§ 50. This setting of colour, towards which stone, wood, and glass all contributed their share, constituted the great beauty of the internal effect of a medieval parish church; and naturally, the more the various craftsmen who worked there advanced in skill--their skill growing in proportion to their opportunity--the more gorgeous was the effect of the assemblage of brilliant windows, screens, and pictured walls. The usual entrance would be through the south porch. Near the entrance, or, at any rate, near the west end of the church, stood the font, beneath its canopy. No piece of church furniture was subject to so much variety of design as the font; and the types vary from perfectly unadorned examples to structures of the utmost richness. The canopy was sometimes a simple cover, which could be moved by hand: often it was a towering structure, suspended by pulleys from the ceiling: sometimes it formed a roofed enclosure on carved uprights, within which the font stood, of stone at Luton in Bedfordshire, of wood at Trunch in Norfolk. Some fonts, like the famous one at Little Walsingham in Norfolk, perhaps the most beautiful of those on which the seven Sacraments are represented, stand on high stepped platforms: others are on a low plinth, which is occasionally continued from the base of a neighbouring column. In fact, the arrangement of fonts is as various as their shape. The rest of the furniture of the nave would vary. Some of the East Anglian churches, such as Irstead in Norfolk, or Dennington and Fressingfield in Suffolk, keep many of the medieval benches, with narrow seats, backs with carved lines of open-work, and projecting ledges which to-day are used for book-rests, but were originally intended as kneelers. Worshippers would kneel on these ledges, with their feet on the seats behind: the age of hassocks had not come, and the floor was hardly an ideal kneeling place. Many English churches were seated with benches of this kind during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Few parts of England are without their examples of bench-ends. Many fine examples remain in Cornwall, as at Launcells, and in Somerset, as at Trull; and in some churches, as Down St Mary and Lapford in Devon, the early sixteenth century bench-ends are almost complete. Wooden benches, however, do not seem to have become general till a comparatively late date, and there was probably little seating accommodation in the earlier churches. The plinths of columns were sometimes made of some size, as at Coddington in Notts, to afford seats; and in some churches, as Belaugh and Tunstead in Norfolk, and Cotterstock, Tansor, and Warmington in Northamptonshire, there are stone benches round the inner walls of various parts of the church, apparently for the same purpose. [Illustration: Fig. 16. Well, Yorkshire: font cover.]