Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/273

 CHAPTER XXII

Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Mediæval Art—Fonts.

When we talk of Anglo-Saxon art it is not to be implied that no artistic work was done before Saxon time in Britain. But if we speak of churches, though doubtless British churches were once to be found here, there are certainly none now existing, and we cannot get back beyond Saxon times. The British churches were built probably of wattle, or at the best of stones without mortar, and so were not likely to be long-lived. Still, Stonehenge is British work, and domed huts, like beehives, similar to but smaller and ruder than those to be still seen in Greece, were made by the ancient Britons. It was the Romans who first introduced architecture to our land. They had learnt it from those wonderful people, the pioneers of so much that we all value, the Greeks, who in turn had got their lessons from Egypt and Assyria. That takes us back eight thousand years, and we still profit by the art thus handed down through the centuries. When the Romans left us, all the arts at once declined in our islands, and notably the art of building.

In speaking of the churches in the south of the county, I drew attention to the number in which traces of Saxon work were still visible and spoke of the two remarkable specimens only three miles over the border at Wittering and Barnack. It is pleasant to hear so good an authority as Mr. Hamilton Thompson say that Lincolnshire is more rich than any other county in churches which, though only in few instances of a date indisputably earlier than the Conquest, yet retain traces of an architecture of a distinctly pre-Norman character. We do not vie with Kent and Northumbria, for we cannot show anything which can be referred to the first century of Anglo