1919.] EVOLUTION OF THE COUNTRY CHURCHES. 211 



The Doors are the next feature which would strike the 

 ordinary sightseer. They are mostly of the ordinary round 

 head pattern of the type so often met with in our old farm- 

 houses, except where they are the inner door of a porch- 

 Avhere they generally, but not always, e.g., at the Yale and 

 St. Peter-in-the-Wood, partook of the nature of an inner door. 

 The presence of these rounded arched doors throughout the 

 Channel Islands leads one to believe that there must have been 

 a large industry on the neighbouring French coast. I have had 

 them pointed out to me as being ecclesiastical whether used in 

 churches or in private houses, but I do not hold with this view 

 at all, and I believe, as I stated above, that there was practically 

 no difference between the external building of our churches 

 and of our ordinary residences, and that the round arches 

 imported in such numbers were used indiscriminately both for 

 sacred and secular buildings. 



We now come to the interior and here we are without 

 much material for thought. 



The Roofs, with the exception of St. Peter's-in-the-Wood and 

 the south aisle of St. Sampson's, are vaulted and, with 

 the exception of the south chancel of the Yale Church, 

 are without groining, giving the churches a tunnel-like 

 effect when all ornamentation is removed. The broken- 

 down vaulting of the Priory of Lihou and the Chapel 

 of St. Apolline shows clearly the construction of these 

 roofs, and the slating now seen universally is a modern 

 protection against the weather only. I do not trace signs of 

 thatch on the roofs of any church. If there had ever been any 

 this would have shown itself on the walls of the towers. 



Each church, with the exception of St. Saviour's, has at least 

 one piscina, and it is not at all certain that in the exception, a 

 careful search under the plaster would not reveal one. There is 

 a specially fine piscina of granite at the Yale Church in the north 

 chancel and at the Forest there is also a fine specimen. 



There is a stoup at St. Martin's Church. 



At St. Sampson's is an Easter Sepulchre, the only example 

 in Guernsey, and at the same church is the only example of a 

 mensa or altar slab. 



At the Yale are three sculptured figures on the columns of 

 the arcading of the nave of which only one, the figure of a lion, 

 is distinguishable ; they appear to have supported corbels to 

 carry the figure of a saint, and the two indistinguishable 

 figures may have been those of a bull and an eagle, but there 

 is no trace of a fourth which would have been a ram. 



There are matrices of brasses at the Yale and at St. Peter's- 

 in-the-Wood. 



There are three windows of which the original tracery 

 remains in whole or in part, viz., the well-known example in 



