In a specially made display stand in the Savile chapel (north of the chancel)

A major reconstruction of Thornhill parish church was carried out in 1875–6: this involved the demolition of the Georgian nave, and its rebuilding by the architect G. E. Street to connect the old east and west ends together. The work resulted in the discovery of most of the stones recorded here (see (–––) 1876a), and information on most of the finds was sent to the Rev. D. H. Haigh by the Clerk of Works, Mr Edwards.

Haigh (1877, 416) says, however, that this piece was first noticed by the Rev. J. T. Fowler among the 'recent discoveries', and was not on the original list, although clearly found at the same time.

St Michael and All Angels

Only one face survives, in two joining fragments now reunited, but the lettering of the inscription is clear and sharp.

Part of the incised border of the face of a cross-shaft, or possibly a grave slab, survives on the right.

Inscription Remnants of four lines of an inscription (Okasha 1971, no. 116) survive on the two pieces of the panel. An uncarved framing strip defined by an incised line runs along the right-hand edge of the panel. The incised line leans slightly to the left, suggesting that the panel tapered gradually towards the top, as it might have done on the face of a cross-shaft.

This indicates where the lines ended. Text is certainly lost in a broken section to the left of the third and fourth lines. Presumably there have been losses before the first two lines also. (The original surfaces of the left-hand, rear and right-hand faces no longer survive.) The lettering is boldly incised with a deepish V-cut. The heights of complete letters in the second and third lines range between 6 and 7 cm. The surviving text reads:

This may be partially reconstructed AEFT[ER] OSBER[HTAE] BEC[UN] '... in memory of Osberht, a monument ...'. It is clearly related to the vernacular memorial-inscriptions found also in runes at Thornhill (nos. 2–4 below), and in both scripts more widely across Northumbria (see Chap. VIII, pp. 79–84). Osberht is a well attested Old English masculine personal name.

By examining the extent of the losses on the left-hand side it is possible also to make a suggestion for the fragmentary fourth line. The inscription- type is formulaic, and we might expect the beginning to run 'X setae aefter Osberhtae becun ...'. This would imply the loss of no more than two letters, ER, before OSBER in the second line. There are several variables at the beginning of the third line: spellings of the name-element berht can vary (–bereht, –bercht, etc.), and the case ending is not absolutely certain (it could have been E rather than AE, for instance).[2] Nonetheless, a loss of four, perhaps five, letters is probable before the surviving BEC. On this basis, assuming a roughly symmetrical layout, we would expect four or five letters also to have been lost before the three surviving fragments of the fourth line. These fragments are distinctive. The first and third preserve the tops of bows consistent with B, P or R; the second has a horizontal arm at the top, which might be from C, E, F or G. What may be slight traces of a second horizontal where the stone breaks support the identification of the letter as E.
Given these clues, the text is unlikely to read becun aefter ..., requiring seven letters before the first visible fragment (which would then be the final r of aefter). A variation on the most common form of the text is needed, therefore. Stephens (1884b, 150) proposed a repetition of the name Osberht, and –BER– would certainly fit the fragments. However, there is no parallel for such a repetition, or indeed for the appearance of another personal name a word or two after becun. The suitable parallel that does exist, from a runic text at the same site, is bekun on bergi, 'a monument on a hill/mound' (see Thornhill 2 below). A text running BEC | UN ON BER|G I would certainly fit the surviving fragments.[3] This stone may possibly therefore have held a second example of this alliterative formula. [4]

The lettering consists of a confident and free variety of Insular decorative capitals (Higgitt 1994). The letters are tall, narrow and close-packed. The strokes are mostly finished off with wedge-like serifs, although a line-serif terminates the lower stroke of the C. Only a few forms are preserved intact. B and R are capitals in which the bow remain open rather than meeting the vertical in the middle of the letter. C is the very common rectangular variant of the capital. E takes the form of the 'Roman' capital but the middle bar is set well above the mid-point of the letter, probably under the influence of the half-uncial letter. Comparable high-set middle bars can be seen, for example, in the half-uncial and some of the capital Es in the display script of the Lindisfarne Gospels (Alexander 1978, ills. 37, 39–41, 43–5). O is a relatively unusual pointed or 'lentoid' version of the capital, a form that is found amongst similarly compressed lettering in inscriptions of around the eighth century found at Jarrow and York Minster (Okasha 1971, pls. 63, 150). S is the common 'reversed-Z' angular variant of the capital. The incomplete A in the first line had an angular cross-bar, the right-hand stroke of which was extended down to the base-line, an unusual variation on a common form. The curving lower bar of the incomplete F in the same line is also hard to parallel. It perhaps echoed the curved upper bar normal in the half-uncial letter.

