Anyone now visiting the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, after a lapse of fifty years, would scarcely recognize in the present stately building the woe-begone and neglected place of his recollections. In the apse and the transepts, in the lofty screen to the west of the stalls, suggesting a hidden nave beyond, and in the glimpses of the Lady Chapel across the eastern ambulatory, he would see the completed choir of some collegiate church, of which the principal architectural features suggested an ancient foundation. It is true that, in the church of fifty years ago, the Norman details were still very distinct, though the round arches of the arcades had been parodied by the Georgian windows of the east end, and by the plastered romanesque reredos; but gloom and darkness overspread the whole place, encroachments of the most incongruous kinds had invaded the most sacred portions, and to the casual observer it seemed impossible that the church could ever be rescued from the ruin with which it was threatened, or reclaimed from the squalor by which it was surrounded. To understand the difficulties which lay before the restorers, who, in 1863, commenced the task of saving the building from annihilation, and to properly appreciate what they have achieved, as well as what they only aimed at accomplishing, it is necessary to give some account of the state of the fabric in that year, and, without repeating at undue length the oft-told tale of its foundation, to give a history of the church during the eight hundred years of its existence.