To see: an imposing stone canopy on six Corinthian columns shelters the recumbent effigy of Frances Kitson, Lady FitzWarren, hands joined in prayer. Look up at the canopy and friezes: strapwork — those interlaced cut-leather bands so typical of the Elizabethan age — runs across the whole structure. Frances was the mother of William Bourchier, 3rd Earl of Bath, whose tomb stands in the same church. For St Peter's, Tawstock, is a true museum of funerary sculpture: the Bourchier line, Earls of Bath, left here a series of monuments spanning the English Renaissance. This one, by an unidentified workshop, marks one of its late-sixteenth-century milestones.
Did you know?
Such canopied tombs on six columns are nicknamed "six-posters," by analogy with the four-poster bed: the deceased rests as if in a stone bedchamber, between sleep and eternity.
Info
- Praying effigy under a six-column Corinthian canopy.
- Elizabethan strapwork (interlaced band) ornament.
- St Peter's, Tawstock: funerary series of the Earls of Bath (Bourchier).