"But who could have been so fearless and wicked as to take them away?" exclaimed Constance, who already had begun to feel a real interest in the subject.
"Alas! Constance, that question is easily answered. There was indeed a time, long ago, when people would not have _dared_ to commit these acts of sacrilege. You know among the ancient Romans there was a belief that the manes or spirits of the departed protected their tombs, and so persons were afraid to rob them; but people since then have been deterred by no such fear, indeed by no fear at all. Within the period between 1536 and 1540 somewhere about 900 religious houses were destroyed, and their chapels were dismantled and robbed of their tombs, on which were a great number of brasses. And this spirit of sacrilege extended beyond the monasteries, for at this time, and afterwards, very many of our parish churches were also despoiled of their monumental brasses; indeed the evil spread so much that Queen Elizabeth issued a special proclamation for putting a stop to it. The greatest destruction of brasses, however, took place a hundred years after this, when thousands were removed from the cathedrals and churches to satisfy the rapacity or the fanaticism of the Puritan Dissenters, who were then in power[42]. In later times, I am sorry to say, large numbers have been sold by churchwardens, for the just value of the metal, and many have been removed during the restoration of churches and have not been restored; of course, those whose special duty it was to protect them have been greatly to blame for this. Then not a few have become loose, and been lost through mere carelessness. Some of the most beautiful brasses in our church I discovered a few years since under a heap of rubbish in the wood-house of Daniels, the former sexton[43]. So you see it is no wonder we find so many of those curiously-indented slabs in the pavement of our churches, which mark the places where brasses have formerly been.
A few of these memorials are to be found in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Some also exist in France, Germany, Russia, Prussia, Poland, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden. In these countries, however, they have never been numerous.