To see: beneath a canopy of alabaster and local marble, Sir John Glanville the elder, a judge, half-rises in the long robe of his office — a pose that gives the stone an almost living presence. Before him his wife Alice kneels in prayer; along the base, five children are ranged. Look closely at the little heads: several are broken, damage traditionally blamed on the Civil War a century later. It was the widow who raised the monument in 1615, fifteen years after the judge's death. The work of an unidentified English workshop, it ranks among the finest early-seventeenth-century funerary monuments in the South-West of England.
Did you know?
Glanville is said to have been the first English lawyer to reach the judicial bench after starting as a mere attorney — a striking rise, appointed Justice of the Common Pleas in 1598.
Info
- Half-recumbent effigy of the robed judge, kneeling wife, five children at the base.
- Broken children's heads: damage traditionally linked to the Civil War.
- Alabaster and Devon marble; raised by the widow in 1615.