What is recorded here

Graveslab in Gardens (kilkenny City By., St. Canice Par.) is a 13th/14th-century coffin-shaped slab of carboniferous limestone, incised with a fleur-de-lis cross and orb and inscribed +DAVI:FI:WM [probably David FitzWilliam]. It was found upside-down as a step between orchard compartments, its base chopped away to fit the garden path. That much is clear. What is less certain is whether David FitzWilliam walked this ground, died here, or was simply remembered here long after the orchard took his name. The slab moved into St Canice's Cathedral, but the garden kept the shape of the discovery: a buried life made useful by forgetting.

Medieval graveslab uncovered in archaeological monitoring (19E0666) by Cóilín Ó Drisceoil in the former walled garden known as the 'Deanery Orchard', now a park and carpark, 40m SE of St Canice's Cathedral (KK019-026029-) (Ó Drisceoil 2019, unpublished). The Deanery Orchard site is depicted as an open garden area on John Rocque’s 1758 map of Kilkenny, and since then it has been divided into three enclosures by stone fences that were added in the 19th century. Before it was the orchard for the Deanery (KK019-026033-) on the opposite (W) side of Coach Road (built 1690), it formed part of the plot of the manse house (KK019-026106-) for the precentor of the cathedral in the Cathedral Close. In the early medieval period it formed part of the S side of the precinct of the ecclesiastical settlement of Cill Chainnigh. The graveslab had been reused, upside-down, as a step between the NE and SE compartments of the Deanery Orchard. It is a 13th/14th-century coffin-shaped slab (L 1.2m; Wth 0.52m; T 0.4m ) of carboniferous limestone decorated with an incised fleur-de-lis cross and orb and is inscribed in Norman-French and Lombardic lettering on its sinister: +DAVI:FI:WM [probably David FitzWilliam]. The base and one side of the base of the graveslab was removed for the step. The graveslab was moved into the N transept of St Canice's Cathedral. See attached photograph. Compiled by: Cóilín Ó Drisceoil Date of upload: 5 November 2020

Medieval Christian graveslab; significant for its association with St Canice's Cathedral and the ecclesiastical history of Kilkenny.

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