But it is not necessary to leave too much to imagination. A great deal more can be said to prove that the maintenance of sea-lights was, in mediaeval England, really a religious office. Most of us have heard of (many have seen) the famous lighthouse on St. Catherine’s Point in the Isle of Wight. It was built only at the close of the last century, but hard by it, from the hermitage chapel on Chale Down, a light had been nightly kept, by the monks there serving God, for more than five hundred years. I shall tell the history of this lighthouse later on. So, too, in 1427, a hermit who had settled at Ravenspurn—close by the Spurn Point on the Humber—moved by the constant disasters to shipping that he witnessed, set to work to build a lighthouse to warn vessels entering the river of the dangers of the point; and of this lighthouse also I shall have more to say presently. Then on the chapel of St. Nicholas, which stood above the harbour of Ilfracombe, there was maintained by the priests who served in the chapel a fire of wood, which was lighted, throughout the winter, at dusk, and by being constantly tended gave throughout the night a light that to ships at a distance seemed like a bright star, and guided them safely into port. The site of this chapel is yet called Lantern Hill, and a light is still shown there from a lighthouse at night during the winter months. In one instance, at least, the work of coast lighting was performed by a religious guild: the Brethren of the Blessed Trinity of Newcastle-upon-Tyne—the Trinity House of Newcastle, as it is now called. In 1537 Henry VIII committed to this guild the general care of all matters connected with the navigation of the Tyne, and amongst other things which the guild had expressed its willingness to do, was to build two towers on the north side of ‘Le Shelys,’ one a certain distance above the other, to embattle these towers for due defence of the port, and to maintain on each ‘a good and steady light by night,’ for the guidance of passing ships. In 1746 these two lighthouses, one of which was movable, were still standing; they were illuminated only by a few candles, but were the sole lighthouses of which the River Tyne, at its entrance, could boast. Then, to emphasize further the fact that, prior to the religious changes in the reign of Henry VIII, coast lighting was carried on as a work of Christian charity, we may call to mind the traditions, so often associated with the towers or steeples of parish churches on the coast, that those towers or steeples had once been lighthouses. Blakeney, in Norfolk, is one of these, Boston is another; from the summit of ‘Boston Stump’—as the marvellously high tower of the latter church is called—we are told that a light was formerly displayed by which sailors in the German Ocean could shape their course to enter ‘Boston Deeps’ in safety.