THE MEMORIAL STONES OF SPAXTON CHURCHYARD
|
Although St Margaret's Church at Spaxton is many centuries old, there are no more than 115 memorial stones in the churchyard. The reason for there being so few is that in medieval days few people would have been able to afford such luxuries. The more eminent were interred inside the church itself and most old churches still have at least one or two stone memorials even if they are no more than inscribed stones on the floor. Spaxton church contains several such memorials . The overwhelming majority of folk were in fact buried in woollen cloth (not even a coffin) close to the church and had no permanent gravestone. In due course when further ground was required for burials the old bones were dug up and removed to a corner of the churchyard or placed in the enamel house. If one remembers that most of our medieval forefathers were illiterate, we realise that there would have been little point in any case to an inscribed memorial stone which the bereaved would not have been able to read. Churchyard memorials began to appear during the Seventeenth Century and in fact the oldest memorial in Spaxton churchyard, a few yards to the east of the south porch, bears the date 1675. It is a box tomb and is a memorial to Barnabas Leave, who died in 1675, and to John Thomas, who died much later in 1755. This grave is the only one that can be definitely dated as Seventeenth Century. There are three others, commemorating Garland, Street, Thomas, Jenkins and West, from the Eighteenth Century and another with the name John Thomas which is probably Eighteenth Century. All the rest, more than a hundred, are Nineteenth and Twentieth Century memorials. The gravestones are on the south, east and west side of the church with the exception of only one grave which lies in the shadow of the north wall. The north side of the church was symbolically associated with the devil and superstitiously considered to be an evil place. The north door of a church, which opened on to this ground, was frequently known as 'the devil's door'. In days when people were in some ways less enlightened suicides and plague victims were sometimes buried on the north side of a church. The earliest gravestones are all within a few yards of the south porch. |
6 1 ~ 2 ~ 3 ~ 4 ~ 5 ~ 6 ~ 7 ~ 8 ~ 9 ~ 10 ~ 11 ~ 12 ~ 13 ~ 14 ~ 15 ~ 16 ~ 17 ~ 18 ~ 19 ~ 20 ~ 21 ~ 22 ~ 23 ~ 24 ~ 25 ~ 26 ~ 27 ~ 28 ~ 29 ~ 30 ~ 31 ~ 32 ~ 33 ~ 34
Return to main menu
