(September 2026)
Tombstone epigraphy is a splendid (and to date largely unutilised) source of evidence for the moral opinions of the past. Nonetheless, it is subject to various limitations, some inherent in the nature of the material, some arising from the way it has been collected and organised.
First, the vast majority of surviving pre-twentieth-century epitaphs are found inside churches. This skews the record, for it was only notables who were buried inside churches, where their decomposing bodies would assail the noses of worshippers. In 1820 this practice was halted for hygienic reasons, but prominent individuals could still be honoured, for a fee, by a plaque on the nave or chancel wall. The poor, meanwhile, were commemorated in the churchyard. Whatever was written in praise of their virtues has long since been torn down or eroded. Thus of the 2829 records collected here to date, 167 are of baronets, 56 of admirals and generals, 56 of bishops, and 82 of members of parliament. Only 25 are of servants. And memorials to men outnumber those to women by somewhat over 2 to 1.
Second, the practice of commemorating the dead with tombs and plaques inside the church was largely an Anglican one. Nonconformist and Roman Catholic churches contain few if any epitaphs. Thus far, the website contains only two nonconformist churches (designated as “chapels” on the map here) and no Roman Catholic churches. Civil cemeteries of course house thousands of tombs, but the vast majority of these make no mention of the virtues of the deceased. So this website is, in essence, a record of the moral culture of the Anglican gentry.
Finally, the large majority of these photographs were taken by me on my travels around Britain. There are thus biases in favour of the South West, which is where I live, and in favour of cathedrals and large city churches over small village churches (these latter are alas now often shut except for services). So far, however, I have found no signs of regional variation in the texts of epitaphs (though there is some in the carving and ornamentation), suggesting that the records collected here are fairly representative of Britain as a whole.
Selection and categorisation of records
Two simple rules have guided my selection of epitaphs. First, include only epitaphs which mention the virtues of the deceased; and second, include all epitaphs – or all encountered epitaphs – which mention the virtues of the deceased. By following these two rules, I have hoped to allay any suspicion of cherry-picking data to illustrate a thesis.
I have deviated from these rules only in two cases. First, I have included a few early tombstones which I thought particularly striking visually or in some other way, even though they contain no virtue terms but only poetry or mentions of the afterlife (see for example this beautiful tomb of Judeath Wakeman in Exeter). Such records are two few in number to affect the statistical ratios, however. Second, I have omitted vast numbers of modern tombstones commemorating a “loving” or “devoted” mum or dad. I have put in a few, to give the gist, but to include them all would have been tedious.
In categorising the images, I was forced to strike a compromise. Obviously not everything of historical interest could be tagged, or the website would have become cumbrous to use. Some categories were inescapable: sex, profession, date of death, age at death. Others struck me as potentially useful to researchers with particular interests — tombstone poetry, for instance. In selecting virtue search-terms, I let myself be guided by the actual wording of the inscriptions, avoiding all interpretation. Thus, for instance, I decided not to amalgamate into a single category “kindness”, “humanity” and “benevolence”, on the grounds that these words might once have marked important differences of meaning. (And those wishing to search under all three categories simultaneously can always do so.) But other important concepts can be expressed indifferently in a myriad of ways, which would have been pointless to list separately. Thus “intelligence” here does duty for “genius”, “vigour of mind”, “strength of understanding”, and so forth. Where virtue categories are “interpretative” in this way, I have placed an asterisk beside them: explanations are then given together with search results.
I envisage that one of the chief uses of this website will be to investigate trends in word and concept use. For this reason, search results are organised chronologically and bunched into decades, enabling users to see at a rough glance when particular words or concepts were most popular. Alongside each decade, a figure in brackets indicates the total number of records in that decade, or the total number of records with some other selected characteristic. This is crucial, because it is usually relative rather than absolute frequencies which are significant. For instance, there are more references to charity in the period 1800–1849 than there are in the previous half-century, but only because there are more records as a whole. As a ratio of total records, references to charity go down in this period.
Latin epitaphs
When this website was created in 2019, I decided not to include Latin epitaphs, reckoning my schoolboy Latin not up to the task of translating them. This resulted in a big gap in the record, since half or more of all sixteenth, seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century epitaphs are in Latin. However, ChatGPT is now a reliable translator of Latin into English, so I have started filling in entries using AI and (where available) existing human translations, amending both in the interests of consistency. To date, we have 317 Latin epitaphs, somewhat over ten per cent of the total; in the period 1550-1740, this rises to roughly a third.
Including Latin alongside English epitaphs in an indexed database raises obvious cataloguing problems. In this website, I have (with a few exceptions, detailed below) endeavoured to match each Latin virtue-term with one and the same English term, usually its own derivative. Thus all mentions of caritas are included in charity, all mentions of prudentia in prudence, and so on. Occasionally, however, Latin terms are ambiguous in a way that has no parallel in English, requiring the same word to be translated in two or more different ways. For example:
- I have translated fortitudo as “fortitude” except in military contexts, where “courage” seemed more appropriate.
- I have translated fides as “faith” in all religious contexts, otherwise as “fidelity”.
- I have translated pietas as “piety” even in contexts such as uxor pia and summa in deum, et parentes pietate where “obedient” might seem more natural (the sub-categories of “conjugal” and “filial” piety serve to accommodate these special uses). In a very few cases, however, pius demands to be translated as “conscientious”, as in this epitaph to the “pious” doctor Matthew Combe.
- I have translated constantia as “patience” in contexts of illness, otherwise as “constancy”.
- I have translated acer as wit or strenuousness, depending on context.
Suavitas – a common accolade in early-eighteenth-century monuments – raised special problems. “Suavity” seemed the obvious equivalent, but when this forced me to describe young children as “suave” it became apparent that the English term had already by this time drifted some way from its Latin ancestor. In the end, I opted for the literal translation of “sweetness“, reserving “suavity” for English-language epitaphs.
The use of Latin virtue terms is largely consistent with the use of their English equivalents, though there is a marked preference for some Latin terms (for instance, over half of all mentions of probity are probitas). Those wishing to search for only English or only Latin terms can always do so using the “languages” bar on the search page here.