THE OWNERSHIP OF THE DEAD. 325 



freshly burnt, but the mouldering remains of any who had been suf- 

 fered, through mistake or inadvertency, to slip into their graves. 

 Wyclifie, tlie first English translator of the Scriptures, had ventured, 

 in life, to question certain points of dogmatic theology, but, dying in 

 his bed, in the year 1384, had been allowed to sleep for forty-one years 

 in a church-yard in Leicestershire. The assembled dignitaries in the 

 Council of Constance, after duly disposing of the ashes of Huss and 

 Jerome, judicially declared the heresy of WycliiFe, and his bones 

 were accordingly dug up and burnt, and the ashes thrown into the 

 river Avon, in the due exercise of the executive branch of ecclesiasti- 

 cal cognizance, in the year 1425 of the Christian era. 



Nor was the ecclesiastical cognizance of the dead confined to 

 delinquents of low degree, or in the plainer walks of life. The Em- 

 peror of Germany, Henry IV., the victor of more than sixty battles, 

 dying under papal excommunication by Hildebrand, the seventh 

 Gregory, was compelled to lie for five years unbui'ied, in the very 

 sight of the majestic cathedral of Spires, which his father had com- 

 menced, and he had completed. 



But the high and transcendent energy of ecclesiastical cognizance 

 was completely developed in England in the thirteenth century, w^hen 

 it reached its culminating point, with the whole kingdom as the de- 

 fendant. From the year 1207 to the year 1213, the interdict of In- 

 nocent III. kept out of their lawful graves all the dead, from the 

 Channel to the Tweed. No funeral-bell in the kingdom was permitted 

 to toll ; the corpses were thi'own into ditches, without prayer or hal- 

 lowed observance, and the last drop of priestly malice and vengeance 

 was exhausted, in compelling all, who wished to marry, to solemnize 

 the ceremony in the church-yard. 



It was during this unbridled career of papal aggrandizement 

 through these dark and dismal ages, that the ancient civil courts of 

 England gradually lost their original legitimate authority over places 

 of interment, as private property, and their proper and necessary con- 

 trol over the repose of the dead. The clergy monopolizing the judicial 

 power over the subject, burial was committed solely to ecclesiastical 

 cognizance, while the secular courts, stripped of all authority over the 

 dead, were left to confine themselves to the protection of the monu- 

 ment, and other external emblems of grief, erected by the living. But 

 these they guarded with singular solicitude. The tombstone, the 

 armorial escutcheons, even the coat and pennons, and ensigns of honor, , 

 whether attached to the church edifice or elsewhere, were raised as 

 " heirlooms " to the dignity of inheritable estates, and descended 

 from heir to heir, Avho could hold even the parson liable for taking 

 them down or defacing them. 



The reverent regard of the common law for these memorials is cu- 

 riously manifested by Coke in the " Third Institute," page 203, where 

 he expatiates upon a monumental stone, in his time more than four 



