Great Chart, as I saw while still far off, is a village typical of this country that I love, if indeed a place so completely itself is typical of anything:  a little English village, but it outfaces the whole world in its sureness of itself, its quietness and air of immemorial antiquity.  Many a city older by far looks parvenu beside Great Chart.  Let us consider, with tears if you will, what they are making of Rome and be thankful that our ways are not their ways.  For what wins you at once in Great Chart is the obvious fact that it has always stood there on its hill over the Weald, and as far as one may see at a glance, much the same as it stands to-day.  And what delights you is the church there on the highest ground, on the last hill overlooking the great Weald, a sign in the sky, a portent, a necessary thing natural to the landscape.

What you see is a rectangular building with three eastern gables over three Decorated windows, a long nave roof over square Perpendicular windows and clerestory, flat outer roofs and tall western Tower, a noble thing significant of our civilisation and the Faith out of which it has come.

Within, one finds a church like and yet unlike that at Ashford.  Nave and chancel are of the same width, and the arcades run from end to end of the church really without a break, though half way a wall, borne by three arches, crosses the church separating the chancel and its chapels from the nave.  The central arch of the three is of course the chancel arch, but the wall it bears does not reach to the roof so that the nave, clerestory and roof are seen running on beyond it.  All this is curious rather than lovely, but like every other strangeness in England of my heart, it is to be explained by the long, long history of things still—­Deo gratias—­remaining to us, so that when I said that our buildings were growths rather than works of art I spoke truth.

The church of St Mary of Great Chart is not mentioned in the Domesday Survey, but that a church existed here in the twelfth century is certain, for even in the present building we have evidences of Norman work, for instance in the walling of the south chapel, and in the vestry doorway.  According to the Rev. G.M.  Livett, [Footnote:  K.A.S. 26.] the Norman nave was as long as that we have, which is built in all probability on its foundation.  The aisleless Norman church, however, had a central tower to the east of the present chancel arch and transepts, as well as a chancel.  This church appears to have stood till the fourteenth century, when it was entirely rebuilt and reclaimed, and all the lower part of the present church built, to be heightened and lengthened at the end of the fifteenth century when the clerestory and the chancel arcade were built, a new aisle wall set up on the north and the south aisle raised, the rood loft built or rebuilt.