Doles are often distributed in the churchyard. William Robinson, at one time Sheriff of Hull, when he died in 1708, left money to purchase a dozen loaves of bread, costing a shilling each, to be given to twelve poor widows at his grave every Christmas Day. Leonard Dare, in 1611, directed that on Christmas Day, Lady Day, and Michaelmas Day, the churchwardens were "to buy, bring and lay on his tombstone, threescore penny loaves of good wholesome bread," which were to be distributed to the poor of the parish. A quaint custom is still enacted annually in London on Good Friday. The vicar of St. Bartholomew's the Great, Smithfield, drops twenty-one sixpences in a row on a certain lady's grave. The money is picked up by the same number of widows kneeling, who have previously attended service at the church, where a sermon is preached.[12] A quaint old custom, once not infrequently practised, was that of scrambling bread and cheese and other edibles in the churchyard. A story is told of two poor sisters walking to London to claim an estate. Arriving at Paddington, weary, hungry, and footsore, their miserable condition aroused sympathy, and the good folk of Paddington gave them relief. In course of time, their claim was established, and as a token of gratitude they left a bequest of bread and cheese, to be thrown from the top of the church of St. Mary's, Paddington, among the people assembled in the churchyard below. This custom was continued into this present century, for in 1821, it is noticed in the newspapers as an annual practice to throw bread and cheese from the belfry of the church at eight o'clock on the Sunday before Christmas Day. At Barford, Oxfordshire, is a piece of land, known as White-bread Close, the rent of which was formerly spent in buying bread to be scrambled for at the church door. A correspondent of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1824, says that the "distribution occasioned such scenes of indecent riot and outrage, even fighting in the church itself, that a late curate very properly effected the suppression of a practice productive of this gross abuse." Mr. Tuke, of Wath, near Rotherham, who died in 1810, left a bequest whereby forty dozen penny loaves were to be thrown from the church leads at twelve o'clock on Christmas Day for ever. This is the latest instance of a scrambling custom with which we are acquainted.[13]