[9] Ibid., p. 48.

These walls guarded a noble town full of churches and monasteries, merchants’ houses, guild halls, and much else.  We will glance at the beauties that remain:  St. Mary’s, containing specimens of every style of architecture from Norman downward, with its curious foreign glass; St. Julian’s, mainly rebuilt in 1748, though the old tower remains; St. Alkmund’s; the Church of St. Chad; St. Giles’s Church; and the nave and refectory pulpit of the monastery of SS.  Peter and Paul.  It is distressing to see this interesting gem of fourteenth-century architecture amid the incongruous surroundings of a coalyard.  You can find considerable remains of the domestic buildings of the Grey Friars’ Monastery near the footbridge across the Severn, and also of the home of the Austin Friars in a builder’s yard at the end of Baker Street.

[Illustration:  Tower on the Town Wall, Shrewsbury]

In many towns we find here and there an old half-timbered dwelling, but in Shrewsbury there is a surprising wealth of them—­streets full of them, bearing such strange medieval names as “Mardel” or “Wyle Cop.”  Shrewsbury is second to no other town in England in the interest of its ancient domestic buildings.  There is the gatehouse of the old Council House, bearing the date 1620, with its high gable and carved barge-boards, its panelled front, the square spaces between the upright and horizontal timbers being ornamented with cut timber.  The old buildings of the famous Shrewsbury School are now used as a Free Library and Museum and abound in interest.  The house remains in which Prince Rupert stayed during his sojourn in 1644, then owned by “Master Jones the lawyer,” at the west end of St. Mary’s Church, with its fine old staircase.  Whitehall, a fine mansion of red sandstone, was built by Richard Prince, a lawyer, in 1578-82, “to his great chardge with fame to hym and hys posterite for ever.”  The Old Market Hall in the Renaissance style, with its mixture of debased Gothic and classic details, is worthy of study.  Even in Shrewsbury we have to record the work of the demon of destruction.  The erection of the New Market Hall entailed the disappearance of several old picturesque houses.  Bellstone House, erected in 1582, is incorporated in the National Provincial Bank.  The old mansion known as Vaughan’s Place is swallowed up by the music-hall, though part of the ancient dwelling-place remains.  St. Peter’s Abbey Church in the commencement of the nineteenth century had an extraordinary annexe of timber and plaster, probably used at one time as parsonage house, which, with several buttressed remains of the adjacent conventual buildings, have long ago been squared up and “improved” out of existence.  Rowley’s mansion, in Hill’s Lane, built of brick in 1618 by William Rowley, is now a warehouse.  Butcher Row has some old houses with projecting storeys, including a fine specimen of a medieval shop.  Some of the houses in Grope Lane lean together from opposite sides of