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