YOU SEE OLD SCARLETTS PICTURE STAND ON HIE
BUT AT YOUR FEETE THERE DOTH HIS BODY LYE
HIS GRAVESTONE DOTH HIS AGE AND DEATH TIME SHOW
HIS OFFICE BY THEIS TOKENS YOU MAY KNOW
SECOND TO NONE FOR STRENGTH AND STURDYE LIMM
A SCARBABE MIGHTY VOICE WITH VISAGE GRIM
HEE HAD INTER'D TWO QUEENES WITHIN THIS PLACE
AND THIS TOWNES HOUSEHOLDERS IN HIS LIVES SPACE
TWICE OVER: BUT AT LENGTH HIS OWN TURNE CAME
WHAT HE FOR OTHERS DID FOR HIM THE SAME
WAS DONE: NO DOUBT HIS SOUL DOTH LIVE FOR AYE
IN HEAVEN: THOUGH HERE HIS BODY CLAD IN CLAY.
On the floor is a stone inscribed "JULY 2 1594 R.S. ætatis 98." This painting is not a contemporary portrait of the old sexton, but a copy made in 1747.
The sentiment expressed in the penult couplet is not uncommon, the idea of retributive justice, of others performing the last offices for the clerk who had so often done the like for his neighbours. The same notion is expressed in the epitaph of Frank Raw, clerk and monumental mason, of Selby, Yorkshire, which runs as follows:
Here lies the body of poor FRANK RAW
Parish clerk and gravestone cutter,
And this is writ to let you know
What Frank for others used to do
Is now for Frank done by another [48].
[48] Curious Epitaphs, by W. Andrews, p. 120.
The achievement of Old Scarlett with regard to his interring "the town's householders in his life's space twice over," has doubtless been equalled by many of the long-lived clerks whose memoirs have been recorded, but it is not always recorded on a tombstone. At Ratcliffe-on-Soar there is, however, the grave of an old clerk, one Robert Smith, who died in 1782, at the advanced age of eighty-two years, and his epitaph records the following facts:
Fifty-five years it was, and something more,
Clerk of this parish he the office bore,
And in that space, 'tis awful to declare,
Two generations buried by him were [49]!
[49] Ibid. p. 121.
It is recorded on the tomb of Hezekiah Briggs, who died in 1844 in his eightieth year, the clerk and sexton of Bingley, Yorkshire, that "he buried seven thousand corpses [50]."