Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 4.djvu/94

82 ligent gentleman, a surgeon of experience, who inspected it with me; and he thought it not improbable that, these organs being in pairs, an active disease in one might cause the wasting of the other.

"The effigy, therefore, in all probability represents a lady who died in child-bed of a diseased breast, and the left hand calls attention to the fact. It represents also the infant dead lying on its back across her chest. In Elford church, near Lichfield, occurs, I believe, another instance in which the sculptor has indicated the cause of death. It is an effigy of a youth holding in his left hand a ball, while the other points to his right ear; and the tradition is, he was killed by a ball striking him there. Probably other examples of such sculpture exist, though attention has not yet been directed to them.

"It is not known whom the effigy at Sittingbourne commemorates. The tradition, or general opinion is, that the lady died in child-bed, and was brought from an estate in the parish, called Bayford castle, where there remains a moated site of a residence of considerable antiquity. This, in the reign of Edw. III., passed by marriage of the heiress of the de Nottinghams into the Cheney family, and was, temp. Hen. VI., sold to Richard Lovelace of London, in whose family it continued for upwards of a century: so that it is probable the lady was the wife of a Cheney or Lovelace; more likely the latter. The part of the church in which the monument is, Hasted calls the north cross-chancel, and says it belonged to Bayford castle; such was also the tenor of the information I received on the spot, though some persons mentioned that the monument, including the arch and slab as well as the effigy, was supposed to have been removed to its present place from the north side of the middle chancel, next the vestry, when the church was repaired after a very destructive fire in 1762. It has however the appearance of being in its original situation, and the white-washed wall, from which it is said to have been taken, has no external signs of an arch having existed there; nor could I learn that there was any ground for the supposition of its having been removed; on the contrary a gentleman, one of the oldest inhabitants of the parish, and likely to have heard of such removal had it taken place, said he knew nothing about it. Hasted, writing not many years after, mentions the fire, and the destruction of the monuments against the walls, and the removal of many of the grave-stones to other parts of the church; he notices this effigy and the arch and slab, as being in their present situation, and referring to the monument says, the 'whole of it seems very ancient;' but he has not a word of their having been brought from any other part of the church, from which I think the fair inference is, that he believed they occupied the place where they were originally erected."

We have great pleasure in announcing that measures are in progress for restoring the Norman keep at Newcastle-on-Tyne, and the curious chapel within. At a recent and special meeting of the Society of Antiquaries in that town, a petition to the Corporation was adopted and sealed, praying that body not only to allow the Society to make the necessary restorations,