FIG. 95.—AT BLAIRGOWRIE.

The stone copied at Blairgowrie is an enigma which I scarcely dare to unravel, but it will admit of several interpretations. "I.E." probably stands for John Elder and "M.H." for his "spouse," but to set out John Elder's name in full, and at the same time to insert his initials, shews either a misconception of, or disregard for, the principles and usages of the Presbytery. Otherwise, in some respects, this example is almost worthy to be classed with the more degenerate forms of churchyard sculpture in England; the skull, the crown, the hour-glass, the coffin, and the bones being all well-known and conventional signs. The compasses may stand for John Elder's profession, but the figure which resembles a cheese-cutter, just below the crown, can only be a subject of conjecture. This stone, which is one of the least artistic I have met with in Scotland, is an evidence to shew that the rural sculptor was as ready in the north as in the south to blossom forth had he not been checked by the rigours of the Church. At times indeed the mortal passion for a name to live to posterity was too strong to be altogether curbed, as we may see manifested even in the prescribed initials when they are moulded of heroic size, from 8 to 10 inches being no uncommon height. Remarkable also is the fact just mentioned (page 86) that, concurrently with the erection of these dumb headstones, there were flat or table stones¹⁴ allowed, upon which not only were the names and virtues of the departed fully set forth, but all sorts of emblematical devices introduced. The table tomb was probably in itself a vanity, and, the boundary passed, there appears to have been no limit to its excesses. There are a great many instances of this at Inverness, Aberdeen, Keith, Dunblane, and elsewhere, and the stone which appears in the sketch from Braemar is only one of several in that very limited space. Such exceptional cases seem to indicate some local relaxation from the austerity of the period, which was apparently most intense in the centres of population. Humility at the grave extended even to the material of the gravestone. At Aberdeen, the Granite City, few of the last-century gravestones are of any better material than the soft sandstones which must have been imported from Elgin or the south. The rule of initials was almost universal. In like manner, when it became the custom to purchase grave-spaces, the simplest possible words were employed to denote the ownership. I noticed one stone in Aberdeen bearing on its face the medallion portrait of a lady, and only the words of Isaiah, chapter xl. verse 6: "The voice said, All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field." At the back of the stone is written: "This burying ground, containing two graves, belongs to William Rait, Merchant. Aberdeen, 1800." The practice of carving on both faces of the headstone is very common in Scotland, and, so far as I have observed, in Scotland alone; but, strange as it may seem, Scotland and Ireland when they write gravestone inscriptions have one habit in common, that of beginning their epitaphs, not with the name of the deceased person, but with the name of the person who provides the stone. Thus:—

CHAPTER XII.

OLD GRAVESTONES ABROAD.

"Abroad" is a big place, and no sufficient treatment under the head of this chapter is possible except to one who has had very great experience and extended research. Nevertheless I may, with all due diffidence and modesty, tell the little I know on the subject. My opportunities of investigation have been few, and restricted to a limited area—so restricted and so limited that I cannot tell whether or not the observations I have made may be taken as indications of national habits or merely as idiosyncrasies of the people inhabiting the particular localities which I was able to visit. All the churchyards which I have seen in France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland very much resemble each other, and are altogether unlike the graveyards of Great Britain and her children. It is to the villages we should naturally go for primitive memorials of the dead, but in all the continental villages which I have visited memorials of a permanent character, either old or new, are scarcely to be seen. Occasionally a stone slab may be encountered, but almost always of recent date. At Laufen in the Canton of Zurich, near the Falls of the Rhine, I selected almost at random the examples of memorials shewn in my sketch (Fig. 96), one or other of which was at the head of nearly every grave.

1. Cut into stone.

2. Anchor of iron on dwarf stone pillar.

3. Heart and anchor of thin iron on dwarf stone pillar.

4. Iron plate and rod.

5. Wooden cross.

6. Wooden cross.

FIG. 96.—AT LAUFEN.

The average height of these mementoes was about 2 feet, and all the dates which I saw were of the last twenty-five years. Permanence indeed is apparently not considered as it is with us in the like circumstances. The British gravestone is trusted to perpetuate at least the names of our departed friends down to the days of our posterity, but the provision made by our neighbours seems to have been for the existing generation only. Posterity does not trouble the villagers of Switzerland nor their prototypes of other nations around them. This fact was strongly exemplified at Neuhausen, a small place on the other bank of the Rhine, "five minutes from Germany" we were told.

FIG. 97.—AT NEUHAUSEN.

