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".
[Illustration: _Saxon, Norman, and Later Architectural Features_]
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.
[Illustration: _Effigy with Crossed Legs in the Temple Church,
London_
_The feet are placed upon a lion, indicating, it is said, that
the knight took part in the Crusades and was killed in action._]