Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/315



has been usual with those who have made enquiries into the style of our early ecclesiastical buildings, to assign all those exhibiting marks of long and short work to the period of the Anglo-Saxons. Yet it may be reasonably doubted whether construction of this nature, taken by itself, affords sufficient evidence to favour such conclusions: and unless this kind of masonry be found united with proofs of another character less ambiguous, there is great room for disbelieving such buildings to have been erected before the Norman Conquest.

It is indeed not a little remarkable that the church of Brixworth, a building whose claims to priority of age are better established than most others by historical inference, is entirely deficient in the marks so universally assumed to be decisive of the question.

This church, as it is well known, does not shew the least fragment of this peculiar kind of construction, yet there is