126 On the Church of St. Peter, Manningford Bruce, Wiltshire. 



Bruce, and sister of Jane Lane^ who assisted in the escape of King 

 Charles II. after the Battle of Worcester. This monument is now 

 removed and placed on the north wall of the chancel. 



The original chancel of the Church of St. Aldhelm^ Bishopslrow, 

 was demolished at the beginning of this century, and a square-ended 

 chancel substituted. In the course of a re-construction of the 

 Church, about six years ago, the foundations of the apsidal chancel 

 were discovered, but the designs for a square-ended chancel were 

 adhered to. As a ground-work on which to rest the illustration of 

 early Romanesque apsidal Churches, I must beg to quote some re- 

 markable words of Dean Milman in his Latin Christianity : — " For 

 some considerable (it cannot but be an indefinable) part of the three 

 first centuries, the Church of Rome, and most if not all the Churches 

 of the West, were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies ; 

 their language was Greek, their organisation Greek, their writers 

 Greek, their Scriptures Greek, and many vestiges and traditions 

 show that their ritual, their liturgy, was Greek."' In the great 

 work of Gaily Knight, on the early Churches of Italy, depicting 

 grand dromical Churches, with a rowof pillars on each side, and an apse 

 at one or both ends, the resemblance of these to Basilicas or Halls of 

 Justice may seem complete. But we have now pushed our researches 

 further and deeper than Gaily Knight. We have since his day 

 brought more fully into view Byzantine and Eastern Church archi- 

 tecture, and have dug down beneath his " primitive Church," San 

 Clemente, at Rome, till we have discovered a more primitive Church, 

 which is fully described by Father MuUooly in his work on the 

 recent discoveries by excavation under San Clemente. ^ 



The study of the ground-plans of primitive Churches is very 

 instructive for the illustration of early Romanesque Churches in 

 England as shewing that there was a traditional type of Church, 

 antecedent to the ambries and piscinas of the middle ages, and 

 coeval with Basilicas or Halls of Justice, rather than derived from 



^ Milman's Latin Christianity, b. i., ch. i., vol. i., p. 27, quoted in Scudamore's 

 Notitia Eucharistica, ch. vi., part ii., p. 207, note 5 ; Eivington, London, 1872. 



^ See ground-plan o£ Subterranean Basilica, in S. Clement P. & M., and his 

 Basilica in Rome, by Joseph Mullooly, O.P.,facing page 167 ; Rome, Barbara, 1873. 



