THE CROWLE STONE.
A curiously carved shaft in the church of S. Oswald at Crowle, in North Lincolnshire, has been supposed by many to be the shaft of a very ancient cross, and if so, must almost certainly be included amongst those raised as memorials. It is covered on one side with an involved chain pattern roughly suggesting a snake swallowing its tail, and on the other are some human and animal figures, the meaning of which has never been satisfactorily explained. What makes the shaft especially interesting is the presence of the fragment of a runic inscription. The wall into which the Crowle stone is built was part of the eleventh century church of the place, and this ancient memorial to some long-forgotten hero was obviously taken from some neighbouring spot and converted into a lintel for the west door by the Norman builders.[3]
Another memorial cross of quite a different type is the Hall Cross of Doncaster. It was erected by, or in memory of, Oti, or Otho di Tilli, steward of Conisborough for the Earl of Warren, under Stephen and Henry II. It would have been destroyed by the troopers of the Earl of Manchester in the Civil War, but for the action of the mayor, who succeeded in preserving it; but in 1792 it was taken down on making some alterations in the level of the road, and another cross of the same character was put up in the following year on Hall Cross Hill. It consists of a centre circular column, with four others much smaller placed about it, each of the five originally terminating in a cross. Its memorial character is preserved by the old Norman-French inscription, which it still bears, “Icest est la cruice Ote di Tilli a ki alme Deu en face merci. Amn.” It served a more gruesome purpose in the seventeenth century, being the spot chosen for the exposition of the heads of decapitated traitors.
Among the simple crosses planted in such profusion over and around Dartmoor are one or two interesting memorials. Roman’s Cross, at Leemoor, a plain Latin cross nearly six feet in height, standing on a circular base, is claimed by a local tradition as marking a spot whereon the Apostle S. Paul once preached. On Fox Tor stood, till about 1812, a cross raised on a very solid square sub-structure in three tiers, known as Childe’s Tomb. Here, according to the story, Childe, a hunter of ages long gone by, met his death from cold one stormy winter’s night. The whole memorial was wantonly destroyed by some labourers early in this century, but it has recently been re-built and surmounted by a new cross. Bra Tor boasts a modern addition to the Dartmoor Crosses, one having been erected there in memory of her Majesty’s Jubilee, and another, of a style more lofty and ornate than is characteristic of the locality, has been erected at Plympton S. Mary in memory of the Rev. Merton Smith, a late vicar, who perished in the Pyrenees in 1883.
Travelling yet further west, in Cornwall, one ancient cross at least is found which was intended as a memorial of the now forgotten dead. In the market place of Penzance, which can hardly, under the circumstances, be its original site, is a cross some five feet high, on which, at its removal in 1829, from the centre to the side of the square, were found near the base the words, “Hic procumbunt corpora piorum.”
Thus scattered up and down the land, from far Iona to the Cassiterides, is found the simple but expressive emblem of the Christian faith, bearing its silent testimony to the belief and hope of all the ages, that through the Cross the holy dead all sleep in peace to rise in joy.