The Memorial Inscription

So much for the the Parish Registers, for the moment. Let us take a closer look at the memorial inscription itself in the search for further clues.

Cut in the distinct typographical style of the period and executed with skill and flourishes into the weather cracked stone, the opening seven lines are intended to identify Sarah Smith the person in the clerical dispassionate style of a Parish Registrar. Marking the final resting place of her mortal remains, charting the brief span of her life and placing her in the context of her family history and within the physical landscape of the day.

The reference to Bradwall Park* is interesting. This is the site of an important estate of the period with sheep and arable farming about a mile away to the north of the church just beyond the hamlet of Porthill. The earliest family seat of the Sneyd family, Bradwall Hall had been, from its earliest days, one of the major agricultural employers of permanent and seasonal workers in this feudal Parish.

As we shall see later, the Sneyds could trace an unbroken line right back to the year 1400 when they laid claim to the estate at Bradwall. And over these three hundred and fifty years the Sneyds had become one of the largest landowners in North Staffordshire and Cheshire. Their principal income had always been founded on renting out their vast tracts of land to leasehold tenant farmers - there were 140 such tenants in Sarah Smith's day. Patronage to the Sneyds dominated the lives of the parishioners of Wolstanton.

And the Sneyds dominated in more ways besides - they were careful to balance their growing wealth and influence by investing in the spiritual well-being of the community. In 1567, in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, the Sneyds endowed a rectory at Wolstanton Church, recorded thus:

“Sir William Sneyd of Chester, in the penal sum of £600 to the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, to secure (on the granting of the rectory of Wolstanton to Sneyd by the Crown) an annual rent of £19 to the Bishop, from the Manor of Keele, and other conditions.”

On his death in 1571, Sir William Sneyd was buried in the nave of Wolstanton Church and the carved alabaster tomb found in the church today remains one of the earliest and most elaborate Sneyd family memorials.

And the Sneyd connection with the church becomes evident again in Sarah Smith’s day - the Oxford educated ‘Edwd. Sneyd, Vicar’ of Wolstanton Parish is the third son in line to the family titles and only one of many Sneyd younger sons to follow this path.

But what of the Smith family? Did they have local roots or had they migrated here as tithed estate workers? Having scoured the likely dates in the Baptismal and Marriage Registers, not only of the parish of Wolstanton but also of the neighbouring parishes of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Stoke-on-Trent and Audley, the earliest record is found in the Wolstanton Baptismal Register with the telling line, ‘Samuel filius illegitimus Hanna Smith bap. fuit Juny 22 1707’. (Samuel, illegitimate son of Hannah Smith, was baptised June 22 1707). [5]

If this man is indeed Sarah’s father, he would have been 35 years old when she was born. It is a likely start as it ties in perfectly with the burial records of both Samuel and Martha Smith.

The next record of a Samuel Smith is when he appears as a witness in this entry in the Wolstanton Parish Marriage Register: ‘Mar 29 1761, Willm. Cliff of Audley, wid., & Martha Royles of this Parish. Wits.: Samuel Smith & Thos. Morrice.’ And then, a year and a half later in the same register it seems that the family are now indeed settled in the parish with the marriage of Samuel Smith the son, brother to Sarah: ‘Dec 25 1762 Saml. Smith, of this Parish, husbandman, and Ann Allen, of the Parish of Astbury in the County of Chestershire.’ [6 ]

After the formal lines on the stone, we get the epitaph proper in two rhyming four-line couplets. It is hard to believe that Sarah, in the tortured agony of the poisoning, would have had the calm, reflective presence of mind to compose the verses herself - even allowing for an unusual level of literacy for the period.

And yet the thing that jolts you on first reading the lines is the clear first-person voice in which they are couched - in these eight lines, ‘me’ and ‘my’ occur a total of six times. It is the bold assurance of the accusation and the tantalisingly incomplete naming of the accused in the opening lines that first mark the shocking uniqueness of the gravestone:

It was C––––s B––––w
that brought me to my end

And it is beyond doubt that C––––s B––––w lies at the heart of the investigative puzzle. This is followed by an address to her ‘Dear Parents’ which invokes God Himself as a witness to her completely untroubled conscience:

Dear Parents mourn not for me
For God will stand my friend

The opening two lines of the second stanza, like the first, are meant to shock as they describe, in a remarkably unemotional tone, how the accused man did the deed itself:

With half a Pint of Poyson
He came to visit me

And the inscription ends with Sarah making her last wish which she delivers as an imperative. When the last trump sounds - after all the ages of man have passed - Sarah wants God Himself to read the inscription and judge her. And having judged her, for God Himself to judge the deeds of C–––s B–––w:

Write this on my Grave
That all that read it may see.

It is hard not to detect Sarah’s voice in these words, sentiments and revelations, and the directness of the simple and damning phrases. Yet they are wrung of all emotion - the words display a calm confidence that when He has judged her, He will find a place for her among the innocent and will cast C–––s B–––w utterly from Him.

So, if not Sarah, who did pen the verses? Looked at stylistically, the couplets display a charming irregularity of stress pattern - the ‘it’ in the last line, for instance, is a completely rogue syllable next to the perfect regularity of the final line of the first verse. But those four hard stresses: ‘That all that read it may see.’ does give the epitaph the perfect emphatic ending.

A homegrown voice it might seem - her brother Samuel’s hand, perhaps? Did the sound of Sarah’s screaming as the poison took hold bring the family running and in her last moments did Sarah’s consciousness of her looming death lead her to unburden her soul to her family – naming C–––s B–––w as her seducer or lover and then describing the events of the man’s recent visit? Was there anyone present at Sarah’s deathbed who could have written down her last wishes?

Again, the original Parish Marriage Register contains a clue here. As already noted, Sarah’s brother Samuel married Ann Allen on Christmas Day 1762, and the printed line ‘This marriage was solemnized between us’ is followed by two spaces. In the upper line, a crudely penned cross is followed by the clerk’s hand ‘the Mark of Saml. Smith’. Directly below, his new bride Ann has left a delicate little squiggle explained by the clerk as ‘the Mark of Ann Allen’. [6]

No literacy here, then, and very little sign of widespread penmanship throughout the rest of the volume from grooms, brides or witnesses. Maybe, once the family had decided to honour their daughter’s last wishes and make a large investment in buying the burial plot and commissioning a stone mason, they had formed a clear idea of the words of the epitaph themselves.

Along with a written version of the opening seven lines which might have been composed for the purpose by the Reverend Edward Sneyd, they would then have arrived at the inscribed version of the verses with some help from the stone mason and his extensive knowledge of memorial versifying.

Or maybe the Reverend Edward Sneyd took a more active role in seeing that Sarah’s last wishes were realised?

*The name 'Bradwall' has evolved over the years and is today known as 'Bradwell'. The original spelling will be used here.

Copyright 2006 Jeremy Crick

Bradwall Hall

The carved alabaster tomb of Sir William Sneyd in Wolstanton Church

[Fig 5]

[Fig 6]

A plan of Wolstanton churchyard showing the position of Sarah Smith's gravestone