Institutes and the influence of War comradeship, many 

 of the villages have the intrinsic beauty of ruins. They 

 were populous and busy places before the Reformation, 

 when the favourite playing fields were alongside the 

 church, and Sunday afternoon was the chief hour of 

 recreation. The churches themselves were not only 

 monuments of religious zeal ; they were made big to seat 

 a big congregation. They were never cenotaphs. If 

 you walk from the chapel on the hill in Steeple Gidding 

 to the great church in the village on the brook, you may 

 pass through two splendid avenues now leading no 

 whither. Those pits in the field, one above the other, 

 were once fishponds, invaluable for Friday s meals. The 

 deserted brick-yard now a favourite haunt of coot and 

 heron and of snipe was a busy mine in comparatively 

 recent times, though not in memory : but when you 

 reach the spacious glebe you may read the characters 

 written by a much earlier generation. Rich grass has 

 grown over the foundations of houses that were built 

 before the oldest of the tall elms was big enough for a 

 wren, much less for a rook, to nest in. The square angled 

 moat was dug not later than the days of Henry VIII. A 

 bigger and busier population was housed round the 

 church as its monuments indicate, one of them incident 

 ally bearing witness to the size of the families in the 

 larger houses. 



Such signs of populous antiquity astonished even some 

 of the residents of old Buckinghamshire villages when a 

 sort of pictorial survey was made of the Penn county 

 to the end of persuading the world that the place where 

 Milton and Gray sang and where the founder of Penn 

 sylvania was born, was worth preservation. It has been 

 written by that eminent historian, H. A. L, Fisher : &quot; The 

 earliest .English Atlas that of Saxton shows how 



