Ledger stone

A ledger stone or ledgerstone is an inscribed stone slab usually laid into the floor of a church to commemorate or mark the place of the burial of an important deceased person. The term "ledger stone" derives from the German word legen, meaning to lie. Ledger stones may also be found as slabs forming the tops of tomb chest monuments.

Ledger stones take the form of an inscribed stone slab, usually laid into the floor of a church to commemorate or mark the place of the burial of an important deceased person. Ledger stones may also be found as slabs forming the tops of chest tombs. An inscription is usually incised into the stone within a ledger line running around the edge of the stone. Such inscription may continue within the central area of the stone, which may be decorated with relief-sculpted or incised coats of arms, or other appropriate decorative items such as skulls, hour-glasses, etc. Stones with inset brasses first appeared in the 13th century.

This is a regional style of lettering that occurs in Breconshire and in Lincoln and in Humberside in the United Kingdom. The style where the lettering and armorial are raised in cameo and the lettering set in a border or cartouche may indicate a local workshop. These slabs occur during a period from about 1630 to 1740. In Breconshire these slabs might be connected to the Brute family of stonemasons who lived at Llanbedr Ystrad Yw, Breconshire Similarly lettered ledger slabs of black marble occur in Lincoln Cathedral and in St Martin's churchyard Lincoln possibly indicating a local workshop. Neave illustrates another ledger slab of this type of 1718 in Holy Trinity Church, Hull and indicates that other examples exist in the East Riding of Yorkshire

Rocks from the Tournai area date from the Carboniferous Period and have been used to define the Tournaisian Age, a subdivision of the Carboniferous lasting from 359 to 345 million years ago. Tournai stone is a dark limestone which takes a polish and was used particularly in the Romanesque period for sculpted items such as Tournai fonts. It is sometimes called Tournai marble, though this is geologically inaccurate. These marbles are found over a large area of central Belgian and normally have white inclusions and fossils in them, but there is also the Nero Belgio which is almost jet black in appearance and come from quarries that are still operating at Golzinne and Mazy. It is noticeable that an almost jet black marble, similar to Nero Belgio occurs as ledger slabs in that later part of the 18th and early 19th century, an example being Dean Kaye’s memorial in Lincoln Cathedral. Many other black ledger stones of the 17th to 19th. centuries have white flecking, which may also suggest that they come from Belgian sources. Neale notes references in the Hull Port in the 17th and 18th to the importation of ledger stones and draws comparisons between those in churches in Humberside and those in St Bavokerk's church in Haarlem. Some of the closest examples of ledgerstones come from the St Stevenskerk, Nijmegen, but it will be noted that at the Dutch examples normally use upper case lettering for the inscriptions.

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