A COUPLE in Bolton have gained permission from a church court to carve a likeness of their daughter on her headstone in a churchyard.

Initially, the same church court turned down the parents' requests, but they got the judgement reversed on appeal to the Chancellor of the Manchester Diocese, John Holden.

This is very good news. For too long. the Church of England has exercised dictatorial judgment over the style of monuments. I remember having a lot of trouble about this issue when I was a country parson in Yorkshire. There, the authorities didn't allow marble stones, loose chippings, statues of angels and even - and I'm not kidding - the cross.

Other dioceses are not as generous as Manchester, apparently. The Bishop of Oxford won't allow any monument to be more than four feet high, nor can they be made out of marble or polished stone. And permission has to be specially applied for to have a statue. Mark Hill, Chancellor of the Chichester Diocese, said that he feared the Bolton judgement would result in what he calls "excesses" in churchyards all over the country. He is quoted as saying that, in municipal cemeteries, he has seen "even holograms, utterly tasteless and really quite foul".

It all goes to prove that the church is run by snobs. Who are these authorities to decide what memorial a family can erect to their loved one? What if some are in bad taste? Surely, we must be allowed to have bad taste. It may be an offence against the arty farty, but poor taste isn't a crime. There is the strongest case for saying that the dead may be memorialised in any way preferred by the nearest and dearest. Anyway, graveyards are a social history and a valuable record of tastes and fashions of all kinds. The authorities have no right to come along and say that every memorial should conform to their homogenising bureaucratic standards.

It reminds me of a true story. A monumental mason in Yorkshire asked his young apprentice to carve an inscription on a headstone. When he went to inspect what the lad had done, he saw he had carved: SHE WAS THIN. He played hell with the boy, saying, "You've missed off the 'E'." When he went back to check, he found that the apprentice had carved: E SHE WAS THIN.

But there are serious issues here. It fair takes your breath away to hear senior clergy and ecclesiastical civil servants reject monuments on the grounds of taste. This is the tasteless hierarchy that has chucked out the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and replaced them with modern versions that set your teeth on edge.

Pop into most local or village churches and see what they've done to the interior: beautiful high altars replaced by ugly tables at the edge of the chancel step. And for music, choruses which repeat over and over again words so banal and puerile that they weren't worth singing once. Who will deliver us from these meddling priests?

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.