British Museum, no. 1859.7-7.1

Found in October 1843 in digging drain near no. 7. Skeleton here clearly described as lying beneath decorated stone, with head to the west resting on small square stone

St Hilda

Unworn but very chipped

This rectangular stone seems to have been smoothly dressed on all faces.

A (broad): There is no border on the carved face, which is quartered by a deeply incised cross, type G2. Each of the arm-pits has a deep socket and in the centre is a raised band.

It is conceivable that the upper quadrants carried an inscription which has been totally obliterated. The lower left quadrant was certainly inscribed but only an illegible portion of a single letter survives. The lower right quadrant is inscribed in Insular majuscules:

 [—.] II UGUID

Presumably a personal name ending in the feminine personal name-element -gyth (Okasha 1971, 79).

The phenomenon of the small inscribed grave-marker, or name-stone, has been discussed in the Introduction, p. 7. The Hartlepool group like Lindisfarne uses both runic and Latin alphabets. However they are kept distinct on each stone. `An eighth-century date fits the Hartlepool language' (Page 1973, 25). The Hartlepool name-stones have a common design, but the inscriptions are not essential to that design. If commercial masons made these pieces, they may have prepared in advance numbers of incised slabs and added names to them as they came into use. The names may then belong to different traditions, even though the slabs are closely similar. Dr Elisabeth Okasha found tentative evidence for the practice in two of the non-runic stones where the words ora (or orate) pro seem to have been carved at a different time from the names they govern (Okasha 1971, 77-8).

Mid seventh to mid eighth century

(—) 1844; Haigh 1846, 189-90 and fig.; Haigh 1858, 22 and fig.; Longstaffe 1862, xv-xvi; Haigh 1875, 366, no. 2, pl. 1, 2; Hübner 1876, 70, no. 196, and fig.; Allen and Browne 1885, 352; Frank 1888, 43; Pettigrew 1888, 28, fig. on 31; Allen 1889, 217, 221; Boyle 1892, 611; Hodges 1894, 6; Hodges 1905, 212 and pl.; Hodgkin 1913, 154; Howorth 1917, III, 189-92, 303-4, pl. facing 188; Brown 1918-19, 202, fig. 4, 8; Brown 1921, 67, pl. 6; Smith 1923, 121-2; Collingwood 1927, 12, 94, fig. 16H; Scott 1956, 202; Okasha 1971, 79, pl. 50

1. The following are general references to the Hartlepool stones: Charlton 1855-7, 70-1; Haigh 1873, 269; Smith and Cheetham 1880, 1979; Stephens 1884a, 189; Allen and Browne 1885, 352; Browne 1886b; 12; Howorth 1914, 47; Peers 1914-15; Clapham 1930, 75; Rivoira 1933, 153; Pfeilstűcker 1936, 127; Kendrick 1938, 110; Henry 1965, 158; Page 1973, 25.