He wears a long straight gown, his hair curls down over his ears, and his head rests on a pillow. Pressed to his chest is a small object, possibly a vial or box. That detail is the telling one. At barely 0.98 metres in length, this is almost certainly not a full burial monument at all, but a marker for a heart.

The practice of burying the heart separately from the body was well established in medieval Europe, particularly among the nobility and clergy, and it carried considerable theological and social weight. A person might wish their heart interred at a favoured religious house while their body lay elsewhere, or the circumstances of death abroad might make transporting an entire body impractical. To commemorate such burials, a miniature or half-length effigy was sometimes commissioned in place of a full-length tomb slab, its reduced scale signalling the partial nature of what lay beneath. The scholar John Hunt, writing in 1974, dated this particular effigy to the mid-thirteenth century and identified the figure it carries as likely representing just such a heart burial. The slab itself is tapered limestone with chamfered edges, carved in raised relief, and shows some damage at the base and on the lower left surface. It originally belonged to the medieval church of St Mary's, a thirteenth-century foundation whose chancel was later incorporated into the nineteenth-century Protestant church now standing on the site. Being built into a window rather than lying flat, the slab has survived in a way that many comparable pieces have not, fixed upright in the wall where it has been visible, if rarely examined closely, for generations.