210 
Hradtord-upon-Abon. 
(Continued from page 88.) 
THE PARIGG. CHURCH. 
kept in observance of the dedication of the Church is still preserved 
in an annual fair “holden in the Borough on the morrow after 
Trinitie Sunday.” 
Although the building, taken as a whole, has no great preten- 
sions to architectural excellence, being a strange, and, to many 
eyes, discordant mixture of every variety of style, yet its very 
antiquity makes it interesting. Nearly eight hundred years have 
perhaps passed by since the original structure, much of which still 
remains, was erected. The additions that from time to time have been 
made to it seem to be a connecting link between the present and 
the past, and to tell silently, yet not unimpressively, the tale of by 
gone generations, who slumber now within its walls or beneath its 
shade, each of whom has left a memorial behind them. Its very 
irregularities, whilst they preserve the vestiges of the growth and 
tell the history of the building, mark also the successive changes 
in the parish itself, from times when wealth and devotion went 
hand in hand, and men vied with one another in their costly offer- 
ings to the Temple of God, to times when they measured all things 
by the narrow standard of a selfish utilitarianism, and, though 
they themselves ‘dwelt in cedar,’ suffered the House of God to be 
altogether unadorned, and to a great extent uncared for and 
* neglected. 
“A mother Church,” says Bishop Kennett, “was the more 
honorable for being branched out into one or more subordinate 
chapels.”! In this respect our ‘old Church’ was more than usually 
privileged, at least six, if not more, distinct chapels being dependent 
1 Parochial Antiquities, ii, 272. 
