Epitaphs

EPITAPHS provide a rich source of information about those who went before, often as a brief characterisation of their personality or perhaps a favourite thought beloved during their lifetime. These short and pithy sayings, often in verse, can be found on memorials in many public places, on statues, monuments and plaques, but by far the best place to see them in all of their fascinating detail is on the tombstones in our churchyards and cemeteries.

Burials in our graveyard adjoining the Abbey Church at Bourne date from the earliest times until 1855 when they were switched to the town cemetery. There was no more space and some plots had been used two and three times for interments with bodies stacked one upon the other, making the erection of tombstones for each one a difficult task. Those memorials that have survived have been the victims of the weather and much of the lettering has been rendered undecipherable through erosion by wind and rain but those which can be read will give delight.

Religious texts were the most popular and there is one corner of the churchyard with a particular poignancy below the east window, an area that was much sought after because it catches the early morning sun and therefore contains some of the grandest memorials in the churchyard, large sarcophagi with elaborate inscriptions intended to remember the great and the good of this town.

They departed this life with grand funerals and perhaps a horse-drawn hearse with black frock-coated mourners following on but here they lie in one of the most neglected sections, and few who visit have even heard of their names, Dyer and Layton, Mawby and Munton, Osborn, Harbut, Phillips and Dove, all once leading citizens of this town but now totally forgotten. One of the biblical quotations from Ecclesiastes 1 provides an appropriate epitaph: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity."

Another of the ancient tombstones in the churchyard contains a curious verse, slowly eroding, dedicated to Thomas Tye, a blacksmith, of Star Lane [now Abbey Road], Bourne, who died in the early years of the 19th century:

My sledge and hammer lie reclined,
My bellows too have lost their wind,
My fire's extinct, my forge decayed,
And in the dust my vice is laid,
My coal is spent, my iron's gone,
My nails are drawn, my work is done,
My fire-dryed corpse lies here at rest,
My soul like smoke is soaring to the bles't.

The memorial stone for Thomas Knott, who died on 7th July 1832, aged 48 years, also has a philosophical inscription:

Afflictions some long time he bore
Physicians were in vain
Till God did please to give me ease
And free me from my pain.

Slate memorials which were once popular fare better because they can withstand the elements and one which can be found in a corner of the churchyard contains some wise words from the past. It was erected to the memory of Benjamin Ferraby, a veterinary surgeon, who died on 30th October 1838 at the age of 50, and his wife Mary who died on 17th November 1834, aged 53, and the inscription over their grave is still relevant today: "Praise wrote on tombs is often vainly spent; the honest man is his own monument."

The town cemetery has far more tombstones but the inscriptions tend to be religious rather than philosophical or whimsical and most reflecting a belief in the afterlife, such as the epitaph to Henry Berry who died on 16th April 1896, aged 52: “Not lost but gone before”. Among the most popular are “Re-united”, “Thy will be done”, “Peace, perfect peace” and “At rest” while the thought for a lost child is often “Safe in the arms of Jesus”. Premature deaths, such as Nellie Branston, who passed away in 1894 at the age of 32, are often remembered with “Her sun has gone down whilst it was yet day” and many elderly people are buried with the inscription “Life‘s race well run, now cometh rest”.

The more elaborate tombstones also have symbolic engravings which usually have a religious significance. The flying angel, for instance, represents rebirth or resurrection and the ivy mean friends and mortality, while the lamb is indicative of innocence and the open book was often used for a teacher or minister. Flowers are meant to depict the fragility of life and corn shows that someone has lived to a ripe old age while handshakes are meant as a last farewell and a spade or pick the mortality of the grave.

Our village churchyards also contain many interesting examples for those prepared to seek them out and at Carlby there is a memorial finely carved and enriched with a cross and a tablet that reminds us of the feeble grasp we all have on life because it announces that Oliver Smith "died suddenly in his chair" on May 21, 1872, aged 54 years: "In the midst of life we are in death".

There is also a memorial in the churchyard at Folkingham that has been immortalised by the printer and publisher William Marratt in his survey of Lincolnshire carried out in 1814-17, over the grave of Amy Berry. She was the wife of William Berry, a surgeon and apothecary, who died in 1811, aged 64, and who must have been a paragon of virtue because the inscription placed there by her husband and two sorrowing daughters says:

"In uniform piety to God, warm benevolence to her fellow creatures, domestic affection and unaffected sincerity, she exhibited that which speaks more than the tongues of men and angels, which is more instructive than precept, more persuasive than eloquence, more authoritatively commanding than law; the amiable and pleasing example."

Few people can aspire to this goodness and it is a pity that we do not know more about Amy Berry and to discover why she was so highly regarded. Tombstones today mostly carry less eloquent epitaphs although we should not regard this as a sign that the righteousness illustrated here has vanished from our lives with the passing of the years.