Mediaeval citizen, who sauntered into the church to cross himself and to utter a momentary prayer, might often be tempted to stay a full hour to converse with his fellows. The church was a hall for social intercourse, a comfortable shelter for the poor. It was a museum of sculpture and painting, an academy of music. But, running through all these arrangements, there was a current of salutary religious influence. To judge the Mediaeval condition of affairs by the standard of the eighteenth, or the early nineteenth century, as one might be hastily led to do, would be a grievous error. The broken windows, once “richly dight,” the defaced carvings, the bare, whitewashed walls and the concealed fresco, the demolished rood-loft, the font out of position, the memorial brass at the back of the kitchen fireplace, the registers torn up by the village shopkeeper--these are features which do not belong to the period when the nave, perchance, was used as a storehouse and a market. Such treatment was left to a generation of which eye-witnesses can still speak. We must discriminate between the theoretical principle that all secular matters are bound up in religion, and the lukewarmness which engenders sheer indifference to desecration. If we learn to make this distinction, we shall put a different construction on such queer survivals as the distribution of doles and charities in church, or the scrambling for loaves in the churchyard. They are not acts of wanton irreverence; commendable or not, they are genuine relics of the older legitimate tradition. From the sale of commodities in the nave we pass to the question of guilds and festivals. The English guilds, which once played an important part in Church history, largely owed their origin, if Dr F. A. Gasquet be correct, to the revival of the religious spirit after the desolating effects of the Black Death in A.D. 1348 and 1349. It will be remembered that the bells of Newcastle summoned the members of the local guild to church three times annually (p. 131 _supra_). These guilds or brotherhoods were in the habit of holding feasts and banquets. For example, the churchwardens’ accounts for the village of Chagford, Devon (A.D. 1550-99), show that a society known as the “Young Men’s Wardens” were responsible for getting up the “Church-ales.” These “Ales” we shall describe in a moment. At South Tawton, in the same county, the “St George’s Wardens” undertook the duty[413]. Frequently, the entertainments would be provided in the parsonage-house (Figs. 45, 46), or the church-house [Illustration: