In store at the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes (accession no. 1998.13.1)

I am grateful to Paul Robinson, curator of the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, for the information transcribed below and other help. The history of the stone is that it is said to have been brought by Dr John Thurnam (1810–73), the first medical superintendent of the Wiltshire County Asylum at Devizes from 1849 to his death, from Gore Cross (unpublished autobiography of Sydney John Cole in the Library of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society at Devizes, p. 158) in the hope that after his death it would be erected over his grave. This wish was not respected and "Thurnam's Stone" was set up under a yew tree near the door of the chapel of the Asylum cemetery (John Leech, Inside Out (1995), p. 9), where it was seen in 1918 by the Wiltshire archaeologists, Ben Cunnington and Canon E. H. Goddard. In 1938 as a memorial to Thurnam the stone was cemented into the floor of the porch of a new chapel for the asylum cemetery, and in 1998 when the chapel was demolished following the closure of the asylum, the stone was bought to Devizes Museum. Gore is a settlement mentioned in the Domesday Book and in the later Middle Ages there was a chantry chapel there' (Paul Robinson, In Lit., 24/9/04).

St Joan

Worn on both faces and reshaped for reuse

This rectangular slab is carved on the two broad faces.

A (broad): At the top is a circle-headed cross, carved in low relief; the arms are type B1 with an incised circle in the centre. The ring is decorated with pellets enclosed in flat-band mouldings, and the spandrels of the arms are filled with scooped 'leaves'. On either side at the base of the head are the worn remains of rosettes which appear to have been originally attached to the ring. There are vestiges of what may have been similar features on either side at the top.

B (narrow): Broken and plain

C (broad): The bottom section of the face has been chiselled away, but above is a ring (b) cross-head in low relief. The cross, type A1, is plain with an incised circle in the centre and possibly on the lower arm; the ring is incised with zigzags. Outside the ring at the base are features composed of triple U-shaped rings.

D (narrow): Plain

Appendix A item (stones dating from Saxo-Norman overlap period or of uncertain date).

Despite the fact that this piece has been very damaged by later reuse, it is possible to see that it was a grave-marker of some pretension, in contrast for example to Shaftesbury 2–4 (Ills. 92–4). The head of a cross from St John Walbrook in London (Tweddle et al.1995, ills. 347–9) throws some light on this original piece, since rows of pellets, zigzags, and the ring head with simple A1 type cross are all there present. Head shapes such as these, which are intermediate between ring heads and plate heads, are usually assigned to a late date in the series, and the London piece is given an eleventh-century date, as Tweddle admits, on 'very insubstantial evidence' (ibid., 225).

Nearer at hand there is a resemblance, in the rosettes with drilled dots in the tips of the petals and also the scooped infilling leaves, to the piece from Whitchurch Canonicorum, Dorset (Ills. 160–1), which likewise is difficult to date. Rosettes can be seen as a late feature, but attached to the cross as here can be interpreted as hanging wreaths for dressing the cross, such as one finds on Escomb 7, co. Durham (Cramp 1984, 79, pl. 55, 271). The ambiguity of the ornament is further expressed in the U-shaped features on the opposite face, which are reminiscent of the domed 'clips' which are such a feature of late Saxon plant ornament in Wessex (see introduction, pp. 51–4). A date in the eleventh century whether before or after the Conquest is therefore possible.

Mid to late eleventh century

Leech 1995, 9

None