Individuals too, as well as corporations, have taken a hand in the overthrow of crosses.  There was a wretch named Wilkinson, vicar of Goosnargh, Lancashire, who delighted in their destruction.  He was a zealous Protestant, and on account of his fame as a prophet of evil his deeds were not interfered with by his neighbours.  He used to foretell the deaths of persons obnoxious to him, and unfortunately several of his prophecies were fulfilled, and he earned the dreaded character of a wizard.  No one dared to prevent him, and with his own hands he pulled down several of these venerable monuments.  Some drunken men in the early years of the nineteenth century pulled down the old market cross at Rochdale.  There was a cross on the bowling-green at Whalley in the seventeenth century, the fall of which is described by a cavalier, William Blundell, in 1642.  When some gentlemen came to use the bowling-green they found their game interfered with by the fallen cross.  A strong, powerful man was induced to remove it.  He reared it, and tried to take it away by wresting it from edge to edge, but his foot slipped; down he fell, and the cross falling upon him crushed him to death.  A neighbour immediately he heard the news was filled with apprehension of a similar fate, and confessed that he and the deceased had thrown down the cross.  It was considered a dangerous act to remove a cross, though the hope of discovering treasure beneath it often urged men to essay the task.  A farmer once removed an old boundary stone, thinking it would make a good “buttery stone.”  But the results were dire.  Pots and pans, kettles and crockery placed upon it danced a clattering dance the livelong night, and spilled their contents, disturbed the farmer’s rest, and worrited the family.  The stone had to be conveyed back to its former resting-place, and the farm again was undisturbed by tumultuous spirits.  Some of these crosses have been used for gate-posts.  Vandals have sometimes wanted a sun-dial in their churchyards, and have ruthlessly knocked off the head and upper part of the shaft of a cross, as they did at Halton, Lancashire, in order to provide a base for their dial.  In these and countless other ways have these crosses suffered, and certainly, from the aesthetic and architectural point of view, we have to bewail the loss of many of the most lovely monuments of the piety and taste of our forefathers.

We will now gather up the fragments of the ancient crosses of England ere these also vanish from our country.  They served many purposes and were of divers kinds.  There were preaching-crosses, on the steps of which the early missionary or Saxon priest stood when he proclaimed the message of the gospel, ere churches were built for worship.  These wandering clerics used to set up crosses in the villages, and beneath their shade preached, baptized, and said Mass.  The pagan Saxons worshipped stone pillars; so in order to wean them from their superstition the Christian