The smell of those services is unforgettable. It was a mixture of flannel, lamp-oil, dripping umbrellas and mackintoshes, mingled with the very old immured damp, which was being drawn by the stoves from the walls, and from the heavy curtains made of red cloth powdered with black fleurs-de-lis.
Over the heads of the congregation, through the thick smoky air, my eyes always came to rest on the numbers of memorial tablets which covered the walls. To preserve them had been the main reason for the preservation of the chancel when the church was pulled down in 1845. These memorials pointed to a timepiece of yet another type—a timepiece, the pendulum of which beat out the passing of separate human lives, while the family remained. Underlying these eighteenth century epitaphs was the assumption that though the individuals passed, yet their houses would continue in Wilton and be for ever known there. Some of the tablets contained the records of four of five successive generations in a family of unpretentious burgesses, who had played their parts in the life of the town, as mayors, aldermen, manufacturers, surgeons, or shopkeepers. Their sense of the permanency of the community was not affected by their awareness of the short span of life allotted to each poor mortal. When a man bequeathed a benefit to the town, he decreed that it should continue ‘for ever’.
The Phelps family memorial tablet is typical.
‘John Phelps. Master of the Free School in this town, died the 21st of November 1823, aged 57. Endowed with qualities of mind and manners that might have graced a higher rank of society, he walked humbly in his own, and at the peaceful close of a tranquil and useful life, he feelingly confessed his own unworthiness, resting all his hope for eternity on the mercy of God, through the merits of his Saviour.
‘As Master of the Free School, he succeeded his father, William Phelps, who had conducted it for twenty-eight years, whose virtues he copied, whose memory he tenderly cherished, and with whose ashes his own are now mingled.’
The writer of that epitaph had a great sense of rhythm, and a genius for selecting peacefully-sounding words. The family history is continued to 1878, but by another hand, and with less of music or meaning. In the next generation, ‘John Phelps, M.A.’ (the University degree suggests a new tradition) ‘was for twenty-one years his father’s successor in the school’. He died as Vicar of Hatherleigh; while another son of old John Phelps carried ‘his qualities of mind and manners to a higher rank of society’, and died an Archdeacon and Canon of Carlisle.
The seventeenth-century inscriptions mostly described only the dead man’s trade or profession, saying little or nothing of his family. Thomas Mell, for instance, was ‘once servante to the Right Honourable William Earle of Pembroke, afterwards to Kinge James and Kinge Charles, and also Mayor of this Borough of Wilton’. He died in 1625; and another tablet commemorates Edmund Phillips, ‘Sweeper of Burbidg and Farer to the Earl of Penbruck, hoo died the 19th of January 1677.’
After these, the earliest of the eighteenth-century epitaphs are very tender and touching. Two sisters, Susannah and Mary Bignell, both died in 1726, their ages being eighteen and twenty-three. Of them it is written:
In the spring and flower of my time,
My life to God I did resign,
Being in my years so young,
Yet my day was spent, my glass was run.
The Rev. Henry Pitt was evidently a favourite, when he died aged twenty-seven, in 1733.
‘His days of nature were as an agreeable tale that is soon told, not tedious, trifling, idle, or insignificant, but short, instructive, moral, and entertaining.’
Poor little Eliuzay Jones must have been a lonely child, with no one very near to lament her when she died. This is her epitaph:
In memory of Eliuzay, a granddaughter of the Rev. Mr. Barford, by Catherine the wife of Mr. Jones of London, who died January 28, 1733, aged 14. Erected by the order of Mr. Sharpe, who died October 28, 1738, aged 71.
‘The Righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.’
It seems as if the ‘righteousness’ must refer to Mr. Sharpe who thus parsimoniously ordered a tablet to include his own epitaph with that of little Eliuzay.
In a very dark corner was the almost-obliterated tablet to the memory of John Hickey Gent, who ‘deceased ye 25th of March Ano 1709.’ On it I thought I read the words:
‘Earth lies on thy heart,’ followed by more which was illegible, till a candle disclosed what was less poetical though hardly less ominous. The inscription really ran thus:
Reader, write on thy heart and still bear it in mind, the Wicked go into everlasting punishment, the righteous into life eternal.
Of Robert Powell Whitmarsh, surgeon and apothecary and alderman of this borough, one of the Coroners for the County, who died in 1829, aged fifty-seven, it is written:
The summons came while yet life’s onward stage
He walked, not worn by sickness, nor by age
Dust sank to dust: th’ unbodied spirit’s eye
Saw—Reader! ask not what, but learn to die.
Found if well sought, seek early thou, and find
Pardon in
