When the legions were finally withdrawn in A.D. 410, the country districts became unsafe. Traces of fire in the ruined villas of Scampton, Worlaby, and other places betray the work of a ruthless, uncivilised foe. The owners may have escaped to the towns, or even, if wealthy, have reached the Continent. But their industry was doomed, and many miles of cultivated land must have passed back into mere prairie. The banks and drains were neglected, and much of the fenland, so laboriously won, returned to its former flooded state. If we could recover the story of one large town, such as Lincoln, in the fifth and sixth centuries, many a dark problem would be solved. In the absence of such records, the withdrawal of the Roman legions and officials is like the ringing down of a thick curtain upon the drama of British history in the ancient world. SAXON CHURCHES IN LINCOLNSHIRE BY A. HAMILTON THOMPSON, M.A. Lincolnshire is more rich than any other English county in churches which, if few are indisputably of a date earlier than the Norman conquest, retain traces of an architecture whose character at any rate is of a distinctly pre-Norman type. The county has nothing to show, it is true, of that early work, associated with the first century of Saxon and Anglian Christianity, which gives so unique an interest to the church architecture of certain districts in Kent and Northumbria. The neighbouring shire of Northampton possesses in Brixworth a monument whose importance overshadows that of Stow, and in Barnack and Earl’s Barton buildings which are, in point of detail, a match for Barton-on-Humber; while many who might hesitate to grant the pre-Conquest origin of Bracebridge, could hardly deny it to the Northamptonshire church of Wittering. The missionary visit of St. Paulinus has left but one trace, in the dedication to St. “Paul” of a church in Lincoln, of the connection of Lindsey with the religious life of Northumbria. That distinction on which Lincolnshire has prided itself, the possession of a Saxon cathedral at Stow, not hidden away in the foundations of a later building, but still in use as a parish church, begins to lose its value as the historical evidence on which it depends is more carefully examined. With the exception of Stow and St. Peter’s at Barton, the Saxon monuments of Lincolnshire are humble and unpretentious in character, without any very definitely architectural features; and he would be a bold man who should assert positively, on the little evidence which we have to show for their date, that they were built in days of Saxon rule. Equally bold was the assertion of Professor Freeman with regard to the two towers in the southern suburb of Lincoln, that native workmen built them while the Minster was rising in the style of the conquerors on the hill above.[30] Such positiveness is rebuked by the discovery that this picturesque statement was founded on evidence referring to churches in