Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/322

292 Henry VI., at Colly Weston in Northamptonshire, Lambley in Nottinghamshire, and Tattershall in the county of Lincoln: and equally so the works of Bishop Burnell at Acton Burnell in Shropshire, and the chancel of the great collegiate church of Wolverhampton in Staffordshire, one of the twenty-eight manors belonging to this talented and wise prelate. The buildings in Sussex marked by the Pelham badge and buckle are well known. The students of William of Wykham's works will probably find no difficulty in detecting at St. George's chapel, Windsor, at Adderbury and Hanwell in Oxfordshire, and probably at Wolverhampton, the same kind of analogy. This may, when pursued out fully, also tend to explain further the family likeness that exists between village churches throughout particular parts of a county. It is well known that the Cistercian and Cluniac orders had their own peculiar ritual and monastic arrangements, and is it therefore too unreasonable a supposition, that the friends of those and other orders likewise should have endeavoured to copy on a smaller scale the ornaments, the decorations, and the mouldings they admiringly observed at the great church of the district? At the present day the handling of a chisel indicates to his fellow labourers the workman who was employed: the style of a building often shews by unmistakeable marks in its proportion, its design, or general character, who is the architect; and it is not hoping too much when I express the conviction that we may still obtain, by means of the present practical knowledge so generally diffused on these subjects, if united to a research of the foregoing nature, a clearer insight into, a better classification, and a positive assignment of certain structures to the piety of tenants in capite whose mouldering effigies still lie within the walls themselves, or else to other individuals whose memory may only be preserved by the national archives.

These examples will not unappropriately serve to shew how desirable it is to refrain from drawing crude and hasty generalisations, from attempting to affix precise dates to structures simply because there are found co-existing in them some features in common with similar ones elsewhere. For this reason then, caution should be observed in coming to conclusions from anomalous or isolated portions of a building, seeing that as yet we have much enquiry to make from careful measurement, as well as from records, knowing that churches were progressive in their erection, built by degrees, as the money