PAGANUS: The Ancestral Tomb

The tomb on the South wall of the chapel is for Paganus Trenchard, the earliest recorded Trenchard in England. He collected the Danegeld for Henry I in the Isle of Wight and lived at Hord Hill, or Hordle or Hord Hall: old medieval spellings differ radically thus muddle the place's original association - was it a hall or a hill or both? I have named my castle after this place, so that it is an imaginary family seat, a Hord of all the treasures the family might have passed down to each other through the ages if they hadn't moved to Dorset, Somerset and beyond. 

I have also named the chapel after its deceased occupier, so it is PAGANUS or the Pagan Chapel, with symbolic references in it to Celtic, Roman, Jedi, Jewish, Daoist, Vedic, Christian and pre-Roman Earth religions, and to nature. 

Inspiration for the tomb's design comes from Archbishop ?'s tomb in Norwich Cathedral (below). 

But the effigy itself was a lucky find in Canterbury Cathedral gift shop. It's actually a statue of the Black Prince's tomb (below). I know it has a crown on it which is unbefitting Paganus, but it looks better than the statue of Henry VIII's armour that I was going to use instead.

Below is the tomb in construction with the originally intended effigy occupant: a statuette of Henry VIII's armour from the Tower of London.

The green and red card is from exercise book covers, decorated with gold and black pens to resemble the original model at Norwich, and the stonework is made of layers of cereal packet card, between two and eight layers thick. The fleurs de lys at the top are a brass etching and the bosses beneath include a green man, a dragon, an angel and a squirrel, all cut out of cereal packet card. The backing is wrapping paper, and the side pillars are hexagonal pencils layered up with card strips.

The inside ceiling of the tomb (all cereal packet card again) is probably the most complicated part, and will be hardly visible when finished so here is a photo of it as the effigy would see it.

I want the effigy of the tomb to tip up revealing a secret passageway. This means I have to wait until I've worked out where this leads before I can complete the tomb and the wall behind. This shows the working inside: