the same reason Governor Legge burnt the new episcopal palace, which Bancroft had only finished ten years before at Cuddesdon.  At the same time Thomas Gardiner burnt his manor-house in Cuddesdon village, and many other houses were so battered that they were left untenanted, and so fell to ruin.[1] Sir Bulstrode Whitelock describes how he slighted the works at Phillis Court, “causing the bulwarks and lines to be digged down, the grafts [i.e. moats] filled, the drawbridge to be pulled up, and all levelled.  I sent away the great guns, the granadoes, fireworks, and ammunition, whereof there was good store in the fort.  I procured pay for my soldiers, and many of them undertook the service in Ireland.”  This is doubtless typical of what went on in many other houses.  The famous royal manor-house of Woodstock was left battered and deserted, and “haunted,” as the readers of Woodstock will remember, by an “adroit and humorous royalist named Joe Collins,” who frightened the commissioners away by his ghostly pranks.  In 1651 the old house was gutted and almost destroyed.  The war wrought havoc with the old houses, as it did with the lives and other possessions of the conquered.

  [1] History of Oxfordshire, by J. Meade Falkner.

[Illustration:  Seventeenth-century Trophy]

But we are concerned with times less remote, with the vanishing of historic monuments, of noble specimens of architecture, and of the humble dwellings of the poor, the picturesque cottages by the wayside, which form such attractive features of the English landscape.  We have only to look at the west end of St. Albans Abbey Church, which has been “Grimthorped” out of all recognition, or at the over-restored Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, to see what evil can be done in the name of “Restoration,” how money can be lavishly spent to a thoroughly bad purpose.

Property in private hands has suffered no less than many of our public buildings, even when the owner is a lover of antiquity and does not wish to remove and to destroy the objects of interest on his estate.  Estate agents are responsible for much destruction.  Sir John Stirling Maxwell, Bart., F.S.A., a keen archaeologist, tells how an agent on his estate transformed a fine old grim sixteenth-century fortified dwelling, a very perfect specimen of its class, into a house for himself, entirely altering the character of its appearance, adding a lofty oriel and spacious windows with a new door and staircase, while some of the old stones were made to adorn a rockery in the garden.  When he was abroad the elaborately contrived entrance for the defence of a square fifteenth-century keep with four square towers at the corners, very curious and complete, were entirely obliterated by a zealous mason.  In my own parish I awoke one day to find the old village pound entirely removed by order of an estate agent, and a very interesting stand near the village smithy for fastening oxen when they were shod disappeared