minators of our sacred edifices worked upon the very material of the walls,-producing the pictures which the Reformers, under Cranmer's primacy, instead of actually scraping them from the plaster and stone on which they had been put, merely obliterated by covering them with thick overcoats of whitewash or paint. Of the pictures thus obliterated by the brushes of house-painters, numerous specimens have been brought to light in these later times by our church-restorers, who have taken commendable pains to relieve these interesting relics of medieval art of the disfiguring materials imposed upon by successive generations of churchwardens. Of these pictorial curiosities some good examples may be found in the church of Wisborough Green, Sussex, the vicar of which parish recently published a very entertaining and scholarly treatise on their characteristics and purpose. These remains of mural adornment, lately discovered in a country church, are perhaps more valuable, as historic evidence, than the relics of greater and higher work in more important temples, since they assist in showing that the churches of even obscure parishes were not overlooked by the medieval limners. Mr. Maze Gregory inclines to the opinion that some of the Wisborough Green relics may have been painted so early as the later part of the eleventh century; but we are disposed to think that the learned vicar assigns too remote a date to the paintings about which he has spoken and written so serviceably. In lieu of the paintings, thus removed or defaced under Cranmer's primacy, the walls of churches were decorated with verses of Scripture which were regarded by the Catholic party with vehement dislike,-as innovations on ancient ways, and controversial affronts to the papal system. That the clergy, who directed the labours of the Protestant illuminators in Edward the Sixth's time, selected for exhibition on the church walls such texts as appeared to justify the proceedings of the Reformers, and to reflect on Catholic abuses, may be inferred from the language of the mandate in which Bonner ordered the *The Sins and Punishment of Our Members. Six Lectures, delivered on the Fridays in Lent, 1867, on the Ancient Paintings recently discovered in the Parish Church.' By the Rev. Maze W. Gregory, M.A., Vicar of Wisborough Green, and Chaplain of Loxwood, Sussex. Rivingtons, 1867. prompt obliteration of the scriptures and writings painted upon the church walls' of the diocese of London. 'Because some children of iniquity,' the insolent prelate proclaimed, 'given up to carnal desires and novelties, have by many ways enterprised to banish the ancient manner and order of the church, and to bring in and establish sects and heresies; taking from thence the picture of Christ, and many things besides instituted and observed of ancient time laudably in the same; placing in the room thereof such things, as in such a place it behoved them not to do, and also have procured, as a stay to their heresies (as they thought) certain scriptures wrongly applied to be painted on the church walls, all which persons tend chiefly to this endthat they might uphold the liberty of the flesh, and marriage of priests, and destroy, as much as lay in them, the reverent sacrament of the altar, and might extinguish and enervate holydays, fasting-days, and other laudable discipline of the Catholic Church; opening a window to all vices, and utterly closing up the way unto virtue; wherefore we, being moved with a Christian zeal, judging that the premises are not to be longer suffered, do, for discharge of our duty, commit unto you jointly and severally, and by the tenor hereof do straitly charge and command you, that at the receipt bereof, with all speed convenient, you do warn, or cause to be warned, first, second, and third time, peremptorily, all and singular church-wardens and parishioners whatsoever, within our diocese of London (wheresoever any such scriptures or paintings have been attempted) that they abolish and extinguish such manner of scriptures, so that by no means they be either read or seen.' OF CHAPTER IV. TOMBS, SEATS, FLOWERS, AND CANDLES. F tombs and other material devices for perpetuating the memory of deceased persons-the excess of which demonstrations of human pride and vanity tends in modern times more to the disfigurement than the beauty of our temples-the medieval church had comparatively few. Instead of interring their dead within the walls of their towns, our earlier Saxon ancestors devoted to purposes of sepulture pieces of ground lying at a distance from the habitations of the living,—a course to which their descendants of the nineteenth century have resorted after enduring for generations upon generations the inconvenience and evils of intramural interment. Cuthred, king of the West Saxons, (740-754) was the first English ruler to allow the dead to be buried within the walls of towns, during the life of which sovereign Archbishop Cuthbert obtained the Pope's permission that churchyards should be used as burial-grounds. But the practice of interring corpses in churches did not begin till a much later date. Even so late as 1076, Archbishop Lanfranc, in the council of Winchester, forbade that burial should be performed within the temples under his sway; and a considerable period elapsed before this canon was relaxed in favour of private persons. During the Norman and Plantagenet period, individuals who wished to lie beneath the roofs of sacred buildings could obtain their desire at great cost and through special ecclesiastical favour by erecting chapels contiguous to churches,-care being taken by the authorities of the original edifices, that the architecture of these sacella harmonised with the temples to which they were attached, and that the control and custody, though not the absolute ownership, of the new chapels went with the parent churches.