Eliza Dutton's Tomb (Neale Family Tomb)
Here lies best of wives of mothers & of friend / Whose soul to (sic) good for earth in heaven attend / With joy and comfort till the day of doome / When all her virtuous deeds shall thither come / To save her neighbours she has spilt her blood / And like her saviour died for doing good / May that curst hand forget itself to feed / That made its benefator thus to bleed. [Monument also records that Eliza Dutton] 'was murdered ye 13 of July 1687 by her Neighbour indeavouring to make peace between him & his wife aged 53 years'.Context & sources
Found via a search of Historic England's own listings for the word 'murdered'. This Portland stone chest tomb in the churchyard of St Dunstan's, Cheam (in what is now the London Borough of Sutton) primarily commemorates Christian and Henry Neale (d.1675), and was later extended to also record their daughter, Eliza Dutton, aged 53, who was murdered on 13 July 1687 while trying to make peace between a neighbour and his wife during a domestic dispute - killed, in other words, for intervening as a peacemaker. The epitaph makes this explicit, comparing her to Christ dying 'for doing good' and cursing the hand that killed her. An early example of an outdoor chest tomb, Grade II listed, and cited in print as far back as Daniel Lysons's 'The Environs of London' (1796).
Behind a paywall
- Daniel Lysons, 'The Environs of London', Vol. I (1796), p.146 - the earliest printed source cited by Historic England; likely digitised somewhere but not located here.
- Roger Bowdler, 'St. Dunstan's Church, Cheam', HART Reports and Papers 20 - cited as a source, not located online.
- Town
- Cheam, Sutton
- County
- Greater London
- Country
- England
- Coordinates
- 51.3609, -0.2140
- Year
- 1687
- Condition
- Legible
Know something we don't?
Submit a correction, an extra detail, or a photo for this record. Reviewed by hand before it's applied.