TJie General Aspect of the Count ry. 293 



versial matter of the very prickles, titles, and accents of the 

 law." Cambridgeshire farmers, not yet sufficiently educated 

 to combine the principles of pneumatics and hydrodynamics 

 with any practical results, traversed their lands on stilts. 

 During the drier months of the year their cattle battened on 

 the herbage of the grass fen, the superfluous growth of which 

 they fired just before the autumn floods, so that the glare of 

 the vast plain startled the flocks many miles away in the 

 sheep walks of Norfolk and Suffolk. They were uncouth 

 fellows, these lowland stilt-walkers, who made the most of 

 their aquatic vegetation by plaiting baskets out of its willows, 

 burning its peaty turf in their cottage reredos, and thatching 

 their roofs with its water grasses, while every dyke and ditch 

 afforded them fish and fowl for the table. 



Throughout Camden's great work there is frequent mention 

 of ruined abbeys and castles, forcibly and graphically empha- 

 sising the decay of both monasticism and feudalism ; and it 

 will be now interesting to watch the growth of a Tudor archi- 

 tecture, which quite as graphically emphasises and fitly intro- 

 duces a fresh polity, and a coincident departure from the 

 time-honoured precedents and customs hitherto associated with 

 the landed interest. 



During the Middle Ages there was probably no distinctly 

 architectural profession, and buildings were planned by master 

 masons, guilds of workmen, or bodies of freemasons. The 

 feature of this era had been a religious mysticism which left 

 its stamp even on the building trade. But the Renaissance 

 architects took their cue from the altered religious views of the 

 times which Henry VIII. had initiated by the destruction of 

 Church property, and the religious element was henceforth 

 eliminated even from the plans of churches and tombs. Fresh 

 ideas borrowed from Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, 

 were introduced by foreign architects, and worked out by 

 foreign trowels. Torrigiano came over as early as 1506. 

 Holbein, Grerome de Trevisi, Lucca Penni, and John of Padua 

 found a patron in Henry VIII., the last-mentioned artist hav- 

 ing, it is said, designed Longieat, and both Sion and Somerset 

 Houses. In the following century Bernard Janssen, Thorpe, 



