Rewarding rhymes (From The Northern Echo)

Stanhope's rewarding rhymes

9:35pm Tuesday 6th December 2011 in Echo Memories By Chris Lloyd, Deputy Editor

When I drag my poor, long-suffering family to a churchyard to stare at something that interests only me, I try to enthuse them with the search for odd headstone rhymes.

It doesn't really work, and they quickly drift off to something more enticing, like a coffee shop.

Stanhope churchyard, where tomorrow morning's Echo Memories is based as it stares at the sundial on the wall, proved rewarding for rhymes.

A stone in memory of Jane, wife of Jacob Earle of Boultsburn, who died July 14, 1770, aged 36, is inscribed on the rear:

Tir'd with traveling thro' this world of sin,

At length am come to nature's common Inn.

In this dark place, here, for to rest a night,

In hopes to rise that Christ might give me light

When Jacob himself died, aged 66, in 1791, the front of the stone was engraved for him:

Affliction sore. Sometime I bore

Phiscians was in vain

Till God did please.

To give me ease And rid me of my pain.

A strange poem, don't you think? There's a most odd spelling of physician, and two full stops in the middle of lines. For all that, you can really feel the old boy's pain. I think he suffered, poor chap, at the end of his days.

Sarah Vickers was only five when she died on December 22, 1787. The rear of her headstone is quite positive:

Let friends forbear to mourn & weep

While quiet in the dust I sleep.

I left this toilsom world behind

A crown of glory for to find.

There's a little poem on the headstone of Jacob Vickers, of Unthank, who died in 1815, aged 68. He shares the stone with his son, Joseph, who was 19 when he died in 1800, and his daughter Elizabeth, who died in 1813, aged 30. One word I couldn't decipher:

Reader cast thy Eyes around the

and attend to the sad Lessons of youth

and let Reflection prepare the for ??

as Death is certain but uncertain when.

This really is a cheery hobby. No wonder the children are reluctant to seek out yet another rhyme about death. In Stanhope they were rhyming into the 1860s, which is really rather late for what I regard as an end of 18th Century fashion. On the stone dedicated to the Robinson family of Bushey Flatt, members of which died in 1861 and 1869, it says:

Farewell dear friends our life is past

May you and we all meet at last

And join our songs of praise in heaven

Our sins through Jesus blood forgiven.