This is the front panel of a medieval chest tomb, a box-shaped raised monument whose flat top, or mensa, would once have formed a kind of stone table over the burial below. What makes this particular piece so arresting is not just the carving but its purpose: each object is an Arma Christi, a symbol of the Passion of Christ, and each carries a specific penitential prayer. The scourge asks forgiveness for sloth. The nails call for help against sins done by hands and feet. The hammer prompted the invocation, "May the hammer be my succour if I have smitten any with staff or knife." The imagery functioned as a kind of portable confession, worked in stone.

The panel belongs to a group of four slabs, comprising the mensa, the front panel, and two side panels, which may all have come from the same chest tomb associated with the medieval church of Newtown Earley in County Kilkenny. The stones came to wider attention during a clean-up of the graveyard between 1985 and 1987, when a large number of graveslabs were uncovered. R. Harte, writing in the Old Kilkenny Review in 1987, catalogued and illustrated them, identifying the front panel's imagery in detail. Each symbol carries a dual weight: it recalls a moment from the Passion narrative and simultaneously encodes a petition against a particular sin. The reed used to strike Christ becomes a prayer to be forgiven for wronging any man. The sword, usually understood as the weapon that severed the ear of Malchus in the Garden of Gethsemane, carried in some Early English readings the meaning of the knife of Circumcision, with an accompanying prayer against lechery. The thirty pieces of silver speak against treason and covetousness.

The slabs are currently housed within the interior of the church at Newtown Earley, where they were moved for safekeeping after their discovery.