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Tools and objects carved on graves, and why they are weaker evidence of a trade than they look.
Also known as: Occupational gravestone symbols, Tools on a grave, Trade symbols on monuments
Anvils, anchors, pickaxes and shears appear on monuments and are routinely read as the occupation of the person beneath. Sometimes that is right. Often the object is a guild emblem, a fraternal order's device, a hobby, or the only carving the mason had a pattern for. This record sets out what separates the cases.
Tools, instruments and objects of trade carved on gravestones and monuments, most densely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and concentrated in industrial and maritime districts.
Contexts: History
An object is not proof of an occupation. The same carving may record a trade, a guild or company membership, a fraternal order's emblem, an interest pursued outside work, or simply what the monumental mason had a pattern for.
The commonest error in this area, and the one most confidently repeated online. A tool suggests an occupation; it does not establish one.
What raises confidence: an accompanying inscription naming the trade, a cluster of occupational stones in a district with that industry, tools drawn with working accuracy rather than generically, and the absence of a fraternal emblem that would explain the object differently.
Guild and livery company arms are a distinct category frequently mistaken for occupational carving: they identify membership of a body rather than the practice of its trade, and by the nineteenth century many members of London livery companies did not work in the trade at all.
Not a single symbol but a class of carving: tools and objects of trade — hammers, anchors, shears, wheels — cut in relief into the face of a monument.