In most English churches the most convenient plan from the earliest times has been the oblong nave and practically square chancel, divided by an arch which, to our modern ideas, has sometimes been inconveniently narrow, but without the intervening tower-space, which became in so many later churches an obstruction to the unity of worship in chancel and nave. We have seen Lincolnshire builders experimenting with that new-found addition to the plan, the tower, packing their nave into its ground-floor, trying what can be done with a central area, abandoning—we speak of probabilities—the complete symmetry of the centralised plan, and finally wedging the tower in between the arms of the building, as an effective focus for the church as seen in elevation. The difficulties, the inconvenience, the uncertain conditions, of centralised or quasi-centralised planning, are now in most cases abandoned: the builders frankly remove their tower-space to the west end of their plan. Upon it rises a bell-tower, which may on occasion be used as a look-out tower in time of disturbance, or even—though this seems very doubtful—as a place of refuge for the inhabitants of the township. In most instances the tower-space will be entered by a western doorway, and will be the porch of the church, just as, at Brixworth or at Monkwearmouth, in other counties, the original porch has become the substructure of the tower. The porch will lead into the nave of the church, oblong and aisleless; and, in the east wall of the nave, an arch will give access to a small rectangular chancel. This is the normal Lincolnshire, and indeed the normal English plan; and this plan powerfully affects the architecture of the Norman and Gothic periods of English art. The centralised plan may survive in beautiful forms, and will always be the more interesting, owing to its greater capacity for variation; but the western tower of the Saxon period, and the elongated plan associated with it, will be the standard of planning congenial to the larger number of English masons. It is unnecessary to particularise between the various churches of Saxon origin in Lincolnshire which have western towers. There are many, and the number may be stated rather variously. The present writer, excluding Hough and Broughton, which, as we have seen, may be treated more suitably with centralised plans, counts some thirty towers in part or wholly of the distinctively Saxon type.[36] Some of these, as he already has said, evidently were built at a date later than the Conquest. Of no one of them would he courageously assert, on the mere evidence of plan and details, that it was built actually and beyond doubt before the Conquest. But that they were built by the hands of Saxon workmen, and that they represent a definitely Saxon tradition, are hypotheses which, if they do not offer themselves to a very clear proof, may at any rate be enunciated as highly probable.