The sign of our salvation having come to fill so large a place in Christian art, it would naturally be expected that in memorials in any way connected with religious feelings it would be employed, and above all in the monuments of the dead laid to rest in hope of a joyous resurrection through the victory of the Cross. As a matter of fact, our earliest Christian cross-forms are the disguised crosses of the catacombs, and in spite of every outbreak of bigotry against other uses of the symbol, it has never been entirely abandoned for such purposes. Preaching crosses and market crosses might fall into ruin, and roods and crucifixes be wantonly destroyed, but the Cross, carved in stone or cut on stone above the grave, is found in all ages, though not so frequently in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as before or since. The first cross said to have been raised in the Kingdom of Northumbria, was that wooden one which S. Oswald, the King and Martyr, planted with his own hands on the eve of the battle of Hevenfelth in 635. This, originally a sign of the cause for which Oswald sought to reclaim his realm, became a memorial of the Christian victory, and was still preserved as such in the time of the Venerable Bede, who tells us that "the place is shown to this day, and held in great veneration." Another memorial of battle was the famous Neville's Cross, near Durham, erected to mark the spot where Ralph Neville, in October, 1346, defeated the Scottish invaders. This, according to ancient accounts, was a singularly dignified structure, with a crucifixion beneath a stone canopy at the top, and a series of figures at the base, the whole being raised on half-a-dozen steps. The greater number of our memorial crosses, however, preserve the memory, as was above indicated, of persons rather than of events; and amongst the earliest of these is a very ancient example of the so-called runic type in the Parish Church of Leeds. It is curiously wrought with human figures, difficult now to name with any certainty, and with several fine specimens of the varied and intricate scrolls so popular with the early stone-carvers of the north. It is supposed to be a monument to Onlaf Godfreyson, who died about 941. Travellers in the Alps will be familiar with the memorials, pathetic in their simplicity, of those mountaineers and wayfarers who have met sudden destruction beneath the overwhelming avalanche; ever and anon the rustic cross of wood is met with, marked with the initials of the dead and with the letters "P. I.," or perhaps the words in full, _Perit ici_. Spain, too, has her wooden crosses scattered along her most lonely roads and hillsides, or by the forest pathway; memorials, these, however, of more sombre tragedies, telling where the brigand or the highwayman struck down his victim.