§ 46. Our parish churches, as we have them to-day, are stripped of much that made them beautiful. The cold walls, often scraped of all their plaster and whitewash; the windows, glazed with white glass, or with modern glass of very uncertain merit, reveal merely the structural skeleton of the building. The robe of colour with which the interior was clothed is gone; and only fragments here and there remain to tell us of the beauty of the decorative art which was, at the close of the middle ages, at its very highest point. But enough is left to enable us to picture to ourselves the appearance of the interior of an English medieval church, and reconstruct that arrangement of furniture and pictorial decoration which made it so beautiful. § 47. To take, first, the features common to nave and chancel alike, the walls of the building were covered with paintings executed on a plaster surface. As might be expected, the best remains of such paintings are to be found in districts where the churches are built of rubble, and the plaster covering, necessary to the internal wall-surface, afforded the fullest field for this form of decoration. There are numerous and beautiful examples in Sussex and Surrey, from which a good idea may be gained of the general scheme of painting in a medieval church. The earlier wall-paintings, such as those at Copford in Essex, or South Leigh in Oxfordshire, or the probably thirteenth century paintings at Easby in Yorkshire, are stiff in drawing and somewhat crude in colouring. From the earliest times, however, this method of decoration was adopted, and gradually assumed a more independent existence and a more pictorial character. As the history of art advanced, and the demand for special kinds of work increased, the lesser arts, hitherto treated as mere servants of masoncraft, began to strike out paths for themselves. The painters at Pickering in Yorkshire or at Raunds in Northamptonshire, treated the walls on which they worked as the backgrounds of strong and brightly coloured designs bearing no relation to the architectural divisions of the building. Where the space to be covered was limited, like the wall between two aisle windows, the treatment was more restrained: in these positions there occur, as at St Breage in Cornwall, panel pictures of saints. In the north aisle at Kettering there is a faded picture of St Roch, the blue background of which, studded with gold stars, is a beautiful example of medieval colour. But the general treatment pursued by the later medieval painters, in their subject and figure painting, was unconfined by architectural limits, and sometimes a single subject spreads below and round a window. Above the chancel arch was usually a painting of the Doom, of which traces remain in many churches, as at Holy Trinity, Coventry, and (much restored) at St Thomas, Salisbury. At Liddington in Rutland and at Kettering, the Doom seems to have been extended to the north and south walls of the