Now, in other districts, a church of the scale and grandeur of that, say, of Ashbourne, Bakewell, Melbourne, Norbury, or Spondon, could scarcely have failed to be enlarged, when extra chapels came to be called for, by the addition of chancel aisles. And yet in every one of these Derbyshire instances the chancel is aisleless—an anomaly, surely, remarkable enough! Nay (albeit the important churches of Chesterfield, Morley, and Norton, for example, testify to the contrary), it is noticeable in how many cases almost any other device was more welcome than that which would have involved interfering with and arcading the side walls of the chancel. An east aisle to the transept would occur more readily than the erection of a new aisle to the chancel in cruciform churches (as, for instance, at Ashbourne and Bakewell), or, in churches where there was no transept to widen nor to appropriate, the area of the nave itself (as at Fenny Bentley), or of the nave aisles (as at Elvaston and Sawley), would be encroached upon for the purpose; the wealthy corporate body or individual having as little hesitation about annexing and enclosing the amount of the parish church’s space which they wanted for their own uses, as they would about enclosing (provided it could be accomplished with impunity) the people’s common land. A typical Derbyshire parclose, then, is no mere grate within an arch, to connect the one side of it with the other, but rather a formidable barrier fencing in, on two sides, a specific portion of the body of the church, and even, may be, comprehending (as in the before-mentioned instances of Elvaston and Sawley) a column or more of the arcade itself. Whatever may be thought of the propriety of this local caprice (for what else was it which, in a county abounding with excellent building stone, could have caused the bodies of parish churches to be thus cut up with internal partitions, instead of extending them from without by additional chapels and chancel aisles for the reception of fresh chantries?), the net result has been to enrich Derbyshire with even greater distinction in respect of its parcloses than of its rood-screens; notwithstanding the parcloses which still remain represent only a proportion of all those ascertained to have been formerly in existence, but such that have now gone, many of them, and left nothing beyond the bare record behind; or of that, no doubt, larger quantity whereof even the very memorial has perished.