The Shugborough Inscription

Summary

Eight letters, O U O S V A V V, are cut between a D and an M beneath an eighteenth-century marble copy of a Poussin painting at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire. No one has shown what they mean.

The relief was made around 1750 for Thomas Anson. The letters are first recorded some seventy years later, in a local history which says that Anson "would never explain" them. Since then they have been read as a widower's dedication, a lament for a lost love, a line from Ecclesiastes, a prayer, an epitaph for a fellow MP's wife and a clue to the Holy Grail. Every reading fits the letters. None can be checked against anything else.

What is documented

The monument. The Shepherd's Monument stands in the garden of Shugborough Hall, the Anson family's seat. Historic England, which lists it at Grade II*, describes "an entablature with Doric columns enclosing an arch resembling a ferny grotto", framing a marble relief by Peter Scheemakers, a Flemish sculptor who worked in London. It was commissioned by Thomas Anson (1695 to 1773), MP for Lichfield and elder brother of the admiral George Anson. Anson's biographer Andrew Baker, as cited by the classicist Jack Mitchell, places its erection between 1748 and 1750. Other accounts leave it undated within the mid-eighteenth century.

The relief. It copies Nicolas Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadie (1637 to 1638, now in the Louvre): an old shepherd, watched by two younger ones and a woman, reads the words Et in Arcadia ego on a tomb. The Shugborough version is reversed, and its tomb is taller and more ornate than Poussin's.

The letters. Beneath the relief, eight letters are cut in a line: O·U·O·S·V·A·V·V. A D and an M sit on a lower level at either side of them. D M is presumed to stand for Dis Manibus, "to the spirits of the dead", the formula that heads many Roman epitaphs. The second letter is cut as a U and three of the others as V, although Roman inscriptions used V for both.

The earliest descriptions. Thomas Pennant described the monument in The Journey from Chester to London (1782). He called it the work of Scheemakers "under the direction of the late Mr. Anson", described the scene and suggested that it was perhaps also "a secret memorial of some loss of a tender nature in his early days", but said nothing of the letters. The first known record of them is in a history of the neighbouring parish of Tixall by Sir Thomas Clifford and Arthur Clifford, printed in Paris and usually dated 1817; its dedication is dated 13 January 1818. The Cliffords quoted Pennant's passage, suggestion included, and printed the "mysterious inscription" he had left out, which in their view made his opinion "the more probable". They added: "The meaning of these letters, Mr. Anson would never explain; and they still remain an enigma to posterity." Mitchell notes that this implies the letters were there before Anson died in 1773. No earlier record of them is known.

The Grail. In 1982 The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, built its conspiracy theory partly around Poussin and his painting, and it gave the Shugborough letters a place. Mitchell calls the book "that mother of all historical conspiracy theories".

The 2004 campaign. In 2004 the estate's general manager, Richard Kemp, ran a promotional campaign with the Bletchley Park museum in which two veterans of the wartime codebreaking centre, Oliver and Sheila Lawn, examined the letters. The publicity leaned on the Grail. The Independent reported it on 12 May 2004 as Bletchley Park trying "to crack a 250-year mystery". The campaign produced no accepted solution.

Leading explanations

Most published proposals treat the letters as the initials of Latin or English words. Initials cannot be deciphered, only guessed, and many different sentences fit the same eight letters.

An abbreviated epitaph or dedication (the scholarly approach, unproven). The D M frame points to a funerary text. The novelist Oliver Stonor (1903 to 1987) proposed Optimae Uxoris Optimae Sororis Viduus Amantissimus Vovit Virtutibus, a devoted widower's dedication to the virtues of an excellent wife and sister. Baker, as Mitchell reports, objects that there was no Anson widower when the relief was made. The Roman historian Duncan Fishwick argued in a paper published in 2012 that the letters are standard abbreviations of common Latin words, not a code. In 2022 Mitchell set out Optimae Uxoris Optimi Sodalis Viri Annae Venables-Vernon, a reading he credits to the journal Antigone itself: an epitaph for Anne Venables-Vernon (1721 to 1742), wife of George Venables-Vernon, who preceded Anson as MP for Lichfield. He concedes that Anne died some years before the relief was put up, and ends: "We can prove nothing."

A private memorial (suggested in 1782, untested). Pennant's suggestion, which the Cliffords endorsed, that the relief marked a loss in Anson's youth, names no one and has never been tested. Margaret, Countess of Lichfield (1899 to 1988), read the letters in English as "Out Your Own Sweet Vale, Alicia, Vanishes Vanity", with D M as "Twixt Deity and Man". Mitchell notes that the shepherdess Alicia is otherwise unattested.

A religious motto (proposed, contested). Steve Regimbal, an American lawyer and playwright, proposed Orator Ut Omnia Sunt Vanitas Ait Vanitas Vanitatum, after Ecclesiastes. The American linguist Keith Massey proposed Oro Ut Omnes Sequantur Viam Ad Veram Vitam, "I pray that all shall follow the path toward the true life". Mitchell faults the first for its Latin syntax and the second for putting a Christian prayer inside a pagan D M.

A cipher, or a clue to the Grail (popular, unsupported). Theories in this line treat the letters as an encrypted message, often tied to the Grail theories of 1982. None has been published in a form that others have tested and accepted.

Current status

Unsolved. The letters have been on record for two centuries and no reading of them has been confirmed. The letters are too few to decide between them. What would change the status is outside evidence: a letter, account or design drawing from Anson's circle that names the person commemorated or explains the letters, or an earlier record that dates them.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.