that it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman,' and when they partake of any delicacy with a foreigner they ask him whether such a thing is made in his country.' In regard to the religious practices of the people, this intelligent foreigner says, "They all attend mass every day, and say many Paternosters in public. The women carry long rosaries in their hands, and any who can read take the Office of Our Lady with them, and with some companion recite it in Church verse by verse, in a low voice, after the manner of churchmen. On Sundays they always hear Mass in their parish church and give liberal alms, because they may not offer less than a piece of money of which fourteen are equivalent to a golden ducat. Neither do they omit any form incumbent on good Christians.”

In these days perhaps the suggestion that the English people commonly in the early sixteenth century were present daily at morning Mass is likely to be received with caution, and classed among the strange tales proverbially told by travellers, then as now. It is, however, confirmed by another Venetian who visited England some few years later, and who asserts that every morning "at daybreak he went to Mass arm-in-arm with some English nobleman or other." And, indeed, the same desire of the people to be present daily at the Sacrifice of the Mass is attested by Archbishop Cranmer when, after the change had come, he holds up to ridicule the traditional observances previously in vogue. What he specially objected to was the common practice of those who run, as he says, "from altar to altar, and from sacring, as they call it, to sacring, peeping, tooting and gazing at that thing which the priest held up in his hands . and saying, 'this day have I seen my Maker,' and 'I cannot be quiet except

I see my Maker once a day.''

A Relation of the Island of England (Camden Society), p. 20.

2 Ibid., p. 23.

3 Venetian Calendar, ii. p. 91.

• Works on the Supper (Parker Society), p. 229.

If there were no other evidence of the affection of the English people on the eve of the Reformation for their =religion, that of the stone walls of the churches would be sufficient to prove the sincerity of their love. In the whole history of English architecture nothing is more remarkable than the activity in church building manifested during the later half of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth centuries. From one end of England to the other in the church walls are to be seen the evidences of thought and skill, labour and wealth, spent freely upon the sacred buildings during a period when it might not unnaturally have been thought that the civil dissensions of the Wars of the Roses, and the consequent destruction of life and property, would have been fatal to enterprise in the field of church building and church decoration and enrichment. It is not in any way an exaggeration to say that well-nigh every village church in England can show signs of this marvellous activity, whilst in many cases there is unmistakeable evidence of personal care and thought in the smallest details.

No less remarkable than the extent of this movement is the source from which the money necessary for all the work upon the cathedrals and parish churches of the country came. In previous centuries, to a great extent churches and monastic buildings owed their existence and embellishment mainly to the individual enterprise of the powerful nobles or rich ecclesiastics; but from the middle of the fifteenth century the numerous, and in many cases, even vast operations, undertaken in regard to ecclesiastical buildings and ornamentation, were the work of the people at large, and were mainly directed by their chosen representatives. At the close of the fifteenth century, church work was in every sense of the word a popular work, and the wills, inventories, and churchwardens' accounts prove beyond question that the people generally contributed generously according to their means, and that theirs was the initiative, and theirs the energetic administration by

which the whole was accomplished.1 Gifts of money and valuables, bequests of all kinds, systematic collections by parish officials, or by directors of guilds, often extending over considerable periods, and the proceeds of parish plays and parish feasts, were the ordinary means by which the sums necessary to carry out these works of building and embellishment were provided. Those who had no money to give brought articles of jewellery, such as rings, brooches, buckles, and the like, or articles of dress or of domestic utility, to be converted into vestments, banners, and altar hangings to adorn the images and shrines, to make the sacred vessels of God's house, or to be sold for like purposes. For the same end, and to secure the perpetuity of lamps before the Blessed Sacrament, or lights before the altars of saints, people gave houses and lands into the care of the parish officials, or made over to them cattle and sheep to be held in trust, which, when let out at a rent, formed a permanent endowment for the furtherance of these sacred purposes.

Undoubtedly, the period with which we are concerned was not merely an age of building, but an age of decoration, and of decoration which may almost be described as "lavish." The very architecture of the time is proof of the wealth of ornament with which men sought to give expression to their enthusiastic love of the Houses of God, which they had come to regard as the centre of their social no less than of their, religious life. Flowing lines in

To take one instance: the church of St. Neots possessed many stained glass windows placed in their present positions between the years 1480 and 1530. Almost all of them were put in by individuals, as the inscriptions below testify. In the case of three of the lights it appears that groups of people joined together to beautify their parish church. Thus below one of the windows in the north aisle is the following: "Ex sumptibus juvenum hujus parochia Sancti Neoti qui istam fenestram fecerunt anno domini millessimo quingentessimo vicessimo octavo." Another window states that it was made in 1529, “ Ex sumptibus sororum hujus parochia"; and a third in 1530, "Ex sumptibus uxorum."

tracery and arch moulding gave place to straight lines, groined roofs were enriched by extra ribs, and panels of elaborate work covered the plain surfaces of former times; the very key-stones of the vaulting became pendants, and the springers branched out like palm trees, forming that rich and entirely English variety of groin called "fantracery," such as we see at Sherborne, Eton, King's College, Cambridge, and Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster. "In other respects," says a modern writer, "the architects of the fifteenth century were very successful. Few things can be seen more beautiful than the steeples of Gloucester Cathedral and St. Mary's, Taunton. The open roofs, as for example, that of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, are superb, and finally they have left us a large number of enormous parish churches all over the country, full of interesting furniture and decoration."

The fact is, that this was the last expression of Gothic as a living art. The builders and beautifiers of the English churches on the eve of the religious changes spoke still a living language, and their works still tell us of the fulness of the hearts which planned and executed such works. It is somewhat difficult for us to understand this, when living in an age of imitation, and at a time when architecture has no longer a language of its own. "Imitation," writes Mr. Ferguson, "is in fact all we aim at in the architectural art of the present day. We entrust its exercise to a specially educated class, most learned in the details of the style they are called upon to work in, and they produce buildings which delight the scholars and archeologists of the day, but which the less educated classes neither understand nor appreciate, and which will lose their significance the moment the fashion which produced them has passed away.

"The difference between this artificial state of things and the practice of a true style will not be difficult to understand. When, for instance, Gothic was a living art in England, men expressed themselves in it as in any

other part of the vernacular. Whatever was done was a part of the usual, ordinary every-day life, and men had no more difficulty in understanding what others were doing than in comprehending what they were saying. A mason did not require to be a learned man to chisel what he had carved ever since he was a boy, and what alone he had seen being done during his lifetime, and he adapted new forms just in the same manner and as naturally as men adapt new modes of expression in language as they happen to be introduced, without even remarking it. At that time any educated man could design in Gothic Art, just as any man who can read and write can now compose and give utterance to any poetry or prose that may be in him.

"Where art is a true art, it is naturally practised and as easily understood as a vernacular literature of which, indeed, it is an essential and most expressive part, and so it was in Greece and Rome, and so, too, in the Middle Ages. But with us it is little more than a dead corpse, galvanised into spasmodic life by a few selected practitioners for the amusement and delight of a small section of the specially educated classes. It expresses truthfully neither our wants nor our feelings, and we ought not to be surprised how very unsatisfactory every modern building really is, even when executed by the most talented architects as compared with the productions of our village mason or parish priest at an age when men sought only to express clearly what they felt strongly, and sought to do it only in their natural mother tongue, untrammelled by the fetters of a dead or familiar foreign form of speech."1

To any one who will examine the churchwardens' accounts of the period previous to the religious changes, the truth of the above quotation will clearly appear. Then, if ever, ecclesiastical art and architecture was the

1 History of Modern Architecture, pp. 37, 87.