these stones may be of Druidical origin, but there is nothing to support the theory.  Among the aboriginal Britons the custom of simple inhumation was probably prevalent, but there are not wanting evidences in support of the belief that cremation also was sometimes practised in prehistoric times.  An instance of early interment was discovered in a tumulus at Gusthorp, near Scarborough, in 1834.  In a rude coffin scooped out of the trunk of an oak-tree lay a human skeleton, which had been wrapped or clothed in the skin of some wild animal, fastened at the breast with a pin or skewer of wood.  In the coffin were also a bronze spearhead and several weapons of flint—­facts which all go to establish a remote date.  The absence of pottery is also indicative of a very early period.  Regarding the skins, however, it may be remarked that Caesar says of the Britons, when he invaded the island, that “the greater part within the country go clad in skins.”

[Footnote 3:  The ancient Jewish burial-ground had to be no less than 2000 cubits (or about a mile) from the Levitical city.]

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