The prejudice against burial on the North side can be traced beyond the advent of Christianity. It is one of those “clinging faiths and fears” which beset the early folk of these islands. As a result of the examination of several hundred British barrows, Canon Greenwell found that, in secondary burials, bodies were rarely deposited on the North side of the mound, the most favoured positions being towards the South and East[923]. Mr J. R. Mortimer, after quoting Canon Greenwell’s observations, confirms them by the testimony of the mounds of Yorkshire. Canon Atkinson’s experiences yielded similar results. During the course of many years, he opened some eighty “houes” or grave-mounds in his own district of Danby-in-Cleveland, and found one interment only in which the body “lay a little, and but a little, North of the magnetic East-and-West line[924]” (i.e. the median line). The evidence derived from megalithic monuments and prehistoric dwellings and settlements tends the same way. The chilly North was shunned; the brilliant East and the gracious South were courted. These ancient preferences were emphasized in the building of temples and Christian places of worship. Egregious among these old-world superstitions stands the hatred of the North. All the inherited antipathies of primeval folk were long retained by their civilized successors, and hence the Northern portion of the graveyard was allotted to those who were deemed spiritually undeveloped or spiritually lost. Another fact which tends to prove the continuity of the superstition is that, during the Romano-British period, the bodies of persons who had committed suicide were not allowed to be burnt. The prohibition was afterwards extended to those who had died in their infancy[925].