Graveslab, Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

A medieval graveslab that was almost certainly intended to lie flat over a burial now stands upright, fixed to the east wall of a chapel, which gives it the slightly disorienting quality of a door into another century.

The slab is set into the Grace chapel at Tullaroan's medieval church in County Kilkenny, and it is an unusually well-formed piece of funerary stonework: nearly two metres long, tapering from just over half a metre wide at the top to around thirty centimetres at the base, and carved in raised relief with a four-armed cross whose terminals end in fleur-de-lis, the stylised lily form borrowed from French heraldic convention. At the centre of the cross sits a lozenge, and the shaft carries a knop, a small rounded protrusion, just beneath its own fleur-de-lis terminal. The edges of the slab are bordered and chamfered, giving it a precise, finished quality that speaks to a patron of some means.

The inscription, now very faded, runs in Lombardic script, a rounded, formal lettering used across medieval Europe from roughly the twelfth to the fourteenth century, along the right-hand face of the shaft. The Reverend William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his history of the diocese of Ossory, recorded the text as: DAV : FIS : HVVE : GIT : ICI : DEV : DE : SA : [A]LME : EIT : MERCI, which he translated as "David Fitz Huue lies here. God on his soul have mercy." The language is Anglo-Norman French, which was the prestige language of the colonial settler class in medieval Ireland, and the name David Fitz Huue places him within that culture. The slab itself is dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and the Grace chapel in which it now stands takes its name from another prominent family of the region, suggesting that Tullaroan's church served as a focal point for several of the area's medieval landowning families over successive generations.

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