Philippe Andersson's Historical Research Page

Introduction

Table of Contents

• Slide #893: Huccorgne (B), Church St-Jean Baptiste, Gravestone.
  • Style-based analysis
  • Historical context

Slide #893 (V B 21): Huccorgne (B), Church St-Jean Baptiste, Gravestone.

Shot taken on November the 21^st, 1995 - click to enlarge.

Slide #893 was taken in Huccorgne (Belgium, Liège prov., commune of Wanze), just opposite the church door. An old gravestone, the shape of a latin cross, has been embedded in a stone wall (probably both for aesthetical reasons and to better preserve the old stone cross). The text carved on the top half of the cross is completely un-intelligible to me -- I don't even recognize the script it's written in.

The stone in itself is of a good quality (though its grain is rather coarse and contains a lot of minute shell fossils) and is well preserved. It has been, at some point, broken in two just below the horizontal bar of the cross, and was mended when set in the wall.

The wall and the embedded headstones (taken on Nov. 4, 2004)

Below is a faithful reproduction of that stone and its text. If it follows the tradition, one could expect the first line to be a standard religious formula like R.I.P. or I.H.S.. The second line could be the name of the deceased and the third a date. Of course, I could also be completely wrong about that.

Any information as to the script used or, even better, the translation of the text would be highly welcomed.

Below follows a discussion of the various hypotheses that have been suggested to me, or that I came up with over the time, along with the research I made in order to either validate or refute them.

1. The shape of certain characters reminded me of hand-written modern Hebrew. Could it be a stone-carved rendition of a cursive modern Hebrew script, possibly a clumsy one, the engraver not being familiar with the script, and copying shapes off a scrap of paper handed over by the customer, a relative of the deceased, without understanding them ?
   This was easily ruled out by an Israeli friend, to whom I showed the drawing. None of the characters was recognizable to him. (Thanks for your help, Shay !)
2. A family member (cheers, Pierre !) suggested to me to investigate a short-lived German script called Sütterlin. Could this gravestone be dating back to the German occupation of Belgium, during World War II ?
   Let's consider this. As explained in [¹], die Sütterlinschrift is a German script based on the Latin alphabet. It was taught in German elementary schools from 1934 to 1941 as a more easily mastered replacement for the traditional Gothic script used before. Here is my attempt at some sütterlin calligraphy:
   
   As you can see, with the possible exception of the letters c, d, e, h, r, s, v, x and y, most characters are immediately recognizable by anyone familiar with modern Latin-based scripts. Moreover, as described in my source, all numerals in Sütterlin are exactly the same as the ones we use today.
   Based on this evidence, and the lack of any similarity with the Huccorgne gravestone script, I think we can rule out Sütterlin as well.
3. A cursory search on Omniglot and AncientScripts.com, two on-line guides to writing systems, hasn't yielded any conclusive match. A deeper investigation would be required in order to compare this inscription with all the entries in their databases, though.

Maybe the Priest in charge of the parish, or the history department at the local commune would be able to tell me more about it. I'll try to find out.

Style-based analysis

Let's ignore for a while the problem of the script and of the meaning of the text. The look of the stone can already provide us with some information if we can decypher it by comparing it with other, similar cases.

The Huccorgne headstone has three notable characteristics:

• the shape of the stone itself
• the profile of the inscription grooves
• the absence of any decoration

Let's discuss each of these characteristics in turn.

The shape of the stone

The stone has the most straightforward shape imaginable for a roman cross (the intersection of two plain rectangles). It also has peculiar proportions: the horizontal branch of the cross is shorter than expected. Lastly, the whole cross is much smaller than usual (roughly 70cm high by 40cm wide).

The profile of the inscription grooves

Most stone-carved inscriptions I know in the area use V-shaped grooves. This inscription uses square-shaped grooves. I could find other examples of those, of course, but not in the same context.

One typical use of square-shaped grooves is for gothic-inspired scripts (could it be the case here ?). Another is when the carved-out letter is to be filled by some colored stucko meant to make the inscription text stand out. There is no trace of anything like that here.

The absence of any decoration

Most other preserved headstones display some form of iconographic motif. Some are really sparse, others almost lavish, but I couldn't find (in my collection) another example of a headstone with no decoration at all. Of course, this could be explained by the fact that in the past, only decorated stones were preserved (for their "artistic" value), while plain ones were discarded. In this case, the stone that preoccupies us would also have been discarded, were it not for its unusual script.

Historical context

The church, in its present state, is a neo-gothic sandstone building with 3 naves, dating from 1907. It reuses old limestone columns (dating from the XVIth century) from the previous church. The foundation stone of this older building can still be seen outside, set in the outer wall of the apse, bearing an inscription and the dedication date: 1662 [2] (see also slide #1014 - IV B 26). I suppose it is possible that the wall in which the inscribed stone cross is set, was built at the same time as the present church. In which case the cross was already seen as something of an historical curiosity at the time. If this supposition is true, we at least have a terminus ante quem for the engraving of the stone (it has to be older than 1907). As a comparision point, the other headstones embedded in the same wall are dated between 1636 and 1831. As for a terminus post quem, here is a first hypothesis: they mention in [3] that the village economy, based exclusively on agriculture at first, developped around the end of the XIXth century due to the opening in the vicinity (in Moha) of a quarry (freestone, iron ore). This, I suppose, is likely to have brought at least some foreign workers in the village, which might account for the unusual script. But it of course still leaves the problem that the gap between the end of the XIXth century and 1907 may be a bit short for a gravestone to be already seen as "obsolete" and removed from the tomb. (A possibility here is that all tombs lying too close to the building had to be removed / relocated prior to the edification of the new church, no matter how recent they may have been.) After discussing the issue with Pierre Capers, we believe that the likelihood of the stone being a lot older than this is altogether stronger.

Foundation stone (taken Aug. 5, 2001)