‘An absolutely wonderful book … These
epitaphs do what they were carved to do – give us pause.’
Ronald Blythe
‘A delightful and wide-ranging collection.’
These epitaphs have been collected from churches and churchyards in the
towns and villages of Oxfordshire. In verses or prose pieces that are
beautiful, touching or eccentric, they tell us what people over the
centuries have been moved to say about their dead. The young lady of
Dorchester who died ‘a martyr to Excessive Sensibility’, the baby of
Compton Beauchamp whose
‘life was like his length all but a span’, the Cottisford man, a
servant of the East India Company, who ‘acquired the entire esteem of
the Natives and great Honour to the English factories’, the itinerant
female rat-catcher who found her ‘last lodging’ in Chipping Norton
churchyard, John the Smith of Brightwell Baldwin, who died in 1371 –
all these and many more are for a moment brought to life as we read
their epitaphs.Sunday Times ‘A splendid little anthology … It is a most notable and worthwhile achievement, one which everyone with a love for English and, above all, local life will welcome with acclaim.’ Senex, Oxford Times The book first appeared in 1980: for this new paperback edition (1990) Patricia Utechin has added twenty-six epitaphs. Patricia Utechin, daughter of an army officer, lived in India as a child, but has spent most of her adult life in Oxfordshire. Towards the end of the Second World War she was a VAD in military hospitals at Middleton Stoney and Tusmore Park. Thereafter she was a student at Ruskin College, and since then has worked largely in Oxford itself. She has one son, who works as a radio producer, and she lives in Old Headington. |