The preceding passage in Hamlet begins with an allusion to a very ancient custom, which is still observed in Spain at the monumental crosses erected on the highways to those who have perished by the hands of robbers.
“For charitable prayers, Sherds, flints, and pebbles, should be thrown on her.”
This is literally done by every peasant when passing one of those rude and melancholy monuments. A heap of stones is always observed at the foot of the cross; not, however, _instead_ of prayers, as the passage would seem to imply, but as a tale by which the number of _Paternosters_ said by the compassionate passengers, might be reckoned. The antiquity of this _Christianized_ custom appears, from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, to be very great. The proverb or sentence, translated as it is in the margin of the English Bible, runs thus: “As he that putteth a precious stone in a heap, so is he that giveth honour to a fool.”[48]
The Latin version which, you must know, is of great antiquity, and was made the basis of Jerom’s, about the middle of the fourth century, renders this proverb in a remarkable manner. _Sicut qui mittit lapidem in acervum Mercurii; ita qui tribuit insipienti honorem._ As he that casts a stone on the _heap of Mercury_, &c. &c. Now, bearing in mind that stones are at this day thrown upon certain graves in Spain; that, according to the passage in Shakspeare, a similar custom seems to have prevailed in other parts of Europe; and that Jerom believed he rendered the spirit of the Hebrew proverb by translating the word which the English Divines doubted, whether to construe _a sling_, or _a heap of stones_, by the phrase, _acervus Mercurii_; a deity, whose statues were frequently placed over sepulchres among the Romans--bearing all this in mind, I say, it appears to me that the custom of covering some graves with stones thrown at random, must have existed in the time of the writer of the Proverbs. Perhaps I may be allowed to conjecture that it originated in the punishment of stoning, so common among the Jews; that passengers flung stones, as a mark of abhorrence, on the heap which hid the body of the criminal; that the primitive Christians, many of whom were Jews, followed the same method of shewing their horror of heathen tombs, till those places came to be known, in Jerom’s time, by the appellation of _heaps of Mercury_; that modern Christians applied the same custom to the graves of such as had been deemed unworthy of consecrated ground; and, finally, that the frequency of highway robberies and murders in Spain detached the custom from the idea of crime, and softened a mark of detestation into one of prayer and intercession for the unfortunate victim.