Others of these crosses appealed to the devotion of certain classes of the people, like one which stood at King's Weston, on the Severn, which was emphatically the sailor's cross. Here the mariner, after a successful voyage, or perhaps after an almost unlooked-for escape from the perils of the deep, paid his vows and offered his grateful thanksgiving. Various civic functions, also, took place around the high crosses of the towns, or those of a similar character in the villages. The good folk of Folkestone were summoned by the blast of a horn to assemble at the churchyard cross before proceeding to elect their mayor; and at Aston Rogers and elsewhere, the court of the lord of the manor met at the cross. The parish cross was, in a word, in bygone days the centre of the parochial life, and speaks most convincingly of the extent to which religion entered into the lives of the people. In times when the people's holidays were begun by attendance at the Eucharist, when trade gilds had their special altars in the parish church, when every public function naturally included the offering of the great act of Christian worship, it was simply a part of a consistent national life that the cross should dominate the market, should offer its welcome form at each turn of the high-road, should mark the boundaries of property, and crown the hillside and the cooling spring, as well as stand where the dead lay, sown as seed for the Great Harvest, or gleam from the lighted altar, or tower above the worshippers from the rood-loft. In the destruction of these holy emblems all England has not suffered equally. The west has been most fortunate; Cornwall, Devon, Somersetshire, and Gloucestershire, being especially rich in the number and excellence of the examples still preserved in a more or less perfect condition. The eastern counties have met with the hardest usage, Lincolnshire and the neighbouring shires having been swept almost bare of them.