"The nearer the church the further from God," says the old saw. How irreligious then should Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and thirty-four ancient churches, and modern places of worship fully as numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as old Fuller suggested, "make good use of their churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These churches bear a close resemblance to one another, having nearly all been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period, some five hundred years ago, and all built of the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian architecture quite distinct from that of other districts. The time when they were thus rebuilt was not only a great period of church-building throughout England, but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile and trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful and merchants wealthy in the flourishing industry of cloth-weaving introduced some time earlier by Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool that before had gone across the narrow seas for manufacture into stuffs was now weaved in the land of its growth. "Many thousands," says Blomefield, "that before could not get their bread could now by this means live handsomely." In that age, to become rich and prosperous was to become also a founder and benefactor of churches; hence the great ecclesiastical buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor of an old writer, writing when there were no fewer than sixty-one churches in the city, "surrounded the cathedral as the stars do the moon." The old citizens sleep in the parish churches for which they did so much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or alabaster curiously wrought, often with their "merchant's marks"--the distinctive signs with which they labelled their wares--engraved on them in lieu of coats of arms. It is as though a modern trader were to have the registered trade-mark of his speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of Thomas Sotherton, in the church of St John Maddermarket. He-- "Under this cold marbell sleeps," and was no common fellow, mark you, but "Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit, Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt." [Illustration: NORWICH MARKET PLACE.] Although the calendar of saints is a long one and more than sufficiently lengthy to have provided each one of the Norwich churches with a patron, yet so popular were some saints, that several churches to the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in the city of London. As in old London, it was in those cases necessary to confer surnames, so to speak, upon those churches.