[69] It appears from a note by Mr. Heathcote, a former Rector, in the parish book, that the church and chancel were ceiled in the year 1777. This is the only note in these books which refers to the building, if I except an entry in regard to the erection of a western gallery, which has been removed in the course of restoring the church. The old parish books are all destroyed, and no record exists earlier than the end of the last century.
[70] “Less usual,” but not unique. The church at East Barnet afforded another example of the same mode of spending money in the palmy days of ample church-rates and irresponsible church-wardens.
[71] John Bokeland, in his will, talks of the chancel door: I believe he means the door in the Rood-screen, from the nave into the chancel.
[72] The central shaft and part of the internal tracery of this window are destroyed, and we have been unable yet to restore them.
[73] I see no evidence of the existence of a clerestory; and the columns are so delicate that I think it is impossible that it can ever have been intended to erect one.
[74] I cannot express my vexation at finding that in spite of my earnest injunctions to the workmen to be careful, this painted cross was destroyed. It is often absolutely impossible for an architect to stop wilful destruction of this kind. I have sometimes thought that it might be a good plan to draw up a contract for church restorations, inflicting a heavy fine on the contractor for any such destruction of any old feature.
[75] See particularly papers by me on Some Churches in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, in the Ecclesiologist of 1850, and On the Middle-Pointed Churches of Cornwall, in the Transactions of the Exeter Architectural Society, vol. iv.
[76] There are one or two points which appear to me to make it possible that the sculpture of foliage was not done at Stone, but wrought elsewhere and sent there to be fixed. The northernmost spandrel in the east wall should be examined with a view to this point.
[77] I need not say, to those who know the north of Germany, that the arrangement of this church is, after all, only an exaggeration of a not uncommon plan. The cathedrals at Hildesheim and Naumburg, the Liebfrauen-Kirche at Halberstadt, and many others, have crypts, whose floor is but little lower than the floor of the church, whilst the floors of their choirs are raised immensely, and so shut in with solid stone screens and parcloses, that little can be seen of them from the naves. The crypt at Wimborne Minster is a rare instance of the same kind of thing in England; but this is a middle-pointed contrivance for creating a crypt in a first-pointed church, which was never intended to have anything of the kind.
[78] It is owing to this arrangement of the nave, and the consequent uselessness of the aisles, that several of the old altars still remain, one in each bay, against the north aisle wall, and one or two against the south aisle wall.