In the churchyard at this place was one handsome tombstone, shewn in the drawing, erected apparently in 1790. This was evidence of somewhat ancient art, and I looked about for the old gravestones which should have kept it company. Erect in its place there was not one, but in the remotest corner of the enclosure I came upon several stones lying flat, one upon another, the uppermost and only visible inscription bearing the recent date of 1870! Only twenty years or so "on sentry" at the grave, and already relieved from duty! There was likewise a miscellaneous heap of old crosses, etc., of iron and wood, the writing on which had disappeared, and they might reasonably have been condemned as of no further service; but that gravestones in perfect preservation should have been thought to have served their full purpose in a little over twenty years, and be cast aside as no longer requisite, was a remarkable lesson in national character. All the graves were flat, and at the head of every recent one was a small iron slab bearing a number. Many of those which had crosses were hung with immortelles, composed generally of glass-beads.

In Neuhausen Graveyard, at the end of the row of graves, are seen two rings protruding from the ground. Lying near is an iron shield with two similar rings surmounting it. It is readily supposed that the first-named rings are also attached to a shield buried in the earth, and so it proves. In order that no space may be lost between the graves, the shields are used alternately to serve as the dividing wall, and are then drawn out, thus enabling the sexton to pack the coffins close together.

The towns and cities abroad have their cemeteries beyond the outskirts, as is the practice here. Occasionally an old churchyard is to be met with, but never an old gravestone as we know it. Still there are instances in which ancient carvings of the same character have been saved by attachment to the church or churchyard wall. Several such are to be seen in German churchyards long since converted to purposes of recreation, and one at Heidelberg may be taken as an example.

FIG. 98.—AT HEIDELBERG

Beneath is the text from the First Epistle of Peter, chapter i. verses 24 and 25.

"All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the Word of the Lord endureth for ever."

At Lucerne, tinder similar conditions, the striking figures of two skeletons, partly in military garb, keep guard over the tablet which records the virtues of a departed hero. He was probably a soldier, but the figure of a lictor on the left with his fasces of axe and rods seems to betoken some civil employment. In ancient times the lictors walked in advance of the magistrates, and executed sentence when pronounced.

FIG. 99.—AT LUCERNE.

The two last-given illustrations may possibly belong to the category of mural tablets rather than that of gravestones, being fixed apparently by original design, and not by afterthought, as in our "converted" burial-grounds, against the outer walls of the church. There are, however, no other remains which I could discover bearing any resemblance to the old British headstone, and the evanescent character which seems to have attached for a certain period to the memorials of the dead among our neighbours abroad forbids the expectation that any such as those which have appeared in our earlier chapters are to be found in Europe outside the boundaries of our Empire. In more modern observances, especially in the centres of population, English and continental manners more nearly approximate; and in the many new cemeteries which are now to be found adjacent to the cities and large towns of Western Europe there are tombs and gravestones as many and as costly as are to be found in any round London. In Germany the present practice appears to be single interments, and one inscription only on the stone, and that studiously brief. Thus:

This I copied in the cemetery at Schaffhausen. But at Hendon, a north-west suburb of London, has recently been placed against the church wall a still simpler memorial, a small slab of marble, inscribed:

For brevity in excelsis the following, from the cemetery at Heidelberg, can hardly be eclipsed:

Sometimes the asterisk is used by the Germans to denote birth, and the dagger (or cross) for death, thus:

CHAPTER XIII.

VERY OLD GRAVESTONES.

Although, for reasons already explained or surmised, the gravestones in our burial-grounds seldom exceed an age of 200 years, there has probably been no time and no race of men in which such memorials were unknown. Professor Dr. John Stuart, the Scottish antiquary,¹⁵ opines that "the erection of stones to the memory of the dead has been common to all the world from the earliest times," and there are many instances recorded in the Old Testament, as when Rachel died and Jacob "set a pillar upon her grave" (Genesis, chapter xxxv. verse 20); and another authority, Mr. R. R. Brash,¹⁶ in a similar strain, comments on the sentiment which appears to have been common to human nature in all ages, and among all conditions of mankind, namely a desire to leave after him something to perpetuate his memory, something more durable than his frail humanity. This propensity doubtless led him in his earliest and rudest state to set on end in the earth the rough and unhewn pillar stone which he found lying prostrate on the surface, and these hoar memorials exist in almost every country.