* It was thus that many of our churches acquired their aisles (ala), or wings built out from . the original edifices, within which no interments might be made. Thus also, through the combined piety and arrogance of the wealthy individuals who erected the side-chapels, or sacella, of which sufficient notice has already been taken, a single church in course of time became, as it were, an accumulation of churches. But long after royal and noble persons, and humbler individuals of extraordinary wealth, could thus obtain intra-ecclesial sepulture for themselves and their families without infringing Lanfranc's ninth canon, persons of considerable, though secondary influence,-persons, to use modern terms, of gentle condition and average social respectability, continued to be debarred from the costly distinction of interment under the church-roof. Even so late as Henry the Seventh's time the author of The Book of the Festival'-a work throwing much light on the church-life of our ancestors in the fifteenth century-speaks with strong disapprobation of the growing fashion of burying inferior persons in the Lord's House. That patrons and incumbents might be buried in their churches, the author admits; but he insists that to inter persons of inferior quality within church walls was a profane and abominable act. In language which it is difficult to peruse with gravity, he assures us, 'They' (i.e. churchyards) were appointed by the fathers to bury in, for two causes: one, to be prayed for, as our holy Church useth; 6 So recently as July 7, 1866, one of our Vice-Chancellors recognised, in a judicial decision, a manorial lord's apparent right of private property in a sacellum thus attached by a medieval lord to Icklesham Church. In his judgment, his honour said, 'that in ancient times the founders of churches were very generally lords of manors; and that it was the custom in early times for the lord of a manor, when founding a church, to found with it a private chapel, not annexed to his house, but to the church itself; considering, perhaps, that it derived some additional sanctity from being, as it were, made part of the church, in appearance, and close to the church. And it was a common practice for lords of manors, and other men of note in the country, to obtain leave either from the Pope, or from the Crown, or from the Patron, the ordinary and the incumbent (and the lord of the manor would generally be the patron), to annex a chapel to an existing church; that this was most commonly done in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in that manner a number of chapels were annexed to churches, such chapels being founded for the purposes of private masses and as places of sepul ture for the families of the founders.'- Vide Law Rep.' Churton v. Frewen. For the fiend and another, for the body, to lie there at rest. hath no manner of power with Christian burials. in the church, except it be the patron, that defends it from bodily enemies; and the parson, vicar, priest, or clerk, that defend the church from ghostly enemies with their prayers. Some have been buried there and cast out again on the morrow, and all the clothes left still in the grave. An angel came on a time to a warden of a church, and bade him go to the bishop to cast. out the body he had buried there, or else he should be dead within thirty days. And so he was; for he would not do as he was bidden.' The custom of burying the dead in churches grew more and more general in the Elizabethan period and throughout the seventeenth century, notwithstanding the strenuous opposition offered by many influential persons to the objectionable usage. When John Evelyn's father-in-law had died, Feb. 12th, 1683, at Sayes Court, he was interred in the churchyard of his parish, in accordance with his particular directions, given in the hope that the example of his interment would tend to put intra-ecclesial burial out of fashion. By a special clause in his will,' says his son-in-law, the diarist, he ordered that his body should be buried in the churchyard under the south-east window of the chancel, adjoining to the burying-places of his ancestors, since they came out of Essex into Sayes Court, he being much offended at the novel custom of burying everyone within the body of the church and chancel; that being a favour heretofore granted to martyrs and great persons; this excess of making churches charnel-houses being of ill and irreverend example, and prejudicial to the health of the living, besides the continual disturbance of the pavement and seats, and several other indecencies. Dr. Hall, the pious Bishop of Norwich, would also be so interred, as may be read in his testament.' Six years later (April 12th, 1689) John Evelyn co-operated with the Bishop of St. Asaph to urge the Archbishop of Canterbury to forbid needless private administrations of baptism, and to lessen the frequency of intra-ecclesial interments:-'the one proceeding much from the pride of women, bringing that into custom which was only indulged in case of imminent danger, and out of necessity during the Rebellion and persecution of the |