426 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
missing brasses are some letters or figures belonging to the original 
inscription, rudely carved, somewhat as follows :— 
XX DE LE 
RIS AOE 6 EX Nos 
Along the space once occupied by the brass representing Bishop 
Sanders, a later inscription in similar, but smaller, characters wes 
added. It occupies a single line, and is as follows :— 
Chas filayp - cps -ieghlin of - 1567. 
Though the inscription presents no difficulty to anyone familiar 
with the like, Ryan only read five words correctly, and he fell into 
the serious error of assigning the date 1567 to Bishop Sanders, instead 
of to Bishop Filay, whom he ignored. 
In plain English, the record runs :— 
‘¢ Here lies Mathew Sanders, Bishop of Leighlin, who died on the 
28rd of December, 1549: To whose soul may God be gracious. Amen.” 
The ‘‘disjecta membra ” which figure about the base of the cross 
might baffle even those familiar with the vagaries of medieval stone- 
cutters. They were probably intended to be somewhat cryptic; and 
if the object was to puzzle posterity, assuredly it has been attained. 
Nevertheless the solution seems simple. If read as three lines, the MB, 
being taken as line 2, it yields :—xxm DrEcEmsris xirx.—a repetition, 
in abbreviated form, of the date of Bishop Sanders’ death. By a curious 
coincidence, exactly a century later, the same year-date abbreviation 
was used in the appellation of the ‘‘’49 officers.” 
The second inscription on this stone simply stated that— 
‘“¢Tyomas Frnray, Bisnor or LercHury, DIED 1567.” 
It may be worth observing, in reference to the characters used— 
firstly, that in the date in black-letter (as is the case in the other in- 
scriptions to be noticed presently), instead of the letter D bemg com- 
bined with M to indicate one thousand five hundred, five C’s are used 
for the purpose; secondly, that as Bishop Filay’s date is given in 
Arabic numerals, it may be assumed that they came into fashion in 
tombstone epigraphy in Ireland between 1549 and 1567. This transi- 
tion is well illustrated by the Power inscription in St. Canice’s, 
Kilkenny (Graves and Prim, p. 178), where the date is mitrrrrs3— 
both forms of numerals being combined. The first instance of the use 
of Arabic numerals in England is in a brass of 1481, at Rougham, in 
Norfolk, mentioned by Cotman; thirdly, the C in the ‘‘ Decembris”’ 
of the abbreviated date is not curved, but distinctly square in form, in 
fact a modern E bereft of its central stroke. This type of C will be 
