By Clifford W. Holgate, M.A. 7 
Parish Church, of which he was one of the churchwardens from 
1873 to 1895. 
To go back, then, first to the year 1847. The Rector of the 
parish then was the Rev. John David Hastings, whose tenure of 
the benefice extended from 1841 to 1869. I have ascertained that 
in 1846 the joists and flooring of the Church, and the vaults 
underneath, were found to be in a decayed and insecure state. A 
faculty, accordingly, was applied for to remove the then existing 
pews, replace the joists and flooring with new materials, repair 
extensively the vaults underneath, remove the western gallery, 
remove the organ from it to the south transept, and to remove the 
“incongruous Grecian altar piece’? from before the east window. 
The re-seating proposed was to raise the accommodation from eight 
hundred and ninety-three sittings to nine hundred and ninety-six, 
of which three hundred and thirty-seven were to be free; £1200 
was to be raised in the town by a rate of 1s. 6d. in the pound, and 
the remainder of the total estimated cost of the alterations—£6000 
—it was hoped would be raised by voluntary subscriptions in the 
town and county. A faculty for the proposed “re-pewing and 
making other alterations in and about the Parish Church ,of 
Trowbridge,’ was duly granted by the Consistorial Court of 
Salisbury on January 15th, 1847. In it no special mention was 
made of OCrabbe’s or of any other particular monuments or vaults, 
but there was the following general proviso :—“ provided that all 
monuments, tablets, or tombstones, which it shall be found necessary 
to remove for the purposes aforesaid, shall respectively be replaced 
in a proper and suitable situation, as near as conveniently may be 
to their present position.” . 
It was during the restoration and re-pewing of the Church in 
1847—fifteen years after the poet’s burial—that his remains were 
disturbed, and his skull taken away by a workman engaged in the 
work in the chancel. 
The details of what actually happened with regard to the skull, 
given in the words of the gentleman into whose hands it eventually 
came, will be quoted directly. 
The facts relating to its abstraction, as known generally, and as 
