§ 45. The double crypt at Grantham, below the south chapel of the chancel, is not a very usual feature. The entrance to the Grantham crypt was originally by two external doors, which still remain. In process of time, it is not improbable that the relics, which at an earlier date were in the chapel above the north porch, were translated to the eastern crypt. A stairway, with a very imposing doorway at its head, was made to it from the south side of the chancel in the early part of the fifteenth century. A certain number of crypts of Saxon date still remain beneath chancels: these, however, are few, and perhaps the last survival of the _confessio_ in the English parish church is the aisled crypt at Lastingham, near Pickering. The greater part of a twelfth century crypt, with ribbed vaulting, remains beneath the chancel at Newark. Where the church is built on ground with a steep slope eastward, it is more economical to build the chancel on an open crypt, which also may have its uses as a bone-house when the churchyard is cleared, than to build it on a solid lower stage. This accounts for the crypts at Bedale and Thirsk in Yorkshire, and Madley, near Hereford, which are really lower stories to the chancel, and not subterranean chambers. The Lastingham crypt is also built on an abrupt eastward slope. The site of St Mary Redcliffe at Bristol allowed for the construction of large crypt-chambers on its south side and beneath the lady chapel. Sometimes, as at Hythe in Kent, the floor of the chancel was raised to make room for a crypt below. Such crypts were used as bone-houses, when the churchyard was disturbed to make room for new burials. The crypt beneath the south aisle at Rothwell, in Northamptonshire, contains a collection of bones to which, as to that at Hythe, ill-founded legends have been attached. Both these large bone-holes contain altars, at which masses for the dead were said: there is also an altar in the eastern crypt at Grantham. Sometimes, as at Oundle and St Mary Magdalene's, Bridgwater, there is a small crypt or bone-hole beneath one of the transeptal chapels. Bone-holes also occur beneath the east end of an aisle, as at Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire, and Hallaton in Leicestershire. At Burford, St Thomas' chapel, to the west of the south transept, has its floor raised to give headway to the vault of the bone-hole below. A similar bone-hole is entered from the interior of the south aisle at Bosham, in Sussex: the altar at the end of the aisle is raised on a platform above it, as the floor of the hole is only a little below the level of the aisle. The splendid twelfth century crypt at St Mary's, Warwick, extended beneath the chancel and transepts of the collegiate church, and is to be classified with the crypts or lower churches of our Norman cathedrals, rather than with the less ambitious crypts of our parish churches. CHAPTER IV THE FURNITURE OF A MEDIEVAL PARISH CHURCH: CONCLUSION