Chance excavations sometimes attest the early laxity of custom. Outside the churchyard wall of Kirby Grindalythe, in the East Riding, stretching towards the West, are many ancient interments. This fact seems to indicate, either that the Norman church originally stood in an unfenced portion of the hillside, a part of the cemetery being excluded when the wall was built, or that the open wold had been used for burials, Christian or pagan, before the church was erected[918]. Gilbert White was of opinion that the churchyard of Selborne was once larger, and had extended to what was, in his day, the vicarage garden[919]. Maplescombe church, the ruins of which were referred to on p. 38, seems to have never been properly fenced in from the fields. The retired churchyard of Branxton, in Northumberland, which lies within a bowshot of Flodden Field, has at least two features which are illustrative of our subject. The present churchwarden, Mr John Rankin, the representative of a family which has long held that office, informs me that the graveyard was formerly unfenced, save on the South side, where a thorn hedge separated it from the road. On this side, also, there is a narrow strip of land which contains no graves, and which, Mr Rankin asserts, has, through an oversight, never been consecrated. (Cf. p. 343 _supra._) The churchyard at Norton, near Evesham, was unenclosed, except on the Eastern side, down to the year 1844. It stood in a grass field which formed part of the church glebe, thus illustrating Wordsworth’s lines, descriptive of an Oxfordshire parsonage: “Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends, Is marked by no distinguishable line[920].”