Our English Towns and Villages

by H. R. Wilton Hall

5. The monuments set up in the churches in the reign of King Charles II were somewhat smaller than they had been. They were often tablets on the walls, ornamented with curious carvings of skulls and cross-bones, cherubs' heads, curtains, and festoons of flowers and fruits, often finely carved. You will not find in churchyards many grave-stones or tombs of an earlier date than 1660. The head-stones were then very small, and had little on them except "Here lyeth the body of" so-and-so, and the date.

6. A great many churches were built in London after the Fire. They were furnished with high pews, usually all of the same height, and having doors. The wood-work, especially of the pulpit, reading-desk, and organ-case, in these churches is mostly very fine. A celebrated carver of this period was Grinling Gibbons, and he and his pupils did a great deal of such work, both in churches and houses.

7. In other parts of the country Wren's work was imitated in some of the new churches then built, and in some of the old ones which were altered or rearranged. One of the best specimens of work done at this time is to be seen at Whitchurch, in Middlesex.

8. Not very many new churches, however, were built until the beginning of the nineteenth century, except in some of the towns which had grown up from country villages. In and round London most of the villages increased so much in size that the little old parish church was much too small for the population. Galleries were put up in them in all sorts of queer places, to provide more seats. More room still being wanted, many churches were pulled down, and larger buildings set up.

9. The new churches of the latter part of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries were simply big oblong rooms. The outsides were often copies of parts of Grecian temples. They were crowned with towers and spires somewhat like those on Wren's churches, but not nearly so handsome.

10. Inside, the church was fitted up with a gallery running along two sides and across one end. In the end gallery a big organ was placed, and on either side of it, high up, near the ceiling, were smaller galleries, one for the charity-school boys, the other for the charity-school girls of the parish. The galleries and floor of the church were filled with high pews. On the floor opposite the organ were three huge boxes, rising one above the other. The lowest box was for the parish clerk, the middle one was the reading-desk, and the highest was the pulpit, which was often provided with a sounding-board, not unlike an umbrella. The altar was in a little niche behind the pulpit. Chapels were fitted up in much the same way.

11. Under all these churches and chapels were vaults, in which people were buried, but not in the earth. The coffins were placed on shelves, one above the other, round the vault. On the walls of the church above were often tablets to the memory of people lying in the vaults below. These, by the nineteenth century, were for the most part simply slabs of white marble, with black or grey borders. There was hardly any carving at all on them; only inscriptions or epitaphs, and texts.

12. The churchyards were used for burials, and by the middle of the nineteenth century most of them were crowded with tombstones. In London nearly all are now laid out as open spaces; many of the grave-stones have quite disappeared, and those which remain are rapidly perishing.

13. When we remember that the churchyards of the old churches had been used as burial-places in many cases since the early days of Christianity, and even before that, we can easily grasp the fact that the earth had been used over and over again for burials. About the middle of the nineteenth century the nation came to the conclusion that burials in churches and crowded town churchyards should no longer be allowed. The practice was dangerous to the living. So cemeteries were opened in districts away from the towns and homes of the people. Towns have grown so fast that many of these cemeteries are now surrounded by houses, and are the centres of big populations.

14. About the year 1840 interest began to be taken in the old English styles of building, and a taste for Gothic architecture arose again. Since that time places of worship of all descriptions have for the most part been built in some sort of Gothic. When you read that such and such a church or building is in the fourteenth or fifteenth century style, you must understand that it is not a copy of a church built in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but that its window-heads, doorways, arches, and fittings are in the style of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Most of these modern buildings are of brick, only faced or dressed with stone. It is pretty safe to say that there is no old church standing which was built entirely in the fourteenth century, and has remained unaltered from that day to this.