Students of English literature will have noticed that marriages in the church porch were once common. Chaucer makes the “Wife of Bath” speak thus: “Housbondes at chirche-dore I have had fyve[374].” The allusion to the church-door is not mere rhetorical licence. According to the Sarum service, the marriage ceremony was performed in the porch (_ante ostium ecclesiae_), the nuptial benediction being pronounced at the altar afterwards. It was only when the first Prayer Book of Edward VI. was issued that the rubric was thus settled: “The persons to be married shall come into the body of the Church,” and this version has been retained to the present time[375]. Several minor details might be noted to illustrate the secular uses of the porch. Frequently the parson used the porch as a temporary stable for his horse, and, although such action is now held to call for interference on the part of the churchwardens[376], we may confidently say that public opinion has not always discountenanced the practice. Occasionally, one meets with old “stirrup stones” or “jossing blocks,” placed in such positions as to show that no prohibition could have been effectively in force against the horseman who brought his steed to church. One of these stoops still remains at the gate of Duddington churchyard, near Edinburgh, while at Edlington, Lincolnshire, the mounting block is actually fixed on the North side of the porch[377]. Doubtless, a careful search would show that many more examples remain. Only when we have fully recognized the vitality of ancient superstitions and customs, shall we appreciate certain lingering practices connected with the porch. John Aubrey saw, in the porch of a Suffolk church, a horseshoe fixed on the wall to keep away the witches. The numerous authenticated cases of portions of human skin having been found nailed to church doors also bear on the point. Such instances carry us back, not simply to the period when the secular and the religious were combined in one mode of thought and action, but to a still earlier time when the Christian teachers could not, or would not, repress the savagery of paganism. The fragments of skin served to warn sacrilegious robbers that they, too, ran the risk of being flayed alive.