St. Sepulchre’s—properly the “Church of the Holy Sepulchre”—generally known as “Pulker’s Church,” or “St. Pulker’s,” one of the four round churches in England—or five if we may include the round chapel in Ludlow Castle—is ascribed to the influence of the Templars, whose churches were avowedly built on the model of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. Like the Temple Church and others, it is the nave portion of the building that is circular; the choir and presbytery branching eastwards from it. It is in a massive and gloomy Transitional Norman style, the eight huge pillars surmounted by pointed arches. It is magnificent in its austerity and in the warm golden-brown hue of the stone. St. Giles’s, of nearly all styles from Norman to Perpendicular, and St. Peter’s, a fine late Norman work, built about 1160, complete the ancient churches of the town, with the exception of the mouldering old St. John’s Hospital, now used as a French Catholic church. XIX The electric tramways, without which no town nowadays considers itself fully furnished, run far out to the north, through the extended boundaries of “Greater Northampton” to the village of Kingsthorpe: the prosperity of the town certified to every beholder in the long lines of newly completed streets butting on to the fields, and in the new boot and shoe factories, from which you do not indeed hear the noise of the lapstones—such things being obsolete in these days of machinery—but the purr and the humming of wheels. Just outside the borough boundaries are even more factories, built there for the frugal purpose of avoiding the borough rates; and so, in one way and another, Kingsthorpe, which was not so long since a rural village, with quiet village green, has now been invaded by the restless spirit of the age. Even the village inn has been rebuilt by the inevitable Phipps & Co., and might now, to all appearance, save for the sign of it, be a Jacobean mansion, renovated. [Sidenote: _A PUZZLING MONUMENT_] The apparent prodigality of the highway authorities at Kingsthorpe, in the matter of milestones, is a standing wonder to all wayfarers, for there, side by side, are two cast-iron “stones,” each giving sixty-seven miles to London, with distances to other places. The explanation of this singularity is that here, in the old days, the Kingsthorpe and Welford Trust and the Northampton and Market Harborough Trust met. The “stone” erected by the first gives thirteen miles to Welford, twenty-nine to Leicester, and one to Northampton: the other indicates sixteen miles to Market Harborough and one to Northampton.