Note (return) — Chapter VII

Christian burials, as we have seen, cannot be dated in England earlier than the eighth century, and monuments at the grave may have possibly originated about the same period, but there is nothing whatever to sustain such a belief, and we cannot assign the earliest of existing memorials to a time prior to the eleventh century. Indeed it is very significant to find that the tombs within the churches are only a trifle older than the gravestones outside, scarcely any of them being antecedent to the sixteenth century. As burials inside churches were not permitted until long after the churchyards were used for the purpose,4 it is indeed possible that no memorials were placed in the edifice until Tudor days; but this is scarcely feasible, and the more probable explanation is that all the earlier ones have disappeared. Those which can boast an antiquity greater than that of the common gravestone are very few indeed. It might have been supposed that the sculptured shrine under the roof of the sanctuary, reverently tended and jealously watched, might have stood for a thousand years, while the poor gravestone out in the churchyard, exposed to all weathers and many kinds of danger, would waste away or meet with one of the ordinary fates which attend ill-usage, indifference, or neglect. This indeed has happened in a multitude of places. Who has not seen in ancient churchyards the headstones leaning this way and that, tottering to their fall? Are there not hundreds of proofs that the unclaimed stones have been used, and still serve, for the floors of the churches, and actually for the paving of the churchyard paths? It was not thought strange, even within the memory of the present generation, to advertise for owners of old graves, with an intimation that on a certain date the stones would be removed; and vast numbers of them were thus got rid of—broken up perhaps to mend the roads. But still greater perils have been survived by the earlier of those memorials which remain to us, both without and within the churches. The dissolution of the Papal power in Great Britain was the cause of one of these hazards; for, towards the latter end of Henry VIII.'s reign, likewise during the reign of Edward VI., and again in the beginning of Elizabeth's, commissioners in every county were vested with authority to destroy "all graven images" and everything which seemed to savour of "idolatry and superstition." Under colour of this order, these persons, and those who sympathized in their work, gave vent to their zeal in many excesses, battering down and breaking up everything of an ornamental or sculptured character, including tombs and even the stained windows. Moreover we are told by Weever5 that the commission was made the excuse for digging up coffins in the hope of finding treasure. Elizabeth soon perceived the evil that was being done by the barbarous rage and greediness of her subjects, and issued a proclamation under her own hand restraining all "ignorant, malicious, and covetous persons" from breaking and defacing any monument, tomb, or grave, under penalty of fine or imprisonment. This checked, but did not wholly cure, the mischief; and, although in her fourteenth year of sovereignty she issued another and sterner edict on the subject, the havoc was perpetuated chiefly by a sect or party whom Weever describes as "a contagious brood of scismaticks," whose object was not only to rob the churches, but to level them with the ground, as places polluted by all the abominations of Babylon. These people were variously known as Brownists, Barrowists, Martinists, Prophesyers, Solisidians, Famelists, Rigid Precisians, Disciplinarians, and Judaical Thraskists. Some who overstepped the mark paid the penalty with their lives. One man, named Hachet, not content with destroying gravestones and statuary, thrust an iron weapon through a picture of the Queen, and he was hanged and quartered. Another, John Penry, a Welshman, was executed in 1593, and of him was written: