On one side of us is the King’s Head, whose steep tiled roof and square front has just that air of respectable importance that one expects to find in an old-established English hotel. It looks across the cobbled space to the curious block of buildings that seems to have been intended for a church but has relapsed into shops. The shouldering of secular buildings against the walls of churches is a sight so familiar in parts of France that this market-place has an almost Continental flavour, in keeping with the fact that Richmond grew up under the protection of the formidable castle built by that Alan Rufus of Brittany who was the Conqueror’s second cousin. The town ceased to be a possession of the Dukes of Brittany in the reign of Richard II., but there had evidently been sufficient time to allow French ideals to percolate into the minds of the men of Richmond, for how otherwise can we account for this strange familiarity of shops with a sacred building which is unheard of in any other English town? Where else can one find a pork-butcher’s shop inserted between the tower and the nave, or a tobacconist doing business in the aisle of a church? Even the lower parts of the tower have been given up to secular uses, so that one only realizes the existence of the church by keeping far enough away to see the sturdy pinnacled tower that rises above the desecrated lower portions of the building. In this tower hangs the curfew-bell, which is rung at 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., a custom, according to one writer, ‘that has continued ever since the time of William the Conqueror.’ The bell, we know, is not Norman, and the tower belongs to the Perpendicular period, but the church is referred to in Norman times, and Leland, writing in the reign of Henry VIII., suggests an earlier survival. He may, of course, be describing Norman grotesque carvings, but, on the other hand, he may be recording some relics of a more barbarous age when he writes: ‘There is a Chapel in _Richemont_ Toune with straung Figures in the Waulles of it. The Peple there dreme that it was ons [a temple of] Idoles.’ I wonder if those carved figures were entirely destroyed in the days of the Commonwealth, or whether they were merely thrown aside during some restoration, and are waiting for digging or building operations to bring them to light.