); _A True Discourse Historicall, of the
succeeding Governors in the Netherlands_ (1602).

The chief authority for Churchyard's biography is his own "Tragicall
Discourse of the unhappy man's life" (_Churchyardes Chippes_). George
Chalmers published (1817) a selection from his works relating to
Scotland, for which he wrote a useful life. See also an edition of the
_Chippes_ (ed. J.P. Collier, 1870), of the _Worthines of Wales_
(Spenser Soc. 1876), and a notice of Churchyard by H.W. Adnitt
(_Transactions_ of the Shropshire Archaeological and Nat. Hist. Soc.,
reprinted separately 1884).

CHURCHYARD, a piece of consecrated ground attached to a parochial
church, and used as a burial place. It is distinguished from a cemetery
(q.v.), which is also a place of burial, but is separate and apart from
any parochial church. A cemetery in England is either the property of a
private company, incorporated by special act of parliament, or of a
local authority, and is subject to the Cemeteries Clauses Act 1847,
incorporated in the Public Health Acts. The practice of burying in
churches or churchyards is said to have been connected with the custom
of praying for the dead, and it would appear that the earlier practice
was burying in the church itself. In England, about the year 750, spaces
of ground adjoining the churches were enclosed and appropriated to the
burial of those who had been entitled to attend divine service in those
churches.

The right to burial in the parish churchyard is a common law right,
controlled in many points by the provisions of the law ecclesiastical.
This double character is sufficient to explain the controversy which has
so long raged round the subject of burials in England. Every man,
according to the common law, has a right to be buried in his own
churchyard, or, as it is sometimes put, in the churchyard of the parish
where he dies. But the churchyard, as well as the church itself, is the
freehold of the parson, who can in many respects deal with it as if it
were a private estate. A statute of Edward I. (35, st. 2) speaks of the
churchyard as the soil of the church, and the trees growing in the
churchyard "as amongst the goods of the church, the which laymen have no
authority to dispose," and prohibits "the parsons from cutting down such
trees unless required for repairs." Notwithstanding the consecration of
the church and churchyard and the fact that they are the parson's
freehold,