All over the country, remains of ancient churchyard crosses exist. At Dindar, and at North Petherton, in Somersetshire, are graceful shafts from which the tabernacled heads have disappeared; at Crowle, in Lincolnshire, is a short shaft on steps, which now supports a sun-dial; at Bebbington, in Cheshire, the base alone is left. And so the catalogue of battered fragments might be continued, through every county in England. In their perfect state, these churchyard crosses often witnessed to the artistic feeling of our ancestors, and always to their sincere faith; are we driven to draw as a moral from their ruins, that we have fallen as far behind them in the latter, as it will hardly be denied we have in the former?
In recent years something has been done to repair the losses of the past in this respect. It has been pointed out above that several of the crosses as we have them now, such as those at Eyam, at S. Ives, and at Lanteglos, are the carefully rebuilt fragments of antiquity. But besides these, some new churchyard crosses have recently been erected, proving the revival of the ancient feeling of their fitness. Quite recently the old base of a cross at East Brent, in Somersetshire, has been crowned with the addition of an impressive stone crucifix, intended as a memorial of the long incumbency of the late Archdeacon Denison. At Harburton, in Devonshire, is a new cross, designed after the best ancient type, with a tabernacled head surmounted by a short crocketed spire; the carvings represent, on the four sides, the Crucifixion, the Epiphany, and S. Andrew, and S. Bartholomew. Hickleton Churchyard, in Yorkshire, and other places, have also had crosses re-erected in them in recent years; as at Broadwood Widger, near Launceston, where an ancient cross has been recovered from secular use, and placed in the churchyard.
The churchyard crosses, besides exciting the devotion of the faithful, as they passed amid the sleeping dead to prayer, were often used as fitting places for the performance of penances, and hence were sometimes called “Weeping Crosses.” Another name, “Palm Crosses,” marks the fact that the Palm Sunday procession in passing round the church made a station at the churchyard cross, which was for the nonce adorned with palm-branches, or more strictly with yew or willow, which in mediæval England generally served as substitutes for the oriental palm.
CHAPTER V.
Public Crosses.
That “the ages of faith” considered religion foreign to no department of life, is in nowise more strikingly shown than by the public use of the emblem of Christianity. Our forefathers held it as the fittest of all ornaments, not for the Church only, but for every place where Christian men were found. Over five thousand crosses, it is said, existed at one time in the public places of England;—in the obscure village churchyard and the busy mart, the lonely highway and the crowded city thoroughfare.
Precisely how many of these now remain, it would be difficult to say; but certainly only a small proportion exists in anything like the original state. Some have survived as mere shafts, beautiful still in many cases, but shorn of almost all meaning by the loss of the one member that gave them a being and a name. In other cases an unsightly stump, a useless flight of steps, a few worn stones, an ancient place-name, or a bare tradition, keep alive the memory of the Cross, now desecrated or destroyed.
The ceaseless beating of the tide of time is responsible for much of this decay, which the local authorities, in carelessness or ignorance, have been guilty in too many instances of watching without attempting to retard; and in not a few cases the whole structure has at last been taken down simply to avoid the cost and trouble of needful repair.