freshly burnt, but the mouldering remains of any who had been suffered, through mistake or inadvertency, to slip into their graves. Wycliffe, the 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 Wycliffe, 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 ecclesiastical 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 Emperor 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 unburied, in the very sight of the majestic cathedral of Spires, which his father had commenced, and he had completed.
But the high and transcendent energy of ecclesiastical cognizance was completely developed in England in the thirteenth century, when it reached its culminating point, with the whole kingdom as the defendant. From the year 1207 to the year 1213, the interdict of Innocent 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 thrown into ditches, without prayer or hallowed 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 control 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 monument, 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, who could hold even the parson liable for taking them down or defacing them.
The reverent regard of the common law for these memorials is curiously manifested by Coke in the "Third Institute," page 203, where he expatiates upon a monumental stone, in his time more than four
