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On the Incised Grave-stones and Stone Coffins of MincMnhampton 

 Church. By G. F. Playne. 



Eead at GloucestbBj April 7, 1869. 



On the occasion of our Field Meeting in May last year, the 

 Parish Church of Minchinhampton was visited, and I had there 

 the pleasure of exhibiting to the Club plans of some Incised 

 Grave-stones, or Coffin-lids, found at that Church, and which 

 our President considered of sufficient interest to be engraved 

 for the records of the Club. I have now briefly to bring before 

 you an account of these Incised Slabs, and also of some Stone 

 Coffins, with such particulars of the buildings of which they 

 have formed part, as are needful to illustrate their history. 



From the Doomsday Survey we learn that in the reign of 

 Edward the Confessor, Goda, the Countess, held Hamptone, 

 and that in the reign of King William the Conqueror the 

 church of the nuns of Caen, in Normandy, held it. This foreign 

 convent continued to hold it until the suppression of alien 

 monasteries in the reign of King Henry the Fifth, when it 

 passed into the possession of the nunnery of Syon, in Middlesex. 

 No evidence remains to show whether a church stood here in 

 Saxon times, but a portion of a Norman church existed quite 

 recently, — for until the restoration of this Parish Church, in 

 1842, there remained a range of piers and arches of Norman 

 work, on the north side of the nave ; and in the wall over these 

 arches were found two small Norman vdndows, walled up, the 

 apertures of which were only 6 inches in width. Of Early 



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