Museum of London (accession number 4073)

Found during demolition of church; perhaps one of 'several antiquities found on the site of the churchyard' donated to Guildhall Museum in 1846 by Mr. J. B. Bunning, clerk of works

St Benet Fink

Broken and worn

Part of a tapering grave-cover, broken horizontally below and irregularly above. The break rises gently from left to right, but the upper right-hand corner is lost. Only one face is carved.

A (top): Along the left- and right-hand edges is a narrow, plain, raised border, the inner edge to the left also being defined by an incised line. There is a broad, plain, low-relief median moulding. This has a median-incised line which terminates in a drilled hole where the median moulding unites with a broad U-shaped moulding defined by incised lines at the upper end of the stone. This is placed open end outwards and is median-incised. The incomplete field defined by this moulding is undecorated apart from a pair of closely-spaced, parallel, incised lines developing from the broken edge to the right of the vertical axis of the stone, and sloping down to the right. They stop short of the U-shaped moulding. Below, to the right of the median moulding and bounded by it and the right-hand border, is an incomplete rectangular panel decorated with a low relief four-strand plain plait. The field between the median moulding and the left-hand border is dressed roughly flat.

This grave-cover is one of the east midlands types first described and classified by Fox (1920–1). It belongs to Fox's type 5, that is, with a median ridge and U- or V-shaped ends and flanking panels of interlace. Evidence from the excavations at Peterborough cathedral (ibid., 23–4) and Cambridge castle (ibid., 20–1) have demonstrated that grave-covers of this general type originated in the late pre-Conquest period, and probably continued in use after the Conquest. The present example represents the southern outlier of the group, although there are other examples of east midlands covers from the region, at Milton Bryan (Ill. 361) and Cardington (Ill. 264) in Bedfordshire, and Great Maplestead (Ill. 274), Essex. It is possible that these were made in the Barnack region and exported from there.

Tenth or eleventh century

Lethaby 1902, 170, fig. 32; ( --- ) 1903, 125; Page 1909, 170, fig. 34; Smith 1917, 237, 241; Fox 1920 - 1, 24 - 5; Wheeler 1927, 52; Vulliamy 1930, 255; Cottrill 1931, 51, appendix; Wheeler 1935, 108, 191; Kendrick 1949, 83; Tweddle 1986b, i, 89, 219, ii, 411 - 12, iii, pl. 62a