Chapter XXVIII: Traces of Early Times in the Churches

In most villages the church is the chief old building in the place, and it is a good thing to be able to tell the time to which its different parts belong. It will help us to fix in our minds the different periods, or steps, in the history of our country.

A little party of holiday-makers were one day strolling through a country churchyard in which was a very old church. They were not much interested until one of the party saw in the wall of the church a slab to "an honest carpenter", dated 1765. "How very, very old!" he exclaimed, and called the attention of his companions to it, and they all wondered and marvelled. Yet in that same wall were bits of work which belonged to a past age, not just a hundred or so years back, but a thousand years back. They had not been trained to read "the signs of the times".

Never be ashamed to ask questions about an old building. It will be a very strange thing indeed if you cannot find, in every town and village, _somebody_ who has a keen interest in old buildings and who will delight in pointing them out to you. Nearly every local newspaper in the country, from time to time, prints odds and ends connected with the history of the neighbourhood. If there is anything about an old building that you want explained, you can easily write a short letter to the editor of the paper, and there is sure to be someone who will take the trouble to answer your question, and help you to understand, and to distinguish between things "that differ".

An old parish church has a good deal to tell us about the history of the parish and its people, and if you know something of the history of the place in which you live you will know something _worth knowing_ of the history of your country, which will help you to be a good citizen. But this knowledge can only be picked up little by little, and you cannot learn "all about it" in the course of a few days.

There are, as we said in a former chapter, some few churches which have little bits of Saxon work left in their walls and windows. In a great many more we shall see some Norman work, especially in pillars and arches and doorways. That Norman Period takes in the reigns of all the kings from William I to the time of King John, from the middle of the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth, down to the time of Magna Carta.

When we come to the time of Magna Carta we are in the thirteenth century, when pointed arches came into use. Through the reigns of King Henry III and King Edward I a great deal of building in that style went on. In almost every parish some alteration was made in the church in that century; and probably in the chancel there are one or two old window's which will be pointed out to you as having been first put in during that century.[14]

[14] In the "Lancet Windows", shown in the illustration on p. 94,
you have a specimen of that thirteenth-century or Early-English
style.

You may perhaps find a very old battered figure of a man in chain armour, the sort of armour in which King Edward I went fighting in the Third Crusade, in Wales, and in Scotland; in which Simon de Montfort and Wallace and the Bruce fought. Some of these effigies have the legs crossed--some at the ankles, some at the knees, and some at the thighs. It used to be said that these represented crusaders; but nobody seems really to know what was the meaning of the cross-legged effigies.

Then there are some flat stones, lying in the pavement, with inscriptions running round the edge in strange worn letters, with perhaps an ornamental cross also cut the whole length of the stones. These are the cover-stones of the graves where some great baron or landowner was buried, and they belong to the thirteenth century, and some are even of earlier date. They are called incised slabs.

In this same century another kind of cover-stone for a grave came into use, especially in the southern and eastern parts of England. Metal was fixed in the incised slabs, and the portrait of the knight and his lady, the merchant or the lawyer, the bishop or priest, was engraved on the metal, showing the person in the kind of dress worn during life. It is said that there are about four thousand of these brasses still left in England. Some of them have been sadly damaged and worn. They do not all belong to the thirteenth century, as this kind of memorial of the dead was used during several centuries--in fact, well on into Queen Elizabeth's reign, at the end of the sixteenth century. The oldest brass in England, showing a man in armour, is in Surrey, in Stoke D'Abernon church. Brasses are very valuable, as they show us the kinds of armour and dress worn in particular centuries.

_The feet are placed upon a lion, indicating, it is said, that
the knight took part in the Crusades and was killed in action._]