The Church of St Peter Great Berkhamsted

The set of four diamond-shaped panels on the wall are 19th-century funerary hatchments.

During the Middle Ages, when a member of the nobility died, his “achievements” (armour, sword and shield displaying his coat of arms) were carried in the funeral procession and laid up in the church in or near the grave. Over the centuries, as battle armour fell out of use, black-framed heraldic paintings were used instead. A custom very common in England from the 17th  to the 19th century was to display this board on the house front to give notice of the death to the neighbourhood and to act as a sign of mourning; they would later be moved to the parish church. The word “hatchment” is a corruption of “achievements”.

All these hatchments date from the 1840s; soon afterwards, as modern communications developed, the fashion for displaying them ended.

These hatchments commemorate local people:

Top: the arms of Samuel George Pechell, Capt RN  (black background) alongside those of Caroline, daughter of William Thoyts (white background). Capt Pechell died in 1840, Caroline a widow.

Right: the arms of James Smith, a Nottinghamshire banker who bought Ashlyn’s Hall in 1801, and his second wife Mary Isabella Pechell of Berkhamsted Place, daughter of Augustus and Sarah. Since the arms are on a shield and the background is black on both sides it is James’s hatchment and he was a widower.

Left: Pechell arms: Sarah, daughter of the Revd Thomas Drake, rector of Amersham who married Augustus Pechell (died in 1839)

Bottom: Unidentified, but the armorial bearings include those of the Parker family. There is a monument to Elizabeth Parker on the west wall of the north transept. 

The motto Resurgam appears on three hatchments – Latin for “I shall rise again”.