A remarkable instance is afforded by Absalom, the son of David, who himself set up a stone to record his memory: "Now Absalom in his lifetime had taken and reared up for himself a pillar, which is in the king's dale: for he said, I have no son to keep my name in remembrance: and he called the pillar after his own name: and it is called unto this day, Absalom's place" (2 Samuel, chapter xviii. verse 18).

Professor Stuart indeed declares that there is no custom in the history of human progress which serves so much to connect the remote past with the present period as the erection of pillar stones. We meet with it, he says, in the infancy of history, and it is even yet, in some shape or other, the means by which man hopes to hand down his memory to the future. The sculptured tombs of early nations often furnish the only key to their modes of life; and their memorial stones, if they may not in all cases be classed with sepulchral records, must yet be considered as remains of the same early period when the rock was the only book in which an author could convey his thoughts, and when history was to be handed down by memorials which should always meet the eye and prompt the question, "What mean ye by these stones?"

THE BRESSAY STONE FIG. 100.

To such remote antiquity, however, it is probably undesirable to follow our subject. It will no doubt be thought sufficient for this essay if we leave altogether out of view the researches which have been made in the older empires of the earth, and confine ourselves to the records of our own country. Of these, however, there are many, and they are full of interest. In date they probably occupy a period partly Pagan and partly Christian, and it has been conjectured that all or most of those discovered had their source in Ireland, with a possibility of an earlier importation into Ireland by Icelandic, Danish, or other peoples. Many of these stones have been found buried in the ruins of old churches, and most of them may be supposed to owe their preservation to some such protection. The drawings of one or two may be given as samples. Those here sketched (Figs. 100 and 101) are in the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, and occupy with others a considerable space, being well displayed to shew the inscriptions on both sides.¹⁷ It is by the fact of both sides being written upon that we assign to them the character of gravestones, that is upright gravestones; but it is also well authenticated by historical records that the memorial of a Pagan chief in Ireland was a cairn with a pillar stone standing upon it, and there is little doubt that the Irish invaders carried the practice with them into Scotland. It is indeed in Scotland that a large proportion of these stones have been discovered, and there are more than a hundred of them in the Edinburgh Museum. In the Museum at Dublin there is also a good collection, conveniently arranged; but the British Museum in London has less than half a dozen—only five—specimens. The number in each of the three museums fairly represents the relative abundance of such remains in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Marked on a chart the discoveries are thickly grouped in the North-Western parts of Scotland, in the South of Ireland, and on the South-Western promontory of Wales. In Cornwall and Devonshire, along the coast line, there have been found a goodly few, and the others are dotted sparsely over the whole kingdom—England, as just indicated, furnishing only a modicum.

OGAM AND RUNIC INSCRIPTIONS.

The inscriptions upon such stones, when they are inscribed, are usually in Ogam or Runic characters. An example of the Ogam writing is shewn on the edges of the Bressay stone (Fig. 100), and also on the front side of the Lunnasting stone (Fig. 101a). The Ogam style was used by the ancient Irish and some other Celtic nations, and the "Ogams," or letters, consist principally of lines, or groups of lines, deriving their signification from their position on a single stem, or chief line, over, under, or through which they are drawn, perpendicularly or obliquely. Curves rarely occur; but some are seen in the inscription on the Bressay stone, which has been thus interpreted by Dr. Graves, Bishop of Limerick: "Bentire, or the Son of the Druid, lies here." "The Cross of Nordred's daughter is here placed." This stone was found by a labourer about 1851, while digging in a piece of waste ground near the ruinous church of Culbinsgarth at Bressay, Shetland. The design is said to be thoroughly Irish, and the inscription a mixture of Irish and Icelandic. The stone measures 4 ft. by 1 ft. 4-1/2 in. by 2 in. It is attributed to the ninth century.

The stone 101a is a slab of brownish sandstone, 44 in. by 13 in. by 11/2 in., from Lunnasting, also in Shetland. It was found five feet below the surface in 1876, and, having probably lain there for centuries, was in excellent preservation. The authorities, however, are unable to make a satisfactory translation. The cross or dagger is also of doubtful explanation; and Mr. Gilbert Goudie thinks it is a mere mason's mark. It is, however, admitted on all hands that the stone is of Christian origin, and probably of the period just subsequent to the termination of the Roman rule in Britain. It has been suggested that most of these ancient gravestones were carved and set up by the Irish missionary monks not earlier than A.D. 580. The Ogam inscription on the Lumasting stone has been made by one expert to read:

EATTUICHEATTS MAHEADTTANNN
HCCFFSTFF NCDTONS.

A strange and inexplicable aggregation of consonants.

