The perfume-phials had disappeared so early as the Merovingian period, but the custom of placing the other vases in the coffin lasted, in some countries, even down to the eighteenth century. Their presence in a place of burial is not, therefore, a proof of its antiquity. The liturgists have endeavoured to explain the origin and the meaning of a custom so general and so long maintained; and William Durand suggests, in his “Rationale,” that these funeral vases, of whatever shape they might be, were intended for containing incense. A miniature of the fourteenth century would appear to confirm this theory, for we find that it represents, at the four corners of a coffin covered with the pall, small pots placed in a row with the tapers (Fig. 349); and there is reason to believe that the incense in them was burnt during the funeral service. In fact, the pots represented in this miniature are white; the reddish colour of the holes with which they are perforated, and the smoke issuing from them, show that there was fire inside. Perhaps this was only the fire of red-hot coals, since they have been found to contain ashes mixed with pieces of coal. [Illustration: Fig. 349.--Funeral Service, in which are shown, between the candelabra, the incense vases which were deposited in the coffin.--Drawing of the Fourteenth Century. Fig. 350.--Absolution Cross of the Eleventh Century, in lead, found in a coffin in the Abbey of Bury St. Edmund’s (1855). From “Les Sépultures Gauloises, Romaines, et Franques,” by the Abbé Cochet.]