This could be part of a cross-shaft, or even a stele such as those from York Minster, nos. 20 or 21 (Lang 1991, 62–6, ills. 76–7, 80–1, 86–90), but is more likely to be part of a flat slab, which could have been either upright or recumbent. Collingwood (1915a, 243; 1929, 33–4, fig. on 34) linked this with a small fragment of interlace of a similar thickness, now missing (see Thornhill 10 below). It is impossible to reconstruct the form of monument from this evidence.

Inscription The fragmentary Old English memorial text on Thornhill 1 was clearly related in type to those on Thornhill 2, 3 and 4 and on a number of monuments elsewhere in Northumbria (see Chap. VIII, pp. 79–84). Thornhill 2, 3 and 4 are parts of cross-shafts and the inscriptions are set low down on the shafts below panels of ornament (Ills. 728, 733, 739). Their inscriptions are in runes and are set into a grid of incised lines with horizontals separating the individual lines of text. Thornhill 1 probably also formed part of a cross-shaft but its position on the shaft is unknown. The lines of its Roman-letter inscription were more deeply cut than the runic inscriptions and they were not separated by incised lines. Grids of incised lines of the sort that frame the runic texts seem to have been rare before the ninth century (Higgitt 1991, 46–7; id. 1995, 233). There seem to be no compelling grounds for deciding whether these differences represent two successive phases in funerary inscriptions at Thornhill or whether Roman and runic inscriptions were produced at the same time, perhaps for different types of client.

The narrow Insular decorative capitals of Thornhill 1 are fluid in treatment rather than geometrically rigid. They are not closely datable but probably belong some time in the second half of the eighth or first half of the ninth century.

Late eighth to ninth century

Haigh 1877, 416, 420–7, no. VII, fig. facing 420; Browne 1880–4c, cxxxiv–cxxxv, fig. on cxxxv; Stephens 1884a, 212, and fig.; Stephens 1884b, 150, and fig.; Allen 1885, 341–3, 346; Allen and Browne 1885, 354; Browne 1885b, 80; Frank 1888, 45; Allen 1890, 297–8; Allen 1891, 232–3, nos. 4, 5; Stephens 1894, 12–13; MacMichael 1906, 360, 365; Morris 1911, 499; Collingwood 1912, 131; Collingwood 1915a, 243–4, 285, 289, fig. a on 244; Brown 1921, 268; Collingwood 1927, 17, 61, fig. 24; Collingwood 1929, 33–4, 36, fig. on 34; Elgee and Elgee 1933, 196; Dahl 1938, 162; Page 1958, 149; Okasha 1964–8, 328; Page 1969, 30; Okasha 1971, 118, no. 116, and pl.; Fell 1994, 128–9; Sidebottom 1994, 272, nos. 7–8, and pl.; Page 1995, 20, 162, 298; Everson and Stocker 1999, 124, 149; Parsons 1999, 23, 83; Hadley 2000a, 262; Koch 2001, 156n; Lang 2001, 268, 275; Okasha 2004, 278; Cramp 2006a, 112

[1] The following are general references to the Thornhill stones: (–––) 1876a; (–––) 1876b; Haigh 1877, 416, 419; Allen 1889, 213, 220, 221, 222; Allen 1890, 293, 297; Browne 1899–1901, 169; MacMichael 1906, 360, 365; Innocent 1910, 90; Morris 1911, 499; Collingwood 1915b, 334; Collingwood 1927, 23, 42, 109; Collingwood 1929, 22, 33, col. pl. facing 7; Collingwood 1932, 51, 53; Arntz 1938, 89; Pevsner 1959, 21, 503; Pevsner 1967, 21, 511; Page 1973, 29, 31, 34–5, 37, 48, 134–5, 217; Faull 1981, 218; Ryder 1991, 44; Ryder 1993, 174; Page 1995, 298; Page 1999, 29, 31, 34–5, 37, 130–1, 136, 228.

[2] The following slight indications of lost letters at the beginning of the third line remain: two serif-like marks from the top of a letter or letters under the space preceding the O in the line above; marks, perhaps the ends of the three bars of E, immediately preceding the B of BEC.

[3] See Browne (1880–4c, cxxxiv–cxxxv), who reconstructed this phrase as 'Becun at bergi' and suggested a possible allusion to the hill at Thornhill, 'conceivably' with a play on the meanings of 'hill' and 'grave-mound'.

[4] These two paragraphs are by David Parsons.