Our English Towns and Villages

1. A little boy, who had been born in a log cabin in the backwoods of Canada, was taken by his father, when he was about eight years old, to the nearest settlement, for the firs...

1. Man is a very ancient creature. It is a curious fact that we have learned most of what we know about the earliest men from the rubbish which they have left behind them. Even...

1. Other remains not so ancient as these oldest stone implements, but still very ancient, are found nearer the surface than the remains of the River-Drift Men. They are the rema...

1. There are still remaining, in many parts of the country, curious mounds and stones. We can say very little about them here; but though learned men have discovered much, there...

1. Here, then, at the time the Romans first came to Britain were tribes of Britons who had been established in the country for centuries, living their lives according to the cus...

1. The conquest of Britain by the Saxons took a long time--considerably over one hundred and fifty years. A great many people are born, and live their lives, and die, in such a...

1. It is with the coming of the Saxons that the history of our towns and villages really begins. For, though there are not a few places which show some connection with Romans, B...

1. A good many Britons no doubt settled down with the Saxons as slaves, and that probably accounts for so many of the natural features of the country--the rivers and hills--keep...

1. Though the Saxons, as they settled down in England, formed "tuns", which at first had very little to do with one another, that state of things probably did not last a very lo...

1. At first, as we have seen, the Saxons were an agricultural people, and each village or tun produced all that it needed for its own support. But in peaceful times a tun might...

1. One great and important factor in the making of Saxon England was Christianity. The first Saxons who came were heathen, and they wiped out the British Christianity, where the...

1. The Saxons learned to respect the quiet simple lives of the early monks. They saw them toiling hard in their fields, bravely facing many difficulties and hardships, and turni...

1. Now let us see what an ordinary village was like in the time of King Cnut, when Saxon and Dane were living pretty comfortably together, side by side, under good government.

1. In speaking of our towns and villages we are obliged to make mention frequently of churches and monasteries. At the time when Cnut was king, each vill or tun had its church a...

1. Every old town and village has got its oldest house, of course. You will most likely have heard people trying to be funny about it, and saying they think it must have been bu...

1. When Duke William of Normandy became King of England, the power of the Crown was greater than it had ever been before. All the old folk-land had become =king's land=. Many kn...

1. The king, then, granted manors to his followers, and to such Saxon eorls and thanes as were willing to hold their lands on the same conditions as the Normans. If they objecte...

1. When we speak of Norman times we must bear in mind that they lasted for over 130 years--say from 1066 to 1200. That period covers a good many years, and consequently a good m...

1. The passion for building castles in England had begun before the Norman Conquest; but during the Norman period a great many castles (about 1100, it is said) were built in var...

1. However useful a castle might be in protecting the overlord's tenants and property, the sense of security was always a great temptation to quarrel with other lords. With stro...

1. The hundred years after the Norman Conquest was a great period of building. It was a time for establishing or _founding_ new =religious houses=. Something like 389 such house...

1. When we go from a big modern manufacturing town into an old town or village, we cannot help noticing the old buildings, the ancient churches, the old town-hall, the alms-hous...

1. For many centuries the houses of the villeins and cottiers did not alter very much in their general plan. You will remember that in those old pit-dwellings the hearth and its...

1. Houses in towns have been more frequently rebuilt and altered in various ways than those in the villages. The chief material used in building was wood, as it was in the villa...

1. Disease was one of the great dangers always lurking in a town. Plague of some kind or other was never very far away, and it frequently made its presence felt. People had not...

1. Back in early Saxon times we find that the inhabitants of a town were banded together to keep the peace, thus forming a society pledged to each other--the Peace or Frith Guil...

1. We have seen that in Norman times the whole country was, so to speak, the king's. There were the great lords who held "fiefs" or possessions directly from the king, which con...

1. In most villages the =church= is the chief old building in the place, and it is a good thing to be able to tell the time to which its different parts belong. It will help us...

1. The fourteenth century is covered by the reigns of King Edward II, King Edward III, and King Richard II. The architecture became much more ornamental, and there is a good dea...

1. Changes took place much more slowly in the Middle Ages than they do now. First of all, the population was very much smaller, and hundreds and hundreds of acres, now covered b...

1. The word "Fair" calls up to our minds all sorts of wonderful sights and sounds--the stalls with their wonderful "fairings" and "goodies"; the shows and the shooting-galleries...

1. One of the pleasantest sights, to a Londoner at any rate, is the market-place of an old-fashioned country town on a market-day. In many such towns the weekly market is held,...

1. The earliest schools in England were held in the =monasteries=, and were intended for boys and young men who were to be trained as priests, missionaries, or monks. There were...

1. Now, just as the tide flows and ebbs, so in England did interest in learning rise and fall during the Middle Ages. Schools of all kinds had their good times and their bad tim...

1. In the middle of the fourteenth century, in the reign of King Edward III, came the Black Death. It carried off half the population of the country at least, and all classes of...

1. The two great industries of England in the Middle Ages were =agriculture= and =wool-raising=. The wool was the finest grown in Europe, and attracted hither merchants from the...

1. From early Christian times in England to =relieve the poor= was looked upon as a Christian duty, and every church and religious house took its part in the work as a matter of...

1. In the time of King Edward III, that is, in the fourteenth century, there was a great change in the arrangement of castles and castle-building. We cannot say much about it he...

1. In early Tudor times our towns were much more picturesque than they are to-day. That was chiefly owing to the fact that there were in every town so many religious houses, col...

1. There were, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, in all parts of the country, hundreds of bare, gaunt ruins where once had been flourishing houses and centres of life and work. It...

1. We have said that the Tudor period was a time of building of big houses and mansions. Every county in England has some such houses to show. Many of them were built of =stone=...

1. Not very long after the dissolution of the monasteries the churches had a very bad time to go through. It is perfectly marvellous how rapidly some people, who were in power,...

1. The most notable architect after the Great Fire of London was Sir Christopher Wren, and his master-piece is, of course, St. Paul's Cathedral. He designed, too, most of the ci...

1. After the Reformation the churches, as we have said, were much neglected for a long time. They were used in a different way from what they had been in the Middle Ages--a grea...

1. A little of the property which had belonged to the religious houses was saved and turned to useful purposes. Just a very few of the old alms-houses were allowed to continue t...

2. All through the Middle Ages the only way by which a man could become a craftsman was by being first of all an =apprentice=, and the rules by which a lad was bound to a master...

1. In all the many centuries of our history there have been boys and girls; and, whatever has been going on in the world around them, they have found time to play. Many of their...

2. The borough towns, which gained their charters back in the days of King John, or King Henry III, had them confirmed by various kings in later times; but the powers of the tow...

1. There was not much alteration in the outward appearance of the villages and the "look" of the country round them for many centuries. Indeed even now many of the villages them...