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 Weever[5] 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: 

  “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.”

[Footnote 4:  The unhealthy practice of using churches for this purpose was continued some way into the nineteenth century.  The still more objectionable plan of depositing coffins containing the dead in vaults under churches still lingers on.  In 1875 I attended the funeral (so-called) of a public man, whose coffin was borne into the vaults of a town church, and left there, with scores of others piled in heaps in recesses which looked like wine-cellars.  Not one of the many mourners who shared in that experience failed to feel horrified at the thought of such a fate.  Some of the old coffins were tumbling to pieces, and the odour of the place was beyond description.  In the words of Edmund Burke:  “I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a country churchyard than in the tomb of the Capulets.”]