatter and more engraved in character, a tendency he traced through comparable Irish examples at Ardfert in County Kerry and Kilfenora in County Clare. The details he found worth pausing over include the liripipes, the long pendant strips hanging from the sleeves at the elbow, the barbe worn close around Margaret's throat, a pleated linen covering associated with female mourning dress, and the way the sculptor has spread the man's mantle protectively over his feet. Margaret holds something unidentified in her left hand against the barbe. Hunt was careful to note that the Lombardic lettering, which had older associations, should not mislead anyone into dating the monument too early; the style of dress places it firmly after the mid-fourteenth century.
By the time William Carrigan recorded the slab in 1905, it was lying on the south side of St Mary's churchyard, exposed to the elements. In 2015 it was moved indoors to the Medieval Mile Museum, which occupies the former church building, where it now stands against the west wall of the new north aisle, sheltered at last from the weathering that had already consumed most of its inscription.
