With regard to interment within the churches, the Scottish Reformers seem to have been in advance of those south of the Border. The Brownists were as much in advance of the former, for in 1590 one of the leaders of that denomination wrote:--"Where learned you to bury in hallowed churches and churchyards, as though you had no fields to bury in? Methinks the churchyards, of all other places, should be not the convenientest for burial; it was a thing never used till Popery began, and it is neither comely nor wholesome." Interment in churches was, on sanitary grounds, even more objectionable than in the grounds adjacent to them, and in 1576 the General Assembly prohibited the practice, and ordered that those who contravened the ordinance should be suspended from the privileges of the Church. Long after that time, however, burials in churches continued to take place, owing to the value attached by families of rank above that of the commonalty to the privilege of having their relatives buried apart. In 1643, the Assembly again prohibited all persons, "of whatsoever quality, to bury any deceased person within the body of the kirk, where the people meet for hearing of the Word." But the ordinance was disregarded by all who thought themselves powerful enough to do so, and as ministers had very little to do with a matter which had been declared to be unministerial, they usually found their will sufficient to serve their purpose. In 1695, the Kirk Session of Kilmarnock recorded a minute that, the north aisle being then filled with pews, "they shall, when required, cause lift six pews, on each end, next to the north wall of the aisle, so oft as any of the families of Rowallan, Craufordland, and Grange, shall have occasion to bury their dead;... and, after burial, the said pews shall be set up again in their places, at the expense of the session." Kirk Sessions seem to have felt themselves powerless to enforce their ordinances in the face of a long existing custom and a fancied right of the gentry to burial within the church; and in one instance, which occurred in a Highland parish in 1727, the Kirk Session petitioned the Presbytery to "put a stop to such a bad practice."