Excerpt from Parish Churches of England: Illustrated From a Selection of Photographs Specially Taken by Thomas W. Sears for Harvard University

They are never formal, or mannered, but are spontaneous and courageous in expression. Cell is added to cell, openings are made in walls, buttresses are supplemented or removed to suit the im mediate requirements. They have grown and developed as healthy organisms, not as affectations. There is scarcely one of them that does not show the activity and increase of religious functions from the time of the Normans until the devastating touch of Henry viiichecked their growth. Norman, Transitional, Early English, Dec orated, Perpendicular, - each and all of these styles have left their traces upon them, so intimately intermingled that the local verger today gives bewildering and not always enlightening information to the tourist, and the vicars and curates wrangle over the exact date of a capital or of a moulding as evidenced by the stone cutting or its position in the wall.

It is interesting to follow the testimony of the buildings them selves, regardless of the intricate fabric of history and tradition woven about them by the local chroniclers. The battle of Hastings was in 1066. Before this time whatever chapels were built by the Saxons are of a crude description, - mere cells with pitched roofs, walls of rubble, flint and brick indiscriminately used, - but the square Saxon tower was existent, as was also-the round tower of the Celt. With the coming of the monks to Durham, with the founding of Norman abbeys, the small churches in the outskirts of the See began to multiply and in certain factors to imitate neighboring cathedrals.

The square apse, the tower at the crossing of the transept and nave and great length in comparison to width are characteristic of English cathedrals. The small churches also show imitative qual ities. Saxon square towers were at times incorporated into the building, in fact made the nucleus of it, as occurs in some of the churches near Hitchin Herts.

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