The curfew has not even yet fallen entirely into disuse.  In the last century it was oftener heard to ‘toll the knell of parting day.’  At Ripon its place was supplied by a horn sounded every evening at nine.[961]

‘If,’ said Robert Nelson, ’his senses hold out so long, he can hear even his passing bell without disturbance.’  Towards the beginning of the century, this old custom seems to have been tolerably general.  Its original object had been to invite prayers in behalf of a departing soul, and to summon the priest, if he had had no other admonition, to his last duty of extreme unction.  It was retained by the sixty-seventh canon as a solemn reminder of mortality.  But towards the end of the century it was fast becoming obsolete.  Pennant, writing in 1796, says that though the practice was still punctually kept up in some places, it had fallen into general desuetude in the towns.[962]

Churches neglected and in disrepair were not likely to be surrounded by well-kept churchyards.  During the Georgian period it was common enough to see churchyards which might have served as pictures of dreariness and gloom.  Webb’s collection of epitaphs, published in 1775, is prefaced by some introductory verses which intimate, without any idea of censure, a condition of things which was clearly not very exceptional in the churchyards of towns and populous villages:—­

    Here nauseous weeds each pile surround,
    And things obscene bestrew the ground;
    Skulls, bones, in mouldering fragments lie,
    All dreadful emblems of mortality.[963]

Secker hopes the clergy of his diocese will keep their churchyards ’neat and decent, taking the profits of the herbage in such manner as may rather add beauty to the place.’  But he implies that there were many incumbents who turned their cattle into the sacred precincts, ’to defile them, and trample down the gravestones; and make consecrated ground such as you would not suffer courts before your own doors to be.’[964] And there were some who were not satisfied with turning in their cow and horse.[965] Practices lingered within the recollections of living men which would nowadays cause a parochial rebellion.  While, for example, the transition from licence to order was in progress, a certain rector had sown an unoccupied strip of the burial-ground with turnips.  The archdeacon at his visitation admonished this gentleman not to let him see turnips when he came there next year.  The rebuked incumbent could so little comprehend these decorous scruples that he supposed Mr. Archdeacon to be inspired by a zeal for agriculture, and the due rotation of crops.  ‘Certainly not, sir,’ said he, ’’twill be barley next year.’[966]