they were proud to receive the _Parliamentum Diabolicum_ which Henry VI. called together within shelter of their walls, and turned to the use of a public prosecution against the beaten party of the White Rose: hence its name. One of the private houses, at the corner of Hertford street, bears on its upper part an effigy of the tailor, Peeping Tom, who, tradition says, was struck dead for impertinently gazing at Countess Godiva on her memorable ride through the town. [Illustration: SPIRE OF ST. MICHAEL'S, COVENTRY.] The great variety in the designs of windows and chimneys, and the disregard of regularity or conventionality in their placing, are characteristics which distinguish old English domestic architecture, as also the lavish use of wood-carving on the outside as well as the inside of dwellings. No Swiss chalet can match the vagaries in wood common to the gable balconies of old houses, whether private or public: one beautiful instance occurs, for example, in a butcher's stall and dwelling, the only one left of a similar row in Hereford. Here, besides the ordinary devices, all the emblems of a slaughter-house--axes, rings, ropes, etc., and bulls' heads and horns--are elaborately reproduced over the doors and balconies of the building, and the windows, each a projecting one, are curiously wreathed and entwined. This ingeniousness in carving is a thing unknown now, when even picture-frames are cast in moulds and present a uniform and meaningless appearance, while as to house decoration the eye wearies of the few paltry, often-repeated knobs or triangles which have taken the place of the old individual carvings. The corn-market of Coventry, the former Cross Cheaping, is another of the city's living antiquities, as busy now as hundreds of years ago, when the magnificent gilded cross still standing in James II.'s time, and whose regilding is said to have used up fifteen thousand four hundred and three books of gold, threw its shadow across the square. Even villages of a few hundred inhabitants often possessed market-places architecturally worthy of attention, and sometimes the covered market, open on all sides and formed of pillars and pointed arches, supported a town-hall or rooms for public purposes above. The crosses were by no means simply religious emblems: though their presence aimed at reminding worldlings of religion and investing common acts of life with a religious significance, their purposes were mainly practical. Proclamations were read from the steps and tolls collected from the market-people: again, they served for open-air pulpits, and often as distributing-places for some "dole" or charity bequeathed to the poor of the town. A fountain was sometimes attached to them, and the covered market-crosses, of which a few remain (Beverly, Malmesbury and Salisbury), were merely covered spaces, surmounted with a cross, for country people to rest in in the heat or the rain, and were