David Soden has shown me a piece of wood six foot long, with a painted inscription, gold lettering on grey-blue. He believes it came from the yard of the Poulton family business who were long active in the building trade in the Sibfords. The lettering is in rough seventeenth century script, upper and lower case, and reads:

Qui rebellaverit ori tuo morietur ANN…
(in capitals, for ‘anno’, presumably it continues with a year date)

[Whosoever rebels against your words, shall be killed ANN]

This is taken from the Latin Vulgate version of Joshua 1.18, a famous passage in the Bible, where after the death of Moses Joshua tells the Israelites to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land and seize it from the poor Palestinians (very topical given Netanyahu’s policy in Gaza). The first four words are quoted from an early Vulgate version by Trebellius (1569): the word ‘rebellaverit’ instead of the later ‘contradixerit’ proves that the inscription is genuinely seventeenth century. I have consulted the two most eminent historians on 16th-17th century religious history in Oxford and Cambridge but they know of no parallels for this use of such a rather bloodthirsty biblical text.

The secret Catholic church in Brailes was repanelled in the eighteenth century: Is this inscription what remains of the earlier decoration, preserved because it was inscribed and dated? Is the lost date related to the battle of Edgehill, fought in 1642 just down the road? The survival of the wooden text can plausibly be explained if the Poulton family business were employed in the eighteenth century renovation; they would have transported the old panelling to their Sibford base, and perhaps this section survived because it was lettered.

Maybe someone can come up with a better explanation!

Oswyn Murray