Mary Staining commemorates such a church. After the Conquest a rage for building set in, builders and masons came over from the Continent in numbers, and the period of Norman architecture began. Still, however, the parish churches continued to be small and dark. But the City grew richer: the nobles who lived in the City and the merchants began to rebuild, to decorate, and to beautify their churches: they pulled down the old churches, they built them up again larger and lighter, in Early English first and next in Decorated Style. Small the City churches continued and remained, but to some of them were added gateways and arches. Adorned as they were by the pious care of the citizens, for generation after generation, by this fifteenth century they had become beautiful. The citizens had filled the windows with painted glass, they had covered the bare walls with paintings, they had erected tombs for themselves with fine carved work and figures in marble and alabaster, they had covered the carved font with a carved tabernacle, they had glorified the roof with gold and azure, they had given the chancel carved seats, they had adorned the altars, they had given organs, they had endowed the church with singing men and boys, and they had bestowed upon it such collections of plate, furniture, rich robes, candlesticks, and altar cloths, as makes one wonder where the Church found room to stow everything. Everybody knows the Treasury of Notre Dame, of St. Denys, of Aix-la-Chapelle. The cupboards are crammed with ecclesiastical gear and relics and reliquaries. We must realise that the same thing, on a smaller scale, is to be seen, in the fourteenth century, in every parish church of London. We look into church after church. There are treasures in every one, treasures that the priests and the sacristans bring out with pride. And the monuments over the graves of City worthies bring out very strongly, as we stand in the churches and read the names, the fact that the members of the great distributing Companies, largely, if not entirely, belong to families of gentle birth: upon this fact there will be more to say in another place. Another point is that there are few monuments older than this—the fourteenth-century. Thus, taking half a dozen of the churches as we walk about the streets, we find that a monument of the thirteenth century occurs in one or two cases only. What does this mean? That the monuments of all the merchants who died in London and are buried in the City churches have been removed or wantonly destroyed? I think not. It has another meaning. The erection of monuments to the dead belongs to a very primitive stage of civilisation, and it is also found in an advanced stage; in times of continual uncertainty and warfare it does not always exist: nor does the craftsman or the rustic desire a post-mortem memory. The citizens of London before this time have not generally nourished the desire of posthumous honour. They left money