Month: September 2025

I used to smile when I passed the grave of Sarah Fletcher in Dorchester Abbey.

First there was the singular rubric, accompanied by an exclamation mark, clamouring for attention: “Reader!” In the mid nineteenth century exclamation marks were commonly known as Shriekmarks or Screamers, and that is how they always appear to me. Worse, as F Scott Fitzgerald suggested, they can sound like people laughing at their own jokes, though that is surely not the case here.

Next came the hyperbole, typical of eighteenth and nineteenth century epitaphs, enumerating the lady’s unqualified virtues:

A Young Lady, whose artless Beauty,

Innocence of Mind, and gentle Manners,

Once obtained her the Love and

Esteem of all who knew her.

But it was always the next sentence, making Sarah sound like an absurd antagonist in a Jane Austen novel, which amused me most:

But when Nerves were too delicately spun to

Bear the rude Shakes and Joltings

Which we meet with in this transitory

World, Nature gave way: She sunk

And died a Martyr to Excessive

Sensibility.

But when I learned Sarah’s pitiable story, I was ashamed of my heartless mockery. Sarah had discovered that following a series of infidelities, her husband Captain Fletcher, was planning a bigamous marriage to an heiress. With impressive resolution she arrived at the church in time to stop the ceremony; the heiress returned to her parents and Captain Fletcher to his ship. Unhappily, Sarah’s fortitude then deserted her, and she hanged herself from the curtain rail of her four-poster bed.

I want to tell her: Sarah, he wasn’t worth it, why didn’t you just walk away? But of course, that was not an option for women in 1799. The Married Women’s Property Act did not pass into law until almost a century later in 1882. Until then marriage made husbands and wives one person under the law, and that was not a romantic union. For it meant that any property or other assets the wife brought to the marriage were surrendered to the husband, anything she subsequently acquired in the form of income or belongings was legally his. She could not own anything in her own right or even jointly.

And effectively there was no divorce, for until 1857 the latter could only be obtained through a personal act of Parliament. This prohibitively complex and costly procedure was made even more difficult for women who had to provide evidence of grounds in addition to those of adultery. In 1857 there were only four divorces in the whole country, and they were all requested by men.

If she had broken away from him Captain Fletcher could have left Sarah destitute. And given his conduct there is no reason to believe that he would have acted otherwise.

Yet it was surprising to find Sarah buried in the Abbey, for another brutal law of the day prohibited the burial in consecrated ground of those who had killed themselves. Bodies of suicides were usually buried at a crossroads, commonly with a stake driven through the heart. Not until 1882 was it legal to hold a Christian service for anyone who had taken their own life.

Sarah’s body was able to be buried in the abbey church only because at the inquest,

“the derangement of her mind appearing very evident…the jury…found the verdict – Lunacy.” *

Sarah was not responsible for her actions. We cannot know if that verdict was motivated by a compassionate desire to allow her a church burial, but the words on the grave now make sense as a delicate euphemism.

It is not clear who was responsible for placing the stone and deciding the wording. Perhaps her parents, for Sarah was only twenty-nine years old, and they could still have been alive. If she chose not to return to their home, the possibility arises that she killed herself not because she feared impoverishment, but because she still loved the errant Captain Fletcher. The tragedy is no less either way.

It is strange, in the circumstances, that Captain Fletcher is named on the grave. I suspect it was a bleak attempt by the family to conceal the suicide, the lunacy verdict, and the sorry circumstances which prompted both, beneath a veneer of respectability and normality.

Unable to share in the hope expressed in the final lines on the stone, that “her Soul meet that Peace in Heaven which this Earth denied her,” I no longer smile when I pass her grave.

