Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 10.djvu/187

10 s. x. AUG. 22, 1908.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

151 They occupy a central position close under the north wall. Taking them in order from west to east, I copied the inscriptions as follows:—

The last (No. 7) faces eastward.

The oldest stone in the enclosure is that of Mr. Wm. Mead, the donor of the ground. It stands in a central position, close beside the path, and is the only memorial not of a uniform type, being taller and containing more particulars than the others. It is thus inscribed verb, et lit.:—

The Friends' Burial-Ground attached to Drapers' Almshouses near Margate, founded by Michael Yoakley in 1708, has been used for interments since 1769. There are only seven memorial stones in the burial area, and they are flat on the ground. The following is a list of them, with their sizes in inches:

's notes on the memorial stones in the Quakers' Cemetery, Exeter, throw new and interesting light on the question of Nonconformist burial-grounds, but I am not quite satisfied that they upset my statement that the Society of Friends did not allow memorial stones until 1851. My information was taken from the manuscript minute-book of the Dover Preparative Meeting of the Society of Friends, which covers a period from 1818 to 1867; and the document from which I quoted was the following report:—

On the report is written this note:—

The foregoing is evidence that the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in 1850 made an order respecting gravestones, and that the Monthly Meeting at Dover, September, 1851, received and adopted a report making provision for the use of gravestones. It is also a fact that, although there had been a Friends' burial-place under the Town Wall at Dover from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, there were no gravestones there; nor were there any in the Friends' burial-ground attached to their Meeting-House in Queen Street, built in 1802, until after the date of the above report, and the stones which are there now are in accordance with that report.