114 
From Robert de Vallibus it is a far cry to his descendant, 
George William Frederick Howard, seventh earl of Carlisle, to 
whose memory the Naworth estate tenants in 1866 placed a 
stained glass window in the west wall of the aisle. That window, 
however, having been accidentally injured, the present window,* 
designed by Burne Jones and executed by William Morris, was 
placed in its stead in 1890 by the seventh earl’s sisters. His life 
of varied public usefulness is well known. 
Immediately under the De Vallibus tablet, and fixed to the 
small blocked door at the end of the north wall, we see the broken 
shaft of a stone cross, the basement of which stands, where it was 
originally placed, on the priory green. Its chief interest lies in 
its Latin inscription; nearly half of which, however, has been 
chiselled away to make room for an English epitaph, the conclu- 
sion only of which now remains, viz : 
who was buried | ye 20 of July | 
1657 | 2nd yere of his age. 
Neither the parish register, which begins at 1684, nor the tran- 
scripts, which begin at 1666, enable us to recover the name of 
this child’s father ; which, were it known, would for his vandalism 
be held in evil repute. Yet, though unwittingly, he has done a 
service by recording a date (1657)t which suggests the cause of 
the mutilation of the cross, viz., an injunction issued during the 
Commonwealth for the demolition of churchyard crosses, as being 
“monuments of superstition.” Nor is it unlikely that, but for his 
having appropriated it for a gravestone, the shaft would have been 
entirely destroyed. It lay for about a century and a half in the 
churchyard ; whence, according to Lysons (p. ccvi.), who wrote in 
1816, it was removed at the beginning of the present century and 
fixed against a barn door; whence after many more years it was 
taken into the crypt; whence four years ago it was transferred to 
* Representing the angel Gabriel announcing the birth of our Lord to the 
shepherds. 
+ In vol. ix, p. 195, of the C, and W. Arch. Trans. this, date is incorrectly 
given as 1667. 
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