That is an oft-told tale which finds its counterpart in many towns and villages, the entire and absolute destruction of the old church by ignorant vandals who work endless mischief and know not what they do.  There is the village of Little Wittenham, in our county of Berks, not far from Sinodun Hill, an ancient earthwork covered with trees, that forms so conspicuous an object to the travellers by the Great Western Railway from Didcot to Oxford.  About forty years ago terrible things were done in the church of that village.  The vicar was a Goth.  There was a very beautiful chantry chapel on the south side of the choir, full of magnificent marble monuments to the memory of various members of the Dunce family.  This family, once great and powerful, whose great house stood hard by on the north of the church—­only the terraces of which remain—­is now, it is believed, extinct.  The vicar thought that he might be held responsible for the dilapidations of this old chantry; so he pulled it down, and broke all the marble tombs with axes and hammers.  You can see the shattered remains that still show signs of beauty in one of the adjoining barns.  Some few were set up in the tower, the old font became a pig-trough, the body of the church was entirely renewed, and vandalism reigned supreme.  In our county of Berks there were at the beginning of the last century 170 ancient parish churches.  Of these, thirty have been pulled down and entirely rebuilt, six of them on entirely new sites; one has been burnt down, one disused; before 1890 one hundred were restored, some of them most drastically, and several others have been restored since, but with greater respect to old work.

A favourite method of “restoration” was adopted in many instances.  A church had a Norman doorway and pillars in the nave; sundry additions and alterations had been made in subsequent periods, and examples of Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles of architecture were observable, with, perhaps, a Renaissance porch or other later feature.  What did the early restorers do?  They said, “This is a Norman church; all its details should be Norman too.”  So they proceeded to take away these later additions and imitate Norman work as much as they could by breaking down the Perpendicular or Decorated tracery in the windows and putting in large round-headed windows—­their conception of Norman work, but far different from what any Norman builder would have contrived.  Thus these good people entirely destroyed the history of the building, and caused to vanish much that was interesting and important.  Such is the deplorable story of the “restoration” of many a parish church.

An amusing book, entitled Hints to Some Churchwardens, with a few Illustrations Relative to the Repair and Improvement of Parish Churches, was published in 1825.  The author, with much satire, depicts the “very many splendid, curious, and convenient ideas which have emanated from those churchwardens who have attained perfection as planners and architects.”  He apologises for not giving the names of these superior men and the dates of the improvements they have achieved, but is sure that such works as theirs must immortalize them, not only in their parishes, but in their counties, and, he trusts, in the kingdom at large.  The following are some of the “hints":—­