service is held annually within its walls.  It was a pre-bend of S. Mary’s, Stafford, and previously a Free Chapel, the advowson belonging to the Lord of the Manor; and it was sometimes supplied with preachers from Ranton Priory.  Of the story of its destruction I can discover nothing.  It is now carefully preserved and, I have heard it suggested that it might some day be rebuilt to meet the spiritual needs of its neighbourhood.

“We pass now to the most stately and beautiful object in this neighbourhood.  I mean the tower of Ranton Priory Church.  It is always known here as Ranton Abbey.  But it has no right to the title.  It was an off-shoot of Haughmond Abbey, near Shrewsbury, and was a Priory of Black Canons, founded temp. Henry II.  The church has disappeared entirely, with the exception of a bit of the south-west walling of the nave and a Norman doorway in it.  This may have connected the church with the domestic buildings.  In Cough’s Collection in the Bodleian, dated 1731, there is a sketch of the church.  What is shown there is a simple parallelogram, with the usual high walls, in Transition-Norman style, with flat pilaster buttresses, two strings running round the walls, the upper one forming the dripstones of lancet windows, a corbel-table supporting the eaves-course, and a north-east priest’s door.  But whatever the church may have been (and the sketch represents it as being of severe simplicity), some one built on to it a west tower of great magnificence.  It is of early Perpendicular date, practically uninjured, the pinnacles only being absent, though, happily, the stumps of these remain.  Its proportion appears to me to be absolutely perfect, and its detail so good that I think you would have to travel far to find its rival.  There is a very interesting point to notice in the beautiful west doorway.  It will be seen that the masonry of the lower parts of its jambs is quite different from that of the upper parts, and there can, I think, be no doubt that these lower stones have been re-used from a thirteenth-century doorway of some other part of the buildings.  There is a tradition that the bells of Gnosall Church were taken from this tower.  I can find no confirmation of this, and I cannot believe it.  For the church at Gnosall is of earlier date and greater magnificence than that of Ranton Priory, and was, I imagine, quite capable of having bells of its own.”

It would be an advantage to archaeology if every one were such a careful and accurate observer of local antiquarian remains as the Rural Dean of Stafford.  Wherever we go we find similar deserted and abandoned shrines.  In Derbyshire alone there are over a hundred destroyed or disused churches, of which Dr. Cox, the leading authority on the subject, has published a list.  Nottinghamshire abounds in instances of the same kind.  As late as 1892 the church at Colston Bassett was deliberately turned into a ruin.  There are only mounds and a few stones to show the