The earliest part of the present church is the chancel arch and the four eastmost compartments of the nave, which were built about 1125, in the Norman style of architecture. It is greatly to the credit of King William I. and the invaders and their descendants, that no sooner had they got this island into a settled state than they began building cathedrals, monasteries, and parish churches all over the kingdom. Croyland was the first to inaugurate the church-building move in this district, and if they had completed the church as evidently originally designed by the Norman architect, it would have been a very fine specimen of the period. Before the work was resumed at Whaplode, in the Transitional Period, the masons had been busy at work on the present churches of Moulton and Sutton St. Mary. The monks of Croyland, about forty or fifty years after they had built the Norman portion of the nave, erected the westernmost portion in the Transitional style (1145-1190), and which made the nave 110 feet long and 19 feet wide, the longest and narrowest nave in the Elloc division of Lincolnshire. The Norman chancel arch is only 13 feet wide and very low, which gives the east end of the nave a very heavy appearance. The smallness of the Norman arch seems to have claimed the attention of the architects at a very early date. They cut away the large semicircular shafts which carried the soffit of the arch and worked in a Transitional corbel to make the opening wider. One cannot but think that the Norman columns of the nave were intended to carry a far heavier structure than was ever placed on them, and that the architects altered their plans even before the arches had been erected. The clerestory is partly Norman, and the rest, with the west front, Transitional. The west front has been terribly mutilated, but happily sufficient remains to guide the architect to its perfect restoration; fortunately it has not been so badly ill-treated as the chancel, which is a standing disgrace, and is as bad a form of Churchwarden’s style as can well be conceived. There is even here, however, enough of the original work left to guide the architect in its restoration, if only funds were forthcoming from the rectors, who are trustees of a public school. One regrets it is not possible in an article of this nature to enter into the details of the Norman-Transitional work at Whaplode, or compare it with the work of the same period in the churches at Sutton St. Mary and Moulton. To the student a visit to the three churches is very instructive. As at Moulton Church, where the tower with its spire wins the admiration of all visitors, so does the tower of Whaplode. It is curiously placed, and with what object one is at a loss to understand. Mr. Sharpe, writing on the tower, states—