OLD MARKET CROSS
Time has dealt hardly with the old crosses of England. Many of them were destroyed by the Puritans, who by the Parliamentary decree of 1643, ordered that all altars and tables of stones, all crucifixes, images and pictures of God and the saints, with all superstitious inscriptions, should be obliterated and destroyed. In London, St. Paul’s Cross, Charing Cross, and that in Cheapside, were levelled with the ground, and throughout the country many a beautiful work of art which had existed hundreds of years shared the same fate. Place-names sometimes preserve their memory, such as Gerard’s Cross, in Buckinghamshire, Crosby, Crossens, Cross Inn, Croston; these and many others record the existence in ancient times of a cross, and probably beneath its shade the first preachers of the gospel stood, when they turned the hearts of our heathen ancestors, and taught them the holy lessons of the Cross.
CHAPTER IX
ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE
Saxon monasteries—Parish churches—Benedict Biscop—Aldhelm—St. Andrew’s, Hexham—Brixworth Church—Saxon architecture—Norman architecture—Characteristics of the style—Transition Norman— Early English style—Decorated style—Perpendicular style.
The early Saxon clergy lived in monasteries, where they had a church and a school for the education of the sons of thanes. Monastic houses, centres of piety and evangelistic zeal, sprang up, the abodes of religion, civilisation, peace, and learning. They were the schools of culture, sacred and profane, of industry and agriculture; the monks were the architects, the painters, the sculptors, the goldsmiths of their time. They formed the first libraries; they taught the young; they educated women in convents, and by degrees dispersed the shades of ignorance, idolatry, and barbarism, and reformed England.
To record the number of these monastic houses which were erected in the seventh and eighth centuries would require much space; and as our chief concern is with the vestiges that remain in our English villages, and as most of these Saxon monasteries were plundered and destroyed by the Danes, or rebuilt on a grander scale by the Normans, we will not now enumerate them.
After the country had been evangelised by the itinerant monks and preachers, the next process was to establish a church in every village, and to provide a pastor to minister therein. Archbishop Theodore encouraged the thanes to build and endow churches on their estates, and introduced to this country the parochial system, by means of which all villages could have the services of a resident pastor.