The stone represented below, 101 b, bears an inscription in Runic characters. Runic is a term applied to any mysterious writing; but there were three leading classes of "runes"—Scandinavian, German, and Anglo-Saxon—all agreeing in certain features, and all ascribed by some authorities to the Phoenicians. The stone 101 b was found in 1865, at Kilbar, Barra, a remote island of the outer Hebrides, off the north-west coast of Scotland. It measures 6 ft. 5-1/2 in. in height, and its greatest width is 15-1/2 inches. Mr. Carmichael has conjectured that it was probably brought from Iona about the beginning of the seventeenth century, and erected in Barra at the head of a grave made by a son of McNeil for himself. But it is believed to have been in any case a Norse memorial in the first instance, though certainly Christian, for it reads:

"Ur and Thur Gared set up the stones of Riskar.¹⁸ May Christ guard his soul."

The Barra stone has on the reverse side a large cross, carved in plaited bands. Dr. Petrie has pointed out that the cross is not necessarily indicative of belief, the ancient Danes and other peoples having used various signs—the cross frequently—to mark their boundaries, their cattle, and their graves.¹⁹ There is little doubt, however, that in most of these British and Irish memorials, although the stones may originally have been Pagan, the cross is typical of Christianity. We are told that it was not unusual for St. Patrick to dedicate Pagan monuments to the honour of the true God. On one occasion, it is related, on the authority of an ancient life of the Saint, that, on coming to the Plain of Magh Solga, near Elphin, he found three pillar stones which had been raised there by the Pagans, either as memorials of events or for the celebration of Pagan rites, on one of which he inscribed the name of Jesus, on another Soter, and on the third Salvator, along probably with the cross, such as is seen on nearly every Christian monument in Ireland. In the same way on two of five upright pillars in the parish of Maroun, Isle of Man, are crosses deeply incised. This spot is traditionally associated with St. Patrick as the place where he preached, and the stones appear to be remains of a Druidical circle.

This practice is quite consistent with the principles upon which the Christian conversion was established by the early missionaries. Thus, Gregory, in a letter from Rome, in 601, directed that the idolatrous temples in England should not be destroyed, but turned into Christian churches, in order that the people might be induced to resort to their customary places of worship; and they were even allowed to kill cattle as sacrifices to God, as had been their practice in their previous idolatry. Hence also arose the system of establishing new churches on the sites previously held as consecrated by heathen worship.

Of the five old gravestones in the British Museum, four are from Ireland and one from Fardell in Devonshire. The Fardell stone was found about the year 1850, acting as a footbridge across a small brook at Fardell, near Ivybridge, Devonshire—a district once inhabited by a Celtic tribe. It is of coarse granite, 6 ft. 3 in. high, 2 ft. 9 in. broad, and from 7 to 9 inches thick. It bears an Ogam inscription on two angles of the same face, and debased Roman characters on the front and back. It reads, according to Mr. Brash, in the Ogam, "Safagguc the son of Cuic;" and, in the Roman, "Fanon the son of Rian."

The three Irish Ogam stones were presented to the British Museum by Colonel A. Lane Fox, F.S.A., who dug them out of an ancient fort at Roovesmore, near Kilcrea, on the Cork Railway, where they were forming the roof of a subterranean chamber. No. 1 cannot be positively deciphered or translated; No. 2 is inscribed to "the son of Falaman," who lived in the eighth century, and also to "the son of Erca," one of a family of Kings and Bishops who flourished in the ancient kingdom of Ireland; and No. 3, which is damaged, is supposed to have been dedicated to a Bishop Usaille, about A.D. 454. All the stones came probably from some cemetery in the district in which they were found.

It has been remarked that the distribution of these old stones marks clearly the ancient history of our islands; their frequency or rarity in each case corresponding accurately with the relations existing in remote times between Ireland on the one side, and Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland on the other. Further enquiry into the subject is scarcely to be expected in this rudimentary work.

To seek for the germ of the gravestone is indeed a far quest. Like the ignis fatuus, it recedes as we seem to approach it. In the sculpture galleries of the British Museum there are several examples preserved to us from the ancient Empire of Assyria, and one described as the "Monolith of Shahnaneser II., King of Assyria, B.C. 850," is almost the exact counterpart of the headstones which are in vogue to-day. It stands 5 ft. 6 in. high, is 2 ft. 9 in. wide, and 8 inches thick. Like the Scottish stones of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it is inscribed on both faces.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE REGULATION OF GRAVESTONES.

