Graveslab in Townparks North

From Potterton (2005, App. 13, 395, No. 2): Thirteenth/fourteenth-century Purbeck slab This monument was set by Butler into a disused doorway in the north wall of the ruined chancel of St Patrick's church (ME036-048012-). A recent examination confirmed that this badly decayed memorial slab, now in two pieces, is of stone imported from the Isle of Purbeck in Dorsetshire (Gittos and Gittos 1998, 5, 12, 13). Although usually described as ‘marble’, the stone from Purbeck is in fact a dark, fossiliferous limestone, favoured by masons in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This late-thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century, coffin-shaped slab also has indents for a marginal Lombardic brass inscription, enclosed on both the inside and outside by a lcm-thick border. Conwell (1872-3, 400-01) noted that there was a speck of greenish metal remaining in the inscription when he inspected it in the early 1870s. With the exception of a small number of letters, the lettering on the matrix is now indecipherable. Even when Conwell was writing in the 1870s it was impossible to decipher the name of the ecclesiastic, but he was able to identify a cross followed by the letters IVID and space for about six more letters. The name is followed by an inscription which Butler recorded as...HIC: RECTOR: ET: ARC[HILE V1TES]: HIC: JACET: IRA: DEI: PACIFICETVR: El: (Butler 1854, 155). The word archilevites has been translated as archdeacon. In England, monuments of this type are known from as early as the 1270s, but the presence at the head of this slab of what was once identifiable as the bust of an ecclesiastic under a pinnacled and crocketted canopy, led King (1994, 124) to suggest a date in the first decades of the fourteenth century. A monument of similar style is the tomb of Sir Richard de Boselyngthorpe, at Buslingthorpe in Lincolnshire, which dates to c. 1290. [Length: 200cm; Width: 80-75cm; Depth of indent: c.2mm)

Medieval Christian funerary slab; 13th–14th century. Repurposed as part of a church structure, indicating reuse of materials in later ecclesiastical construction.