One more building, I must notice. It has often been mentioned that our Anglo-Saxon forefathers built largely of timber; and, strange to say, after the lapse of more than eight centuries, we have one of their timber structures remaining! Edmund, king of East Anglia, who had been slain by the Danes in the ninth century, had been canonised; and on the invasion by Sweyn, more than a century later in 1011, his relics were removed from Bury St. Edmund’s to London for security. On their being [Illustration: Fig. 228.--Barnach Tower, Northamptonshire.] carried back in 1013, an old register of Bury informs us, “he was also sheltered near Aungre, where wooden chapel remains as a memorial unto this day.” [Illustration: Fig. 229.--Tower, Sompting, Sussex.] This chapel still exists at Greensted, near Ongar (Figs. 230, 231). It consists of cleft oak-trees grooved and tongued together by their edges, and let into grooves in horizontal cills and heads. The exterior of the trees was exposed on the outside of the church, the sapwood of which having long since perished, the furrowed and gnarled heart is now seen, presenting a most ancient and interesting appearance. It is more than thirty years since I visited this most venerable relic. Since then it has been repaired; but I trust that its antiquity has not been compromised, and that it will long remain as a relic of the royal saint, and a visible exponent of the old Anglo-Saxon verb _getymbrian_--to build. I must not, however, go on enumerating specimens: they will be found in great numbers in several publications, as Mr. Bloxam’s _Principles of Gothic Architecture_, Mr. Parker’s _Glossary_, Britton’s _Antiquities_, and elsewhere; while very interesting articles have been written on them by Mr. Freeman, Mr. Ayliffe Poole, Mr. Paley, and others. In my own practice I every now and then fall in with minor specimens not mentioned in books, and often walled up and hidden from view, to make way for later work. [Illustration: Fig. 230.--Chapel at Greensted, Essex. _Taken from a drawing made in 1748._] [Illustration: Fig. 231.--Plan of Chapel at Greensted, Essex.] Fragments of Saxon crosses are frequent. They are usually covered with that plaited ornament so frequent in the illuminations of the period. In proof of their early age, we often find them imbedded, as mere material, in Norman walls. In St. Peter’s, at Northampton, I found the base of one of the Norman columns to be wrought out of a piece of one of these crosses; and at Jarrow there are several portions of them built into the tower, which was itself erected in the reign of the Conqueror.[13] Though this form of architecture spread over a period of some 470 years, we have little or no means of classifying it into distinct divisions of date. It would seem that the system of rapid change which characterises the centuries succeeding the tenth had not then commenced, and that much the same manner of building pervades long spaces of time.