In most villages the church is the chief old building in the place, and it is a good thing to be able to tell the time to which its different parts belong. It will help us to fix in our minds the different periods, or steps, in the history of our country. A little party of holiday-makers were one day strolling through a country churchyard in which was a very old church. They were not much interested until one of the party saw in the wall of the church a slab to "an honest carpenter", dated 1765. "How very, very old!" he exclaimed, and called the attention of his companions to it, and they all wondered and marvelled. Yet in that same wall were bits of work which belonged to a past age, not just a hundred or so years back, but a thousand years back. They had not been trained to read "the signs of the times". Never be ashamed to ask questions about an old building. It will be a very strange thing indeed if you cannot find, in every town and village, _somebody_ who has a keen interest in old buildings and who will delight in pointing them out to you. Nearly every local newspaper in the country, from time to time, prints odds and ends connected with the history of the neighbourhood. If there is anything about an old building that you want explained, you can easily write a short letter to the editor of the paper, and there is sure to be someone who will take the trouble to answer your question, and help you to understand, and to distinguish between things "that differ". [Illustration: _Saxon, Norman, and Later Architectural Features_] An old parish church has a good deal to tell us about the history of the parish and its people, and if you know something of the history of the place in which you live you will know something _worth knowing_ of the history of your country, which will help you to be a good citizen. But this knowledge can only be picked up little by little, and you cannot learn "all about it" in the course of a few days. There are, as we said in a former chapter, some few churches which have little bits of Saxon work left in their walls and windows. In a great many more we shall see some Norman work, especially in pillars and arches and doorways. That Norman Period takes in the reigns of all the kings from William I to the time of King John, from the middle of the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth, down to the time of Magna Carta. When we come to the time of Magna Carta we are in the thirteenth century, when pointed arches came into use. Through the reigns of King Henry III and King Edward I a great deal of building in that style went on. In almost every parish some alteration was made in the church in that century; and probably in the chancel there are one or two old window's which will be pointed out to you as having been first put in during that century.[14] [14] In the "Lancet Windows", shown in the illustration on p. 94, you have a specimen of that thirteenth-century or Early-English style.