Then, again, the Celtic churches were very small, mere oratories, that could not possibly contain a moderate congregation. The saints took their station at a cross, and preached thence. With the Saxons there was a rooted dread of entering an enclosed place for anything like worship, fearing, as they did, the exercise of magical rites; and they were accustomed to hold all their meetings in the open air. S. Walpurga, the sister of S. Willibald, who wrote in 750, and was a Wessex woman, says:-- “It is the custom of the Saxon race that on many estates of nobles and of good men they are wont to have not a church, but the standard of the holy cross dedicated to our Lord and reverenced with great honour, lifted up on high so as to be convenient for the frequency of daily prayer.” In connection with this, I may mention a fact. In the parish of Altarnon was an old pious Wesleyan, and when the weather was too bad for him to go to chapel he was wont to go to one of the crosses of granite that stood near his cottage, kneel there, and say his prayers. He died not long ago. Bede, some twenty years before Walpurga, says that-- “The religious habit was then held in great veneration, so that wheresoever a clerk or a monk happened to come he was joyfully received, ... and if they chanced to meet him upon the way, they ran to him, and bowing, were glad to be signed with his hand and blessed with his mouth. On Sundays they flocked largely to the” (bishop’s) “church or the monasteries to hear the word of God. And if any presbyter chanced to come into a village, the inhabitants flocked together to hear the word of life; for the presbyters and clerks went into the villages on no other account than to preach, baptise, visit the sick, and in short to take care of souls” (_H.E._, iii. 16). This shows that, in the first place, among the Anglo-Saxons there were no churches except the cathedral and the monastic church, and no parochial clergy. Bede does not actually say that there was a cross set up from which the itinerant clergy preached, and to which the faithful resorted for prayer, but this additional fact we have learned from Walpurga. So we come to this very interesting conclusion, that the _village cross preceded the parish church_. The crosses were, in fact, the religious centres of church life, and we ought accordingly to value and preserve them with the tenderest care. A great many of those that we have now on our village greens are comparatively modern, and date from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but there still remain a vast number, not in the midst of a village, but on moors and by highways of an extremely early description, and which most assuredly have been the scene of many a primitive “camp meeting” in the fifth and sixth centuries.