200 AN ANCIENT BRITISH SHRINE 



Margarelting, Blackmore, and other places. The remark- 

 able part of Greensted church is the nave, which 

 measures just under thirty feet in length, is fourteen 

 feet wide, with walls five feet six inches high. These 

 walls consist entirely of great slabs of oak, split trunks 

 felled in the primeval forest nine hundred years ago. 

 They stand just as they were reared, it is believed, as 

 a temporary resting-place for the body and relics of 

 St. Edmund the Martyr in its transit from London to 

 Bury St. Edmunds in the year 1013. Not quite as they 

 were first set up; for in 1848 it was found that their 

 lower ends, mortised into the oaken sill which rested 

 upon the bare ground, were showing signs of decay, so 

 they were underbuilt with a course of brickwork. Four- 

 and-twenty of these rough-hewn slabs suffice to form the 

 south wall of the nave, and five-and-twenty compose the 

 corresponding north wall. It is impossible to gaze un- 

 moved upon this ancient timber, hewn from the green- 

 wood of Saxon England, which has withstood storm and 

 sunshine, rain and frost, through all these centuries. We 

 may not live to see it at the end of a thousand years of 

 exposure, which, if it has not come yet, will arrive at 

 latest in the year 2013 ; but, barring accident by fire, 

 there is no probability that these venerable planks will 

 fail before that time. 



Sceptics may ask how the age of each individual plank 

 can be verified. Is it not possible that some of the 

 timbers may have been replaced from time to time ? No, 

 it is not; for this reason, that every slab was mortised 

 into the wall-plate above and the sill below, so that the 

 roof must have been removed before a single timber could 

 be renewed. 



