that such tales arose as means of accounting for the peculiar appearance of certain stones.
5. The resemblance to a sack was remarked upon by Charles Danby in a letter over the signature Greybeard in the Market Rasen Mail, 100 years ago. He says "I first heard the legend and went to see the stone sack in 1814, 21 years after it was broken. One end of the stone was then ribbed and indented in a manner very much resembling a sack mouth gathered up and tied. Each side of the three several fragments was also ribbed in resemblance of the seams."
6. With regard to the first sequel it is quite impossible to identify the farmer concerned.  Mr C. W. Phillips in the Archaeological Journal (vol. LXXXIX, p.202) presumably on the authority of the late Mr John Johnson, printer to the Universitv of Oxford, and a native of this district, says that the farmer was nicknamed Bad-hat, and that he worked the land not much before living memory.  However, on the authority of the late H. E. Smith, of Caistor, (1828-1908), a most careful and accurate recorder, no such removal of the stone has taken place since 1800, in which year the Kirkbys came to the farm. He suggested that the year of the cattle plague, 1747-8, in which Fonaby suffered was a more probable date.
One Mr Cook, late of Normanby le Wold, told Smith that he remembered when a boy hearing the legend from an elderly man who had worked most of his life at Fonaby, as had his father before him. This man stated that the stone was placed beside the kitchen door and that milking "kits" were put on it to dry after scouring. One William Leonard of Limber, a fellow workman of the stone-mason used to say that the stone was made a sill on which the step ladder rested going up to the granary.
7. An older version of the story of the Stone's vengeance seems to be that the man concerned was employed in building the Brocklesby mausoleum (I790-4) and that he broke the stone into three pieces and three days afterwards was killed by falling from the scaffolding.
The tradition in Caistor was that the mason employed on Pelham's Pillar was a Scotsman called Wright who married a Caistor girl, Mary Brocklesby, and had two or three children.