being imbued with the like feelings, and concentrating their means upon a common purpose, they became enabled to accomplish the great works which now call forth our admiration.
In military buildings we behold nothing at all parallel, no successive additions, no intermingling of styles, no needless decorations or profuseness of ornament, but evidences of cotemporary workmanship carried throughout the whole fortress, every part presenting the appearance of having been run up simultaneously, as if it were designed to meet a sudden emergency, which in point of fact was usually the origin of its existence. And here again the exigency was provided for by a state of things unlike any existing at present: for the barons of these noble castles had on their estates numbers of slaves, personal and prædial, whose services they could enforce; such were the subinfeudatories who held their cottages or their petty fiefs by these and similar tenures.
Again, when necessities of a more urgent nature arose, the ecclesiastics made the same appeals to the consciences or to the generosity of men that would still be adopted. The sale of articles to increase the building funds of a church was not unattempted in the fourteenth century, and by resorting to this method John de Wisbeach, a simple monk of Ely, was enabled to procure money enough to build the chapel of the Virgin Mary attached to that cathedral. For twenty-eight years and thirteen months, as the chronicle states, he was not ashamed to take whatever he could procure for the continuance of the work, not only by asking, but by begging through the country, and thus passing his life in various labours in furtherance of his pious design: by begging, and offering from a large pack at his back, such wares as he was licensed by his order to expose for sale, he completed the beautiful fabric, and transmitted his office unburdened of debt to his successor.
Again, the foundation of chantry chapels produced much of the irregularity that swells the size of churches, the gift of mortuaries, the bequest of sums of money, in some cases so profusely given, that among the wills preserved at Lynn, I have found as many as twenty churches thus enriched by the liberality of the same individual, not to mention more particularly the sale of pardons and indulgences, and the offerings left by pilgrims and devotees at the shrines of those who had a widely spread reputation for sanctity. These and similar