It has been already pointed out, and is probably well known, that the clergyman of the parish church has possessed from immemorial time the prerogative of refusing to allow in the churchyard under his control any monument, gravestone, design, or epitaph which is, in his opinion, irreverent, indecorous, or in any way unbecoming the solemnity and sanctity of the place. This authority, wherever exercised, has been subject to the higher jurisdiction of the Diocesan Bishop, and presumably to the rule of the Ecclesiastical Courts; but, as we have seen, the authority has been but indifferently employed, and the inference is that the clergy have in times past been wofully ignorant or lamentably careless as to their powers and obligations. A more healthy system now prevails, and we seldom or never find anything in the way of ornament, emblem, or inscription of an offensive or ridiculous character placed in any of our burial-grounds, the Burial Boards being as strict and watchful over the cemeteries as the rectors and vicars are in the management of the churchyards. Nor has there been, so far as we have gone, any difficulty in reconciling this stringency of supervision with the Acts of Parliament which have been passed in recognition of religious equality at the grave; and it is not too much to hope that there is in the present day such universal prevalence of good taste and propriety under the solemnity of death as to ensure concurrence among all sects and parties in securing decorum in all things relating to interments. To the incongruities which have been left to us as legacies from our ancestors we may be indulgent. They are landmarks of the generations which created them, and records of times and manners which we would fain believe that we have left behind in these days of better education and better thought. They are therefore of value to us as items of history, and, though we would not repeat many of them, we shall preserve them, not only because we reverence the graves of our forefathers, but because they are entitled to our protection as ancient monuments. However uncouth they may be in design or expression, they must be tolerated for their age. It cannot be denied that some of them try our patience, in the epitaphs even more perhaps than in the carvings, and "merely mock whom they were meant to honour." Two out of a vast number may be selected as painful evidences of a departed century's tombstone ribaldry. The first, from a village near Bath, is a deplorable mixture of piety and profanity, sentiment and vulgarity:

"To the memory of Thomas and Richard Fry, stonemasons, who were crushed to death, Aug. the 25th, 1776, by the slipdown of a wall they were in the act of building. Thomas was 19 and Richard 21 years.

"They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death were not divided.

"Blessed are they that die in the Lord, for their works follow them.

"A sacred Truth: now learn our awful fate.

The other is at Cray ford, and is as follows:

"Here lieth the body of Peter Isnet, 30 years clerk of this parish. He lived respected as a Pious and a Mirthful Man, and died on his way to church to assist at a wedding on the 31st day of March 1811, aged 70 years. The inhabitants of Crayford have raised this stone to his cheerful memory and as a Tribute to his Long and Faithful Services.

The habit of imitation which we have noticed in the masonry of the gravestone is even more pronounced in the epitaphs. One of the most familiar verses is that which usually reads:

These lines, however, have undergone variations out of number, a not infrequent device being to adapt them to circumstances by such changes as—

The same idea has an extended application at the grave of Joseph Crate, who died in 1805, aged 42 years, and is buried at Hendon Churchyard:

But the most startling perversion of the original text I saw in the churchyard at Saundersfoot, South Wales, where the stone-carver had evidently had his lesson by dictation, and made many original mistakes, the most notable of which was in the second line:—

The following from Hyden, Yorkshire, is remarkable:

"William Strutton, of Padrington, buried 18th May, 1734, aged 97 years, who had by his first wife 28 children, by his second, 17: was own father to 45, grandfather to 86, great-grandfather to 23; in all 154 children."

Witty tombstones, even when they are not vulgar, are always in bad taste. Two well-known instances may suffice—

"Here lie Walker's Particles."

"Here lies Fuller's Earth."

The same misplaced jocularity must be accountable for an enigmatical inscription at St. Andrew's, Worcester, on the tomb of a man who died in 1780, aged 65 years:

"H.L.T.B.O.
R.W.
I.H.O.A.J.R."

This, we are told, should be read as follows:

"Here lyeth the Body of
Richard Weston
In hope of a Joyful Resurrection."

Rhymed epitaphs have a history almost contemporaneous with that of the old gravestones, having their flourishing period between the middle of the seventeenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century. They were little used in England prior to the reign of James the First, and it is supposed that Mary, Queen of Scots, brought the custom from France. She is also said to have been an adept at composing epitaphs, and some attributed to her are extant.

It may be suspected also that other inventors have written a vast number of the more or less apocryphal elegies which go to make up the many books of epitaphs which have been published; but this is a point wide of our subject, and we must be careful in our Rambles that we do not go astray.

Index.