Chapter VII
Reading edition
EARLIER GRAVESTONES.
"The Welshman is hanged Who at our kirke flanged And at her state banged, And brened are his buks. And though he be hanged Yet he is not wranged, The de'ul has him fanged In his kruked kluks."
"Concerning Burial of the Dead, all customs of praying, reading, and singing, both in going to or from the grave, are said to have been greatly abused. The simple direction is therefore given, that when any person departeth this life, let the body upon the day of burial be decently attended from the house to the place appointed for public burial, and there immediately interred without any ceremony."
Penalties were at the same time imposed for using the Book of Common Prayer in any place of worship or in any private family within the kingdom—the fine being £5 for a first offence, £10 for a second, and a year's imprisonment for the third.
The Puritans, however, are to be thanked for stopping the then common practice of holding wakes and fairs in the churchyards—a practice traceable no doubt to the celebration of Saints' Days in the churches, and for that reason suppressed as remnants of Popery in 1627-31.
From one cause or another it is pretty certain that for every old gravestone now to be seen twenty or more have disappeared.
In Gough's "Sepulchral Monuments of Great Britain" many instances are given of the wanton and wholesale destruction of church and churchyard memorials, even late in the eighteenth century. In some cases the church officers, as already stated, gave public notice prior to removal of gravestones, in order that persons claiming an interest in the remains might repair and restore them; but more frequently the stones were cleared away and destroyed, or put somewhere out of sight without observation. Sometimes this was the act of the Rector; at other times individuals, exercising rights of ownership, have done the disgraceful work, and occasionally the whole of the parishioners have been implicated. Gough says that the inhabitants of Letheringham in Suffolk, being under the necessity of putting their church into decent order, chose to rebuild it, and sold the whole fabric, monuments and all, to the building contractor, who beat the stones to powder, and sold as much at three shillings a pound for terrace (?) as came to eighty guineas. A portion of the fragments was rescued by the Rev. Mr. Clubbe, and erected in form of a pyramid in the vicarage garden of Brandeston, in the same county, with this inscription:
Indignant Reader! These monumental remains are not, as thou mayest suppose, the Ruins of Time, But were destroyed in an Irruption of the Goths So late in the Christian era as 1789. Credite Posteri!