There are several other kinds of crosses besides those in churchyards. There are market crosses, called "cheeping" crosses after the Anglo-Saxon _cheap_, to buy, from which Cheapside, in London, Chippenham and Chipping Norton derive their names. Some crosses are "pilgrim" crosses, and were erected along the roads leading to shrines where pilgrimages were wont to be made, such as the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury, Glastonbury, Our Lady of Walsingham. Sometimes they were erected at the places where the corpse rested on its way to burial, as the Eleanor crosses at Waltham and Charing, in order that people might pray for the soul of the deceased. Monks also erected crosses to mark the boundaries of the property of their monastery. [Illustration: AN OLD MARKET CROSS] Time has dealt hardly with the old crosses of England. Many of them were destroyed by the Puritans, who by the Parliamentary decree of 1643, ordered that all altars and tables of stones, all crucifixes, images and pictures of God and the saints, with all superstitious inscriptions, should be obliterated and destroyed. In London, St. Paul's Cross, Charing Cross, and that in Cheapside, were levelled with the ground, and throughout the country many a beautiful work of art which had existed hundreds of years shared the same fate. Place-names sometimes preserve their memory, such as Gerard's Cross, in Buckinghamshire, Crosby, Crossens, Cross Inn, Croston; these and many others record the existence in ancient times of a cross, and probably beneath its shade the first preachers of the gospel stood, when they turned the hearts of our heathen ancestors, and taught them the holy lessons of the Cross. CHAPTER IX ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE Saxon monasteries--Parish churches--Benedict Biscop--Aldhelm--St. Andrew's, Hexham--Brixworth Church--Saxon architecture--Norman architecture--Characteristics of the style--Transition Norman-- Early English style--Decorated style--Perpendicular style. The early Saxon clergy lived in monasteries, where they had a church and a school for the education of the sons of thanes. Monastic houses, centres of piety and evangelistic zeal, sprang up, the abodes of religion, civilisation, peace, and learning. They were the schools of culture, sacred and profane, of industry and agriculture; the monks were the architects, the painters, the sculptors, the goldsmiths of their time. They formed the first libraries; they taught the young; they educated women in convents, and by degrees dispersed the shades of ignorance, idolatry, and barbarism, and reformed England. To record the number of these monastic houses which were erected in the seventh and eighth centuries would require much space; and as our chief concern is with the vestiges that remain in our English villages, and as most of these Saxon monasteries were plundered and destroyed by the Danes, or rebuilt on a grander scale by the Normans, we will not now enumerate them.