A more serious objection is the anachronism, for so it seems, which makes English assemblies meet indoors at the early period when open-air courts were the rule. For we are not dealing with the Norman or the Plantagenet periods. That the old Greek assemblies were held in the basilicas may be true, but the earliest moots of which we have records in Britain were held out of doors. Little can be inferred from comparing the customs of peoples who occupied different social and political levels. The British open-air gatherings were doubtless in vogue before the days of the feudal lord, or even his pre-manorial prototype. From what has gone before, it will be readily supposed that the church built near the stronghold of the feudal chief was dominated by the lord or his representative. In this special sense, the church was, indeed, the “lord’s house,” because, if necessary, it was utilized as a court-room[365]. But that the “Lord’s house” in England was ever primarily and essentially the “lord’s house” (κῡριακόν), may be doubted. Leaving aside the question of origins, we require to know by what process that particular transition from the political to the religious use was made; if it were ever effected in this country at all. The English evidence rather shows that a reverse development took place: the “Lord’s house” gradually became the “lord’s house” in the limited sense just indicated. At any rate, before the time when churches began to be commonly used as secular trysting places, that is, in the late Saxon and the Norman periods, the word “church” itself was established in popular speech. And it remains to be proved that “basilica” ever was, to any appreciable extent, an alternative term. Expressed otherwise, we may say that the word “church” would, by the time of the introduction of Christianity to Britain, have lost its primary Greek connotation, and this would scarcely be revived and transferred to Christian churches reared under a new set of conditions.