commonplace English landscape beautiful, and the little grey house
that still, in some parts of the country at least, makes an English
village a thing apart, to be seen and pondered on by all who love
romance and beauty. These form the mass of our architectural
treasures, the houses that everyday people lived in, the unregarded
churches in which they worshipped.

And, once more, who was it that designed and ornamented them? The
great architect, carefully kept for the purpose, and guarded from
the common troubles of common men? By no means. Sometimes,
perhaps, it was the monk, the ploughman's brother; oftenest his
other brother, the village carpenter, smith, mason, what not--'a
common fellow,' whose common everyday labour fashioned works that
are to-day the wonder and despair of many a hard-working
'cultivated' architect. And did he loathe his work? No, it is
impossible. I have seen, as we most of us have, work done by such
men in some out-of-the-way hamlet--where to-day even few strangers
ever come, and whose people seldom go five miles from their own
doors; in such places, I say, I have seen work so delicate, so
careful, and so inventive, that nothing in its way could go further.
And I will assert, without fear of contradiction, that no human
ingenuity can produce work such as this without pleasure being a
third party to the brain that conceived and the hand that fashioned
it. Nor are such works rare. The throne of the great Plantagenet,
or the great Valois, was no more daintily carved than the seat of
the village mass-john, or the chest of the yeoman's good-wife.

So, you see, there was much going on to make life endurable in those
times. Not every day, you may be sure, was a day of slaughter and
tumult, though the histories read almost as if it were so; but every