208 THE SHALL-CROSS. 



upon the line of the parish boundary, and not only upon the line, 

 but the face of the cross, as indicated in the stump, was always 

 true to the direction. Hence there is little doubt that the 

 crosses were originally placed to record the boundary of each 

 parish, and they are usually at its comers. One instance in 

 particular demonstrated this. From the Picking Rods, one of 

 the boundaries runs in a south-easterly direction to the stump of 

 a cross we discovered, and then in a straight line to the Abbot's 

 Chair, which is a Saxon cross stump of the ordinary rectangular 

 section set true to line. Here the boundary turns sharply 

 to the north-east, but only for a length of about fifty yards, 

 where it crosses the road called the Monks' Road ; yet here, 

 although so close to the other, is also a cross stump, but seem- 

 ingly of later date, and thence the boundary once more assumes 

 a south-easterly direction, though not quite in the same line as 

 before. From this I am now inclined to- deduce that originally 

 the Abbot's Chair marked the comer of the whole, but that 

 at the date of the later cross a small deviation was made, possibly 

 in consequence of some charter to the Abbot of Basingwark, 

 who held a grange in this neighbourhood. In this relation I 

 would suggest that the word " chair " here, is really the old Anglo- 

 Saxon cerre, which means a turn, corner, or bend, hence it was 

 the abbot's boundary-corner. We note the same word in Pym 

 Chair, the Saxon cross stump at Taxal, which is also on the 

 boundary line of its parishes. 



It follows, as Dr. Cox cogently remarked, that if a single 

 cross was necessary to define the direction of the single 

 boundary between two parishes, double crosses would be required 

 to point those where three parishes unite at a corner. This is 

 exactly what occurs where the two> pillar crosses — Robin Hood's 

 Picking Rods — stand in one huge block of millstone grit on 

 Ludworth Moor, and their cross heads no doubt originally 

 pointed the meeting of the three ways. It is true that the 

 precisely similar monument, the Bow Stones, does not now stand 

 upon a boundary line, but as the point of junction of three 

 parishes does occur within a mile of it, on Whaley Moor, we 



