churches and public buildings and the insignificance of most of the
houses. Some of the finest churches in England, built in the style
of architecture called 'Norman,' one or more of which you may have
seen, date before the year 1200, as for example, Durham Cathedral,
and the naves of Norwich, Ely, and Peterborough Cathedrals. The great
churches abroad were also beautiful and more elaborately decorated,
in the North with sculpture and painting, in the South with marble
and mosaic. The towns competed one with another in erecting them finer
and larger, and in decorating them as magnificently as they could.
This was done because the church was a place which the people used
for many other purposes besides Sunday services. In the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the parish church, on week-days
as well as on Sundays, was a very useful and agreeable place to most
of the parishioners. The 'holy' days, or saints' days, 'holidays'
indeed, were times of rejoicing and festivity, and the Church
processions and services were pleasant events in the lives of many
who had few entertainments, and who for the most part could neither
read nor write. Printing was not yet invented, at least not in Europe,
and as every book had to be written out by hand, copies of books were
rare and only owned by the few who could read them, so that stories
were mostly handed down by word of mouth, the same being told by mother
to child for many generations.

The favourites were stories of the saints and martyrs of the Catholic
Church, for of course we are speaking now of times long before the
Reformation. The Old Testament stories and all the stories of the life
of Christ and His Apostles were well known too, and just as we never
tire of reading our favourite books over and over again, our
forefathers of 1200 wanted to see on the walls of their churches
representations of the stories which they could not read. Their daily