How would you like to be remembered in your epitaph? STEPHEN LEWIS talks to a Riccall man with a grave obsession.

ON a gravestone in Ripon Cathedral's churchyard, there is an inscription that demonstrates a quirky sense of humour.

Here lies poor but honest Bryan Tunstall;

he was a most expert angler

until Death, envious of his Merit,

threw out his line, hook'd him, and landed him here

the 21st day of April 1790

As a memorial to 'poor but honest' Mr Tunstall, it takes some beating. And it is typical of a type of epitaph of its time, commemorating honest workmen. A quirky inscription at Selby Abbey commemorates an otherwise long-forgotten sexton:

Near to this stone lies Archer (John),

Late saxton, I aver,

Who, without tears, thirty-four years

Did carcases inter,

But Death at last, for his works past,

Unto him thus did say:

Leave off thy trade, be not afraid

But forthwith come away;

Without reply, or asking why

The summons he obeyed,

In seventeen hundred and sixty-eight,

Resigned his life and spade.

Sam Taylor loves epitaphs. So much so, that the retired Queen Margaret's School teacher is writing a book about them. He can't see a church without popping into the graveyard to look around.

He loves the sometimes humorous, sometimes grand language of epitaphs, and the glimpse of long-ago lives and professions they offer. They are, he says, an important social document.

Not that you can always believe what is written. There is an old expression, seldom used now, "to lie like an epitaph", he says.

He tells a story about the famous essayist Charles Lamb. As a young boy in the late 1700s, he was taken by his mother to visit Westminster Abbey. He gazed goggle-eyed at the monuments to the great and good interred there, and read their epitaphs with awe. It was only when he emerged blinking into the daylight again that he turned to his mother with a question. "But mother," he asked, "where are all the naughty people buried?"

Mr Taylor laughs. "It's a wonderful comment on the dishonesty of most people's inscriptions," he says.

Epitaphs weren't only used to puff the reputation of deceased relatives. Sometimes they could be an attempt to set the record straight, Mr Taylor says. Admiral John Byng was executed in Portsmouth in 1757 for failing to defend Minorca against the French Navy. An inscription at Southill Church in Bedfordshire, presumably put up by friends or relatives, amounts to a stern and dignified defence of his reputation:

To the Perpetual Disgrace of Public Justice

The Honourable John Byng

Admiral of the Blue,

Fell a Martyr to Political Persecution

On March 14, in the year 1757,

When Bravery and Loyalty

Were insufficient Securities

For the Life and Honour

Of a Naval Officer.

Some epitaphs come across as preachy, such as the (undated) one for jockey Thomas Jackson at Nunnington parish church, which contains the lines:

His faithful and Meritorious Services gained him this Monument, which affords a useful Lesson to the humbler Part of Mankind; who may learn from hence that Men of Industry, and Honesty, may rise to Glory from the lowest Stations.

Others reveal their times. Take that of Jane Austen, for example. One of the greatest figures in English Literature and yet not a mention, in her epitaph, of her achievements. It reads simply:

The benevolence of her heart, the sweetness of her temper, and the extraordinary endowments of her mind obtained the regard of all who knew her, and the warmest love of her intimate connections.

Beautifully written, Mr Taylor concedes. "But it could be anybody. There is no reference to the fact that she wrote these wonderful novels."

Another hugely revealing epitaph, and one of Mr Taylor's favourites, is that to a little girl called Penelope Boothby at Ashbourne Church in Derbyshire.

She died in 1795 at the age of five, her parents' only child. Epitaph writers often resorted to pious expressions about children being saved from the 'temptations of a venal world' in a desperate attempt to square the death of a young innocent with the idea of a just God, Mr Taylor says.

No such pieties in the case of Penelope: her epitaph is raw and desolate. A statue of her lies asleep on top of the tomb, and beneath it is written:

She was in form and intellect most exquisite. The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark, and the wreck was total.

Sadly, the great days of the epitaph are long behind us. The 17th and 18th centuries were the golden period. The decline began with the Victorians use of "dreadful euphemisms" - nobody ever seems to have died in the Victorian period, Mr Taylor says acerbically: they only passed away or passed over.

That was as nothing to the fate of the epitaph in the 20th century, however. The 20th century killed the epitaph. Inscriptions on modern gravestones tell us nothing about the people they are supposed to commemorate, he says. "They say 'John Bloggs, born such and such a date, mourned by so and so.'" Sincere expressions of grief, certainly, but all so similar. "People's lives are not all the same. They have different jobs, different skills. They should be celebrated."

Mr Taylor, writing as JPG Taylor, is compiling a book about epitaphs, and would like to hear of any interesting or unusual examples. He can be contacted on 01757 248513 or at 24 Holmes Drive, Riccall, York YO19 6RT.

Updated: 11:11 Saturday, June 12, 2004