One by one, tiny fragments of testimony accumulate, attesting such a survival and continuance of folk-memory as few men of to-day have suspected. From the mass of facts there emerges the truth of the twofold purpose of Mediaeval church architecture--the religious and the social. Some writers have attempted to interpret the evidence on the principle that, as the ecclesiastical power diminished, the secular increased, and that the sway of custom was brought about by encroachments from the one side or the other alternately. Certainly, the problem must be surveyed from that point of view, yet it appears to me that such an outlook is only partial. For instance--to mention one objection only--at the period when clerical power was in its heyday, the church fabric appears also to have been most used for social purposes, and this fact seems to stand quite apart from the disorderly tendencies observable in times of irreligion and desecration. Whichever power, clerical or lay, chanced to be uppermost, the parochial customs, as a whole, until within the last few centuries, seem to have been fairly, though not entirely, uniform; and when external causes, whether political or economical, produced a balance of forces, the right to use the church for secondary purposes does not seem to have been seriously challenged. For the strength of the earlier faiths long continued to lie in the recognized union of political, social, and religious interests. There was no gulf fixed between the conceptions of the religious and the secular commonwealth. “Such a distinction,” says Kauffmann, “is foreign to ancient modes of thought[482].” And of the tenacity of thought and the persistency of custom we have had ample proof. CHAPTER V THE ORIENTATION OF CHURCHES