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*Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Saturday 15^th June 1799

Thomas Barrow and the Tragedy of the Broken Horse

By Gravedigger

On September 14, 2025

In Drowned at sea

Sussex was the first county that I ever visited in the south of England. In the mid-sixties the south was still a quite different place from the north. True, we did not think of ourselves as northerners in my home county of Cheshire. Surrounded though we were by The North, The Midlands, Wales, and Liverpool, we perceived Cheshire as a misplaced bit of the home counties. Heavy industry, serious pollution, abandoned bombsites, and slum dwellings were the preserve of other, more stereotypically northern counties. Cheshire was dairy farming, the determined gentility of Knutsford and Wilmslow, and well-heeled housewives shopping in the Chester Rows.

Nonetheless a singular difference was apparent to me on that first trip south. Everything was cleaner and smarter, lighter and brighter, the air was fresher, the people were better dressed, the shops more elegant. There was an air of confidence, a swagger of prosperity and modernity. It was as though the sun had come out at the end of a bleak winter or a light had been switched on in a dark room.

In Chichester, the white limestone of the Cathedral contrasted with the dark red sandstone of the Chester I knew. There was an exciting scattering of coffee shops with real coffee; at home, the height of sophistication was a frothy coffee in a Perspex cup at a Wimpy bar. In Brighton, The Lanes burst with colour: greengrocers with Mediterranean fruits and vegetables which had not yet reached us in the north, vied with clothes shops with outrageously coloured and styled fashions.

Today the contrast is less apparent, and conceivably my memory exaggerates the erstwhile difference. I was doubtless influenced by an unusually sunny August, and by meetings with poised and stylish French children on English home holidays.

Nonetheless I still have a great affection for Sussex, not only for memories of a youthful, golden summer, but because it really is a very pretty county. I am particularly fond of Bosham with its the elegant houses, magnificent harbour, spectacular tidal range, and picturesque Anglo-Saxon church.

Of course, Holy Trinity church is surrounded by a picture book perfect churchyard, a gentle paradise of flowers, birdsong, and ancient stones. And there, despite the unhappy story attached to it, rests one of my favourite graves. Although the grave dates from 1759, the carved script, in a charming mixture of calligraphy, is still clear. Perhaps that lack of pollution and the milder southern climate which I noted on my first visit, combined with high quality engraving, has ensured its longevity.

The stone bears witness to the memory of Thomas Barrow, who was master of a sloop called the Two Brothers. It records his tragic misfortune:

In Memory of

Thomas, Son of Richard and Ann

Barrow, Master of the sloop Two

Brothers who by the Breaking of the

Horse fell into the Sea and Drown’d.

October the 13^th 1759 Aged 23 years

Having little knowledge of things maritime, the reference to the horse confused me until I discovered that a horse is an additional footrope hung at the extreme end of the yardarm where the main rope is too tight to stand on. The shorter rope hangs down low enough for sailors to stand on while they are furling the outermost edges of the sails. It is usually thinner and more unstable than the other ropes, and as it is necessary to step off the main footrope to get on to it, it is usually the preserve of more experienced sailors like Thomas. *

Above a rough sea and pounded by storms from the north, the horse broke, and poor Thomas fell to his death. A bittersweet little carving illustrates the tragedy. In the centre is the sloop, below the rumbustious waves, and above a winged putti with distended cheeks representing the north wind. A tiny figure is clearly visible falling from the broken horse.

Below a dramatic yet poignant verse proclaims,

Tho Boreas’s Storms and Neptune’s waves

have toss’d me to and fro

Yet I at length by God’s decree

am harboured here below

Where at an Anchor here I lay

with many of our Fleet

Yet once again I shall set Sail

my saviour Christ to meet.”

And who reading his story could fail to wish that Thomas might “once again set sail”?

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*If this is as unclear to you as it was to me, search for “Flemish horse(rigging)” on https://en.wikipedia.org where there is not only a helpful photograph and a diagram, but an explanation that all footropes were once known as “horses”, with this, the most dangerous one, known as a Flemish horse because the latter were considered the most unruly of equines.

Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Month: September 2025

Sarah Fletcher: A Martyr To Excessive Sensibility

Thomas Barrow and the Tragedy of the Broken Horse