Oxford City Museum. Accession number 77.104

Discovered in 1870 during alterations to east and south walls of chancel, apparently from rubble wall core; in church of St Peter in the East until placed in Oxford City Museum on permanent loan in 1977

Christ Church

Broken, but carving fairly well preserved

The cover tapers, and the foot and lower right-hand side are lost. It is of fundamentally rectangular section, but the edges have a broad chamfer of concave profile. Only the upper face is carved.

A (top): On the vertical axis at what was presumably the head end is a low relief human mask. The square-ended, parallel-sided nose, linked eyebrows, eyes, and mouth, are indicated by incised lines. Enclosing the mask are six closely-spaced concentric semicircular mouldings of half-round section. Along each long side are two similar groups of seven such mouldings, the outer element of each group touching those of its neighbours. The group to the lower right is largely lost, and to the lower left are the remains of a third such group. Each of the two subsidiary fields thus created on the central long axis of the cover is filled with nested concave-sided lozenges.

The contemporary record of discovery of this carving suggests that it was recovered from the rubble core of a twelfth-century wall, suggesting a date for it in the eleventh century or earlier, if a reasonable period of primary use is allowed. The decoration relates closely to that on the cross-shaft fragments from Saffron Walden, Essex (Ills. 371–3). Nested geometrical shapes are also encountered on grave-covers in the east midlands in the eleventh century, as at Waterbeach and Wood Walton, Cambridgeshire (Butler 1956, 90, figs. 1.1–1.2). On these grounds a mid eleventh-century date would be acceptable for the piece.

Mid eleventh century

R.C.H.M. 1939, xix, 35, pl. 9; Sherwood and Pevsner 1974, 19; Tweddle 1986b, i, 89, 226 - 7, ii, 427 - 8, iii, pl. 68b