The stone at Shorne being close to the church door is well known to the villagers, by whom it is regarded as a curiosity.  The schoolmaster was good enough to give me a photograph from which my sketch is made.  But such rarities are seldom esteemed by, or even known to, the inhabitants of a place, and are passed by without heed by the constant congregation of the church.  At Stapleford Tawney, just named, a native, the first I had seen for a mile or two, stopped at the unwonted sight of a stranger sketching in the churchyard, and I consulted him as to application of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the case under notice.  His reply was that, though he had lived there “man and boy for fifty year,” he had “never see’d the thing afore.”  He condescended, however, to take an interest in my explanations, and seemed to realize that it was worth while to seek for objects of interest even in a churchyard.  This was decidedly better than the behaviour on another occasion of two rustics at Southfleet.  They had passed my friend jotting down an epitaph, and the turn of a corner revealed me sketching a tombstone, when one to the other exclaimed, “Land sikes, Bill, if ’ere ain’t another on em!”

[Illustration:  Fig. 78.  Stapleford Tawney.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 79.  Shorne.]

CHAPTER VII.

Earlier gravestones.

Although memorials of the dead in one shape or another have apparently existed in all eras of ethnological history, it would seem that the upright gravestone of our burial-grounds has had a comparatively brief existence of but a few hundred years.  This, however, is merely an inference based on present evidences, and it may be erroneous.  But they cannot have existed in the precincts of the early Christian churches of this country, because the churches had no churchyards for several centuries.  The Romans introduced into Britain their Law of the Ten Tables, by which it was ordained that “all burnings or burials” should be “beyond the city,"[3] and the system continued to prevail long after the Roman evacuation.  It was not until A.D. 742 that Cuthbert, eleventh Archbishop of Canterbury, brought from Rome the newer custom of burying around the churches, and was granted a Papal dispensation for the practice.  The churchyards even then were not enclosed, but it was usual to mark their sacred character by erecting stone crosses, many of which, or their remains, are still in existence.  Yet it was a long time before churchyard interments became general, the inhabitants clinging to the Pagan habit of indiscriminate burial in their accustomed places.  We hear nothing of headstones in the early days of Christianity, but there are occasionally found in certain localities inscribed stones which bear the appearance of rude memorials, and these have been regarded as relics of our National Church in its primitive state.  It is also suggested that