England -- Description and travel; Wales -- Description and travel
The brass is manifestly an ancient one, and the absence of a date is
notable; there is plenty of space for it. Two gloves, crossed, are
shown below. The English word "glover" looks strangely out of place
in the midst of the Latin. Presumably the carver of the inscription,
though doubtless familiar from frequent usage with the usual Latin
employed on the memorials to the dead, its _Hic jacets_, its _Obiits_,
and the rest that goes between, was in a quandary how to render
"glover" in the classic tongue; his limited learning failing him, he
boldly inserted it in English. At least I arrived at that conclusion.
Who was this Petrus Denot, I wondered? The rector knew his story in
part and enlightened me. He was an inhabitant of Fletching, a glover
by trade, and was one of the unfortunates who took a part in the Cade
rebellion; he was captured and hanged, but his body was recovered
by his relations and was buried in the church. I query if that is
the whole of the story, for it seems strange that a tradesman of the
period, to say nothing of his being hanged for treason, should have the
much-sought-for privilege of being buried within the church's hallowed
walls, and honoured with a brass besides. Does the brass being dateless
point to anything? I fancy that there is more in the simple terse
inscription than meets the eye. At one time it appears Fletching was
famous for its gloves made from hogs' skins imported from Holland, and
it is supposed that the plague was conveyed to the village by these
skins, and that brought the industry to an end, and the village nearly
too.
During one of the restorations, when the flooring of the church was
removed, many skeletons were discovered beneath, all in an upright
position--"pointing to Saxon burial," I was told. It may, however, be
remembered that Wordsworth in "The White Doe of Rylstone" alludes to
bodies in after-Saxon days being so buried in a vault at Bolton Priory:
Pass, pass who will yon chantry door,
And through the chink in the fractured floor
Look down and see a grisly sight:
A vault where the bodies are buried upright!
There, face by face, and hand by hand,
The Claphams and Mauleverers stand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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