stalls in the choir; the vicars conversing in a little group as they come across from their court; the surpliced chorister boys under the charge of their schoolmaster; a band of minstrels with flutes, and hautboys, and viols, and harps, and organs, coming in from the city, to use their instruments in the rood-loft to aid the voices of the choir; scattered clerks and country clergy, and townspeople, are all converging to the great south door; and last of all the lord bishop, in cope and mitre, emerges from his gateway, preceded by his cross-bearer, attended by noble or royal guests, and followed by a suite of officials and clerks; while over all the great bells ring out their joyous peal to summon the people to the solemn worship of God in the mother church of the vast diocese. * * * * * But we must turn to our researches into the humbler life of the country rectors and vicars. And first, what sort of houses did they live in? We have not been able to find one of the parsonage houses of an earlier date than the Reformation still remaining in a condition sufficiently unaltered to enable us to understand what they originally were. There is an ancient rectory house of the fourteenth century at West Deane, Sussex,[306] of which we give a ground-plan and north-east view on the following page; but the rectory belonged to the prior and convent of Benedictine Monks of Wilmington, and this house was probably their grange, or cell, and may have been inhabited by two of their monks, or by their tenant, and not by the parish priest. Again, there is a very picturesque rectory house, of the fifteenth century, at Little Chesterton, near Cambridge,[307] but this again is believed to have been a grange, or cell, of a monastic house.